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101 3 The Alluring Pacific Ocean The most celebrated goal of early modern French, British, and Anglo-American western exploration was to find some kind of Northwest Passage to the Pacific. French scouts looking for a river route to the South Sea pushed west of lakes Superior and Winnipeg in the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s. British ships sought a Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay in the 1740s. Thomas Jefferson, famously, hoped Lewis and Clark would find a passage to India, not the Bitterroot Mountains theyactuallyencountered.The persistence of this quest, long after the hard experience of European explorers had dispelled Columbus’s vision of a short westward voyage to the Indies, has raised many questions. One of these is why enthusiasts kept finding reasons to hope for the existence of a transcontinental water route to the Pacific. More basic still is the question of why they cared about finding one. To understand the durability, difficulty, and implications of the Anglo-French search fora Northwest Passage, it is necessary first to consider where a navigable water route through North America would have led. During the half century from 1713 to 1763, and indeed in the decades before and after, the still largely uncharted South Sea offered much to draw the attention , inspire the imagination, and direct the actions of European officials. They could be almost certain the Pacific contained undiscovered islands and, the dimensions of the ocean being ample, it might hold unknown continents. Should a water passage through North America exist, the Pacific might still provide a way to East Asian commerce less difficult than that around the Cape of Good Hope. The South Sea promised access, moreover, to Spanish silver needed to finance tradewith China or wars in Europe.Whether this silver remained in the hands of Spanish Chilean and Peruvian subjects, ascended South America’s Pacific coast to Panama, orcrossed from Acapulco to Manila to support the Spanish colony in the Philippines, it enticed eighteenth-century Europeans who often retained the avarice, but rarely enjoyed the opportunities, of Pizarro and Cortés. Together, geographic mysteries, commercial opportunities, and financial importunities rendered the South Sea and the possibility of novel and superior routes to and 102 | The Alluring Pacific Ocean across the Pacific subjects of great interest to European officials. Such considerations would draw pirates into the South Sea in the late seventeenth centuryand merchants and privateers in the earlyeighteenth. Paradoxically, they would contribute also to the official exclusion of most non-Spanish ships from the Pacific after the War of the Spanish Succession. This restoration of Spanish claims to a closed Pacific would limit possible French avenues of approach to the American West and sow the seeds of future conflicts among western Europe’s maritime powers. Uncharted Waters, Imagined Lands The lingering obscurityof the eighteenth-century Pacific arose in part from geographic fundamentals. Reaching the South Sea required Europeans to sail thousands of miles and to round one of two proverbiallydifficult capes or to find their way across the unforgiving land barriers of Eurasia or the Americas.Once Europeans entered the Pacific, its immeasurable magnitude portended scurvy, shipwreck , and desolation to mariners unfamiliar with its waters and unacquainted with the navigational techniques developed over the centuries by South Sea islanders. In 1492, fewer than fiveweeks out from the Canaries,Columbus’s men “could . . . bear no more.” Five weeks was a third of what Ferdinand Magellan and his crew endured on their 1520–1521 Pacific crossing. In Antonio Pigafetta’s account, They were three months and twenty days without eating anything (i.e., fresh food), and they ate biscuit, and when there was no more of that they ate the crumbs which were full of maggots and smelled strongly of mouse urine. They drank yellow water, already several days putrid. . . . The gums of some of the men swelled over their upper and lower teeth, so that they could not eat and so died. . . . In these three months and twenty days they went four thousand leagues in an open stretch in the Pacific Sea. . . . And they saw but two uninhabited islands, where they saw no other things than birds, and trees. . . . If God had not given them fine weather, they would all have perished of hunger in this very vast sea. And they were certain that such a voyage would never again be made.1 1. The account of the Pacific that follows rests on a sturdy foundation of scholarly literature. J. H. Parry provides a short introduction to the...

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