Pacific Voyages - The Story of Sail in the Greatest Ocean

-Few artists are also historians, and few historians have the talent to illustrate the people and events they study. [Gordon Miller-s] paintings of ships under sail, wrecked on a lee shore, in storms and in cities are luminous.--Pacific Yachting

In Western myths and imagination, the Pacific is the home of soft, warm, gentle trade winds, idyllic island lagoons and waving palms-the exotic earthly paradise of escapists, adventurers and romantics. Until James Cook showed otherwise, eighteenth-century Europeans also believed this ocean to contain a great southern continent of untold riches and beauty. The islands of the South Pacific can indeed be enchanting, their charm often exceeding expectations, but as European mariners realized when they first arrived here in the sixteenth century, the Pacific Ocean is also a region of ferocious tropical cyclones, treacherous, reef-littered atolls, wearying doldrums and mind-numbing