Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Even within itself, the China trade was a complex, multisided, many-splendored thing . . .

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Melville was moved by the native cultures of the South Seas and appalled by what the missionaries had wrought in Hawaii.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The mission of the expedition begun for imperial adventure, expansion, and wealth for Russia in the North Pacific was both an ambitious and an ambiguous one.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The value of silver for individual Europeans was obvious and longstanding: it meant wealth. For governments, it meant not just wealth, but also power.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

His intellectual powers were fully equal to the challenges of helping his father gather plant specimens and linguistic vocabularies. The emotional stress of the voyage was another matter.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

[I]n the days when wind and sail provided the fastest means of travel, when continental and global circumnavigations lay far in the future, there was no obvious way to test whether widely separated seas, such as those that lay off the Arabian Peninsula and those of the Mediterranean, were in any way contiguous.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Sparks’s Ledyard is thus the supreme romantic hero. His adventures are not inhibited by worldly concerns or fear of physical suffering; like the ancient Stoics or the great saints of Christendom, he freely sacrificed himself for some greater cause.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

For three thousand years, these peoples made a homeland of the sea enclosed by Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. Hava’iki, they called it. They sailed the circuit of the sea with confidence. They traded. They raided. They adventured.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

“Last Night some time in the Middle watch a very extraordinary affair happend to Mr Orton my Clerk, he having been drinking in the Evening, some Malicious person or persons in the Ship took the advantage of his being drunk and cut off all the cloaths from off his back, not being satisfied with this they some time after went into his Cabbin and cut off a part of both his Ears as he lay asleep in his bed.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The Russians soon recognized that they would gain greater profits if they could convince skilled native men to do the work for them.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Many thought Moors a sharp trader, and at times people suspected that he was crooked. This was hardly unusual during these years in Samoa. More than once Moors or one of his traders was accused of using doctored weights when measuring coconuts for purchase, and at least once this endangered the life of one of his traders. Even Robert Louis Stevenson, who relied heavily on Moors in his early years, worried that he might be a huckster.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: “Pacific Routes”

For those of us interested in the early history of the United States, these Pacific communities may not be as well known or as influential as their Atlantic counterparts, but their stories still have much to teach us.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

They steered southward towards New Zealand, to try to determine if it was the northern tip of a great southern continent.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

[T]he Manila Galleon, rather than being a curio or sideshow, represented one of the turning points in history, for with its establishment we find for the first time “substantial and continuous trade across the Pacific Ocean.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Cook and Malaspina pursued the same goal in the icy North Pacific—a waterway to the Atlantic Ocean—and they each viewed the purported existence of this natural phenomena with rational skepticism.