Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as ‘the Pacific’ until in 1520–1 Fernao de Magalhãis, better known as Magellan, traversed the huge expanse of waters, which then received its name.^[1] Eight years earlier, in a moment which in the saga of the New World ranks only second to the landfall of Columbus, Balboa had seen—not the Pacific. He had seen the Mar del Sur, the South Sea—and so it remained, in common speech and very generally in maps and academic discourse, for over two centuries—until in fact the fur-traders following Cook, and after them the whalers, brought European shipping north of the Equator, into seas until then scarcely traversed except by the annual Galleons between Manila and Acapulco. What sea it was Balboa did not really know, though presumably beyond it lay the true Indies and Cathay, and just to be sure he claimed, with vast panache and formality,

A comprehensive assertion, leaving no gaps: but still the South Sea, the claims of Their Catholic Majesties notwithstanding, was the greatest blank on the European map of the world; and by 1513 no other people had a world-map remotely comparable in scope and accuracy with that already acquired by Europe in the mere century since Prince Henry had sent the first of the Portuguese caravels creeping out to the Azores and down the desert coast of Africa. It had not always, nor long, been so; before 1421, the probable date of the first Henrician voyage, there can be no question but that Chinese and Arabs taken together, or- 2 -even separately, had a far wider knowledge of the world than had Europeans.^[3] The far side of the globe was only a vast void—though, significantly, it could be thought of as merely a narrow gap—across which Magellan carried a thin line marked with three island-dots, establishing also its vastness; a track almost lost in a waste of mystery and darkness. The major theme of this book will be the essentially European and American achievement of turning this emptiness into a nexus of economic and military power.

And yet, and of course, Europeans were not in truth the first discoverers. It is in one sense loose thinking to use ‘discovery’ as meaning simply the first sighting or exploration, whether by Europeans or others, that we know of: since few even of the remotest islands of the Pacific (the Atlantic is different) were uninhabited when Europeans came upon them, there were discoveries of which we know nothing, except that they happened. However, in a more limited context it is not rationalising too much to take ‘discovery’ in another sense, requiring the placing on written or graphical record, available (at least potentially) to seamen, merchants, and scholars all round the world, of the existence and position of the newly found lands and seas; and for the Pacific this placing of facts on enduring record was basically a European achievement.^[4] Yet the drama of exploration and exploitation was played out upon an already peopled stage; and the priorities of Pacific exploration are intra-European relativities, not absolutes.

To Europeans in the brief interval between Columbus and Magellan (and setting aside Columbus's own confusion between his own ‘Indies’ and Cathay), where is now the Pacific was only a nameless naked space between the known to the west and the known to the east; simply the convexity of the globe, of greater or less extent according as one followed more modern (really more ancient!) or Ptolemaic estimates of the figure of the earth. But for those who lived on its continental shores there was an objective entity: here, a mysterious and limitless expanse of strangely salt water, a barrier; there, an avenue for active but littoral or thalassic, not oceanic, trade. And for those who lived on the islands ‘lost over its blue expanse like a handful of confetti floating on a lake’,^[5] the ocean was, if not a highway, then at least a net of local ways with a few widely-known nodes within an extensive but closed system. Clearly, it cannot always have been closed on all sides, at least not to one-way and perhaps one-time passage: the Islanders must have come from somewhere, though the whence and the how are still matters of sometimes hot dispute.

From the Equator to middle latitudes the Asian margins of the Ocean were the seats of great and ancient civilisations, with continuous polities long antedating the European polity painfully built up from the ruins of the Roman imperium. Tens of thousands of years before the Vikings and Columbus, men had filtered round the eastern shores, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and there too, on the plateaus of Mexico and Peru, they had built up great cities and highly organised- 3 -empires; those of Peru had some maritime capacity. From either side forays into the unknown Ocean may well have been made. Because of the set of winds and currents, these are more likely to have been from the eastern shores except in the north, where in the belt of the west-east Kuro Siwo current and the Westerly winds there are many historic records of involuntary crossings by castaways from Japan.^[6] It is becoming clear that it is not so much a matter of whether men made some sort of Pacific crossing, but rather we must ask to what extent they did so, and whether contacts were on a scale sufficient to leave significant and lasting cultural effects. Some metallurgical techniques in the New World, for example, seem specific enough to suggest direct Chinese or Southeast Asian origins.^[7] But it is very difficult to envisage return voyages, and whatever such links as may once have existed, by the time of European contact their memory had been lost ‘in the dark backward and abysm of time.’

Farther south, the peopling of the Oceanic Islands was the last major migration of mankind into a previously unpeopled realm: so far our earliest radiocarbon date is only some 3000 years ago. Even so, it is salutary to reflect that, by whatever combination of purpose and accident it took place, ‘this incredible maritime venture was under way when sailors in Europe and Asia were barely ever leaving sight of land.’^[8] The achievement of those who so early ventured on the oceanic, as distinct from the marginal, Pacific—‘over those never-navigated seas’^[9]—is indisputable; not so the highly controversial problems involved in its understanding.

South again, the great island of New Guinea paradoxically enough was visited, not merely sighted, by Jorge de Menezes within thirty years of Vasco da Gama's landfall at Calicut, and yet deserves the name given it by its historian Gavan Souter in the title of his book: The Last Unknown. Not until 1933, and after preliminary aerial reconnaissance, did white men cross the jungle-clad and savagely eroded flanks of its central mountain core to find on its savannah plateaus vigorous and still entirely Stone Age peoples,^[10] though we now know of the existence of man in New Guinea 25,000 years ago, and of an advanced horticultural economy three millennia before our time.

And finally Australia, ‘the last of lands’, geomorphologically the oldest of the continents (taken as a whole, and perhaps barring Antarctica), yet to many of its earlier European settlers a mere afterthought of the Creator.^[11] Here again the work of the last few years has revolutionised our concepts of the antiquity of man in the Pacific region. It is now beyond doubt that man was firmly established in Australia between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago; in Tasmania, isolated by the rising postglacial sea, ‘a tiny universe of 4,000 hunters survived as direct inheritors’ of Palaeolithic culture ‘until they were destroyed in one generation by civilised man early last century.’^[12] Both antiquity and failure to survive are in marked contrast to the position in the Islands.

Such, in baldest outline, is a sketch of the Pacific side of our globe as it was before- 4 -Magellan. When he sailed, the best-informed European would have known the outlines of most of the Atlantic shores, and have had some knowledge—incomplete and inaccurate—of the East Indies, together with a tiny glimpse across the Isthmus of Panama and some distorted pictures, vague yet highly coloured, of China. The first reports of Yucatan had reached Spain, but there was as yet little firm knowledge of what was to become Nueva España. All the rest was beyond European ken, and the North Pacific and the east coast of Australia remained so for another two, or two and a half, centuries; and these centuries added little to knowledge of the Islands except some exceedingly spotty reports.

In the remoter phases of the long story of human endeavour in the countries around the Pacific there are still many gaps, many mysteries; and to some of these problems, in Oceania, we may return. But the scope of this book as a whole is temporally more limited, essentially to the Euro-American phase, which, be it remembered, even for the Pacific Islands, the most recently peopled division of the globe, is little if any more than a tenth of their total time-span. For a fair proportion of its sectors, this phase of the Euro-American expansion suffers rather from an embarrassment than a paucity of documentation. The ostensible starting point looks clear cut: Magellan's voyage of 1520–1. Even so, for its antecedents we must go back as far as classical antiquity, and specifically to Ptolemy the Geographer, writing about A.D. 150–60, and to Eratosthenes in the third century B.C.