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# The Pacific before Cook

By Nigel Rigby

Despite numerous crossings of the Pacific during the 16th century, the vast majority of that ocean lay unexplored by Europe. Nigel Rigby examines why it took technological advances, and innovative explorers such as Cook, to open up the Pacific. | Magellan rounding Terra del Fuego using an armillary sphere

#### Entering the Pacific

Lieutenant James Cook rounded Cape Horn, entering the Pacific in his ship Endeavour, in January 1769. It was the beginning of his three great voyages of scientific exploration in the Pacific and southern oceans that, as the naturalist Charles Darwin later put it, 'added a hemisphere' to European knowledge.

Europe had actually known about the Pacific for over 250 years, but in a very limited way. The first European recorded to have set eyes on it was sadly not Keats' 'stout Cortez', but the less well-known Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who had fought his way across the Isthmus of Panama in 1513. Balboa called the ocean 'el mar del sul', the 'South Sea'. It did not receive the name 'Pacific' until seven years later - when the navigator Ferdinand Magellan noted during the first European crossing of the ocean in 1520 that 'in truth it is very pacific, for during that time we did not suffer any storm'.

#### Early knowledge of the Pacific

For the next hundred years there were a number of Spanish voyages across and into the South Pacific. The seamen tended to see this huge stretch of water as an obstacle to be crossed as quickly as possible, rather than an ocean to be explored at leisure. This was not surprising, for navigation was rudimentary at this time, the threat of scurvy hung over any ship embarking on a long voyage and the Pacific is a huge ocean that stretches nearly 16,000km from east to west and from north to south. Certainly Magellan, who followed the best information available from mapmakers at the time during the first circumnavigation of the world, badly misjudged the size of the Pacific - with near fatal consequences for his starving and thirsty crew.

Rosselli's 1508 map - no dragons
A world map by Francesco Rosselli shows that the outline of much of the world was already known by 1508. Portuguese and Spanish ships had started pushing out from the Iberian peninsula from the 1450s, but Europe had gained a rough knowledge of the 'East' before that from the ancient Greek geographers, earlier travellers such as Marco Polo, and Arab and Asian seafarers. Some of this knowledge was fantasy, but there was less of the 'here be dragons' than most people think. Much of the information on early charts and maps was reasonably factual, even if some of the detail was speculative and the proportions were inaccurate.

'Maps such as the Rosselli were drawn for the rich and famous...'

The Pacific was known to exist before Vasco Nunez de Balboa saw it, and Portuguese seafarers probably touched on its western fringes in their early voyages to South East Asia, but the ocean was effectively a closed book to Europeans, and Rosselli's map was typical of its time in underestimating its extent - optimistically placing South America far too close to the riches of Asia. Maps such as the Rosselli were drawn for the rich and famous and were not intended for the purposes of navigation. Wise seafarers used written information to find their way to distant parts. Their notebooks, known as rutters (from the Portuguese roteiro) contained views of significant ports and coastlines and a record of courses and safe anchorages.

#### How natural conditions restricted European knowledge of the Pacific

Because of their limited sailing ability, the first Spanish ships to enter the Pacific had to follow prevailing winds and currents. In the south of the South Pacific, the winds blow steadily from the west, while in the tropics the prevailing wind direction is from the east. Yachts on round-the-world races today always sail from west to east across the Southern Ocean to use the strong westerly winds in the high latitudes.

'The first Spanish ships to sail through the South Pacific were primarily looking for gold.'

Ships of the 16th and 17th centuries entering the Pacific from Cape Horn would not attempt to sail into these westerly winds. They would usually sail up the South American coast before striking out into the ocean north of Juan Fernandez Island (where the real-life Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk, was marooned), and here they would find prevailing south-easterlies to take them across the ocean. Knowledge of the South Pacific before the 1750s was, as a result, largely restricted to the corridor south of the Equator that most Spanish ships followed.

