Chasing a Dream: The Exploration of the Imaginary Pacific

By John Dunmore

Early Europeans may have believed the world was flat, but by the Middle Ages there was widespread acceptance that it was, in fact, a globe. What remained a mystery, however, was what lay on the “other side”. Some believed it was a source of riches, an ocean harbouring countries where gold and unimaginable riches could be found, including islands from which King Solomon had obtained his wealth. In addition, the belief in a vast southern continent went back centuries, and many expeditions set out to find it, sometimes in search of wealth, sometimes to convert its inhabitants to Christianity. This is the story of the voyages into this great unknown, by the Chinese and early Americans, the Dutch, Spanish, French and English; it recounts the exploits of pirates and scientists, and even the impact of popular fiction on popular imagination, leading to the debunking of many myths, from the sunken Great Southern Continent, to the idea that in the “antipodes”, people walked upside down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Upstart Press
• Release date: Jun 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781927262849

John Dunmore

John Dunmore, CNZM, DLitt, Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ, and holder of two of France’s most prestigious awards, the Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur and the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, has written over 30 books in his stellar career as a Pacific historian. Now in his nineties, this is his second book for Upstart Press. Chasing a Dream: the search for the imaginary Pacific (Upstart, 2016) is John Dunmore’s highly readable account of mankind’s obsession with what lay on the “other side” of the world, and how a few brave souls from different nations doggedly pursued the dream of finding fame and wealth through the discovery of the Great Southern Continent.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

ISBN 978-1-927262-84-9

An Upstart Press Book

Published in 2016 by Upstart Press Ltd

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Auckland, New Zealand

Text © John Dunmore 2016

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Design and format © Upstart Press Ltd 2016

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Contents  

Preface

1 Searching An Empty Ocean

2 Three Pioneers

3 A Spanish World

4 The Great Southern Continent

5 A Man with a Mission

6 The Dutch Interlude

7 Pirates and Their Ilk

8 The Novelists Join In

9 Cleaning Up the Map

10 The Great Navigator

11 The Northwest Passage

12 A Scattering of Islands

13 The Sunken Continent

14 An Ocean of Fiction

Notes

Preface

The history of navigation and exploration is full of mysteries and confusion. Man’s efforts to discover his own environment and what surrounds it have always been affected by his imagination. Throughout the centuries, the hardships of daily life, the fear of a bleak and dangerous future, the hope of survival, made him dream of a better world, a more fertile land, a more settled and peaceful society. As the song has it, Somewhere over the rainbow . . . there must lie a happier and safer land.

Each generation necessarily builds its dreams on what the previous one achieved or failed to achieve. The explorer who sets out, whether by land or sea, takes with him in his slim baggage the knowledge that his elders have passed on. And naturally he also carries his own hopes.

Yet how reliable is that knowledge? Did Saint Brendan, the Irish monk, really discover America? Did he truly set off in a curragh into the North Atlantic, make his way around Iceland and sight the coast of North America? And why did he set out on this journey when he apparently was already in his sixties? He was, so tradition has it, looking for the Land of Promise of the Saints.

His voyage contains all the elements one finds in early exploration. There is a burning need to discover, whether it is for one’s own benefit, or for the good of others, including the moral salvation of unknown people, and for the general advancement of knowledge. The outcome is the discovery of strange places, filled with mysteries and legends, which later generations will come to believe in, yet will be unable to rediscover. In Brendan’s case, it was the Sargasso Sea and a handful of islands, including one that turned out to be a giant sleeping fish. And the whole was preserved – and well embroidered – in a major piece of writing, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani.

Narratives, the telling and retelling of voyages, the analysis and likely exaggeration of what was achieved, all play an important role in the history of navigation. They include accounts or myths of mysterious lands, mysterious islands now disappeared, of utopias where mankind has succeeded in creating an ideal society, or dystopias where mankind comes out in its more evil colours.

The mysterious world around the people of Europe, Africa and Asia, suddenly expanded when Christopher Columbus set out, firstly discovering a continent which he believed was part of Asia. But the Spanish Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama, and discovered a vast ocean which later became known as the Pacific and was filled with so much promise, but so much danger, that world history was forever changed. No one could rest at ease until it was explored.

Numberless sailors would set out, suffer and agonise, mentally and physically, dying of scurvy or of other unpleasant diseases, sustained until the very end by their belief in the existence of some distant land. It could bring them fame and wealth, save their own souls as well as those of others, or enrich their sovereign’s empire. But most of the time, there was nothing but the endless ocean, their enigmatic, taunting enemy which at times burst out in a wild, angry and destructive series of storms.

