Exploration of the Pacific Ocean

Maris Pacifici by Ortelius (1589). One of the first printed maps to show the Pacific Ocean; see also the Waldseemüller map (1507)

The exploration of the Pacific Ocean describes the process by which European navigators, beginning with the Spanish expedition of Ferdinand Magellan, crossed that ocean from America to Asia, discovering new routes, archipelagos and continents. Although the Polynesians had already settled almost all the islands of the Pacific by around 1200 AD, the members of Magellan's expedition in 1522 were the first to cross it from one end to the other. Throughout the 16th century other Spanish expeditions followed, such as that of García Jofre de Loaísa in 1525, Ruy López de Villalobos in 1542 and Miguel López de Legazpi in 1565. The last of these gave rise to the first Spanish settlement in the Pacific, in the Philippine Islands, and to the discovery of the tornaviaje (return voyage) by Andrés de Urdaneta. Thanks to this discovery, the first transoceanic route of the Pacific was created: the Spanish route of the Manila galleon, which plied the vast Pacific Ocean between the Viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico) and the Philippines for 250 years. The galleon crossed the Pacific once or twice a year, carrying goods and passengers in both directions. Later, other European powers, especially France, England and Holland, began to explore the Pacific sporadically from the 17th century onward, and more regularly from the 18th century.

Before Magellan

Humans reached Australia at least by 40,000 BC, which implies that they somehow had to cross the ocean, and they were also in America before 10,000 BC. Several theories hold that they might have traveled from the islands of Melanesia and Polynesia in canoes until reaching the coasts of South America.

The Polynesians

Polynesian expansion

Around 3000 BC, speakers of Austronesian languages, probably from the island of Taiwan, began to master the art of long-distance canoe travel and spread, or their languages spread, southward to the Philippines and Indonesia, and westward to the islands of Micronesia and Melanesia. The Polynesians branched off and occupied Polynesia to the east. The dates and routes are uncertain, but they seem to have started from the Bismarck Archipelago, heading west, passing from Fiji to Samoa and Tonga, around 1500 AD. By around 100 BC they were already in the Marquesas Islands and between 300–800 BC in Tahiti (Tahiti is west of the Marquesas). The range 300–800 BC is also given for their arrival on Easter Island, the easternmost point, and for reaching the Hawaiian Islands, which lie much farther north and far from other islands. To the southwest, the islands of New Zealand were reached around 1250 BC, and the Chatham Islands, some 500 km east of New Zealand, were reached around 1500 AD. The fact that some Polynesians possessed the sweet potato before the arrival of the Europeans, a food native to South America, seems to imply that they might have reached the Americas and returned, but the evidence for these contacts is very poor.

On the coasts of America there is no evidence of long-distance navigation or of maritime contacts between the civilizations of Mexico and Peru.

On the Asian side of the Pacific, long-distance trade developed along the entire coast, from Japan to Mozambique, on the African coast of the Indian Ocean. Trade, and therefore knowledge, extended to the islands of Indonesia, but apparently not to Australia. At least by the end of the year 878, when there was already a significant Islamic settlement in Canton, much of this trade was controlled by Arabs or Muslims. In 219 BC, the Chinese sorcerer Xu Fu ventured into the Pacific with a large fleet in search of an elixir of immortality (it is thought he may have reached Japan). Between 1404 and 1433, the Chinese Admiral Zheng He led several expeditions in the Indian Ocean.

An interesting problem is that of Japanese fishing boats. If one of these had been carried out to sea, lacking adequate equipment it would have been carried by the current to North America. Japanese boats reached Acapulco in 1617, the Aleutian Islands in 1782, Alaska in 1805, the mouth of the Columbia River in 1820 and Cape Flattery in 1833. If this happened when there were Europeans nearby to leave records, it may have happened earlier.

The 16th century

Andrés Contero was the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean from the American coast, on September 25, 1513, after crossing the Isthmus of Panama, and Núñez de Balboa took possession of its waters in the name of the Kings of Spain and gave it the name of South Sea (Mar del Sur). Barely eight years later, in 1521, the Spanish expedition of Magellan crossed it, after discovering the strait that bears his name, north of Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Throughout the 16th century, several Spanish expeditions crossed the Pacific from Mexico to the Philippines and the Spice Islands in present-day Indonesia. With the discovery of the return route called the tornaviaje, from Asia to America, by the Augustinian Andrés de Urdaneta in 1565, the trade of the Manila galleon was established, which lasted two and a half centuries. Until 1815 Spanish galleons regularly crossed the Pacific from Mexico to the Philippines and back, once or twice a year, on what was the longest route in history up to that time, and according to some historians the origin of globalization.

On the Asian side, the Portuguese and Dutch built a regular trade from the East Indies to Japan and, on the American side, Spanish power ran from Mexico to Chile. The vast central Pacific Ocean was visited only by the Manila galleons and the occasional explorer. This left two large gaps in European knowledge: the South Pacific was crossed only a couple of times by the Spanish, who found it empty; the North Pacific was entirely unknown to Europeans, including the whole coast from Japan to California.

Spanish explorations and routes in the Pacific Ocean.

Recognition of the Pacific

Europeans knew that there was a vast ocean to the west, and the Chinese knew that there was one to the east. Europeans had already learned to think that the Earth was round and that these two oceans were in fact one. In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west to what he thought was Asia. When Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Brazil in the year 1500, the true extent of the Americas began to be known. The 1507 map of Martin Waldseemüller was the first to show that the Americas separated two great, different seas. This conjecture was confirmed in 1513, when Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and found salt water on the other side. The Magellan expedition of 1519–1522 showed that there was a continuous ocean from the Americas to Asia. The 1529 map of Diogo Ribeiro was the first to show this great new Pacific Ocean at a fairly approximate size.

The coast of Asia

The first European to see the Pacific Ocean was probably Marco Polo around 1292. In 1498 the Portuguese Vasco da Gama reached India and then the Portuguese advanced eastward, conquering Malacca in 1511, with Antonio de Abreu reaching the Spice Islands in 1512. In 1513, the same year that Balboa crossed Panama, Jorge Álvares reached southern China. Jorge de Menezes, in 1526–1527, reached the island of Waigeo, in New Guinea (now part of Indonesia) and named the region Ilhas dos Papuas, for which he is credited with the European discovery of Papua. In 1542, Fernão Mendes Pinto reached Japan. One hundred years after the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Dutch Republic began its remarkable expansion, which would give rise to the birth of the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch reached the East Indies in 1596, the Moluccas in 1602, and in 1619 they founded Batavia. In 1600 a Dutch fleet commanded by William Adams reached Japan from the Strait of Magellan. The Dutch had little success in China, but they established themselves at Hirado (Nagasaki) in 1609 and monopolized the trade of Japan from 1639. In 1639 Matthijs Quast and Abel Tasman searched the empty ocean east of Japan for two islands called "Rica de Oro" and "Rica de Plata". In 1643 Maarten Gerritsz Vries reached Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands. In 1653 Hendrick Hamel was shipwrecked in Korea. This was at almost the same time that the Russians were reaching the shores of the Pacific overland after crossing Siberia (see below). It is significant that Russian and Dutch merchants never linked up, given that the furs of Siberia could easily have been exported to China at great profit.

