Shared Vision: Herman Moll and His Circle and the Great South Sea

By examining a vision shared by an amazing group of early eighteenth-century men, and the impact of that vision of what the southeastern Pacific Ocean was then called—the Great South Sea—in this essay, I seek to clarify and perhaps even to widen somewhat our understanding of a fascinating and significant chapter of the history of discovery and exploration. It is a chapter that opens with the initial European voyages into the Great South Sea by navigators such as Magellan and Drake; includes the exploits and events of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, some of which will be considered here; and concludes with the explorations of Cook and others later in the eighteenth century and on into the twentieth century. In totality or in part, certainly, it is what our famous Texas frontier historian, Walter Prescott Webb, would have considered a story of "high adventure." ¹