The failure to discover was more often than not rationalised. If the land or the island a navigator sought could not be found, it might be because the earlier reports lacked precision, or because some cataclysm, an earthquake or some other disaster, had caused it to sink below the waves. The Pacific Ocean has its share, but so have other parts of the world. In Brittany, for instance, the town of Ys is said to have sunk below the waves, and according to old tales it can still be glimpsed once every seven years, at low tide, during the night of Christmas Eve. Some say that on a quiet night, again at low tide, the bells of its cathedral can be heard tolling faintly in the stillness. And it was so firmly anchored in local mythology that Breton nationalists have forged the dictum: When Ys rises again, Paris will start to sink.

Over time, these myths have been retold and analysed, as have been the voyages of the numerous travellers and explorers who have enabled us to know and try to understand the world we inhabit. The story of the vast Pacific came in the later years, because it was so distant from Europe, where philosophers, geographers and cartographers were trying to build a complete image of their world.

Myths were discovered along its coasts, in Asia and in America and in its many islands. They have been analysed and pieced together, interpreted as part of mankind’s struggle to discover a pattern in the formation of the world and of the many different civilisations which exist in the Pacific as elsewhere. The narratives, reports and journals of the navigators have been reprinted, footnoted and discussed. The characters of the explorers, the clash of cultures, the changes that have occurred in local cultures as the result of the irruption of Europeans, eventual colonisation and the changes brought about by the determination of native people to defend their culture, post-colonialism, the role of Christian missionaries and others in bringing about change, all these have been written about. These have created a vast literature, which is still growing as new areas of research develop.

This book offers an overview of the beliefs and the hopes that led some of the navigators to set off on that great ocean. It is not easy, in these times of advanced technology, radio transmission, sonar equipment, electronic devices of every kind, instant communication with every other part of the world, to realise what it was like to set out on a voyage of exploration two or three hundred years ago. The ships were small, crowded with men, animals and stores. The cramped cabins, many of them not much larger than a cupboard, were reserved for the officers and, when there were any, the scientists. The sailors slept in hammocks, mostly made of rope, which they hung on a couple of hooks and which they used in rotation, as one shift ended and the next one began. The atmosphere below decks was so oppressive, so constantly damp and smelling of rotting food and urine, that the men often preferred to sleep in a corner of the deck on a coil of ropes or some old pieces of sailcloth. The sick mouldered away below decks in their own stench on pallets of rotting cloth and filthy straw, dying of scurvy or gangrene.

Preserving food in days when sealed tins and refrigeration were unknown presented more problems. Live animals, such as cows and pigs, were kept in temporary enclosures on deck, and slaughtered one by one as the need arose, which indeed it soon did. Flour and dried vegetables stored in the hold became corrupted by worms, cockroaches, mice and rats, which multiplied and began to overrun the ship, until they too became part of the men’s diet, cooked into the swill which in time became the main part of any meal. Ports of call or mere inlets along a coast, when discovered, could provide fresh supplies and especially fresh drinking water. Scurvy, a dreaded disease brought about by a lack of vitamin C, was long believed to be caused by the putrid air breathed below deck (as bad as the air breathed by prisoners in their dungeon-like cells), and by a general lack of land air. Consequently, such calls, however brief, provided the opportunity for the men to go ashore and breathe an air that was refreshing and often fragrant with the scent of exotic plants and flowers. It was a great relief, and it contributed to the image that was growing of distant exotic lands.

These stops were always welcomed by the officers who could check their position by taking readings of the sun and moon. Uncertainty had dominated their navigation from the moment they left port and their point of departure began to vanish on the horizon. In order to find their way, they took readings several times a day, comparing each other’s work and recording it in the ship’s logs. But they worked on a constantly heaving deck, which made their task strenuous and irritating, especially when the sky clouded over or a storm broke out. In addition, sea currents, whose strength and force were hard to estimate, drove them off their course. Consequently, their calculations were often erroneous and the errors accumulated since each day’s work had to be based on the results of the previous day. Navigators were therefore glad when they could carry out their observations on land. At times, they even set up a makeshift observatory. They could then bring out their charts to estimate and try to check their course, and work out whether they had landed on some land that already featured, although roughly, on the maps, or whether they had made a new discovery. Unfortunately, most of the time, their estimates were too approximate because of earlier errors or inaccurate charts. So what they now recorded and later reported to their superiors, contained numerous inaccuracies and compounded the errors of their predecessors.

