THE ISLANDS OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN. 



FOR the purpose of this Index the Pacific Ocean will no longer extend from 

 Bering's Strait to the Antarctic circle and from Kamchatka, Japan, China, the 



Philippines, Moluccas and Australia to the American coast : the Aleutian and 

 continental islands, the Galapagos and Juan Fernandez on the East with Kurile, 

 Philippine and the archipelago north-west of Australia belong ethnologically if not 

 geographically to another region, and hence the bounds of the Pacific which shall in- 

 clude all Oceanica ( except Malaysia ) will be on the North the Hawaiian and Bonin 

 Islands, 30'N.; on the East Rapanui or Easter Island, 105° W.; on the South New 

 Zealand and its islets, 55" S.; and on the West New Guinea and the larger portion of 

 Australia, 130' E. Thus defined all minor divisions of this vast expanse of water are 

 eliminated, except the Coral Sea. Shorn of its fringe of seas, gulfs and bays it is still an 

 immense area extending through eighty-five degrees of latitude from north to south and 

 through one hundred and twenty-five degrees of longitude from east to west. We may 

 glance at its history both natural and political, beginning with the latter as best known. 



Although the Portuguese followed Yasco de Gama by the Cape of Good Hope 

 and far beyond the Moluccas into what is now known as the Pacific Ocean, it was left 

 to their neighbors and only rivals in discovery, the Spaniards, in the person of the 

 brilliant and ill-fated Yasco Nunez de Balboa, to reach its eastern shores. September 

 29, 15 13, the brave conquistador, after a terrible journey through Darien, saw the new 

 ocean, and as it was the Michaelmas season, in the custom of those days named it 

 Golfo de San Miguel; then marching into its clear and placid waters took possession 

 in the name of His Majesty of Spain. Balboa died soon after (15 17), murdered by 

 his father-in-law Pedro Arias d'Avila, and his great discovery profited him little if 

 indeed it was not indirectly the cause of his untimely death. 



Another grand man, in man}- ways not unlike Balboa, Fernao de Magalhaes, 

 possessed with the conviction that the continent of America did not, as it seemed to all 

 others, absolutely bar the path to far Cathay, but that there must be a wa}- around if 

 only one could sail far enough to the southward, pushed on with the spirit of Columbus 

 against storms and storm-like men, sailed through the strait which still bears his 

 name, and on November 28, 1520, passed into the wide ocean which in contrast to the 

 rough Atlantic he named Mer Pacifico. We know now that storms on this ocean are 

 as formidable as on the Atlantic, but his experience was all the other way and for 



[8 9 ] (5) 



