Carte des découvertes faites en 1778 dans les Mers de Chine et de Tartarie…

Title

Carte des découvertes faites en 1778 dans les Mers de Chine et de Tartarie…

Description

Map shows the Pacific ocean with South Corea, Islands of Riu -Kiu, Tai- Wan, Islands Mariane and partly the Philipines

ca. 1797

Artist

Pérouse, la (1741-1788)

Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse (1741 1788) was a French Naval officer and explorer whose expedition vanished in Oceania. La Pérouse crossed the Pacific Ocean in 100 days, arriving at Macau, where he sold the furs acquired in Alaska, dividing the profits among his men. Lapérouse sailed all the way south to the Spanish Las Californias in 1786. He stopped at the Presidio of San Francisco long enough to create an outline map of the Bay Area, Plan du Port du St. Francois, which was reproduced as Map 33 in L. Aubert's 1797 Atlas du Voyage de la Perouse. Laterhe arrived in Monterey Bay and at the Presidio of Monterey. In 1787 after a visit to Manila, he set out for the northeast Asian coasts. He saw the island of Quelpart, present-day Cheju in South Korea, which had been visited by Europeans only once before when a group of Dutchmen shipwrecked there in 1635. He visited the Asian mainland coasts of Korea.

Historical Description

The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceanic divisions. Though the peoples of Asia and Oceania have traveled the Pacific Ocean since prehistoric times, the eastern Pacific was first sighted by Europeans in the early 16th century when Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and discovered the great "southern sea" which he named Mar del Sur (in Spanish). In 1519, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed the Pacific East to West on a Spanish expedition to the Spice Islands that would eventually result in the first world circumnavigation. Magellan called the ocean Pacífico (or "Pacific" meaning, "peaceful") because, after sailing through the stormy seas off Cape Horn, the expedition found calm waters. The ocean was often called the Sea of Magellan in his honor until the eighteenth century.