Strait Through: Magellan to Cook & the Pacific

The Friendly Islands, the Dangerous Archipelago, the Unfortunate Isles, Cape Desire, Land of Fire, Islands of Disappointment, Land of the Holy Ghost, Islands of Thieves—such place-names given to Pacific geographic features by European explorers sound like they were lifted from a children’s board game where the object was to navigate around dangerous or hot spots in order to reach safe havens. But confronting more than twenty-five thousand islands, and without very accurate means of establishing locations, Pacific navigation in the Age of Exploration was often more pinball-like: ships rebounding from island to island to known port, searching for wind and water and fresh food and welcoming natives, and often renaming places that others had previously “found.” A good map was only half of the solution; the other was having the means of locating one’s ship on that map.