Magellan and the Manila galleons

Portuguese trade routes (blue) and Spanish trade routes (white)

Main article: Magellan–Elcano expedition

In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan set out southward following the east coast of South America, finding and sailing through the strait that now bears his name and entering the Pacific on November 28, 1520. He then sailed north and caught the trade winds, which carried him across the Pacific to the Philippines, where he was killed. Juan Sebastián Elcano, with one of the surviving ships, returned westward through the Indian Ocean, and the other ship, the Trinidad, went north in the hope of finding the westerlies and reaching Mexico. Unable to find the right wind, it was forced to return to the East Indies. In 1565 (44 years later), Andrés de Urdaneta found a wind system that could carry a ship eastward and then back to the Americas. From then until 1815, every year the Manila galleons crossed the Pacific from Mexico to the Philippines (and back), exchanging Mexican silver for spices and porcelain. Until after the voyages of Captain Cook, these were the only large ships that regularly crossed the Pacific. The route was purely commercial and there was no exploration of the areas to the north and south. In 1668 the Spanish founded a colony on Guam as a resting place for westbound galleons, and for a long time this was the only non-coastal European settlement in the Pacific.

The coast of South America

Western islands reached from South America

A New and Accurate Map of the World of 1627, possibly by John Speed. Western North America north of Mexico is a guess; the Strait of Anián is at the Bering Strait; Japan and other Pacific islands are distorted; only the north coast of New Guinea is shown; nothing of Australia; and an enormous 'Southern Unknowne Land' in the south.

In 1513, six years before Magellan, Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and saw the Pacific Ocean. In 1517–1518 two ships were built on the Pacific coast. In 1522 Pascual de Andagoya set out along the coast as far as Ecuador. In 1532, Francisco Pizarro conquered Peru, and a regular trade soon developed, carrying the silver of Peru to the coast of Panama, where it was taken overland to the Caribbean, from where it was reshipped to Spain. Spanish colonization extended southward to central Chile. In 1557–1558 Juan Fernández Ladrillero explored the islands along the Chilean coast as far as the Strait of Magellan.

The South Pacific

The Spanish in South America made several attempts to find out what lay to the west. All of them used the southern trade winds and made no attempt to drop south and catch the southern westerlies back to South America. They found no land until they were almost at New Guinea. In 1567–1568 Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira sailed from Peru to the Solomon Islands on the first expedition to the Solomons. In 1595 he tried again and reached the Santa Cruz Islands (east of the Solomon Islands toward Fiji). He died, and the survivors reached the Philippines. In 1606 Pedro Fernández de Quirós reached Vanuatu, south of the Solomon Islands. He continued exploring, got lost, and sailed to Mexico. One of his ships, under the command of Luis Váez de Torres, kept sailing west and reached New Guinea. He ran the entire south coast of this large island and passed through the Torres Strait, named in his honor, which separates New Guinea from Australia. He then headed north through the Spice Islands until reaching the Spanish port of Manila. In 1722, the Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen set out from Cape Horn for Batavia and discovered Easter Island and Samoa.

Cape Horn

Main article: Cape Horn

Six years after Magellan, in 1526, one of the ships of the expedition of García Jofre de Loaísa sailed through the Strait of Magellan and followed the coast north to Mexico. In 1578, Francis Drake passed through the strait, sailed north raiding Spanish ships, and put in somewhere on the coast of California. In 1580, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, who went in pursuit of Drake, was the first to sail from the strait to Europe. In 1587 Thomas Cavendish, following Drake, captured a Manila galleon and returned through the Indian Ocean. In 1599 Dutch ships passed through the Strait of Magellan for the first time (William Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan, was on board). Olivier van Noort followed them and became the first Dutch circumnavigator.

In 1525 Francisco de Hoces, while trying to enter the strait as part of the Loaísa expedition, was carried south by a storm and saw what he thought was the end of the land. In 1578, Drake was driven south on the western side and saw what he thought was open water. In 1616 Willem Schouten sought a passage farther south and rounded Cape Horn. In 1619 the expedition of García de Nodal followed the Dutch and showed that Tierra del Fuego was an island by circumnavigating it. Since the Strait of Magellan is narrow and difficult to navigate, Cape Horn became the standard route until the opening of the Panama Canal. It gives an idea of the difficulty of these seas that until 1820 no one went south as far as Antarctica.

The coast of North America

When the Spanish conquered Mexico in 1521 they gained a stretch of the Pacific coast. In 1533, Fortún Ximénez reached Baja California, and in 1539 Francisco de Ulloa showed that it was a peninsula, although the myth of the existence of an Island of California persisted for many years. In 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo reached a point north of San Francisco. In 1578, Francis Drake landed somewhere on the coast. In 1587 Pedro de Unamuno, coming from the Philippines, stopped at Morro Bay (California). In 1592 Juan de Fuca may have reached Puget Sound. In 1602, Sebastián Vizcaíno explored the coast of California again, and one of his ships reached the coast of the present-day state of Oregon. His was the last northward exploring expedition for the next 150 years.

After the conquest of Mexico the Spanish occupied the southern two-thirds of Mexico, all of Central America and the South American coast as far as Chile. To the north, the land was too dry to support a dense population that could be governed and taxed. The only exception was the Pueblo Indians, settled farther north in New Mexico. People such as Francisco Vázquez de Coronado penetrated deep into the interior and found nothing the Spanish valued. The land of the Chichimecas, in northern Mexico, was slowly absorbed, and Baja California began to be colonized in 1687. On the return voyage the Manila galleons departed from the city of Manila westward until reaching the coast of California, but immediately headed south, with hardly more than a few attempts ever made to explore that coast.

Australia and the southwest

Hollandia Nova, map made in 1659 by Joan Blaeu. The cartographer knows nothing of the east coast and ignores the Torres Strait, but does have Tasmania and New Zealand.

Australia is notable for the number of explorers who sailed nearby and failed to sight it. There appears to be no record of Indonesian sailors reaching Australia. There are theories of the arrival of Portuguese navigators in Australia in the 16th century, although there is no consensus on the matter. The Spanish voyages from South America between 1567 and 1606 reached Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and other archipelagos of the South Pacific, but not Australia. Only Luis Váez de Torres reached the north coast of Australia, but he did not land. The first European to definitely see Australia was Willem Janszoon, who in February 1606 reached the Cape York Peninsula, thinking it was part of New Guinea. Also in 1606 (from June to October) Luis Váez de Torres, of the Quirós expedition from South America, followed the south coast of New Guinea and passed through the Torres Strait, without recognizing Australia. (His voyage, and therefore the separation between Australia and New Guinea, was not known with certainty until 1765.) From around 1611, the Brouwer Route (the standard Dutch route) to the East Indies was to follow the Roaring Forties as far east as possible and then turn sharply north toward Batavia. Since it was difficult to determine longitude, some ships reached the western Australian coast or were wrecked on it. In 1616 Dirk Hartog ran into the west coast and made some explorations. Frederick de Houtman did the same in 1619. In 1623 Jan Carstenszoon, following the south coast of New Guinea, missed the Torres Strait and sailed along the north coast of Australia. In 1643 Abel Tasman set out from Mauritius, missed Australia, found Tasmania, continued east and discovered New Zealand, missed the strait between the North and South Islands, turned northwest, missed Australia again, and sailed along the north coast of New Guinea. In 1644 he followed the south coast of New Guinea, missed the Torres Strait, headed south and charted the north coast of Australia. In 1688 the English buccaneer William Dampier beached a ship on the northwest coast. In 1696, Willem de Vlamingh explored the southwest coast. In 1699, Dampier was sent to find the east coast of Australia. He sailed along the west coast, went north to Timor, followed the north coast of New Guinea to the Bismarck Archipelago, and abandoned his search, since his ship was in very poor condition. Until Captain Cook, the east coast was completely unknown and New Zealand had been sighted only once.

