In this sweeping narrative, author Frank Sherry tells the enthralling story of one of the most exciting periods of human discovery: the first 250 years of European exploration of the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific covers one third of the planet, but until 1513 no white man even knew it existed. When the Spanish adventurer Vasco Nunez de Balboa emerged on an open Panamanian mountaintop and beheld a seemingly endless expanse of calm water, he unwittingly began a new age of exploration. The prize that spurred the various European seafaring countries was control of the fabled Spice Islands. Beginning with Ferdinand Magellan's amazing (and ultimately circumnavigating) effort to claim the Spice isles for Spain, Pacific Passions recounts some of the most heroic voyages in human history and places them in their proper historical contexts. From the Spanish-Portuguese guerrilla war for the Spice Islands to the Dutch rebellion against Spanish man time hegemony, here is the race to conquer the vast, remaining unknown stretches of the Earth. The other spur to exploration was the presumed existence of a huge continent in the Southern Hemisphere that was commonly referred to as Terra Australis Incognita Despite the discovery of Australia, geographical scholars persisted in believing that a huge southern land mass had to balance the northern continents, thereby preventing the Earth from spinning wildly out of orbit. Pacific Passions follows the ambitious and disastrous attempts to locate Terra Australis, until Commander James Cook finally exploded the myth. Here is an unforgettable tale of bold exploration and the cataclysmic events that molded sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europe. It ispopular history at its most exciting.