Perils of the Pacific

In the great Iberian empires of the 16th and 17th centuries, a career was already avail-able in global administration not very different from the lives of the bankers or lawyers who globe-trot today. In 1509, as one example among hundreds, Duarte Coelho Pereira, a soldier for the Portuguese crown in Morocco and West Africa, went to India, where he spent the next 20 years accompanying missions to China, Vietnam and Siam. Back in Portugal, he became ambassador to the French court and then commander of a patrol on the Malaga coast before taking up the captaincy of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil, a plum royal job, where he made his fortune and founded a dynasty.

Within a couple of decades of the first Europeans venturing out into the Atlantic and Indian oceans, they had become imperial European ponds, often crossed, winds and currents deeply familiar, thick with government and business. The early Pacific, which is at the heart of Harry Kelsey’s short, careful and fascinating book, was different. It was the great gap — of unknown width in an age where longitude was unmeasurable, spattered with very small, very occasional coral atolls and surprising reefs, with unknown patterns of winds and currents that shifted with the seasons. Treasure islands, real or imagined or somehow transferred here from the Hebrew scriptures, lurked there somewhere as the great prize.

The Portuguese and Spanish had agreed at the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 to split the world in two, the Portuguese having everything to the east of a line that ran down the western Atlantic, the Spaniards everything to the west of it. What no one quite knew was where that division lay on the other, Pacific side of the world.