Pacific islands

Main islands. Off the map, east of the Cook Islands, are the Society Islands with Tahiti, and then the Tuamotu Archipelago with the Marquesas Islands to its north.

In this early period many islands and archipelagos in the Pacific were discovered, the most important being:

• 1521: Guam and the Mariana Islands, by Magellan;
• 1525: Caroline Islands, by Diogo da Rocha, from the Portuguese East Indies;
• 1526: Marshall Islands, by Alonso de Salazar, of the Loaísa expedition;
• 1543: Bonin Islands, south of Japan, by Bernardo de la Torre, from Mexico;
• 1568: Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Wake Island, by Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, from South America;
• 1574: Juan Fernández Islands by Juan Fernández, accidentally;
• 1595: Marquesas Islands and Santa Cruz Islands, by Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, from South America;
• 1606: Tuamotu Archipelago and New Hebrides (Vanuatu) by Pedro Fernández de Quirós, from South America;
• 1616: Tonga and the Bismarck Archipelago, by Willem Schouten, from Cape Horn;
• 1643: Tasmania, New Zealand and Fiji, by Abel Tasman;
• 1722: Easter Island and Samoa, by Jacob Roggeveen, from Cape Horn;
• 1741: Aleutian Islands, by Vitus Bering and Alexei Chirikov, from Russia;
• 1767: Tahiti, by Samuel Wallis
• 1767: Pitcairn Islands, by Philip Carteret;
• 1774: New Caledonia and Norfolk Islands, by James Cook;
• 1778: Hawaiian Islands, by James Cook;
• 1788: Gilbert Islands (Kiribati), by Thomas Gilbert;
• 1790: northern group of the Marquesas Islands, by Joseph Ingraham, from Boston;
• 1791: Chatham Islands, by William Robert Broughton;

Mythical lands

Europeans had long believed in the existence of a Strait of Anián somewhere near the Bering Strait. A long and distorted Hokkaido was called Ezo, Jesso and many other transcriptions. One of the Kuril Islands, named by Vries Companies Landt [Company Land], grew and became a large landmass joined to North America. Joao-da-Gama-Land was thought to lie east of Japan. There was an enlarged Puget Sound called the Grande Mer de l'Ouest, possibly connected to Hudson Bay. In the far south there was a Terra Australis. The map published in Diderot's Encyclopédie in the year 1755 is full of errors. In 1875 no fewer than 123 mythical islands were removed from the Royal Navy charts of the North Pacific.

17th and 18th centuries

Alaska and the Russians

Russian fur-trading posts following the natural range of the sea otter

The modern period does not begin with Captain Cook, but with the Russians. They crossed Siberia and reached the Pacific in 1639 (Ivan Moskvitin). In 1644, Vassili Poyarkov found the Amur River. In 1648, Semyon Dezhnev (probably) entered the Pacific from the Arctic Ocean, after sailing along the coast through the Bering Strait. In 1652 Mikhail Stadukhin followed the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk. In 1697 Vladimir Atlasov entered the Kamchatka Peninsula from the north. In 1716, the first seagoing ships were built to reach Kamchatka from the mainland. In 1728, Vitus Bering sailed from Kamchatka through the strait that now bears his name without sighting America. In 1732 Mikhail Gvozdev and Ivan Fyodorov sailed east and reached the mainland at Cape Prince of Wales, charted the northwest coast of Alaska and left a map of their route. The expedition also discovered three previously unknown islands, the two Diomede Islands and St. Lawrence Island.

In 1741, Vitus Bering and Alexei Chirikov sailed south of the Aleutian Islands and reached the Alaska Peninsula. Peter Kuzmich Krenitzin charted the Aleutians before 1769. The myth of a landmass north of the Aleutian Islands took a long time to dispel. Russian fur hunters island-hopped along the Aleutians and then along the south coast of Alaska, mainly in search of the sea otter (Attu Island at the western end of the Aleutian Islands in 1745; Unalaska Island, at the eastern end, in 1759; Kodiak Island, in 1784; the Kenai Peninsula, in 1785; Yakutat, in 1795; Sitka, in 1799; Fort Ross, in 1812). Trading posts north of the Aleutians appeared on the west coast after 1819. The Spanish from Mexico met the Russians in 1788 (see below). Russian America was sold to the United States in 1867.

Captain Cook

The routes of the voyages of Captain James Cook. The first voyage is shown in red, the second in green, and the third voyage in blue. The route of Cook's crew after his death is shown as a dotted blue line.

Main article: James Cook

On his first voyage (1768–1771) James Cook went to Tahiti from Cape Horn, circumnavigated New Zealand, followed the east coast of Australia for the first time and returned through the Torres Strait and the Cape of Good Hope. On his second voyage (1772–1775) he sailed from west to east, keeping as far south as possible, and showed that Terra Australis probably did not exist. On his third voyage (1776–1780) he came upon the Hawaiian Islands and followed the North American coast from Oregon to the Bering Strait, charting this coast for the first time and showing that there was probably no Northwest Passage. Cook was killed in Hawaii in 1779. The expedition made a second attempt at the Bering Strait, stopped at Kamchatka and China, and reached England in 1780. Cook represented a high degree of scientific exploration: by showing that there was no great landmass in the southern ocean, charting the two largest island groups in the Pacific, and following the east coast of Australia and the west coast of North America, he closed the last gaps in European knowledge of the coasts of the Pacific. After Cook, everything was detail.

Cook's rivals and successors

Several governments sponsored expeditions in the Pacific, often in rivalry with or in emulation of Captain Cook. At the time of Cook's first voyage, in 1766–1769 Louis Antoine de Bougainville crossed the Pacific and publicized Tahiti, and in 1767 Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret separately crossed the Pacific. In 1785–1788, Jean-François de Galaup, Count of Lapérouse followed the American coast from Chile to Alaska, crossed to China, explored northern Japan and Kamchatka, went south to Australia and lost his life in the Santa Cruz Islands. The Malaspina Expedition (1789–1794) visited the American coast, Manila, New Zealand and Australia. In 1791–1795 George Vancouver charted the west coast of Canada more thoroughly. In 1803–1806 Adam Johann von Krusenstern carried out the first Russian circumnavigation and investigations on both sides of the North Pacific. In 1820, Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen saw Antarctica. (Other voyages can be found in "Early voyages of scientific exploration".)