The first Spanish ships to sail through the South Pacific were primarily looking for gold. The series of Spanish voyages following Magellan, by Mendana (1567-9), Mendana and Quiros (1595-6) and Quiros and Torres (1605-6) established that the islands of the South Pacific held little mineral wealth. As a result, interest in the area declined, there were no more expeditions for over a hundred years and the many Pacific islands that had been sighted were virtually forgotten.

Spanish activity in the Pacific after Quiros and Torres was greatest in the North Pacific and along the South and Central American coasts, where their silver-rich colonies were based. Spanish navigators discovered that by following the tropical easterly winds across the North Pacific they could reach the Philippines, sell their American silver and gold for Asian products and return via the westerly winds blowing in the far north of the ocean to their American colonies.

The established route 'missed' the Hawaiian islands - which were not seen by Europeans until Cook's last voyage. Buccaneers, pirates and traders from other European nations soon entered the Pacific in numbers to prey on Spanish wealth, but they mainly followed the main trading routes up the American coast and rarely ventured into unknown territory.

#### The West Pacific

Dutch and possibly Portuguese navigators had done much to chart the westerly approaches to the Pacific. In contrast to Spanish ships sailing from their American colonies, the Dutch were sailing east from the Cape of Good Hope, following the prevailing westerly winds in southern latitudes. They too were trying to get to the East Indies, where nutmeg, mace, pepper and cloves could be bought. In the process, they touched on Australia, which they called New Holland, the west coast of New Zealand and some of the Pacific islands.

Pieter Goos' 1660 map shows a broad outline of Australia
Peter Goos' chart, drawn about 1660, shows that the outlines of the west coast of Australia were broadly known, although the east and south coasts were not. Charts such as this one, drawn expensively in colour on vellum, contained valuable commercial information and were not intended for wide circulation, but were made solely for the use of Dutch East India Company officials.

#### The Southern Continent

There was one further element to European 'knowledge' of the South Pacific. Ancient Greek geographers believed that a huge body of land had to exist in the Southern Ocean in order to balance the weight of the northern hemisphere. Without it, people thought, the world would simply tip up. The belief persisted and the Southern Continent, or Terra Australis Incognita, appears on Francesco Rosselli's world map of 1508 placed in the middle of the South Atlantic. It continued to feature in many charts, and on Jan Jansson's chart of 1638 the Southern Continent stretched right up to the southern tip of South America.

'...Mapmakers clung to the belief that the southern continent existed...'

Navigators were pushing out across the Pacific Ocean in the 16th and 17th centuries and failing to find the Southern Continent, but mapmakers clung to the belief that it existed and merely moved its estimated position a bit further south, out of the way of the usual routes across the Ocean. One of Captain Cook's most important achievements was finally to prove that the Southern Continent did not exist - at least, not in habitable latitudes.

#### How advances in ship design helped exploration

Ships of the 16th century were 'square rigged', like Magellan's, with high sides for their size. The high wind resistance, especially of those towering sides, made the ships ungainly and only really able to sail well with the wind behind them. A major step forward in ship design happened in the early 18th century, when the high sides began to be cut down, decreasing wind resistance and giving a vastly improved sailing performance.

'Technological advances had an enormous impact on exploration in the Pacific in the 18th century...'

Neither did the earlier ships have the triangular sails at the front that are now so familiar on modern sailing boats. These foresails, invented about 50 years before the Cook voyages, improved manoeuvrability and enabled ships to sail more effectively into the wind. The impact that these technological advances had on exploration in the Pacific in the 18th century was enormous - it meant that ships could go where they wanted rather than where the winds and currents took them.

#### How improvements in navigation helped exploration

Captain Cook's voyages to the Pacific coincided with important scientific advances that made navigating a ship to a known point, and more importantly finding the way back again, a more reliable business. Up to that point, navigation had been a chancy affair, relying heavily on what navigators themselves called the three 'Ls': lead, lookout and latitude.

We determine geographical position through latitude and longitude, which are imaginary lines of measurement drawn around the world from east to west and from north to south. A position anywhere in the world can be plotted at the intersection of its latitude and longitude.

