- 1987 edition. 248 pages
- Published by Salem House Publishers. USA
- Hardcover with dust jacket. Brown Boards. Just a bit smaller than A4 size book.
- Very good condition. Hint of fading to spine of dust jacket.
The Exploration of the Pacific. Indexed and Illustrated.
The European seamen who explored the Pacific made some of the longest and most hazardous voyages in history. They had to endure squalor, brutality, hunger, thirst and an appalling death rate. However, when they reached the islands of the central Pacific they were made welcome by a people who, in innocence, offered them food, drink, shelter and sex, and asked for nothing in return.
'What a country' wrote the French explorer de Bougainville, 'What a people! I thought I had been transported to Paradise.'
Yet within a century of de Bougainville's landing, the people of the Pacific islands had been decimated by deprivation, disease and the total collapse of their culture - left with nothing to look forward to but 'going into the night to join the spirits of their ancestors'. Paradise had been found. And lost.
Ian Cameron's book describes the physical creation of the Pacific, and suggests how the ocean's multitude of islands may have been first populated by those true discoverers of the ocean, the Polynesians.
It brings vividly to life the epic voyages of the Spanish, Dutch, British, French, Russian and American explorers as they battled against the vast distances of the Pacific and the appalling weather conditions of the ocean's polar approaches. It recounts the excesses of the exploiters - the freebooters, sealers, whalers, missionaries and traders - whio followed in the explorers' wake.
Making extensive use of contemporary diaries and of material and illustrations from the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, Ian Cameron chronicles, in a narrative of extreme readability, both the triumph of the Pacific voyages and the tragedy of their aftermath.
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