Spain explores the west coast of North America

Main article: Spanish expeditions to the Pacific Northwest

For Europeans in the age of sail, western North America was one of the most distant places on earth (9 to 12 months of sailing). Spain had long claimed the entire west coast of the Americas, but paid little attention to the area north of Mexico. This changed when the Russians appeared in Alaska. The Spanish advanced into northern California and built a series of missions: San Diego in 1767, Monterey in 1770 and San Francisco in 1776. (San Francisco Bay was first seen in 1769 by Gaspar de Portolá from the landward side, because its mouth is not evident from the sea.) San Francisco remained the northern limit of land occupation. By sea, from 1774 to 1793 the Spanish expeditions to the Pacific Northwest sought to assert Spanish claims against the Russians and the British. In 1774, Juan José Pérez Hernández reached what is today the southern tip of the Alaska Peninsula. In 1778 Captain Cook sailed along the west coast and spent a month at Nootka Sound, on Vancouver Island. Spain and England were at war; Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra went after him and reached Prince William Sound, but found neither Cook nor the Russians. In 1788, Esteban José Martínez went north and met the Russians for the first time (Unalaska and Kodiak Island) and heard news that the Russians planned to occupy Nootka Sound. In 1789 Martínez went north to build a fort at Nootka and found that British and American merchant ships were already there. He seized a British ship, which led to the Nootka Crisis and to Spanish recognition of non-Spanish trade on the northwest coast. In 1791 the Malaspina Expedition charted the coast of Alaska. In 1792, Dionisio Alcalá Galiano circumnavigated Vancouver Island. In 1792–1794 George Vancouver charted the complex coast of British Columbia. In 1793, Alexander MacKenzie reached the Pacific coast of Canada overland. At that time Spain was involved in the French wars and was increasingly unable to assert its claims on the Pacific coast. In 1804 the Lewis and Clark Expedition reached the Pacific coast overland from the Mississippi River. By the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, Spain renounced its claims north of California. Fur traders from Canada, and later a smaller number of Americans, crossed the mountains and built posts on the coast. In 1846, the Oregon Treaty divided the Oregon territory between Great Britain and the United States. The United States conquered California in 1848 and bought Alaska in 1867.

Northeast Pacific

The Russians moved south and the Japanese moved north and explored the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin Island. Around 1805 Adam Johann von Krusenstern was apparently the first Russian to reach Siberia by sea from European Russia. In 1808, Mamiya Rinzō explored the coast of Sakhalin. During the Crimean War a British fleet failed to capture Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. In 1860 Russia annexed the southeastern corner of Siberia, which belonged to China.

The commercial opening of the Pacific and imperialism

After Captain Cook a large number of European merchant ships began to enter the Pacific. The reasons for this are not entirely clear. On the third voyage, Cook bought furs at Nootka that were later sold in China at a profit of 1,800%—enough to pay for a trading voyage. The first to do so was James Hanna from Macau in 1785. Robert Gray in 1787 was the first American. This maritime fur trade peaked around 1810, drew many ships into the Pacific and brought Canadians and Americans to the coast. The first whaling ship in the Pacific left London in 1788, and in the 19th century there were already dozens of whaling ships in the Pacific every year. Clipper-type ships reduced sailing time from Europe to the Pacific. England founded a colony in Australia in 1788 and in New Zealand in 1840. After 1800 England began to replace the Netherlands along the Asian coast. Hong Kong became a colony in 1839 during the First Opium War, which was also the first time a large European naval and military force appeared in the Pacific. European ships and sailors disrupted life on the Pacific islands. Most of the Pacific islands were soon claimed by one European power or another.

Chronology of the exploration of the Pacific Ocean

The chronology has been arranged as a table, ordered, as is logical, chronologically, though it can be sorted in various ways simply by clicking on the first row of each column. To make it easier to consult, two columns record the scope of each exploration: the first by continent, and the second by ocean or sea.

Continent according to shading color
Asia (As)	North America (AmN) CBF9DD	Central America (AmC)	South America (AmS)	Oceania (Oc)	Australia (Aus)
Seas of the Pacific Ocean according to shading color (Pac)
Sea of Okhotsk (OJ)	Sea of Japan (JAP)	South China Sea (ChS)	East China Sea (ChOr)	Tasman Sea | TAS	Arafura Sea - Gulf of Carpentaria (Ar/Car)
Indian Ocean (IND)		Southern Ocean (ANT)		Arctic Ocean (ART)

Chronology of the exploration of the Pacific Ocean (by Westerners)

