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Cooked

by GAVAN DAWS

The existence of the Hawaiian Islands became known to Europeans late in the eighteenth century at the end of the great age of exploration in the Pacific. It had been a lengthy era: merely to locate the major island groups took two and a half centuries. The reason was simple. The ocean was immense—the biggest single feature of the earth's surface—and the islands were tiny. So it was not surprising that explorers ran into difficulties.

the great southern continentThe first Westerner to enter the Pacific, Ferdinand Magellan, set the tone. Early in the sixteenth century he sailed fomr Cape Horn to the Philippines without encountering a single island on the way. Among the navigators who followed him—Spaniards, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, and Englishmen—were many who made useful discoveries, but more who spent years at a time sailing blindly after nothing.

The Pacific, then, was unreasonably large, an ocean so big that whole groups of islands, once found, might easily be lost again for decades at a time. It was easy to imagine, as well, that in such a place marvelous discoveries remained to be made.

Here the closest attention was given to ocean south of the equator. Theoretical geographers were especially intrigued with the idea of a Great Southern Continent somewhere in the Pacific. As more and more islands were located and mapped, the imagined land mass changed its dimensions and shifted its boundaries, and in the end it disappeared altogether, leaving the enthusiasts with Australia, New Zealand, Antartica and a quote of islands for consolation. But the myth was a sturdy one, still flourishing as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, and it took the work of a practical genius to lay it to rest.

James Cook

Two brilliant voyages to the South Pacific established the Englishman James Cook as the greatest seagoing explorer produced by a nation of explorers. In less than a decade he made systematic traverses of seas covering about a quarter of the earth's surface, and found answers to all sorts of problems that had vexed explorers ever since Magellan's time.

If the Great Southern Continent was gone for good, at least the modern map of the South Pacific had taken its place. This was more than a fair exchange, and it made Cook's name.

So much for the ocean south of the equator. To the north, the Spanish controlled the seas around the Philippines, and they were growing familiar with a few of the thousands of the small islands in the western Pacific that became known collectively as micronesia. In the extreme north, an artic sea was known to exist; and on the eastern side of the ocean, the Spanish and others had explored the coast of the American as far north as California. But points of information about the western part of North America were few and far between, and there another great geographic problem awaited a solution. Was there a sea passage joining the Pacific and the Atlantic? Like the Southern Continent, it was a perennial puzzle.

Obviously Cook was the man to discover the passage, if it existed to be discovered. His government commissioned him to take a third exhibition to the Pacific for this purpose, and it was during the voyage that he discovered the Hawaiian Islands.

The word "discovery," of course, is a conventional one. Wherever Cook went on his first and second voyages to the South Pacific he found populated islands, clearly settled long ago, and he found the same situation in the Hawaiian Archipelago. So he was really a rediscoverer. The Pacific islanders had made his voyages in advance, and they had done so without the benefit of big ships or navigating instruments.

Given the distances involved, this was a formidable accomplishment, and naturally Cook was intrigued. He never settled the question of the islanders' navigating skills to his own satisfaction. Nor, indeed, has anyone else done so since then.

The greatest mystery, then and now, lay in the realization that in places as far apart as New Zealand, Easter Island, and Hawaii people of a common physical stock could be found, speaking much the same kind of language, and living much the same kind of life. Obviously they had a common origin. Where was it? How long ago had they dispersed? And by what means?

The islanders, who were given the general name Polynesians, could not answer these questions themselves. By the time Westerners came to the Pacific, the natives' long-distance canoe voyages had stopped. Legendary tales of migratory expeditions were still told, and the Polynesians could reel off genealogical chants that went back to the creation of the earth.

The three voyages of Captain James Cook, with the first version in red, second in green, and third in blue. The route of Cook's crew following his death is shown as a dashed blue line.But it was difficult to get the traditions of one group of islands to agree exactly with the traditions of another, and harder still to get the Polynesian idea of time to fit the Western historical calendar.

As far the Hawaiian islands were concerned, archeology (a science only of the mid-twentieth century in the Pacific) was finally able to suggest some tentative answers. Evidently, Hawaii was settled from the Marquesas and the Society Islands, probably as early as the eighth century A.D., possibly earlier still: and there was another wave of migration in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this time from Tahiti. After that, apparently, there were no more voyages back and forth to the South Pacific, and the Hawaiians lived in isolation until the arrival of Cook.

The discovery of new islands was no part of Cook's official task on his third voyage. The sea passage from the Pacific to Atlantic was the sole object of search. Cook, with his two ships, HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery, was to go directly from the South Pacific to the coast of North America. But Cook was a man to whom things happened, and it was gift to turn the most matter-of-fact instruction to interesting account.

Early in December 1777, his expedition headed north from the Society Islands towards the equatorial Pacific. The two ships crosses the line before the month was over, and in the last week of the year they made their first new landfall, a tiny, uninhabited crescent-shaped coral atoll. Cook named it Christmas Island.

He set sail for the north again on January 2, 1778, and every day took him farther into unfamiliar waters. He had never before been north of the equator in the Pacific, and neither he nor any other Englishman knew much about the central part of the ocean.

For more than two hundred years the Spanish had been sailing between Mexico and the Philippines, but they were notoriously close-lipped about their activities. If they had sighted the Hawaiian Islands they made no use of the discovery, and certainly they told no one else. Any information about the track followed by the Spanish galleons had to be collected at swordpoint, and even so the best charts available to the English were crude.

They showed little more than the imperfectly matched coastlines of Asia and America, separated from each other in the far north by a narrow strait, and then parting, in the lower latitudes, like ragged curtains on a vast and empty sea.

Gavan Daws is the author of Shoal of Time, from which this excerpt is taken. You can purchase it here.

"Now These Ashes Are At The Bottom" — The Calm Blue Sea (mp3)

"After the Legions" — The Calm Blue Sea (mp3) highly recommended

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Comments

[Jorge A.]

A long post on pacific exploration and you don't even mention the Portuguese? Impressive. The word Pacific is a Portuguese one meaning peaceful. Magellan was born portuguese but sailed for Spain.

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