Geographers and cartographers would later pore over their work, and try to combine their reports with what little was known of the regions visited. But meanwhile, in their home ports, in taverns or in market places, the sailors would boast to any who would listen of the hardships they had overcome and the great discoveries they had made in distant places. Their descriptions of exotic islands, of the delights they had found, the riches such places possessed, grew more extravagant as time passed and their listeners refilled their glasses. Some of these reports were dismissed as nonsense by the geographers who might hear of them, but enough was accepted to distort the image they had formed. And among those towards whom these reports trickled, there were writers who would use them for some fanciful tale, or build up a narrative that readers took as true reports. They were the ancestors of modern reporters and of modern novelists. But they created a confusing world that led others to seek out non-existent places in a vast ocean. It took many years before true and reliable maps could be drawn up, a slow process that cost many lives and destroyed many hopes.

This work presents an overview of the search for non-existent or misplaced worlds in the Pacific Ocean. It broadly surveys some of the old myths and traditions that were resurrected and used by early explorers. These were combined with the beliefs that provided the impulse for voyages by, among others, the Spanish who were driven by the hope of Christianising or conquering the inhabitants of faraway places. And as the Pacific world became more widely known and talked about in Europe, those beliefs, those reports, those tales provided the driving force for resolute and meticulous explorers such as James Cook. In the background toiled unceasingly the scientists and mapmakers, as well as the writers who worked feverishly and at times exuberantly to satisfy the curiosity of the growing mass of readers back home.

In 1570 Abraham Ortelius published a world map, Theatris Orbis Terrarum, which showed a vast unknown southern continent. . .

Eighty years later, the French cartographer Nicolas Sanson still showed this great unknown land, with a vague coastline and, to the north, the suggestion of a Northwest Passage.

1 

Searching An Empty Ocean

Day after day, day after day the same,

A weary waste of water.

Robert Southey, Madoc

Fr om time immemorial, man has been driven by curiosity and the need to explore – what might lie over a hill, across a river, beyond the mountain ranges and over the sea. In many cases, the main incentive was a search for food or for new territory, at times the need to escape from some approaching foe. The same forces were at work in the animal kingdom, but pure curiosity, the need to know, became increasingly marked as human society developed. Exploration led to discovery – but discovery was of no value to mankind unless the discoverer returned to share his news with his fellow beings. Man wanted to know more about his world, and each discoverer, returning to his home base, made his contribution to the growing and exciting sum of human knowledge.

As John Beaglehole, the author of the seminal Exploration of the Pacific, once put it: In every great discoverer there is a dual passion—the passion to see, and the passion to report.¹ As the centuries went by, the range of the discoverers extended further and further. There was much to explore in the great continents, but the sea presented the greatest challenge of all. It lay seemingly limitless in front of the observer. Those who ventured too far from the shore, either because they were caught up by their own rashness or trapped into a sudden storm, simply vanished. It is not surprising that one finds among all the people who live close to a sea numerous myths that are marked by fear and strangeness. Every sea has its gods and monsters. They can be friendly to those who respect them and pay homage to them, but they can fly into wild rages, pound the shore and destroy those who live along it. Gradually, but slowly, man began to tame them. The Mediterranean was the first to yield its secrets, entering the writings of the Greek, Roman and Arab geographers and philosophers. The North Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic came next, but the greatest challenge was the vastest ocean of all, the Pacific.

Its sheer size is awe-inspiring. On the world map, it gives the appearance of an enormous lake, bounded by the two Americas, the Asian continent, and the Arctic and Antarctic icefields. The distance from Malaya to Panama reaches 18,000 kilometres or 9,700 miles. North to south, from Bering Strait to the Ross Sea shelf, it attains 15,500 kilometres or 9,600 miles. One could fit into it the whole of Europe, from Ireland to the Urals, and still have space left to slot in most of North America. It looked frightening to those who lived along its shores, full of mysteries, the home of monstrous sea creatures and, inevitably, of strange people inhabiting remote islands.

But discoverers and settlers did venture out onto those waters, probably as early as 4000 B.C. Bold sailors, they made their way with their families from South-East Asia through what is now known as Indonesia, towards New Guinea and into Australia. Others sailed from the Philippines and Taiwan, settling in the more northern islands of Guam and the Marianas.