Dates	Cont.	Sea	Discovery	Notes	Century
1511-1512	As	Ind/Pac	Moluccas	António de Abreu sails through the Strait of Malacca, between Sumatra and Bangka Island, and along the coasts of Java, Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa and Flores until reaching the "Spice Islands" (Maluku Islands).	16th century
1513	As	Ind/Pac		Jorge Álvares, setting out from Malacca, was the first European to reach southern China, at Lintin Island in the delta of the Pearl River.
1513	AmC	PAC	Gulf of San Miguel	Vasco Núñez de Balboa crosses the Isthmus of Panama and reaches the Gulf of San Miguel, discovering the "Mar del Sur" (South Sea) (the Pacific Ocean).
1516	As	Ind/Pac		Portuguese merchants land at Da Nang, Champa, calling it Cochinchina (modern Vietnam).
1518	As		Island of Borneo	The Portuguese navigator Lorenzo de Gómez reaches the island of Borneo.
1519	AmC	PAC	Gulf of Nicoya	Gaspar de Espinosa sails along the western coasts of present-day Panama and Costa Rica as far as the Gulf of Nicoya.
1519-1522	AmS As	PAC	Guam (Mariana Islands) Homonhon, Limasawa and Mactán islands (Philippines) Island of Borneo	Magellan–Elcano expedition. A Spanish expedition of five ships (Trinidad, San Antonio, Victoria, Santiago and Concepción) and 265 men under the command of Ferdinand Magellan departs from San Lucar de Barrameda on September 20, 1519, with the aim of finding a sea passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific in South America in order to reach the East Indies through Castilian seas (according to the Treaty of Tordesillas), and specifically the Spice Islands (Moluccas). This is the so-called western route, which Christopher Columbus had already sought and failed to find because he ran into the American continent. After exploring the coast of Patagonia, Magellan's expedition discovers the Strait of Magellan and three ships manage to pass through it. In the following months they make the first crossing of the Pacific, reaching the Mariana Islands on March 6, 1521. They discover the Philippine Islands on March 16, and on April 21 Magellan dies fighting the natives in defense of the interests of Humabon, chief of Cebu. Only two ships reach the Moluccas, and only the ship Victoria, under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano, after crossing the Indian Ocean and rounding Africa, returns to Spain, arriving on September 6, 1522, completing the first circumnavigation of the Earth. See also: Magellan–Elcano expedition
1522	AmC	PAC	Gulf of Fonseca	Gil González Dávila explores the interior from the Gulf of Nicoya, discovering Lake Nicaragua, while his pilot Andrés Niño explores the coast to the west, discovering the Gulf of Fonseca and perhaps reaching as far as the southwestern coast of modern Guatemala.
1524-1525	AmS	PAC		Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro explore from Punta Piña (7°56′ N) on the southern coast of Panama to the San Juan River (4°N), on the western coast of Colombia.
1525-1536	Oc	PAC	Bokak Atoll (Marshall) Mindanao Island (Philippines)	García Jofre de Loaísa departs from La Coruña on July 24, 1525, at the head of a fleet of seven ships and 450 men with the aim of taking and colonizing the Moluccas, whose ownership was disputed by the Crowns of Castile and Portugal. The expedition included two of the most illustrious Spanish mariners: Elcano, who lost his life on the expedition, and the very young Urdaneta. They made numerous geographic and maritime discoveries, but their voyage was a succession of disasters, calamities and desertions: besides the deaths of Loaísa and Elcano, three of the ships never managed to get through the Strait of Magellan and only one, the Santa María de la Victoria, reached the Moluccas, where the crew had to confront the Portuguese for almost a year. After suffering countless vicissitudes over a very harsh and bitter voyage, only 24 men from this ship returned to Spain. When Alonso de Salazar replaced the deceased Loaísa, Bokak Atoll (Marshall Islands) was discovered on August 21, 1526.
1526-1528	AmS	PAC		Pizarro and his pilot Bartolomé Ruiz explore the western coast of South America, from the San Juan River south to the Santa River (near 9° S), being the first to sight the coasts of Ecuador and Peru.
1526-1527	Oc	PAC	Island of New Guinea	The Portuguese Jorge de Menezes discovers the island of New Guinea, naming it Ilhas dos Papuas.
1527-1529	As	PAC	Marshall Islands Admiralty Islands	Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón departs from Zihuatanejo, on the Mexican coast, on October 31, 1527, in command of three ships (La Florida, Espíritu Santo and Santiago) built there by order of Hernán Cortés. They were bound for the Philippines; they crossed the ocean and sailed along the northern coast of New Guinea, which they named Isla de Oro, and on October 3, 1528, only one of the ships, La Florida, managed to reach the Moluccas. In his attempt to return to the coasts of New Spain he was diverted by the northeast trade winds, which drove him back to the Moluccas. Some time later Saavedra tried again, but sailing farther south. He returned to the coasts of New Guinea and, after receiving water and food from the natives, headed northeast, where he discovered the groups of the Marshall Islands and the Admiralty Islands. He landed on the small island of Eniwetok, from where he continued his voyage eastward and was again caught by the winds, which carried him to the Moluccas for the third time. In 1529, while trying once more to return, he was caught by a storm and died in the shipwreck.
1532	AmN	PAC		In 1529, while Cortés was in Spain, he signed an agreement with the Spanish Crown by which he undertook to send, at his own expense, "fleets to discover islands and territories in the South Sea" (the Pacific Ocean). He sent the first expedition north in 1532 under the command of his cousin Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, in two ships, the San Miguel and the San Marcos. They departed from Santo Domingo Tehuantepec and sailed along the coasts of the Audiencia of New Galicia (today Jalisco and Nayarit), until discovering the three Marías Islands, named Magdalenas. The San Miguel, battered by storms and with its crew in mutiny, turned back and arrived at the coasts of Jalisco, while the San Marcos, on which Hurtado was traveling, headed north. Nothing was ever heard of them again, although it is assumed that they were shipwrecked on the northern coast of the present-day state of Sinaloa and perished.
1533-1534	AmN	PAC	Revillagigedo Archipelago	Diego de Becerra and Hernando de Grijalva, captaining two ships built in Salina Cruz, are sent by Cortés to aid Hurtado de Mendoza. They set sail from Manzanillo on October 31 and a storm separates them on the first night. Grijalva, on the San Lázaro, waited three days for the Concepción, which, captained by Becerra, headed for the Baja California Peninsula, where Becerra was murdered by Fortún Ximénez, a mutineer, who set course for the coasts of Michoacán and continued north, becoming the first Westerner to land on the Baja California Peninsula. After stealing pearls and abusing some native women, he was killed by the natives. Some survivors managed to return to the Concepción and sailed erratically until reaching the coasts of Jalisco, where Nuño de Guzmán captured them. Meanwhile, on December 21 Grijalva had discovered an island of the Revillagigedo Archipelago, which took him five days to approach and land on. He took possession of it, calling it Santo Tomás (Socorro Island), and a few days later discovered another island, which he called Los Inocentes (San Benedicto Island). On his return he explored the coasts of the Gulf of Tehuantepec, reaching Acapulco in the first days of February 1534. In 1535 Cortés sent Grijalva on the San Lázaro to Baja California in support of his expedition, but the ship ran aground on the coast; upon Cortés's return it was recovered and taken to Acapulco in April 1536.