John Harrison's revolutionary 'H4' solved the problem of finding longitude at sea
That was the theory. Navigators could work out a ship's latitude with reasonable accuracy by measuring the distance of the sun or a star above the horizon with a backstaff or quadrant. Longitude was more difficult. A line of longitude is a measurement of time, and in order to plot where a ship was on that line, a navigator had to be able to measure the distance between the local time and the time at the ship's point of departure from a known meridian. It proved impossible at sea to make the calculations with the necessary accuracy, and as a result establishing a position depended on Dead Reckoning - knowing your latitude and compass course and calculating the effect of the wind and currents on the ship. Errors of hundreds if not thousands of miles were common, and many lands were 'discovered' by early European navigators - only to be effectively lost again.

John Harrison's famous chronometer, H4, built in 1759 after years of experimentation, was the first marine timekeeper accurate enough to be used with confidence when plotting longitude at sea. But it was only one of several scientific advances that made navigation safer and more reliable in the 18th century, and made possible the systematic exploration of the world's oceans and lands that had been heralded by the Cook voyages.

#### Find out more

Books

The Ship - Retracing Cook's Endeavour Voyage by Simon Baker (BBC Worldwide, 2002)

Longitude by Dava Sobel (Fourth Estate, 1998)

The Voyages of Captain Cook edited by John Barrow (Wordsworth Editions, 1999)

Imagining the Pacific - In the Wake of the Cook Voyages by Bernard Smith (Yale University Press, 1992)

Terra Australis - The Furthest Shore by William Eisler and Bernard Smith (International Cultural Corporation of Australia, 1988)

#### About the author

Nigel Rigby gained a PhD on voyager literature from the Pacific, and joined the National Maritime Museum in 1996 as research fellow for the Wolfson Gallery of Trade & Empire. He became Head of Research at the Museum in 2000.

Nigel is co-editor with Howard Booth of Modernism and Empire (Manchester University Press, 1999) and co-author with Pieter van der Merwe of Captain Cook in the Pacific. He also presented The Three Voyages of Captain Cook [/radio4/history/captain_cook.shtml] , a three-part documentary on Captain Cook on Radio 4 (September 2002).

#### Related Links

##### Articles

- Life in Cook's Navy - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/trafalgar_waterloo/life_at_sea_01.shtml
- Endeavour's Scientific Impact - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/exploration/endeavour_voyage_01.shtml
- Cook and Scurvy - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/exploration/captaincook_scurvy_01.shtml
- Captain Cook: Explorer, Navigator and Maritime Pioneer - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/exploration/captaincook_01.shtml
- Cook, Tupaia and Maori - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/exploration/cook_tupaia_maori_01.shtml

##### Multimedia Zone

- Navigation Animation - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/exploration/navigation_animation.shtml
- Endeavour virtual tour - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/exploration/endeavour_3d.shtml

##### Historic Figures

- Captain Cook - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/cook_james.shtml
- Sir Joseph Banks - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/banks_sir_joseph.shtml
- Charles Green - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/green_charles.shtml

##### Timelines

- Britain - Cook in the Pacific - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/bytime/britain/geo_cook_pacific.shtml
- Britain - Founding of the East India Co. - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/timelines/britain/tud_eastindia_co.shtml

##### BBC Links

- BBC Radio 4 - The Three Voyages of Captain Cook - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/captain_cook.shtml
- BBC News - Wreck Challenges Cook - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/1/hi/asia-pacific/2305691.stm
- BBC Radio 4 - This Sceptred Isle - Captain Cook - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/sceptred_isle/page/119.shtml?question=119

##### External Web Links

- 24 Hour Museum - Captain Cook Trail - http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/trlout/TRA13545.html
- The Natural History Museum - Endeavour Botanical Drawings - http://flood.nhm.ac.uk/cgi-bin/perth/cook/
- Captain Cook fact file - http://www.nmm.ac.uk/education/fact_files/fact_cook.html
- Ferdinand Magellan fact file - http://www.nmm.ac.uk/education/fact_files/fact_first.html

Published on BBC History: 2002-08-01
This article can be found on the Internet at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/exploration/cook_pacific_01.shtml

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