Australia to Mauritius in a schooner of 29 tons! Sir James Brooke sailed in 1883 from the mouth of the Thames to conquer North Borneo from the pirates in a sailing yacht of 148 tons.

Think of the courage that must have been required by a Magellan, a de Quiros, or even a Captain Cook, when they steered into the Unknown from the coast of South America across the broad waters of the Pacific! They had only a limited stock of fresh water: how long would it be before an island or a continent was encountered whereon they could land to replenish their supplies from some spring near the seashore or some stream falling from the hills? They had very little in the way of fresh provisions: when these were exhausted might not their mariners develop that dread disease scurvy,[1] and rot into madness or death? or before arriving at such an extremity mutiny and murder their officers? Food of any kind might become exhausted before fresh supplies could be obtained; and we know from many instances how ready the ship's crew of famished, uneducated sailors was, first to talk of cannibalism, and at last to lay violent hands on an officer or a comrade, kill him, and eat him. Or the undiscovered lands which would be their only resource against a death from starvation, disease, or thirst might be populated by ferocious man-eating savages (as indeed many of them were) and the landing parties of seamen and officers be promptly massacred. Or it might be a desert island, and the pleasing-looking herbs or fruits be deadly poison, or the strange fish, mussels, oysters, clams, whelks, or turtles prove to be so unwholesome that all who ate of this new fare were prostrated with illness. The gallant little sailing ship—little in our eyes whether its capacity were of 30 or even 400 tons—might be charged by a bull cachalot whale as big as an islet, and then and there spring a leak and founder with all on board. There might well be—and there were—treacherous coral reefs just masked by two or three feet of water on which the vessel would be driven at night-time and break her back. The crew would take to their frail boats and then have a thousand or more sea miles to cross, with oar and ineffective sail, before they could find a landing place and sustenance. Perhaps on the way thither (the giant, greedy sharks following in their wake) they died of sunstroke or thirst, or went mad and jumped into the sea and the shark's maw. Or they did reach some South Sea island—not to be discovered again for a century or two—where they were received as demigods by the astonished savages, but where they had to pass the rest of their lives as savages too; consoling themselves as best they could with a Polynesian wife or husband (for there were women sometimes in these ventures, especially on the Spanish vessels) and the growing up of a half-caste family; but never heard of again in their far-away homes, and ever and anon weeping and crying in vain to Heaven to be restored once more to the fair cities and romantic life of Spain or Portugal, or to the comfort and the orderly beauty of a Norman or an English homestead.

After sailing, sailing, sailing across the equatorial belt of the Pacific Ocean they at length reached—if no disaster arrested their progress—the limits of the known: they came to some part of Malaysia where the natives were no longer naked, black, unreasoning cannibals, or crafty, yellow, naked thieves; some seaport in the Philippines, Celebes, Timor, or Java where they met men of the Muhammadan religion, or even other European Christians who had reached Australasia round the Cape of Good Hope. But the Muhammadans might out of jealousy or of revenge for wrongs they had suffered from other Christians cause them to be imprisoned or murdered, while more often than not the fellow Christians they were greeting after a twelve-thousand miles' voyage half round the world belonged to some nation in rivalry or at war with their own. Then they might be held long years in captivity, or be executed (with or without torture) outright. (Matthew Flinders was imprisoned in Mauritius for six and a half years by the French not much more than a hundred years ago.) At any rate they would probably be refused those sea stores and materials necessary for repairing a crazy ship, and have to face the return voyage across the Indian Ocean, round the stormy extremity of Africa, and through the violent gales of the northern Atlantic with but a slender hope of reaching home, or even of surviving the perils of the sea, in a leaky, worm-eaten ship with splintered masts and rotten sails.

This fifth division of the earth's surface which they had come to explore consisted of an almost uncountable number of islands ranging in size from Australia, with an area of 2,946,691 square miles, New Guinea, which has about 312,330, and Borneo, with another 290,000, to tiny islets like the Fanning atoll, 9 miles by 4, or little Pitcairn, 2 miles square, on which the mutineers of the Bounty long hid themselves. The larger islands nearer to Asia were for the most part fragments of a former extension of the Asiatic or Australian continents; even New Zealand (104,000 square miles) must once have formed part of a huge strip of continental land stretching southwards from New Guinea and north-east Australia. But most of the islands of Micronesia and Polynesia (as distinct from Melanesia[2]), though they may have been larger than they are now and have risen out of comparatively shallow seas, were nevertheless always oceanic, that is to say, never connected with any great continent in recent ages.

These small islands are divided into two classes: the mountainous or volcanic and the coral or flat islands, also called "atolls", from a word in a South Indian language. Atolls, or coral islands, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are made by the coral animals (a polyp or minute jellyfish-like creature living in communities like the cells of a human body), building upwards towards the surface of the sea the lime structures in which they exist. They start, of course, from some reef or submerged volcanic cone which is not far below the surface of the water. The limestone rock which they make out of secretions from the sea water gradually forms an irregular circle of narrow islets, with a lagoon in the centre and one or more deep openings to the sea. Vegetation—always coconuts—slowly covers these coral islands, and at last they become habitable by man. If the land beneath them is rising above the waves, the coral fossilizes into coralline rock and the living coral animals go on building and extending farther out to sea. If the land is sinking faster than the coral animal can build, then by degrees the once pleasant islets become a jumble of barren and crumbling rocks, only haunted by sea birds (but sometimes valuable for their guano), and finally a dangerous reef or shoal.

Of the smaller Pacific islands that are not mere coral reefs and atolls the Hawaii group, the Marquezas, Tahiti, Easter Island, Pitcairn, the Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji groups, the New Hebrides, most of the Ladrones, and one or two of the Caroline Islands are volcanic, high, and of recent formation, even though like the New Hebrides and the Marquezas they may rest on submerged extensions of sunken lands. The Solomon Islands are also mainly volcanic, but with the Bismarck archipelago practically form an extension of New Guinea; while New Caledonia is a very old fragment of unsubmerged land, and so