1535	AmS	PAC	Galápagos Islands	The ship carrying Fray Tomás de Berlanga discovers the Galápagos Islands by chance on March 10, when the then Bishop of Panama was heading to Peru to carry out a commission from the Spanish monarch, Charles V, to arbitrate a dispute between Pizarro and his subordinates after the conquest of the Inca Empire.
1537	AmN	PAC		In April 1537 Grijalva sets out on the ship Santiago from the port of Paita to explore the Pacific. He traveled southwest to 29°S and then turned north, crossing the equator and reaching 25°N, without being able to reach California because of the east and northeast winds. Grijalva returns to the equator, where his crew demanded that he head for the Moluccas; he refused because he did not want to enter territory recognized as belonging to Portugal, and he was murdered by the mutineers, who reached New Guinea. They had to abandon the ship and were rescued by the Portuguese.
1539	AmN	PAC		Francisco de Ulloa is in command of the 4th expedition sent by Cortés to explore the South Sea. He departs from the port of Acapulco on July 8 with the ships Santo Tomás, Santa Águeda and Trinidad. Off the Marías Islands they abandon the Santo Tomás, and they reach the Gulf of California, arriving at its northern end on September 28, at the mouth of the Colorado River (which they called the mouth of the river "Ancón de San Andrés"). After landing and taking possession of the lands of the Mar Bermeja (Vermilion Sea), a name they gave it because of the reddish color of the waters stained by the Colorado, they rounded Cabo San Lucas and entered the ocean again. On December 5 he passed Magdalena Bay without entering it, as Ulloa had been wounded in a skirmish with the natives. On April 5, 1540, he was at Cedros Island, from where he sent a letter to Cortés on the Santa Águeda. The Trinidad continued the exploration: nothing more was ever heard of Ulloa and his crew, although he managed to establish definitively that Baja California is a peninsula and not an island, as had been thought.
1541-1543	Oc	PAC	Caroline Islands Bonin Islands (south of Japan)	Ruy López de Villalobos is sent by Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza to the East Indies in search of new trade routes, especially the tornaviaje (return voyage) (discovered a few years later by Andrés de Urdaneta). He departs from Puerto de Navidad in 1542 aboard four caravels, and they cross the Pacific to the Moluccas. Along the way they discover three islands of the Carolines (Fais, Ulithi and Yap), as well as eight atolls of the Marshall Islands (Kwajalein, Lae, Ujae, Wotho, Likiep, Wotje, Erikub and Maloelap). In 1543 they reach the southern coast of the island of Mindanao, where they make contact with Malay natives. They continue until reaching the island of Leyte and named the islands "Las Islas Filipinas" in honor of the then Prince Philip II. Because of hunger and the lack of reinforcements, the expedition members had to put in at the Moluccas, a Portuguese dominion. Villalobos died in 1544 in Amboyna, and the rest of the crew managed to escape and return to New Spain. Bernardo de la Torre, in command of the ship San Juan de Letrán, was sent back by Villalobos to discover the return route to Mexico and bring him supplies, and on that voyage he discovered the present-day island of Parece Vela, possibly Marcus Island (present-day Minamitorishima) and some of the Bonin Islands (Ogasawara), which he called islas del Arzobispo, the Volcano Islands and the island of Iwo Jima. Íñigo Ortiz de Retes, another of his expedition members, departed from the port of Tidore on May 16, 1545, in command of the San Juan, with the mission of returning to New Spain, but by a different route from the one used unsuccessfully by de la Torre, and he reconnoitered the northern coast of the island of New Guinea; he is credited with having given the island its name.
1542-1543	AmN	PAC	Santa Barbara Islands	Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo is chosen by Pedro de Alvarado to continue the exploration of the coast of California. He departs from the port of Barra de Navidad (Jalisco) on June 24 with three ships, accompanied by soldiers, Indians, African slaves, a priest, food for two years, livestock and merchandise. Cabrillo, on the San Salvador, reaches Cedros Island on August 5 and continues along the coast of the Baja California Peninsula, drawing up maps. On September 28 he finds a "very good and safe port" (San Diego); on October 6 he is at San Pedro (Port of Los Angeles) and on the 9th at Santa Monica; on October 7 he discovers the Northern Archipelago (today the Santa Barbara Islands), and on the 10th he reaches San Buenaventura; on the 13th he arrives at Santa Barbara and he reaches Point Conception on the 17th. Because of contrary winds, the ships turn back and take shelter at San Miguel Island. They spend three months there waiting for the winter storms to end, and Cabrillo dies on January 3, 1543, from a wound received in a skirmish with the natives. On February 18, the fleet heads north again under the command of Bartolomé Ferrelo. With favorable winds they reach Cape Mendocino on March 1, near the northern limit of the present-day state of California, so it is likely that the expedition reached the neighboring state of Oregon.
1542 (or 1543)	As	Jap	Tanegashima (Japan)	Fernão Mendes Pinto, Diogo Zeimoto and Cristovão Borralho reach Tanegashima island, Japan.
1557-1559	AmS	PAC		Juan Fernández Ladrillero and Francisco Cortés Ojea explore the Chilean coast from Valdivia (39°48′ S) to the Santa Bárbara Channel (54°S); Ladrillero passes through the western entrance of the Strait of Magellan, reaches its eastern entrance and returns.
1564-1565	Oc	PAC		Viceroy Luis de Velasco commissioned Miguel López de Legazpi to put to sea on a new expedition to the Philippines. He set sail from Puerto de Navidad (now Jalisco) on November 21, 1564, and on the voyage he conquered Guam, the Saavedra islands (Mejit, Ailuk and Jemo, today Marshall Islands) and the Mariana Islands (stopping there), and touched at Samar on April 27, 1565. Because of the shortage of food, Legazpi was forced to move from island to island, roaming and seeking places to plunder and to expand the dominions, aided by the fact that the inhabitants were in conflict with one another, and soon afterwards he established the first Spanish settlements. Meanwhile, one of his captains, Alonso de Arellano, after becoming separated, began the return voyage to Acapulco and discovered Lib Island (Marshall Islands), as well as five islands (Oroluk, Chuuk, Pulap, Sorol and Ngulu) in the Caroline Islands. Another of his captains, Andrés de Urdaneta, set sail from San Miguel, in the Philippines, on June 1, 1565, and set a northeasterly course. He rose to the 40°N parallel, where he found the Kuro Siwo current, which carried him across the Pacific to Cape Mendocino, in California, and from there they sailed south along the coast to Acapulco, where he arrived on October 8, having covered 20,000 km in little more than 4 months. Urdaneta achieved universal fame for discovering and documenting the route across the Pacific from the Philippines to Acapulco, known as the Urdaneta Route or tornaviaje.
1567-1568	Oc	PAC	Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Wake Island	Álvaro de Mendaña leads an expedition with the aim of seeking the supposed Terra Australis Incognita, exploring its resources (it was thought there would be gold), studying the possibilities of colonization and founding a settlement. He departs from El Callao on November 20, 1567, with some 150 men and two ships (Los Reyes and Todos los Santos, captained by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa and Pedro de Ortega). On January 15 they pass the island of Jesús (Nui, in the Tuvalu islands), and on February 7 they arrive, without stopovers, at Santa Isabel Island, the first of the Solomon Islands. They remained there for six months and explored the nearby islands, and although they found no gold, the name Solomon Islands had already caught on. They made the return voyage to Acapulco by the route recently discovered by the Manila galleon, passing by the island of San Francisco (Wake Island).
