The South 'Pacific, as Seen by Samuel Enderby 



This map is most startling to all of us who are used to viewing the 

 Pacific as from the South Pole, and usually split in half so that the major 

 land masses of the earth may be preserved in single pieces. We have 

 come to regard the Pacific as a vast empty expanse of water with a few 

 islands dotted about its southern portion. The fact is, it is an immense 

 horseshoe-shaped gutter, bowing to the east, inside which lies a huge 

 submerged continental promontory extending from the East Indies and 

 Austraha to Tonga and Chatham Islands and embracing several huge 

 archipelagoes, including the whole of New Zealand. Beyond this, a 

 further and even vaster tongue of comparative shallows and suboceanic 

 ridges stretches three quarters of the way to the Americas and is dotted 

 with more or less parallel lines of islands, reefs, and shoals. The dry 

 land amounts in the aggregate to only an infinitesimal area compared to 

 the water surface, but it constitutes a fairly even distribution covering the 

 whole inside of the horseshoe. 



Europeans entered this area from opposite sides: first, from the Indian 

 Ocean going east via the Indonesian archipelago; second, round Cape 

 Horn from the South Atlantic going west. The exploration of the Pacific 

 went on from both sides and met in the middle. Apart from a few early 

 voyages of a truly exploratory nature undertaken to circumnavigate the 

 globe, most of the discoveries stemmed from the westward advance of 

 the spermers. By following this whale, the Nantucketers and British 

 crossed the main gutter from the Galapagos to the Gilbert and Ellice 

 archipelagoes straight along the equator, where the sperm whales happen 

 to congregate in large numbers. From this so-called "On-the-Line" fish- 

 ing, they branched out to the left to the Vasquez Ground, thence to 

 New Zealand, and to the right to the Japan Grounds. Finally they pressed 

 forward along the northern edge of the continental shelf and entered 

 the Sulu Sea inside the Philippines, there meeting the East Indiamen on 

 their way to the China coast from the Indian Ocean. 



Meantime, the British merchantmen carrying the reluctant early colo- 

 nists had reached Australia and, finding a plethora of whales in those 

 waters, they initiated bay whaling after the southern right whales, and 

 took to sperming on the continental shelf to the northwest. In a matter of 

 two decades the Pacific, from being a vast aqua incognita, became a whal- 

 ers' pond. 