Settlement therefore came from the west, not the east. This view has been contested, but the prevailing winds and the presence of islands on the western side, which could be used as stepping stones, made it more likely that migration would occur from the Asian side rather than from America. Advancing slowly, the settlers went from island to island, establishing a few villages along the shores, and moving on when the population increased or clashes forced some families out. In time, they reached Hawaii and Easter Island and travelled down to New Zealand in the south. By around 1200 A.D., all the Pacific had been settled and new cultures had evolved. Roughly, the population can be divided between Polynesians, occupying a vast triangle across the central Pacific to the Hawaiian islands and down towards the far south, and the Melanesians, mostly occupying the southwestern parts. They created their own history and their own mythology. To the Polynesians, the ocean was the kingdom of Tangaroa, the sea god. Other gods had lifted islands out of the water, fishing up the North Island of New Zealand, for instance, which is still known as Maui’s Fish. And they set up their heaven in its mythological centre, the sacred land of Hawaiki from where men had migrated and to which all would one day return.

The first settlers could be described as discoverers, but not as explorers in the true sense. They were looking for new homes and accidentally coming across islands they hadn’t known existed, but they were not sailing and risking their lives simply to solve geographical mysteries. Very little precise information trickled back to the homes they had left or could be used to construct a picture of that vast ocean. Usually, mysteries were explained by mythology.

However, to the people who lived along the continental coast of Asia and America, the Pacific Ocean was the very edge of the world, into which it was foolish to ever venture. Those who did, or whom a sudden tempest or a dangerous current drove out of sight of land, never returned. Fishermen or traders were warned to stay close to the shore or risk destruction. The Chinese Chan Ju Kua, the author of Chu Fan Shi or A Description of Barbarous People, writing in the thirteenth century, reminded his readers that to the east lay the Great Hole of Wei Lu where the waters drain into a world from which men do not return. An oceanic plughole to be avoided at all costs.

Legends and myths, based no doubt on real events, whether planned expeditions or accidental voyages, abounded. The great mysterious world that lay just out of sight was both frightening and exciting in its strangeness. For instance, the ancient chronicle Hou Shan Shu, compiled around the fifth century, mentions the Land of Wa where could be found the kingdom of Queen Pimiko. She was a sorceress, unmarried, who had bewitched the local people and become their queen. A thousand female attendants saw to her needs and defended her palace from intruders. A thousand miles to the south lay the Land of Dwarfs, whose inhabitants were no more than three or four feet high. Even further on, so far that some said the voyage could take a year to complete, was the Land of the Naked People and, further still, the Land of the Black-Teethed Men.

These stories may sound like imaginary myths, but they also suggest some knowledge of Japan, and of the islands of Micronesia and Melanesia where clothing is certainly skimpy by comparison with Chinese dress, and therefore where people could be considered as almost naked. The practice of betelnut chewing, common in some of the islands, turns teeth a distinctive and to outsiders a startling and frightening black. The Land of the Dwarfs may suggest some awareness of the hill tribes of Taiwan.

More precise in its details is the story of Hsu Fu, or Xu Fu, a Buddhist monk and a navigator born around 250 B.C. The emperor of China at the time was the great Shi Huang Ti, the founder of the Qin (or Ch’in) dynasty. He built up the greatness of China and, among other achievements, completed the famous Great Wall. As he got older, he began to seek a way of avoiding death, a concern spurred by at least one assassination attempt. He had heard stories of wondrous islands in the mighty sea, where grew a magic herb that ensured eternal life, and decided to send Hsu Fu to look for it.

So around 219 B.C. Hsu Fu set off in search of the islands where immortal beings lived, with the mission of persuading them to share their wonderful herb in order to preserve the life of the great Chinese emperor. He returned, having found the island of Peng Li and a palace he called Chih Cheng, which was guarded by a fearsome dragon. Although he paid homage to the ruling magician and offered him gifts, he had not succeeded in getting the sacred plants. What the immortal wanted was young men of noble lineage and good education, with maidens of similar status and a range of skilled artisans.

This pleased the Qin emperor, who gave him 3000 young men and women, the skilled workers he required, plus food and other supplies. According to some variants of the story, Hsu Fu returned once more to China, asking for archers to protect the shipment of magic herbs from sharks and other dangers. His request was granted, but he was never seen again. Anyhow, not long after this, Emperor Shi Huang Ti died and the Qin dynasty eventually collapsed in widespread disorders and plottings.

Hsu Fu seems to have been not only a skilled navigator, but a crafty negotiator – or fraudster – who got what he needed to set up his own kingdom in some islands or on land east of China, possibly in Taiwan, in the Philippines or in Japan, or even, as some believe, in America. An attempt to recreate Hsu Fu’s voyage was made in 1992 by Tim Severin. Boats were constructed of bamboo and tied with rope, in