Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507-1899

In the second half of the eighteenth century, renewed exploration of the Pacific Ocean gained much attention in Europe. As mostly British and French explorers ventured to the region searching for mythical continents and legendary passageways linking the Atlantic with the Pacific oceans, they encountered the waterlogged world of Oceania - a sea of more than 20,000 islands located in the Pacific. Claiming this newly encountered region as a 'new world' of the eighteenth-century, many voyagers sought to distance themselves from the earlier Iberian periods of expansion. In this work, Buschmann incorporates neglected Spanish visions into the European perceptions of the emerging Pacific world. Buschmann maintains that Spanish diplomats and intellectuals, partially inspired by the political desire to keep the northern Europeans out of the Pacific, envisioned the ocean as an area devoid of mythical continents as well as riches and enchantments. These Spanish notables attempted to create an intellectual link between the Americas and the Pacific Ocean by arguing that the Franco-British exploration of the eighteenth century had a great deal in common with the earlier expansive wave of the Portuguese and the Spaniards.

Rainer F. Buschmann is professor and founding faculty member of history at the California State University Channel Islands, USA. He has formerly taught at Hawaii Pacific University and Purdue University, USA. He has written extensively on the European interactions with the Pacific Ocean.