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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1. "TIDE BEATING HEART OF THE EARTH" Map 1: Abraham Ortelius "Typus Orbus Terrarum," 1570 2. THE FIRST PACFIC EXPLORERS Early Pacific Navigation Art of the Pacific Peoples Map 2: Discovery and Settlement of the South Pacific, 40,000 BC-500 A. D. Map 3: Voyages of Cheng Ho, 1431-1433 3. EUROPEANS ENCOUNTER THE PACIFIC, FROM EAST TO WEST The Spice Trade Map 4: The Spice Trade Route, 100-1500 A. D. Map 5: Dias Finds the Cape of Good Hope, 1488 Vasco da Gama reaches India, 1497-1499 Map 6: Journey of Vasco Núñez de Balboa, 1511-1513 4. MAGELLAN'S CIRCUMNAVIGATION, 1519-1522 Mutiny Circumnavigation and Privateers Map 7: Magellan Finds the Strait, 1520 Map 8: Magellan's Expedition Circumnavigates the Earth, 1519-1521 5. CONQUISTA ESPIRITUAL: THE SPANISH IN THE PACIFIC Women, Slaves, and Colonists Sixteenth-Century Navigation and Ships Map 9: Mendaña Explores the Solomon Islands, 1567-1569 Map 10: Mendaña Establishes a Colony, 1595 Map 11: Quirós and Torres in Espíritu Santo, 1605-1606 6. EXPLORATION IN THE SERVICE OF COMMERCE Cartography The Painted Prince: Pacific Travelers in Europe Map 12: Willem Janz Explores New Guinea, 1606 Map 13: Le Maire and Schouten Venture in to the South Pacific, 1615-1616 Map 14: Abel Tasman Sails to Tasmania, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga, 1642-1644 Map 15: Roggeveen Lands at Easter Island, 1721 7. EXPLORATION IN THE SERVICE OF EMPIRE The Real Robinson Crusoe The South Sea Bubble Map 16: Dampier Reaches Australia and New Guinea, 1699-1700 Map 17: Byron, Wallis, and Carteret In the Pacific, 1764-1767 8. JAMES COOK AND THE ENDEAVOUR Artists Aboard Scurvy Map 18: The Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768-1771 Map 19: Cook in New Zealand, 1768-1771 9. COOK'S PACIFIC The Northwest Passage Mark Twain on the Death of Cook Map 20: The First Voyage of the Resolution, 1772-1775 Map 21: The Second Voyage of the Resolution, 1776-1780 10. SCIENCE AND EMPIRE Whaling Gaugin and Robert Louis Stevenson in Paradise Map 22: Darwin and the Beagle, 1831-1836 Map 23: The Wilkes Expedition, 1838-1842 Map 24: European Colonial Possessions, 1898 GLOSSARY FURTHER READING INDEX <introduction> Introduction The famous words of James Cook, "ambition leads me not only farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for men to go," are found in collections of quotations, on inspirational posters, and somewhere in most books about Cook. The real nature of Cook's greatness is revealed when the January 30, 1774 entry from his journal continues. Cook's ships, the Resolution and the Adventure, had sailed far below the Antarctic Circle. At 71° south latitude a wall of ice forced Cook to turn his ships around. Cook "was not sorry at meeting with this interruption as it in some measure relieved us from the dangers and hardship, inseparable with the Navigation of the Polar Region." Cook, the greatest explorer of the Pacific-and perhaps of any region on earth-was no coward. His genius was in calculating the measure of danger and hardship his men and ships could endure to expand the limits of the known world. The history of exploration in the Pacific is one of courage, of risk, of happy accident. But it is also one of misery beyond words, cruelty, and tragedy. It is not the story of men and ships, even brave men like Cook and gallant ships like the Resolution. Rather, exploration of the Pacific has been a vast mirror of the world's history, from the earliest ocean voyaging to the trade routes that link the West and the East to our day. Explorers of the Pacific had their most important achievements in expanding geographical knowledge. The maps, charts, paintings, and reports generated during voyages of discovery document a monumental increase in human understanding. Polynesian voyagers crafted stick charts guide traders and settlers from one island to another lying far beyond the horizon. Luiz Vaez de Torres charted a course through channel between Australia and New Guinea still used by supertankers navigating the strait that bears his name. As John Locke wrote in a 1704 collection about voyages of discovery, "the Relation of one traveller is an Incentive to stir up another to imitate him..." Exploration was fundamentally path breaking, an opening of new places to following generations of traders, soldiers, scientists, settlers, and tourists. Much of the exploration of the Pacific was significant for what was not discovered. In the second century, A.D., Egyptian geographer Ptolemy argued that a huge landmass must exist in the southern hemisphere. A thousand years later Marco Polo speculated that this great continent, rich in gold and populated by millions of souls, awaited European ships venturing beyond the fabled Spice Islands. Five hundred years of exploration was driven by the quest for Terra Australis Incognita. The possibility that a Northwest Passage to the Pacific existed on the American continent tantalized European scholars, politicians, and explorers for centuries. In searching for the passage, explorers from France, Spain, Russia, England, and the United States documented the west coast of North America and ventured into the Arctic. Each ship that ventured into the Pacific around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Strait of Magellan, or around Cape Horn carried a cargo of national hope and ambition. The Pacific, perhaps even more than the Americas or Africa, became the game board for a global game of imperial chess. Early expeditions aimed to wrestle control of the spice trade from Arab hands and to convert millions to Christianity. By the seventeenth century the nations of Europe sent their ships to gain markets for all sorts of goods. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, expeditions sailed to demonstrate scientific or technological superiority, to establish colonies, and to annex strategic military positions. Remote from the islands of the Pacific, struggles for domination of the European continent such as the War of the Spanish Succession profoundly affected the destiny of island peoples. By the twentieth century, only the most remote and inhospitable islands were free from American, European, or South American colonial administration. Both a product and an object of exploration, scientific discovery occurs as persistent theme in the exploration of the Pacific. Even before expeditions undertook explicitly scientific missions in the eighteenth century, ships' logs and sailors' journals were full of observations about the natural world. Francisco Antonio Pigafetta, whose journal contains the best account of Magellan's circumnavigation, observed the behavior of the fish he saw in mid-ocean, "There are three sorts of fish in this ocean a cubit or more in length...These follow and hunt another kind of fish which flies and which we called Colondriny [sea swallow]." Only through the application of known theories and experimentation on his ships was Cook able to devise a method for preventing scurvy that saved thousands of lives. Scientists accompanying Cook, Bougainville, Vancouver made major contributions in the fields of astronomy, navigation, botany, and zoology. In the late nineteenth century the Pacific incubated an entirely new field of science, oceanography, which continues to drive exploration of its darkest depths. Explorers introduced newfound lands to all sorts of change and exchange. Polynesian rafts brought sweet potatoes, breadfruit trees, and pigs as well as settlers to far-flung islands. Recent work by anthropologists and archeologists such as Patrick Kirch traces the expansion of human settlement in the Pacific by documenting human remains, plants, and domesticated animals. Geneticists like Anne Gibbons have suggested that distinctions between Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian peoples are artificial. Rather than describing real racial differences, the terms should be understood as broad definitions of geographic regions and cultural groups. Biological change and exchange marked the European exploration of the Pacific as well. Some change was one sided and devastating, as disease more than decimated the populations of many islands. Some exchange was reciprocal. When Samuel Wallis planted English cherry trees on Tahiti, he marked the Pacific landscape with the biology of Europe. When David Nelson brought plants from the Pacific to the Royal Botanic Gardens, the flora of the Pacific changed the English landscape. Cultural change and exchange are equally important in the history of Pacific exploration. Strikingly similar patterns can be found on pottery, carving, and tattoos throughout the Pacific, indicating vast and ancient networks of trade and settlement. Linguistic and religious similarities speak to such connections as well. Europeans entered this connected, yet diverse, world of the Pacific with a worldview that characterized its people as "savages" in need of civilizing and "heathens" in need of christianizing. By the eighteenth century, European attitudes about native peoples shifted somewhat. Islanders were seen as living in a perfect state of nature, and even those Pacific natives who traveled to Europe were exhibited as "noble savages." James Cook was asked that his first expedition record the "Features, Complection, Dress, Habitations, Food, Weapons" of the islanders he met and to document "Religion, Morals Order, Government, Distinctions of Power, Police" on the islands. Clearly, Europeans no longer thought islanders lacked cultural traditions and institutions, and interest in learning more about them grew. As Anne Salmond demonstrates in The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, European interest in Pacific cultures did not necessarily result in mutual understanding. Ethnographic observations by eighteenth and nineteenth-century expedition scientists were accompanied by illustrations of Pacific peoples and their environments created by expedition artists. Together, these resources provide some idea of life in both the northern and southern regions of the Pacific at a moment when contact with western culture, technology, and colonialism introduced massive and permanent change. The recent debate between scholars Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere over Hawaiian interpretations of James Cook's death reflects the importance of including native Pacific sources in this ethnographic portrait. The French philosopher Denis Diderot referred to the Pacific as an "ocean of fantasy." Just as Polynesians repeated stories about semi-divine ancestors who fished up islands, Europeans created an imaginary sea in which fiction and fact intertwined. Thomas More's Utopia, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels all had Pacific landscapes, even before much was known about the south sea. Accounts by explorers and travelers sold widely in Europe through the early twentieth century, as did works of fiction by writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville. Even today, dreams of tropical paradise are inspired by articles in glossy travel magazines and by instructional websites for westerners yearning to abandon civilized life for a remote Pacific utopia. Jonathan Lamb, who writes extensively and with careful scholarship about cultural changes and exchanges incited by Pacific exploration, describes Europeans as genuinely "at sea" in the Pacific. If trade, religion, science and empire create neat narratives, straightforward storylines about European expansion into the Pacific, the world of literature captures the ambivalent encounter between ships and islands.
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Pacific Ocean Discovery and exploration Juvenile literature, Explorers Pacific Area Juvenile literature