Take, for example, the size of Polynesian populations. This has been an enduringly difficult number to pin down, in part because one of the things outsiders brought to the Pacific was disease. Epidemics—of smallpox, influenza, measles, scarlet fever, dysentery—affected virtually every island group and dramatically increased Polynesian mortality. So, even before any kind of official census could be taken, many island populations were already in decline. But we can look to the early eyewitnesses for a sense of how densely populated the islands were before any of this had happened. Their estimates are hardly scientific, and scholars continue to debate their validity, but they are a key piece of evidence nonetheless.
We can see other things, too, through the eyes of the early explorers. It is helpful, for example, to learn what animals they found on different islands. Polynesians brought four main animals with them into the remote Pacific: the pig, the dog, the chicken, and the rat. These animals, sometimes referred to as “commensals” because they exist in a symbiotic relationship with people, are an interesting proxy for human movement in the Pacific. Since they were unable to travel from island to island on their own, their presence tells you something about where the people who must have transported them went.
Not all of these animals made it to all of the islands. There were only rats and chickens on Easter Island when Europeans arrived (no pigs or dogs), and only rats and dogs (no pigs or chickens) in New Zealand. In the Marquesas, they had pigs, chickens, and rats, but there is no early record of dogs. And then there are the islands on which Europeans puzzlingly found dogs but no people. On some islands, the animals may have died out (this appears to have been the case with the Marquesan dog, which turns up in archaeological digs); in other cases, they may never have arrived. Either way, their absence suggests something about the difficulty of successfully transporting animals about the Pacific. It may also tell us something about the frequency of prehistoric voyaging, because if you were missing both chickens and pigs and you had the chance to get them from another island, wouldn’t you do it?
Of course, there were lots of things the early explorers did not see, and many of their accounts are maddeningly superficial. Early visitors to the Marquesas saw none of the monumental architecture and sculpture that links that archipelago to both Tahiti and Easter Island. Early visitors to Easter Island reported the presence of “stone giants” but were confusing on the question of how easy it was to grow food. And the first European visitors to New Zealand saw nothing, being too scared of the Māori to go ashore.
Much has been made in histories of the Pacific about the problem of observer bias. Early European explorers saw the world through lenses that affected how they interpreted what they found. The Catholic Spanish and Portuguese of the sixteenth century were deeply concerned with the islanders’ heathenism; the mercantile Dutch, in the seventeenth century, were preoccupied by what they had to trade; the French, coming along in the eighteenth century, were most interested in their social relations and the idea of what constituted a “state of nature.” Still, the project on which these explorers were embarked was, very broadly speaking, an empirical one; their primary task was to discover what was out there and report back about what they had seen. Naturally, there were other agendas: territorial expansion, political advantage, conquest, commerce. But on a quite fundamental level, the project was one of observation and reportage, and, for the most part, they got better at it as the centuries wore on.
There was, however, one really big mistake that all the early European explorers in the Pacific made, one that blinded them to the true character of the region for ages. It was essentially a geographical error, and the best way to understand it is by looking at early European maps.
THE FIRST EUROPEAN maps of the world, the so-called Ptolemaic maps of the fifteenth century, do not even include Oceania, or what Cook would later call “the fourth part” of the globe. Their focus is on the known, inhabited regions of the world, which means, at this stage of history, that there is nothing west of Europe, east of Asia, or south of the Tropic of Capricorn. This all changed with the discovery of the Americas, and maps of the sixteenth century show a world that is already quite recognizable. The outlines of Europe, Asia, and Africa all look surprisingly correct, and even the New World, though distorted, bears a better-than-passing resemblance to North and South America as we know them today.
The Pacific in this period is still something of a cipher. Virtually all the major archipelagoes are missing, California is sometimes depicted as an island, and the continent of Australia is often drawn as though it were a peninsula of something else. The large island of New Guinea is frequently represented at twice its real size, and the Solomon Islands, discovered in 1568 and then lost for almost exactly two hundred years, are not only grossly exaggerated but seemingly untethered. On some maps they are located in the western Pacific, where they belong, but on others they have floated right out into the middle of the ocean, a clear reflection of the fact that for centuries no one had the foggiest idea where they actually were.
But the most remarkable feature of maps from this period is the presence of an enormous landmass, greater than all North America, Europe, and Asia combined, wrapped around the southern pole. This continent, known as Terra Australis Incognita, or “the Unknown Southland,” occupies nearly a quarter of the globe. It is as if Antarctica included both Tierra del Fuego and Australia, stretched almost to the Cape of Good Hope, and reached so far into the Indian and Pacific Oceans that it entered the Tropic of Capricorn.
Terra Australis Incognita was one of the great follies of European geography, an idea that made sense in the abstract but for which there was never any actual proof. It was based on a bit of Ptolemaic logic handed down from the ancient Greeks, which held that there must be an equal weight of continental matter in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, or else the world would topple over and, as the great mapmaker Gerardus Mercator envisioned it, “fall to destruction among the stars.” This idea of global symmetry was inherently appealing, but it also made intuitive sense to Europeans, who, coming from a hemisphere crowded with land, found it difficult to imagine that the southern reaches of the planet might be as empty as they really are.
Like many imaginary places, Terra Australis Incognita—or, as it was sometimes more optimistically known, Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, “the Southland Not Yet Known”—represented not just what Europeans thought ought to exist in the Pacific but what they wanted to find. It was conflated with a whole range of utopian fantasies: lands of milk and honey, El Dorados, terrestrial paradises. Almost from the beginning, it was linked with the land of Ophir, the source of the biblical King Solomon’s wealth, which explains why there are Solomon Islands in the neighborhood of New Guinea. Other rumors connected it with the mythical lands of Beach, Lucach, and Maletur, said to have been discovered by Marco Polo, and with the fabled islands of the Tupac Inca Yupanqui, from which he was said to have brought back slaves, gold, silver, and a copper throne.
For nearly three hundred years, the idea of Terra Australis Incognita drove European exploration in the Pacific, shaping the itineraries and experiences of voyagers, who were convinced that if they just kept looking, they would find a continent somewhere in the southern Pacific Ocean. Of course, there is a continent there—Antarctica—but it is not the kind of continent that Europeans had in mind. They were hoping for something bigger and more temperate, greener and more lush, richer and more hospitable, inhabited by people with fine goods for trade. They were dreaming of another Indies, or, failing that, another New World. But despite the “green drift” reported at 51 degrees south by the Dutch explorer Jacob Le Maire, and the birds he claimed to have seen in the roaring forties, and the mountainous country resembling Norway reported at 64 degrees south by Theodore Gerrards, despite the buccaneer Edward Davis’s rumors, and Pedro Fernández de Quirós’s claim of a country “as great as all Europe & Asia,” no continent resembling Terra Australis Incognita ever appeared.
What European navigators found in the Pacific instead was water—vast, unbroken stretches of