It is impossible to name all who have helped me, especially amongst my colleagues in The Australian National University. To begin with a debt of piety, my much-loved friend Jim Davidson was an inspiration to my first steps in Pacific history. I owe much to Gavan Daws, his successor as head of the Department of Pacific and Southeast Asian History, to Harry Maude, doyen in Australia of Islands historians, and to Pat Croft of the ANU Press, for their constant interest and encouragement; and to Professors Anthony Low, the Vice-Chancellor, and Wang Gungwu, Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies, for their blessings and support to an ambitious project. In the Department itself, Bob Langdon and Tony Reid let me borrow at will from their private libraries, Norah Forster fed me with references, and Robyn Walker enlivened her meticulous typescript with pencilled marginalia, always to the point and always welcome. The maps owe everything except their conception to the care and skill of Keith Mitchell of the Map Room, Department of Human Geography. But indeed the whole ambience of the ANU is in itself a magnificent support for scholarship.

I must thank staff members of the following libraries for their always courteous assistance: in Australia, the ANU and National Libraries, Canberra, and the New South Wales Public Library and the Mitchell, Sydney; in Chile, the Biblioteca Nacional, Santiago; in Peru, the Biblioteca Nacional, Lima; in the United Kingdom, the Bodleian at Oxford, and in London the British Library and those of the Institute of Historical Research, the Institute of Latin American Studies, the Royal Geographical Society, and the University of London; in the United States, the University of California and the Bancroft Libraries, Berkeley.

In South America, I received most generous hospitality from Messrs Noel Deschamps and W. R. Carney, respectively the Australian Ambassador to Chile and Chargé in Peru; but most of all my thanks are due to Claudio Véliz, who made my visit possible by inviting me to the memorable Conferencia del Pacífico held in 1970 at Viña del Mar. Far to the North, in Nova Albion, Professors D. W. Hooson and J. J. Parsons very kindly gave me office facilities in the Department of Geography, University of California at Berkeley; and I received valuable assistance from Professors Woodrow Borah and Robert F. Heizer of the University and Mr Robert H. Power of Nut Tree. Fr Michael Cooper of Sophia University, Tokyo, was most kind in helping me to secure photographs for the plates, as was Miss Elizabeth Ellis of the Map Room in the National Library of Australia.

Scholars who have kindly answered specific queries are acknowledged individually in the notes, but I must mention in particular Dr Helen Wallis, in charge of- xii -the Map Room of the British Library, and Captain Brett Hilder of Queensland.

Finally, the dedication of this book reflects my gratitude to a great scholar, whose generosity was unfailing for twenty years from my first approach to him as a diffident novice to a Master nos feitos que os portugueses fizeram. It is a great sorrow that my tribute must be posthumous.