The Magellanic Clouds have been known for thousands of years to the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere. The natives on the South Sea Islands called them the Upper and Lower Clouds of Mist. The Australian aborigines, who referred to the Milky Way as a river or track along which the spirits travelled to the sky-world, considered the Magellanic Clouds as two great black men who sometimes came down to the earth and choked people while they were asleep (McCarthy 1956, p.130). Al Sufi, in his description of the stellar constellations from the 10th century, told about a strange object, A1 Bakr, the White Ox, which is now identified as the Large Magellanic Cloud. Many of the mariners of the Middle Ages noticed the two Clouds. The Italian Corsali described them: ‘We saw two clouds of significant size which move regularly around the pole in a circular course, sometimes going up and sometimes down, with a star midway between them at a distance of 11 degrees from the pole and participating in their movements.’

The two objects were called the Cape Clouds for hundreds of years; they were the most striking objects appearing in the sky when ships approached the Cape of Good Hope. They were of importance for the navigators of that time for localizing the South Pole, where there is no star corresponding to Polaris in the North (see Allen 1980).