The History of the World in Bite-Sized Chunks by Emma Marriott

Author:Emma Marriott [Marriott, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843179290
Publisher: Michael O' Mara Books

OCEANIA

EUROPEAN DISCOVERIES OF THE PACIFIC LANDS

The islands of the central and southern Pacific Ocean had been settled by the Polynesians (who may have originally come from Indonesia) between 2,500 and 1,500 BC. The Polynesians were skilled navigators, and by AD 400–500 they had reached the majority of Polynesia’s islands, many of which – including Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti and the Hawaiian islands – developed into advanced societies, despite being cut off from much of the world.

Europeans first made contact with the Pacific lands in the sixteenth century. In 1511 the Portuguese reached Malacca in Malaysia, and in the following year, they arrived on the famous ‘Spice Islands’ in the Moluccas and also took Makassar in Indonesia and Timor in 1514. Later Portuguese ships reached New Guinea in 1527. In 1521, the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, sailing with a fleet of three Spanish ships, reached Guam and the Philippines, and on their return to Spain (without Magellan, who had been killed in the Philippines) the fleet completed the first maritime voyage around the world.

The remote island of New Zealand was first settled by the Maori in the early thirteenth century. Originally sailing from Polynesia in large canoes, over the subsequent centuries a distinctive Maori culture was established. The first European to reach New Zealand was the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642 (also reaching Tasmania, which was named after him).

The first recorded European sightings of Australia, which had been inhabited by the Aborigines for some 50,000 years, occurred in the seventeenth century. The Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon reached the Cape York Peninsula in 1606, and throughout the century, the Dutch charted the western and northern coastline (of a land they called ‘New Holland’) but made no attempts at settlement. An English explorer and privateer, William Dampier, landed on the north-west coast in 1688 and again in 1699, but it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that more permanent settlement would be attempted (see here).

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