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The Spanish explorer Balboa was the first European to sight the Pacific from America in 1513 after his expedition crossed the Isthmus of Panama and reached a new ocean. [8] He named it Mar del Sur (literally, "Sea of the South" or "South Sea") because the ocean was to the south of the coast of the isthmus where he first observed the Pacific.
Captain James Cook FRS (7 November [O.S. 27 October] 1728 – 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, cartographer, and naval officer famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean and to New Zealand and Australia in particular.
The history of Hawaii began with the discovery and settlement of the Hawaiian Islands by Polynesian people between 940 and 1200 AD. [1] [2]The first recorded and sustained contact with Europeans occurred by chance when British explorer James Cook sighted the islands in January 1778 during his third voyage of exploration.
Later expeditions went to the Pacific Ocean around South America, and eventually by following the Portuguese around Africa, into the Indian Ocean; discovering Australia in 1606, New Zealand in 1642, and Hawaii in 1778. From the 1580s to the 1640s, Russians explored and conquered almost the whole of Siberia, and claimed Alaska in the 1730s.
1851 map of Pacific listing colonial names of individual islands. Since the beginning of the 19th century, Australia and the islands of the Pacific have been grouped by geographers into a region called Oceania. [17] [18] It is often used as a quasi-continent, with the Pacific Ocean being the defining characteristic. [19]
James Cook's third and final voyage (12 July 1776 – 4 October 1780) was a British attempt to discover the fabled Northwest Passage between the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific coast of North America. The attempt failed and Cook was killed at Hawaii in a violent dispute with the local inhabitants.
Bones of Araucana chickens found at El Arenal site in the Arauco Peninsula, an area inhabited by Mapuche, support a pre-Columbian introduction of landraces from the South Pacific islands to South America. [35] The bones found in Chile were radiocarbon-dated to between 1304 and 1424, before the arrival of the Spanish.
Another early navigator to cross the Pacific from Asia to the Americas was Francisco Gali who completed this journey in 1584. [2] In the 19th century, the first liners built specially for the transpacific ocean service were the "Empress" vessels of the Canadian Pacific Railway. After the railway reached the Pacific seaboard in 1885, the liners ...