Pacific Voyages Before 1768

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32114, 9 October 1969, Page 9

Pacific Voyages Before 1768

For many yeara after European! had dUeovered the Pacific, their conception of it was dominated by the age-old belief in the exist ence of a southern continent, which they called Terra Australis Incognita. In spite of the appalling hardships of a voyage across vast stretches of water in a small sailing ship, with limited supplies of food and water and inadequate navigational equipment, men still felt the urge to search for this mythical land. Their incentives were various: many were driven by the hope of finding gold and silver, or of opening up new trade routes, or winning new lands for church and country. In 1513, Captain Vasco Nunez de Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of Panama and, from a hilltop, had seen the “South Sea” stretching before him. The Portuguese navigator, Ferdinand Magellan, sailing in search of the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, in 1519 under the orders of the King of Spain, entered the ocean through the strait that was to bear his name. He named the sea Mare Pacifico and sailed across it to the regions which had hitherto been reached only by overland routes or round the Cape of Good Hope. Because of the unreliability of current methods of calculating navigational longitude, many of the discoveries made in subsequent yean by Spanish and Portuguese explorers were again lost or forgotten. The islands found by Mendana and de Quiros waited some two centuries before rediscovery.

In the late sixteenth century, voyages into the Pacific were largely devoted to harrying Spanish ships and plundering cities on the west coast of South America. Further discoveries were made, in the next century, by the Dutch from the centre of their Eastern Empire in Batavia (Jakarta). Dutch trading ships began to follow a new route, sailing from the Cape to Batavia up the west coast of Australia.

The most notable Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman, discovered Van Diemen’s Land, later renamed Tasmania, and sailed east to the west coast of New Zealand. By the end of the seventeenth century, some of the south eoast of Australia, known as New Holland, and most of the west and north coast of New Zealand, had been mapped; but these lands were believed to hold no potential wealth.

This impression was confirmed by the Englishman, William Dampier, who first landed in Australia in 1688.

In the mid-eighteenth century interest in scientific dis-

covery for its own sake began to grow. Little advance had so far been made in the -mapping of the Pacific and the belief in the southern continent had yet to be demolished I Voyages of exploration were carried out by John Byron in 1765. and by Captain Wallis and Lieutenant Carteret in 1766 Watiis discovered Tahiti, which he claimed for George 111, just anticipating the French explorer, Louis de| Bougainville, who landed j there on his voyage round the world in 1768. In planning Cook’s expedition to the Pacific in 1768, the Royal Society had decided that the recently-discovered island of Tahiti would be then most suitable place from which to watch the transit of the planet of Venus across the face of the sun.