Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/131

PACIFIC OCEAN 115 Sulaiman, who visited China in the 9th century, declared that he had sailed upon it. But for several hundred years the reports continued so uncertain, and were so loaded with the wild extravagance of travellers tales of the period, that it is difficult to get at the facts from which they probably took their origin. During the 13th and 14th centuries Marco Polo arid his successors travelled far to the East and came to an ocean of the extent of which they were ignorant, but they partially explored its western coasts. The East was the region towards which all the commerce and enterprise of the Middle Ages tended, and it was the hope of finding a safer and shorter sea route to India that led the Spanish court in 1492 to furnish Columbus with a fleet for the exploration of the Western Ocean. Although convinced of the spherical form of the earth, he greatly under-rated its size, and, accepting the popular estimate of the great breadth of the Asiatic continent, he set out on his voyage confident of soon reaching " the Indies." The glowing descriptions of his discoveries in that strange new world of the West that rose up before him to bar his advance immediately attracted the attention of adventur ous Spanish mariners. Headed by Columbus himself, they cruised intrepidly amongst the Caribbean Islands, still lured by the hope of discovering some western passage to the coveted East. Columbus found that what he at first con sidered a labyrinthine archipelago was a continent of vast extent, but not Asia, and he died without knowing what lay beyond. Spain and Portugal were the rival maritime powers at that time, and both took up the search for new countries with great ardour. Pope Alexander VI., in 1493, fearing that the two nations would quarrel over their colonies, assigned all the new lands that might be discovered west of the Azores to Spain, and all east of those islands to Portugal. The Portuguese accepting the gift followed Vasco da Gama in opening up the road to India by the Cape of Good Hope, and pushed forward their trading and piratical excursions into the west Pacific far beyond the Spice Islands. The Spaniards confined themselves to the New World, visiting, naming, and plundering the West India Islands and the headlands of Central America. On the 29th of September 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balbao, the leader of a Spanish party exploring the Isthmus of Panama, saw, from the summit of a mountain, a vast ocean stretching to the west the very ocean of whose existence Columbus was certain, and which he had so long tried vainly to discover. Because he first saw it on Michaelmas day, Balbao named it the Golfo de San Miguel. Magellan, following the east coast of America farther to the south than any previous explorer, sailed on, in spite of terrific storms, until he found the strait which now bears his name, and, steering carefully through it, on the 27th of November 1520 he swept into the calm waters of that new sea on which he was the first to sail, and which he named the Mar Pacifico. The victories of Cortez in Mexico about the same date opened the way for the exploration of the west coast of America, where Pizarro s conquest of Peru in 1526 gave the Spaniards a firm footing. From this time an inter mittent trade sprang up between Europe and the Pacific through Magellan Strait, and latterly round Cape Horn. Before long English fleets, attracted more by the prospects of plundering Spanish galleons than of discovering new territories, found their way into the Pacific. Sir Francis Drake, like Balbao, saw the ocean from the Isthmus of Panama. He entered the Pacific in September 1577, being the first Englishman to sail upon it ; some months later he sailed across it to the Moluccas. Alvaro de Mardana, who preceded him, had discovered the Solomon Islands in 1567. Tasman, Koggewcin, Dampier, and other explorers of the 17 th century discovered Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and many smaller groups of islands. During the 18th century the voyages of Anson, Bass, Behring, the two Bougainvilles, Broughton, Byron, Cook, La Perouse, and many more practically completed the geographical explora tion of the Pacific Ocean. In the beginning of that century the Pacific had a curious fascination for commercial speculators, and the ill-fated Scottish colony founded at Darien in 1698 seemed only to prepare the way for the English South Sea bubble that burst in 1720. All the navigators who explored these seas believed in the existence of a north-west passage between the Atlantic and Pacific, and made attempts to find it ; but its discovery baffled all enterprise until 1 850, when Maclure proved that there was such a channel, but that the ice prevented its being of any commercial utility. In the present century D Entrecasteaux, Krusenstern, Beechy, Fitzroy, and Bennet have taken the lead amongst geographical explorers in the Pacific, although the ranks contain many names scarcely less worthy of remembrance. Within recent years several purely scientific exploring expeditions and British survey ing vessels have examined the Pacific, investigating its depth, the nature and form of the bottom, the tempera ture of the water at various depths and its density, as well as the marine fauna and flora. Of those expeditions the voyages of the "Challenger," "Gazelle," and "Tuscarora" are the most important. 1 Extent. The Pacific Ocean 2 is bounded on the N. by Extent. Behring Strait and the coasts of Kussia and Alaska, on the E. by the west coasts of North and South America ; on the S. the imaginary line of the Antarctic Circle divides it from the Antarctic Ocean, while its western boundary is the east coast of Australia, the Malay Archipelago separating it from the Indian Ocean, and the eastern coasts of the Chinese empire. Some modern geographers place the southern limit of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans at the 40th parallel, and name the body of water which surrounds the earth between that latitude and the Antarctic Circle the Southern Ocean. Although differing from the Atlantic in its general form, being more nearly land-locked to the north, the Pacific resembles it in being open to the south, forming, in fact, a great projection northwards of that vast southern ocean of which the Atlantic is another arm. The Pacific is the largest expanse of water in the world, covering more than a quarter of its superficies, and com prising fully one-half of its water surface. It extends through 132 degrees of latitude, in other Avords, it measures 9000 miles from north to south. From east to west its breadth varies from about 40 miles at Behring Strait, where Asia and America come within sight of each other, to 8500 miles between California and China on the Tropic of Cancer, and to more than 10,000 miles on the Equator between Quito and the Moluccas, where the ocean is widest. The area has been variously estimated at from 50,000,000 to 100,000,000 square miles; but, defining its boundaries as above, Keith Johnston, from careful measure ments, estimated it, with probably a near approach to the truth, at 67,810,000 square miles. 1 The principal ocean tracks followed by trading vessels in the Pacific are three : (1) round Cape Horn and along the South Ameri can coast the . great rush to California on the discovery of gold in 1847 led to the establishment of lines of fast clippers by this route and of steamers from Panama to San Francisco ; (2) from San Francisco to China a regular service was established in 1867 ; (3) the mails began to be carried from Australia to San Francisco in 1873 and to Panama in 1866. The trade with the Pacific will no doubt be greatly increased when the Panama ship-canal is opened for traffic. 2 Formerly called the South Sea, and sometimes still so named by the French and Germans (la Mer du Sud; Siidsee, Australocean), with whom, however, La Mer (L Octan) Pacifique, and Grosser Ocean or Stilles Mcer are the more usual designations.