South Pacific Ocean ('The South Seas')
Although one of its two great archipelagoes extends into the northern hemisphere, the South Pacific Ocean and the South Sea(s) have been interchangeable terms since Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa sighted the water he named Mar de Sur (South Sea) in 1513. Ferdinand Magellan labelled the calmer waters he encountered after a stormy passage through the Magellan Straits the Mar Pacífico (Peaceful Sea).
Lying predominantly north of the Equator and to the west of 180°, Micronesia's numerous small islands are nearly all coralline, as is much of Melanesia. However, the region’s physiography is dominated by large continental islands, including New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji. To the east, Polynesia includes the Hawaiian Islands, Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, the Society Islands (Tahiti), Tuamotu, and the Marquesas.
The islands are thought to have been peopled from Southeast Asia, with the earliest migrations into Melanesia. From there, voyagers moved northward into Micronesia. Between three and four thousand years ago, others moved eastward into Polynesia through long-range voyages that continued until about 1000 CE, when the Maori settled New Zealand. The most extended voyages populated Hawaii, first from the Marquesas Islands and subsequently from Tahiti. Despite their remarkable achievements, Pacific Islanders are largely missing from the narratives of early European voyagers, who largely followed Ferdinand Magellan's track across the Pacific, encountering a few isolated islands and atolls rather than the numerous island groups scattered across Melanesia and Polynesia.
Initially, those voyages were Spanish attempts to rescue survivors from Magellan's expedition and other rescue parties from the Philippines. Later Spanish voyages — by Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, Pedro Fernándes de Quirós and Luis Váez de Torres encountered islands in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, the Marquesas and Torres Strait.
Later, Dutch voyagers, including Jakob Le Maire, Willem Schouten and Abel Tasman, encountered inhabited islands in the northern Tuamotus, Tonga and Fiji. Tasman's encounter with New Zealand's west coast pencilled in a possible west coast for the hypothetical Terra Australis Incognita, which remained a subject of speculation until a succession of British voyages by John Byron, Samuel Wallis, Philip Carteret, and James Cook—and the Frenchman Louis-Antoine de Bougainville gradually eliminated the continent's possible locations. By 1779, when James Cook died in the Hawaiian Islands, little was left to be discovered in the Pacific. Although the Frenchman La Pérouse eliminated many of the few remaining possibilities, isolated 'discoveries' continued into the 19th century.