1563-1574	AmS	PAC	Juan Fernández Archipelago	Juan Fernández, a Spanish mariner expert in navigating the western coast of South America, by sailing farther from the coast found a new sea route that avoided the Humboldt Current, thereby shortening the travel time of the north–south route between El Callao (Peru) and Valparaíso (Chile) to 30 days instead of 6 months. In 1564, after more than fifteen years of experience on that route, he stood out by achieving the aforementioned record, besides having sighted, on November 22 of that year, the archipelago that would later immortalize him, from a distance of 10 nautical miles, while serving as master of the ship Nuestra Señora de los Remedios.
1577-1580	-	Various		Sir Francis Drake completes the second circumnavigation of the Earth.
1595	Oc	PAC	Marquesas Islands Santa Cruz Islands	Mendaña makes a second voyage to establish a colony in the Solomons, in order to prevent English pirates from taking refuge in the Pacific and attacking the Philippines or the American coast, and discovers the Marquesas Islands. Some 400 people embark on four ships, and he is accompanied by his wife, Isabel de Barreto. The chief pilot and captain of the flagship was the Portuguese Pedro Fernández de Quirós. They departed again from the port of El Callao and, after stopping at Paita, found the Marquesas and explored them for ten days. They continued westward, passing one of the Cook Islands and one of the Tuvalu islands, until they reached the Santa Cruz Islands, an archipelago south of the Solomon Islands. They founded a colony in the Santa Cruz Islands, and Mendaña died of malaria on October 18, 1595, whereupon his wife, Isabel de Barreto, took charge of the expedition. As the situation deteriorated, they decided to abandon the colony and set course for the Philippines. Only the ship San Gerónimo, guided by Quirós, reaches port.
1602	AmN	PAC		Sebastián Vizcaíno is appointed General by Gaspar de Zúñiga y Acevedo, Viceroy and Count of Monterrey, to lead the exploration of the Californian coast in search of safe ports for the Manila galleon. From May 5, 1602, to February 21, 1603, he commands three ships (San Diego, Santo Tomás and Tres Reyes), exploring from Acapulco to beyond Cape Mendocino. During the voyage they fixed place names, drew up charts and maps and prepared detailed sailing directions and logs of the coast, which would be used for navigation until the end of the 18th century because of the precision and accuracy of their details. He landed several times in California and went inland, although he had to retreat because of the hostility of the natives. The commander of the ship Tres Reyes, Martín d'Aguilar, separated from Vizcaíno and continued north along the coast until reaching the coasts of the present-day state of Oregon. One of the results of Vizcaíno's voyage was a growing enthusiasm for establishing a Spanish settlement at Monterey, a settlement postponed for another 167 years.	17th century
1606	Aus	Ar/Car	Australia	Willem Janszoon discovers Australia at the mouth of the Pennefather River, on the western coast of the Cape York Peninsula, exploring its coasts southward from Badu Island to Cape Keerweer (13°58′ S).
1606	Oc	PAC	Tuamotu Archipelago New Hebrides (Vanuatu) Pitcairn Islands Torres Strait (Australia)	Pedro Fernández de Quirós leads the 3rd Spanish expedition to find the Terra Australis, with three ships, Santos Pedro y Pablo, San Pedro and Los Tres Reyes. He departs from El Callao on December 21, 1605, with 300 sailors and soldiers. In 1606 the expedition reached the Tuamotu Archipelago and the islands later called the New Hebrides (Vanuatu). He discovered Ducie Island on January 26, naming it La Encarnación, as well as Henderson in the Pitcairn Islands. Later, Quirós's expedition landed on a large island that he believed to be part of the southern continent, and he called it the "Austrialia del Espíritu Santo" (Espíritu Santo). There he founded a colony he called New Jerusalem, but it was soon abandoned because of the understandable hostility of the natives and disagreements among the members of the expedition. Weeks later Quirós put to sea again; bad weather separated him from the other ships, and he set course for Acapulco in Mexico, where he arrived in November 1606. His second-in-command, Luis Váez de Torres, after searching in vain for Quirós, headed back to Espíritu Santo, discovering that it was an island, and continued searching for the Terra Australis until he abandoned the search and headed for Manila, sailing through the Torres Strait, which now honors him with his name.
1616	AmS		Isla de los Estados Cape Horn Islands of Tonga	Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten discover and name the Le Maire Strait, Isla de los Estados and Cape Horn; they also discover several islands of Tonga (Niuafo'ou, Niuatoputapu and Tafahi), Futuna and Alofi (in modern Wallis and Futuna), and several islands in the Tuamotu Archipelago (Takaroa, Takapoto, Manihi, Ahe and Rangiroa) and in the Bismarck Archipelago (including New Hanover and New Ireland).
1623	Aus	Ar/Car		Jan Carstenszoon discovers the western coast of the Cape York Peninsula, from Cape Keerweer to the southern mouth of the Gilbert River, while his companion Willem Joosten van Colster discovers "Arnhemsland" and "Speultsland" (modern Arnhem Land and perhaps Groote Eylandt).
1638-1641	As	Okhotsk	Sea of Okhotsk	Ivan Moskvitin led a Russian reconnaissance party that reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean, becoming the first Russian to reach the Sea of Okhotsk.
1642-1643	Oc	Tas	Tasmania New Zealand Fiji	Abel Tasman discovers "Anthony van Diemenslandt" (Tasmania) and "Staten Landt" (New Zealand); the following year he discovers the islands of "t Eylandt Amsterdam" (Tongatapu), Fiji and New Britain.
1643	As	Jap	Kuril Islands	Maarten Gerritsz Vries sails along the eastern coast of "Yezo" (Hokkaido), between Iturup and Urup, as far as Capes Patience and Aniva, on Sakhalin Island, which, because of the fogs, he wrongly assumed to be part of the mainland.
1643-1644	As	-		Vasily Poyarkov crosses the Stanovoy Range and descends the Zeya River to the Amur River, which he descends to its mouth.
1648-1649	As	ART	Bering Strait	Semyon Dezhnev sails from the Kolyma and is the first Westerner to pass through the Bering Strait, rounding Cape Dezhnev, the easternmost point of Asia (thus proving that Asia and America are separate), and reaches the Anadyr River, which he ascends for 563 km (and builds the zimovie of Anadyrsk).
1650	As	-		Stadukhin and Semen Motora travel overland from the Kolyma, crossing the Nyuyskiy range, until reaching Anadyrsk, where he meets Dezhnev.
1651-1657	As	Okhotsk		Stadukhin travels from Anadyrsk to the mouth of the Penzhina River, and then continues west along the northern coast of the Sea of Okhotsk to Okhotsk.
1696	As	-		The Cossack Luka Morozko, sent by Vladimir Atlasov from Anadyrsk, explores southward along almost half of the western coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, reaching the Tigil River.
1697-1699	As		Atlasov Island	Vladimir Atlasov manages to reach the Golygina River, on the southwestern coast of Kamchatka, from where he sights Atlasov Island (in the Kurils); he also crosses the Sredinny Range (twice), reaching the Olyutorsky Gulf and the Kamchatka River.
1706	As	PAC	Shumshu	Mikhail Nasedkin reaches Cape Lopatka and sights Shumshu, the northernmost of the Kuril Islands.	18th century
1713	As	PAC	Paramushir	Ivan Kozyrevsky reaches the islands of Shumshu and Paramushir, in the Kurils.
1722	Oc	PAC	Easter Island Samoa	Jakob Roggeveen discovers Paasch Eiland (Easter Island), and Tutuila and Upolu.
1728	As	ART	St. Lawrence Island	Vitus Bering sails through the strait that now bears his name; he also discovers and names St. Lawrence Island.
