GREAT NAVIGATOR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 140, 15 June 1932, Page 10

GREAT NAVIGATOR.

TRIBUTE TO COOK.

EARLY PACIFIC VOYAGES. SEARCH FOR " GREAT CONTINENT." "And then came Captain. Cook to enrich, geography as no man had ever done before or has done since." This striking tribute to Cook was paid by Dr. J. C. Beaglehole, M.A., Ph.D., in the course of a public lecture on "The Opting of the Pacific," delivered at the Auckland University College last evening. The lecture was the first of a series of seven on Pacific subjects to be given at the University. There was a large attendance, Mr. Kenneth Mackenzie being in the chair.

The history of the Pacific, said the lecturer, was not a history that was well known, for the names of the men who were concerned with it were not, with few exceptions,- those of national heroes. From the time of the early years of the Christian era philosophers and geographers had hazarded the guess that beneath the equator, if there existed anything at all, there must exist a great continent, The history of the opfening of the Pacific to geographical knowledge, and after geographical knowledge to economic and political enterprise, therefore, was practically the history of the search for that continent, the failure to find it, and the finding of many other things instead. Magellan. "The first voyage across the Pacific, however, that of Magellan, in 1519-20, was fitted out with a quite different object in view." said Dr. Beaglehole. "In 1512 Balboa, the first European to set eyes on the ocean, had claimed it and all it contained for his master, the King of .Spain. About the same tiihe the Portuguese had discovered the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, in the East Indies. Spain was anxious to monopolise the rich profits of the spice trade, and as the Portuguese route round the Cape of Good Hope was closed to the Spanish, Magellan determined to seek a passage across the 'Great South Sea.' He discovered the straits called after him, and crossed the Pacific in a remarkable three months' voyage, tortured by thirst and starvation, sighting only the Ladrone and the Philippine Islands, and losing his life in the latter in a battle with natives.

"The next half-century was spent by the Spanish in the founding of a regular trade route between Central American ports and the Philippines. Succeeding Spanish voyagers searched in vain for the "Great Southern Continent." Such were Mendana, who on two voyages in 1508 and 1595, discovered the Solomon Islands and Santa Cruz; Quiros, who found the New Hebrides in IGO6, and Torres, who sailed west and discovered Torres Straits between Australia and New Guinea. Quiros died convinced that he had been in sight of the continent. Tasman. In the seventeenth century the honours of discovery had been with the Dutch. : Tasman, in 1642, searching once more for the fertile and wealthy continent of legend, had discovered Tasmania, New Zealand and the Fiji Islands, and on a second voyage in 1044 he had sailed along the whole of the north Australian coast. Earlier in the century le Maire and Schonten, coming into the ocean from the South American side, had refreshed their men at S-amoa, and at its end Dampier, the English buccaneer, had cleared up some doubtful points and made new discoveries on the Australian and New Guinea coasts.

The honours of the eighteenth century, apart from the work of tho Dutchman Roggeveen, belonged to England and France, to Wallis and Bougainville, who had both independently discovered Tahiti, to Carteret, who had rediscovered the New Hebrides, and above all to Cook, who on Ms three great voyages between 1768 and 1780, had left the impress of his personality all over the ocean and had enriched geography as no man had ever done before or had since.