p At the end of November 1520 the three surviving ships of Magellan’s fleet emerged from a narrow, tortuous strait into unknown waters. The Spice Islands (Moluccas), the goal of the expedition, lay somewhere to the south-west. The immeasurable expanse across which Magellan sailed was so calm that he named it “Pacific”.

p On January 24, 1521, after two months in these waters, the three ships finally caught their first glimpse of land, a tiny desert island. Ten days later they came to another barren island. Only on March 6, after three months and twenty days, did the seafarers, tormented by hunger and thirst, reach inhabited land, the island of Guam. That was how Europeans discovered the strange, unique, astonishing world of Oceania.

p In the following decades and centuries Spanish, Dutch, English, French and Russian frigates plied the waters of the Pacific Ocean and the explorers entered more and more discovered lands on the map. In the wake of the geographical discoveries a study of the vast ocean and its islands was begun by oceanographers, botanists, zoologists, meteorologists, geologists, linguists, folklorists and anthropologists. Although these investigations have a history of more than 400 years, they have developed on a large scale only in the present century.

p From the very beginning the question that agitated the minds of the navigators and early explorers of the islands and archipelagoes of Oceania was how man had first reached them, for some are separated by thousands of kilometres of ocean.

p In the 16th century the Portuguese navigator Pedro de Quiros advanced the theory that the islands were the remains of a large, now submerged, continent, and their inhabitants were 26 descendants of its population. Many other wellknown navigators supported this view. Its most ardent champions were two students of Oceania, the distinguished French naval commander and explorer Dumont d’Urville and his fellowcountryman Moerenhout, collector of folklore.

p To support the idea that America and Asia were once joined by a large land mass Dumont d’Urville thought that Oceania’s volcanic islands, such as the Hawaiian Islands, were the peaks of mountain chains which stretched across the now sunken continent. The continent, he said, had been inhabited by a large and civilised population whose descendants, now greatly degraded, remained on the Pacific islands and islets.Moerenhout, in his turn, used folklore as evidence that a continent had existed until a colossal cataclysm led to its submersion and the death of a great number of people.

p Dumont d’Urville and Moerenhout published their hypotheses in the first half of the 19th century, when oceanographers, anthropologists, geologists, folklorists and ethnographers had only just begun to study Oceania. As new data came to light, new theories concerning a hypothetical Pacific continent appeared.

p In a monograph published in 1865 the English naturalist Alfred Wallace, associate of the great Darwin, cited evidence to prove that the contemporary aborigines of Australia, the Papuans of New Guinea, the dark-skinned Melanesians and the light-skinned Polynesians were all descendants of a single "Oceanic race" that had inhabited a vast Pacific continent, now sunken. Thomas Huxley, another outstanding evolutionist of the 19th century, shared Wallace’s view.

p The hypotheses of biologists and anthropologists were supported by some geological theories, except that geologists put the disappearance of the Pacific continent at a far earlier date, before man had evolved. The French geologist, Haug, thought that a vast land mass, situated in the central part of the Pacific, began to submerge in the Mesozoic era, that is, between 100 and 200 million years ago. The German geologist H. Hallier agreed with him. In 1911 the Russian geologist Lukashevich compiled a series of maps of the hypothetical Pacific continent showing all the changes it underwent, up to and including its final submergence.

p In 1923 and 1924 two books about the hypothetical continent appeared, written by men living in different countries and working in quite different fields of science; they probably did not even suspect each other’s existence. They were Mikhail Menzbir, Russian pioneer in zoogeography, and J. Macmillan Brown, English ethnographer, who spent a lifetime studying the numerous tribes and peoples of the Pacific. The titles of their books were similar: Brown’s The Riddle of the Pacific and Menzbir’s Secrets of the Great Ocean.

p Menzbir presented a number of arguments relating to geology, ethnography and oceanography that testified, although indirectly, to the existence of a land mass in the Pacific Ocean at one time. His most persuasive and astounding arguments came from zoogeography, a science dealing with the geographical distribution of animals and their migration routes.

p Take the case of the fish called Galaxias, which was first discovered in the rivers of New Zealand in 1764. This genus is confined to fresh water 28 on the continents and islands of the Southern Hemisphere, in 30° to 60°S. The Galaxias is found only in fresh water; it cannot live in salt water. How, then, did it reach New^Zealand, which lies many hundreds of kilometres away from the continents? How did this fish get into the waters of several other Pacific islands? Since the Galaxias could not have migrated through the salty waters of the ocean, the only way was along the fresh-water rivers that once flowed in the now sunken Pacific continent.

p Or take the iguana, a large lizard that once inhabited continents and is now found on the Galapagos and Fiji Islands. Iguanas are poor swimmers, so it is unlikely they crossed the ocean. Doesn’t this signify that the islands were once connected with a land area? There are many other inhabitants of the Pacific islands, from beetles, mollusks, amphibia and ants to butterflies and crayfish, which could not have travelled hundreds, in some cases thousands, of kilometres through the ocean to reach their present habitat. The snakes that live on many Pacific islands can hardly swim at all.

p On the islands of Oceania we find specimens’of specifically North American, East American, South American, Australian, Indonesian, and even Antarctic flora growing side by side.

Botanical and zoological data offered convincing evidence of the existence of a continent or of large land bridges in the Pacific. In Menzbir’s opinion, the humanities, the branch of learning concerned with human thought and relations, showed that the’land mass sank in human’times. Not in the time of primitive man but much later, after man had attained a certain degree of civilisation. Professor Brown devoted almost the 29 whole of his voluminous monograph to proving this. lie concentrated on the enigmatic culture of tiny Easter Island, a culture that vanished before scholars had time to describe and study it.