1732	AmN	ART	Bering Strait	Mikhail Gvozdev, together with participants of the first Kamchatka expedition, the navigators Ivan Fyodorov and K. Moshkov, sail on the Sviatoi Gavriil (Saint Gabriel) to Cape Dezhnev, and after taking on water, they sailed east and soon approached the American mainland at Cape Prince of Wales. They mapped the northwest coast of Alaska and left a map of their route. In this way, Fyodorov and Gvozdev completed the discovery of the Bering Strait, begun earlier by Dezhnev and Fedot Popov and continued by Bering. The expedition also discovered three previously unknown islands, the two Diomede Islands and St. Lawrence Island. He is considered the discoverer of the "Large Country" (Alaska).
1741	AmN	ART	Aleutian Islands	Bering, on what is known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition, sights Mount Saint Elias, the entrance to Prince William Sound, the Alaska Peninsula (from Cape Providence to Chignik Bay) and several of the Aleutian Islands (discovering Great Sitkin, Atka and Kiska), as well as discovering the islands of Kayak, Montague, Hinchinbrook and Sitkalidak, and the Shumagin Islands and the Commander Islands. His second-in-command, Aleksei Chirikov, sights Mounts Fairweather and Douglas and discovers Noyes and Baker (both off the coast of Prince of Wales Island), as well as the islands of Baranof, Chichagof, Kruzof, Yakobi, Kodiak and Afognak, several of the Aleutians (Umnak, Adak, Agattu, Attu, the Islands of Four Mountains) and the Kenai Peninsula.
1766-1768	Oc	PAC	Tahiti Pitcairn Islands Carteret Islands	In 1766 the Royal Navy sent a new circumnavigation expedition to find the Southern continent, in which Philip Carteret was the captain in command of HMS Swallow, accompanied by HMS Dolphin, under the command of Samuel Wallis. The two ships became separated shortly after passing through the Strait of Magellan. Carteret discovered the Pitcairn Islands and the Carteret Islands. In 1767 he also discovered a new archipelago within St. George's Channel, between the islands of New Ireland and New Britain (in present-day Papua New Guinea), and named them the Duke of York Islands, and he also rediscovered the Solomon Islands (already sighted by Álvaro de Mendaña in 1568) and the Juan Fernández Islands (discovered by Juan Fernández in 1574). Carteret was back in England, at Spithead, on March 20, 1769. Wallis, for his part, crossed the Pacific passing through the Tuamotu islands, the Society Islands, Tonga and Wallis and Futuna, until reaching Batavia (present-day Jakarta), where many of his crew died of dysentery. In May 1768 he was back in England, and HMS Dolphin thus became the first ship to have made two complete circumnavigations. Wallis's main discovery was the island he named King George the Third Island or Otaheite, today Tahiti, which he sighted in June 1767. His reports were decisive for James Cook, who was then preparing his first voyage to the Pacific and whose crew included some of the men who had sailed with Wallis.
1769	AmN	PAC	San Francisco Bay	Gaspar de Portolá discovers San Francisco Bay overland.
1769-1770	Aus			James Cook circumnavigates both islands of New Zealand, proving that they were not part of Terra Australis Incognita; he also discovers the eastern coast of Australia, from Cape Howe to Cape York.
1772	AmN	-		Pedro Fages sights the Sierra Nevada from land.
1773-1775	-	Antarctic		Cook is the first to cross the Antarctic Circle, reaching 71°10′ S, finally proving the nonexistence of Terra Australis Incognita; he also discovers New Caledonia and the South Sandwich Islands.
1774	AmN	PAC	Queen Charlotte Islands, Vancouver Island and Dall Island	Juan José Pérez Hernández explores the western coast of North America northward from Cape Mendocino, discovering the Queen Charlotte Islands, Vancouver Island and Dall Island.
1775	AmN	PAC	Prince of Wales Island	Bruno de Heceta discovers the mouth of the Columbia River; his companion Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra discovers Prince of Wales Island (Buccareli Bay).
1777-1778	AmN	PAC	Hawaiian Islands Christmas Island	Cook discovers Christmas Island and Hawaii; he also explores the Alaskan coast as far as Icy Cape, discovering Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound.
1787	As	PAC		Jean-François de La Pérouse leads the second French circumnavigation expedition. He charts part of the Strait of Tartary, without managing to discover the passage between the mainland and Sakhalin Island. The expedition mysteriously disappears in 1788 at Vanikoro, Solomon Islands.
1787	AmN	PAC		Charles William Barkley discovers the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
1788	Oc	PAC	Gilbert Islands (Kiribati)	Thomas Gilbert and John Marshall, captains of the Charlotte and the Scarborough, ships of the British East India Company, discovered the atolls of Aranuka, Kuria, Abaiang and Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands group, while returning from carrying convicts to Botany Bay in 1788, bound for Canton. The ships had been part of the first fleet that carried convicts to Australia, sailing in a convoy under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, the first Governor of New South Wales.
1790-1791	Oc	PAC	Marquesas Islands (northern group)	Joseph Ingraham, departing from Boston on the Hope, a 70-ton brigantine, and after rounding Cape Horn, crosses the Pacific to trade in furs that he will acquire on the Northwest Coast of North America. On that voyage he stops at the Marquesas Islands, discovered by Mendaña in 1595, and, sailing farther north, discovers the islands of the northern group: Ua Pou, Ua Huka, Nuku Hiva, Eiao and Hatutu.
1791	AmN	PAC		Francisco de Eliza discovers the "Canal de Nuestra Señora del Rosario" (Strait of Georgia); José María Narváez explores up it, passing the mouth of the Fraser River and reaching as far north as Texada Island.
1791-1794	AmN	PAC		George Vancouver, together with William Broughton, Peter Puget, Joseph Whidbey and James Johnstone, charts the coast of the modern states of Oregon and Washington, of British Columbia and of the Alaska Panhandle, discovering the islands of Admiralty, Mitkof and Wrangell in the Alexander Archipelago, and proving the insularity of Kuiu Island and the Revillagigedo Islands; he also charts Admiralty Inlet and Puget Sound and discovers the Chatham Islands and the Snares.
1792	AmN	PAC		Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés y Flores circumnavigate Vancouver Island, proving its insularity.
1792	AmN	PAC		Jacinto Caamaño enters Clarence Strait, showing that much of the Alaska Panhandle region was an archipelago and not the mainland, as had been supposed; he also sights the southwest coast of Revillagigedo Island.
1797-1798	Aus	Tas	Bass Strait	George Bass explores from Cape Howe to Western Port, discovering Bass Strait.
1798	Oc	PAC	Nauru	John Fearn discovers "Pleasant Island" (Nauru).
1798-1799	Oc	Tas		Matthew Flinders and George Bass circumnavigate Tasmania, proving its insularity.
1802	Aus	Tas		John Murray discovers Port Phillip Bay.	19th century
1802	Aus			Nicolas Baudin explores the Australian coast from Cape Banks to Encounter Bay, where he meets Flinders.
1802-1803	Aus			Flinders circumnavigates Australia.
1806	Oc	PAC	Auckland Islands	Abraham Bristow discovers the Auckland Islands.
1810	Oc	PAC	Campbell Island and Macquarie Island	Frederick Hasselborough discovers Campbell Island and Macquarie Island in the South Pacific.
1825	Oc	PAC		The English Captain George Anson Byron, 7th Baron Byron, cousin of the poet, discovered Malden Island (Line Islands group) in the central Pacific on July 30, 1825, while repatriating the remains of the King and Queen of Hawaii, who had died of measles during their visit to London.
1826	Oc	PAC	Tuamotu Archipelago	Frederick William Beechey, on a voyage in which he tries to find the Northwest Passage, discovers Vanavana, Fangataufa and Ahunui in the Tuamotu Archipelago.

See also

• Pacific Ocean

References

The English Wikipedia article lists as references:

• Hayes, Derek. Historical Atlas of the North Pacific Ocean, 2001.
• Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders - A Global History of Exploration, 2006.
• Parry, J.H., The Age of Reconnaissance, 1963.