Early Polynesian explorers reached nearly all Pacific islands by 1200 CE, followed by Asian navigation in Southeast Asia and the West Pacific. During the Middle Ages, Muslim traders linked the Middle East and East Africa to the Asian Pacific coasts, reaching southern China and much of the Malay Archipelago. Direct European contact with the Pacific began in 1512, with the Portuguese encountering its western edges, soon followed by the Spanish arriving from the American coast.

In 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and encountered the Pacific Ocean, calling it the South Sea. In 1521, a Spanish expedition led by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan was the first recorded crossing of the Pacific Ocean, Magellan then naming it the "peaceful sea." Starting in 1565 with the voyage of Andres de Urdaneta, the Spanish controlled transpacific trade for 250 years; Manila galleons would cross from Mexico to the Philippines, and vice versa, until 1815. Additional expeditions from Mexico and Peru encountered various archipelagos in the North and South Pacific. In the 17th and 18th centuries, other European powers sent expeditions to the Pacific, namely the Dutch Republic, England, France, and Russia.

History

Human migration and arrival

Humans reached Australia by at least 55,000 BC which implies some degree of water crossing. People were in the Americas before 10,000 BC. One theory holds that the Indigenous Americans travelled along the coast by canoe.

Austronesians About 3000 BC, speakers of the Austronesian languages, probably on the island of Formosa (nowadays Taiwan), mastered the art of long-distance canoe travel and spread themselves, or their languages, south to the Philippines and Malesia and east to the islands of Micronesia and Melanesia. The Polynesians branched off and occupied Polynesian Triangle to the east. Dates and routes are uncertain, but they seem to have started from the Bismarck Archipelago, went east past Fiji to Samoa and Tonga about 1500 BC. By 100 AD they were in the Marquesas Islands and 300-800 AD in Tahiti (Tahiti is west of the Marquesas.) 300-800 AD is also given for their arrival at Easter Island, their easternmost point and the same date range for Hawaii, which is far to the north and distant from other islands. Far to the southwest, New Zealand was reached about 1250 AD. The Chatham Islands, about 500 miles east of New Zealand were reached about 1500. The fact that some Polynesians possessed the South American sweet potato implies that they may have reached the Americas or, conversely, that people from the Americas may have reached Polynesia. Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition successfully demonstrated that the trip from the Americas to Polynesia using only materials and technology available at the time was at least possible, even if highly improbable.Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact, University of California Press, 446 pages. 2002. ISBN 0-520-23461-8, ISBN 978-0-520-23461-1.Andrew Sharp, Ancient voyagers in Polynesia (Univ of California Press, 1964).

Asians On the Asian side long-distance trade developed all along the coast from Mozambique to Japan. Trade, and therefore knowledge, extended to Indonesia but apparently not Australia. By at the latest 878 when there was a significant Islamic settlement in Canton much of this trade was controlled by Arabs or Muslims. In 219 BC Xu Fu sailed out into the Pacific searching for the elixir of immortality. Zheng He (1371–1433) was China's greatest explorer, mariner, and navigator.Corona Brezina, Zheng He: China's Greatest Explorer, Mariner, and Navigator (Rosen, 2016).

Japanese fishing boats, if blown out to sea, could be carried by the current all the way to North America. Japanese boats reached Acapulco in 1617, the Aleutians in 1782, Alaska in 1805, the mouth of the Columbia River in 1820, and Cape Flattery in 1833. Such trips may have taken place before Europeans were present in those areas to make detailed records of them.Hayes, Derek. Historical Atlas of the North Pacific, page 52

European exploration

Iberian pioneers The first contact of European navigators with the western edge of the Pacific Ocean was made by the Portuguese expeditions of António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão, via the Lesser Sunda Islands, to the Maluku Islands, in 1512,Hannard (1991), page 7 and with Jorge Álvares's expedition to southern China in 1513,Porter, Jonathan. (1996). Macau, the Imaginary City: Culture and Society, 1557 to the Present. Westview Press. both ordered by Afonso de Albuquerque from Malacca.

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. 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. Starting in 1519, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed the Pacific East to West on a Castilian (Spanish) expedition, which concluded later with the first world circumnavigation by the Basque sailor Juan Sebastián Elcano. Magellan called the ocean Pacífico (or "Pacific" meaning, "peaceful") because, after sailing through the stormy seas off Patagonia, the expedition found calm waters. The ocean was often called the Sea of Magellan in his honor until the eighteenth century.Camino, Mercedes Maroto. Producing the Pacific: Maps and Narratives of Spanish Exploration (1567–1606), p.76. 2005.

From 1565 to 1815, a Spanish transpacific route known as the Manila galleons regularly crossed from Mexico to the Philippines and back. On the Asian side the Portuguese and later the Dutch built a regular trade from the East Indies to Japan. On the American side Spanish power stretched thousands of miles from Mexico to Chile. The vast central Pacific was visited only by the Manila galleons and an occasional explorer. The south Pacific was first crossed by Spanish expeditions in the 16th century who discovered many islands including Tuvalu, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, the Solomon Islands, and the Admiralty Islands, and later the Pitcairn and Vanuatu archipelagos.

