Yet centuries before Columbus—no one knows how many centuries—men on the opposite side of the world had laid aside whatever fears the ocean may have inspired and were boldly sailing their craft across the Pacific. We know little of the hardships, the difficulties, and the fears that may have beset the Polynesian colonists—we know only that somehow they came from the mainland to those islands, remote from any shore. Perhaps the aspect of these central Pacific waters was kindlier than that of the North Atlantic—it must have been—for in their open canoes they entrusted themselves to the stars and the signposts of the sea and found their way from island to island.
We do not know when the first Polynesian voyages took place. Concerning the later ones, there is some evidence that the last important colonizing voyage to the Hawaiian Islands was made in the thirteenth century, and that about the middle of the fourteenth century a fleet from Tahiti permanently colonized New Zealand. But again, all those things were unknown in Europe, and long after the Polynesians had mastered the art of navigating unknown seas, the European sailors still regard the Pillars of Hercules as the gateway to a dreaded sea of darkness.
Once Columbus had shown the way to the West Indies and the Americas, once Balboa had seen the Pacific and Magellan had sailed around the globe, there arose, and long persisted, two new ideas. One concerned the existence of a northern passage by sea to Asia; the other had to do with a great southern continent generally believed to lie below the then-known lands.
Magellan, while sailing through the strait that now bears his name, had seen land to the south of him through all the thirty-seven days required for the passage through the strait. At night the lights of many fires glowed from the shores of this land, which Magellan named Tierra del Fuego—Land of Fires. He supposed that these were the near shores of that great land which the theoretical geographers had already decided should lie to the south.
Many voyagers after Magellan reported land they assumed to be outlying regions of the sought-for continent, but all proved to be islands. The locations of some, like Bouvet, were so indefinitely described that they were found and lost again many times before being definitely fixed on maps. Kerguelen believed firmly that the bleak, forbidding land he discovered in 1772 was the Southern Continent and so reported it to the French government. When, on a later voyage, he learned that he had found merely another island, Kerguelen unhappily named it ‘Isle of Desolation.’ Later geographers, however, gave his own name to it.
Discovery of the southern land was one of the objects of Captain Cook’s voyages, but instead of a continent, he discovered an ocean. By making an almost complete circumnavigation of the globe in high southern latitudes, Cook revealed the existence of a stormy ocean running completely around the earth south of Africa, Australia, and South America. Perhaps he believed that the islands of the South Sandwich group were part of the Antarctic mainland, but it is by no means sure that he was the first to see these or other islands of the Antarctic Ocean. American sealers had quite possibly been there before him, yet this chapter of Antarctic exploration contains many blank pages. The Yankee sealers did not want their competitors to find the rich sealing grounds, and they kept the details of their voyages secret. Evidently they had operated in the vicinity of the outer Antarctic islands for many years before the beginning of the nineteenth century, because most of the fur seals in these waters had been exterminated by 1820. It was in this year that the Antarctic continent was first sighted, by Captain N. B. Palmer in command of the Hero, one of a fleet of eight sealers from Connecticut ports. A century later, explorers were still making fresh discoveries about the nature of that Southern Continent, dreamed of by the old geographers, so long searched for, then branded a myth, and finally established as one of the great continental masses of the earth.
At the opposite pole, meanwhile, the dream of a northern passage to the riches of Asia lured one expedition after another into the frozen seas of the north. Cabot, Frobisher, and Davis sought the passage to the northwest, failed, and turned back. Hudson was left by a mutinous crew to die in an open boat. Sir John Franklin set out with the Erebus and Terror in 1845, apparently entered the labyrinth of Arctic islands by what later proved a feasible route, but then lost his ships and perished with all his men. Later rescue ships coming from east and west met in Melville Sound and thus the Northwest Passage was established.
Meanwhile there had been repeated efforts to find a way to India by sailing eastward through the Arctic Sea. The Norwegians seem to have hunted walruses in the White Sea and had probably reached the coasts of Novaya Zemlya by the time of Ottar; they may have discovered Spitsbergen in 1194, although this is usually credited to Barents in 1596. The Russians had hunted seals in the polar seas as early as the sixteenth century, and whalers began to operate out of Spitsbergen soon after Hudson, in 1607, called attention to the great number of whales in the sea between Spitsbergen and Greenland. So at least the threshold of the ice-filled northern ocean was known when the British and Dutch traders began their desperate attempt to find a sea road north of Europe and Asia. There were many attempts, but few got beyond the coasts of Novaya Zemlya; the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were marked by the wreckage of hopes as well as of vessels, and by the death of such brilliant navigators as William Barents under the hardships met by expeditions ill prepared for arctic winters. Finally the effort was abandoned. It was not until 1879, after the practical need for such a passage had largely disappeared, that Baron Nordenskiöld, in the Swedish Vega, passed from Gothenburg to Bering Strait.
So, little by little, through many voyages undertaken over many centuries, the fog and the frightening obscurity of the unknown were lifted from all the surface of the Sea of Darkness. How did they accomplish it—those first voyagers, who had not even the simplest instruments of navigation, who had never seen a nautical chart, to whom the modern miracles of loran, radar, and sonic sounding would have been fantasied beyond belief? Who was the first man to use a mariner’s compass, and what were the embryonic beginnings of the charts and the sailing directions that are taken for granted today? None of these questions can be answered with finality; we know only enough to want to know more.
Of the methods of those secretive master mariners, the Phoenicians, we cannot even guess. We have more basis for conjecture about the Polynesians, for we can study their descendants today, and those who have done so find hints of the methods that led the ancient colonizers of the Pacific on their course from island to island. Certainly they seem to have followed the stars, which burned brightly in the heavens over those calm Pacific regions, which are so unlike the stormy and fog-bound northern seas. The Polynesians considered the stars as moving bands of light that passed across the inverted pit of the sky, and they sailed toward the stars which they knew passed over the islands of their destination. All the language of the sea was understood by them: the varying color of the water, the haze of surf breaking on rocks yet below the horizon, and the cloud patches that hang over every islet of the tropic seas and sometimes seem even to reflect the color of a lagoon within a coral atoll.
Students of primitive navigation believe that the migrations of birds had meaning for the Polynesians, and that they learned much from watching the flocks that gathered each year in the spring and fall, launched out over the ocean, and returned later out of the emptiness into which they had vanished. Harold Gatty believes the Hawaiians may have found their islands by following the spring migration of the golden plover from Tahiti to the Hawaiian chain, as the birds returned to the North American mainland. He has also suggested that the migratory path of the shining cuckoo may have guided other colonists from the Solomons to New Zealand.