On 25 September, 1513, Vasev Nunez de Balboa became the first European man to sight the Pacific Ocean. With a chosen band of soldiers he crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and from the summit of the Sierras made the discovery.
Balboa and his party descended to the beach of the Gulf of San Miguel, and named this great expanse the Mar del Sur - the Great South Sea. He claimed it, and all the continents and islands it washed, for the King of Spain.
The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Fernao de Magalhaes) was appointed Captain-General of a Spanish expedition to find a shorter route to the Spice Islands via South America. The Magellan Strait was discovered, and on 28 November 1520 three ships of the expedition passed through to enter the Great South Sea. Magellan completed the first crossing of the Mar del Sur by reaching the Philippines. He renamed it Mar Pacifico - the peaceful sea. Magellan was the man of the century, but it was left to Sebastian del Cano to get a lot of the credit for completing the voyage home in the Vittoria.
Two and a half centuries later, Pierre Antoine Veron, the astronomer with Bougainville's expedition, 1766-9, was able to make a fairly accurate observation of the size of the Pacific from east to west.
In 1573, when privateering, Francis Drake sighted the Caribbean Sea to the east and the Mar Pacific to the west from the highest point of the Sierras, or, the Isthmus of Panama. In 1577 he became the first man to circumnavigate the world in his own ship - the Golden Hind. He entered the Pacific via the Magellan Straits, was driven south to Cape Horn and then probed the west coast of America.
William Dampier circumnavigated the globe three times in his wanderings and official voyages. He referred to Mar Pacifico as the Pacific Ocean in his published journals, which became an immediate and lasting success.
It was left to Cook to unlock the remaining secrets of Balboa's Mar del Sur. He had a mountain of evidence before him in the journals and charts of previous explorers. He went on to prove in his three voyages of discovery that he was the greatest navigator the world has known. Cook's real memorial is shown on the map of the world - the Pacific Ocean.
Stamp Issues
Panama 1906
1c Balboa
Cook Islands 1975 Pacific Explorers Issue
1c Balboa
5c Magellan
10c del Cano and Vittoria
Great Britain 1973 British Explorers
5p Sir Francis Drake
Qatar 1967 Famous Navigator Ship
1r Golden Hind
New Hebrides 1968 Bicentenary of Bougainville's voyage
Australia 1967 Navigator issue
5s William Dampier
7s 6d Captain Cook
Book of reference
Explorations of the Pacific by J.C. Beaglehole
Doug Gibson
Originally published in Cook's Log, page 372, volume 8, number 3 (1985).