The Pacific recognized Europeans knew that there was a vast ocean to the west, and the Chinese knew that there was one to the east. Learned Europeans thought that the world was round and that the two oceans were one. In 1492, Columbus sailed west to what he thought was Asia. When Pedro Álvares Cabral, en route to Asia via the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, reached Brazil, in 1500, the true extent of the Americas began to become known. The Martin Waldseemüller map of 1507 was the first to show the Americas separating two distinct oceans. This guess was confirmed in 1513, when Balboa crossed Panama and found salt water. The Magellan expedition of 1519-22 proved that there was one continuous ocean from the Americas to Asia. The Diogo Ribeiro map of 1529 was the first to show the Pacific at about its proper size.

The coast of Asia The Portuguese reached India in 1498, conquered Malacca in 1511 and in 1512 António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão reached the Spice Islands. In May 1513 Jorge Álvares reached southern China and in the same year Balboa crossed Panama. In 1525 Diogo da Rocha and Gomes de Sequeira reached the Caroline Islands, and Jorge de Menezes in 1526-27 landed on the Islands of Don Jorge de Menezes, in the northwest coast of New Guinea (now part of Indonesia), and named the region Ilhas dos Papuas and is thus credited with the European discovery of Papua. In 1542 Fernão Mendes Pinto reached Japan. From about 1543 until 1614, the Portuguese monopolize the trade between China and Japan, through the nanban trade. In 1589, João da Gama reached Hokkaido and possibly sighted the Kuril Islands, crossing the Pacific further north of the routes usually taken until then. The land that he eventually discovered northeast of Japan, has since become a matter of legend and controversy.

One hundred years after the Spanish and Portuguese the Dutch Republic began its remarkable expansion. The Dutch reached the East Indies in 1596, the Spice Islands in 1602 and in 1619 founded Batavia. In 1600 a Dutch fleet reached Japan from the Strait of Magellan. The Dutch had little success in China but established themselves at Hirado, Nagasaki in 1609 and monopolized the Japan trade from 1639. In 1639 Matthijs Quast and Abel Tasman searched the empty ocean east of Japan looking for two islands called 'Rica de Oro' and 'Rica de Plata'. In 1643 Maarten Gerritsz Vries reached and charted Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. In 1653 Hendrick Hamel was shipwrecked in Korea. At about this time the Russians reached the Pacific overland via Siberia (see below). It is significant that the Russian and Dutch trades were never linked since Siberian furs might easily have been exported to China at great profit.

Magellan and the Manila Galleons In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan sailed down the east coast of South America, found and sailed through the strait that bears his name. On 28 November 1520, he entered the Pacific. Magellan then sailed north and caught the trade winds which carried him across the Pacific to the Philippines where he was killed. One surviving ship returned west across the Indian Ocean and the other went north in the hope of finding the westerlies and reaching Mexico. Unable to find the right winds, it was forced to return to the East Indies. In 1565 (44 years later), Andrés de Urdaneta found a wind system that would reliably blow a ship eastward back to the Americas. From then until 1815 the annual Manila Galleons crossed the Pacific from Mexico to the Philippines and back, exchanging Mexican silver for spices and porcelain. Until the time of Captain James Cook these were the only large ships to regularly cross 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 west-bound galleons. For a long time this was the only non-coastal European settlement in the Pacific.

South America In 1513, six years before Magellan, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and saw the Pacific Ocean. In 1517–18, two ships were built on the Pacific coast. In 1522, Pascual de Andagoya sailed the coast as far as Ecuador. In 1532, Francisco Pizarro conquered Peru. A regular trade developed that carried Peruvian silver up the coast to Panama where it was carried overland to the Caribbean and part to Spain. Spanish settlement extended as far south as central Chile. In 1557–58, Juan Fernández Ladrillero discovered the Juan Fernandez islands and explored the Chilean coast down to the Strait of Magellan.

The South Pacific Several Spanish expeditions were sent from South America across the Pacific Ocean in the 16th and early 17th centuries. They all used the southern trade winds. In 1567/68, Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira sailed from Peru to the Solomon Islands. In 1595, he tried again and reached the Santa Cruz Islands (eastern Solomons toward Fiji). He died there and the survivors reached the Philippines. In 1606, Pedro Fernandes de Queirós reached Vanuatu south of the Solomons. He continued exploring and eventually sailed back to Mexico. One of his separated ships under Luis Vaz de Torres sailed west and discovered the strait that bears his name sighting the northern tip of Australia. Other Spanish expeditions discovered Tuvalu, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, the Admiralty Islands and the Pitcairn. In 1722, the Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen sailed from Cape Horn to Batavia and discovered Easter Island and Samoa.

Cape Horn