In 1995, a five-million-dollar replica of James Cook's Endeavour – the famed navigator's flagship – left its moorings and sea trials in Fremantle, Australia and sailed for Sydney. An armada of small boats accompanied the ship sailing into the harbor, and a thousand spectators watched from the parapets around the opera house. As the ship docked at Man O'War Steps, the curious and enthusiastic joined the welcoming celebration.

The Endeavour replica had been commissioned in January of 1988 as a bicentenary gift to the people of Australia to celebrate the navigational feats of Captain Cook, who charted the eastern Australian seaboard for the British navy in 1770. The Endeavour gave a heroic preface to European knowledge of and interest in the island continent, leading to the first colonial settlement, epitomized by Captain Arthur Philip raising the British flag, first at Botany Bay, and shortly at Port Jackson, and claiming possession of the eastern Australian seaboard on January 26, 1788, with eleven ships and 1,350 passengers – half of them convicts – of the First Fleet. The date would come to mark Australia Day. The rest of the Fleet was mainly convicts and guards, sent now to the South Pacific after the 1776 American Revolution made the British practice of exiling prisoners across the Atlantic no longer tenable.

What stories from Asia to Oceania to the Americas make up Pacific history?

Along the shores of Baja California, sixteenth-century porcelain from East Asia turns up in archeological digs, along with timbers and containers marking the resting place of great Spanish galleons that sailed with cargoes of treasure, silk, and slaves drawn from the Malabar coastline, Portuguese Macao, southern Japan, and the Philippines in transits from Manila across the Mariana Islands to the Americas.

The smallest island nation in the world is Nauru, twenty-one square miles completely encircled, lying northeast from Papua New Guinea, paired with Banaba. It is an archetypical Micronesian reef island, palm fringed, yet one bearing the marks of its own history since being first settled by twelve tribes of legendary seafarers in canoes. Over the centuries, traders and beachcombers landed, and by the nineteenth century, the islanders fell into warfare after the European introduction of firearms and alcohol. A German protectorate from 1888 and British, Australian, and New Zealand mandates from 1914 built up a rich, singular mining economy in phosphates, as in Peru. A Japanese air base during the Pacific War and the center of intensive American bombardment, the island became one of the earliest independent Pacific states in 1968, but with the phosphate fields dwindling, heavily dependent on external aid and support.

In 2001, the Australian government received a distress call from international Pacific waters and requested any nearby vessels to search and rescue. A Norwegian cargo ship, the Tampa, came upon the floundering Palapa, an Indonesian fishing boat packed with more than four hundred sick and desperate passengers, including pregnant women and almost fifty children. They were, it turned out, refugees and asylum seekers, largely from wars, conflicts, and persecution in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 1907, William Jones made his way up the Cagayan River in northern Luzon Province of the Philippines. In a letter posted back to the United States he wrote, “I am sojourning with a Negrito-Malay people called Ilongots, who dwell in lofty booths on poles and in the forks of trees.” He was excited to be among a headhunting jungle society, yet also repelled by the “savagery” that he witnessed. Two years later he was speared and cut down with bolo knives at a bend in the river by Ilongot warriors.

The attack came in response to unfortunate events that might have been reminiscent of the fate of James Cook: Jones had argued about boats, been impatient and unwise in dealing with local clans and, at the last moment, seemed to be taking a local elder, Takadan, hostage until he could have his demands satisfied. In Jones' case those demands centered on balsa rafts that the Ilongot were supposed to build and guide for him downriver. The need for so many rafts was unusual, but Jones had a large cargo: extensive collections of baskets, weapons, fish traps, and models of local dwellings bound for the Field Museum in Chicago.

In 1995, Flor Contemplacion was hanged by the government of Singapore. Accused and convicted of a double murder, Contemplacion's execution set off a storm of protest in her home country, the Philippines, and resulted in a diplomatic crisis, attempted intervention by the Philippine president, and the breaking of international contracts and agreements. Contemplacion was not a known figure, nor was her crime political. She was a low-paid, overseas domestic worker with a job in Singapore away from her own family. The victims had been a fellow overseas worker and a little boy in her care. What the death of an “ordinary” woman meant to the Pacific world was a story of very old and unresolved histories.

Those histories centered on the question of labor. The transit of peoples across the Pacific is a narrative that includes legendary feats of navigation, dark records of slavery and blackbirding, and desperate flight. The nineteenth century was profoundly marked by the oceanic circuits that brought Chinese laborers to California and Australia, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos to Hawai‘i, and Indians to Fiji to work in mines, or on railroads and plantations. The twentieth century saw Javanese slave labor populations working in gangs across Southeast Asia, and the postwar economic migration of workers into factories, sweatshops, and domestic labor jobs.

The Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Majid was a seasoned guide for bringing ships through the transits and ports that crossed the Indian Ocean from Africa to Asia. Born in Oman, he was a poet and scholar who wrote more than forty works, composed elegant verses, and compiled an extensive encyclopedia of navigational principles, star positions, accounts of seasonal winds, reckoning systems, and the traditional lore of sailors and other navigators, including members of his own revered family. He was a master of different rudder and sail designs and a student of compass bearings.

Maritime South Asia was a world he knew well. For centuries, Muslim trade had dominated, spreading faith and teaching along with cargoes of glass and perfumes, rivaling and bargaining with Chinese merchants, some in settlements and entrepôts left behind by Zheng He.

That a reconstructed voyaging canoe from Polynesia should make a twenty-first-century journey to Micronesia to define the Pacific is historically fitting, for the water world of small islands and atolls had long played a key role in Oceanian histories. Archeologists have determined that Taiwan was a likely origin point for voyagers out towards the Marianas, and the indigenous language is a first-order branch of the Austronesian family that spread east. In addition, ceramics from the third millennium BCE seem to share common features with Marianas Red Ware and shell artifacts.

Successive generations of voyaging settlers were original human colonizers. In the islands and atolls, Micronesian ancestors developed sophisticated trading and tribute systems and have been renowned across generations for their wayfinding genius. Navigator Mau Piailug himself hailed from Satawal and carried in him traditions of an epic heritage.

Off the coasts of Vanua Levu, Fiji, during the reign of Naulivou, voyaging chiefs from the Bau region one day regarded a strange vessel from beyond the coastal arrowroot and tobacco weeds. The outlanders made shore and offered iron hoop, knives, and hatchets, and unknown animals like geese, a monkey, and a cat. The chiefs had long traded canoes, woven mats, and spears with Tongans, but the outsiders wanted only croppings of heavy trees with rough, mottled bark, unsuitable for canoes, which they cut, scored, and loaded into their vessel. The boat would be only one of many to follow, and in a few years, the chiefs were not only trading, but negotiating contracts for their forests and the work gangs to cut and haul them.

Many of the ships then made port in a place largely unknown to the chiefs of Bau. In April 1805, the governor of New South Wales wrote from Sydney, relating “the circumstances of a small Vessel belonging to an Individual being sent in quest of the Bêche-de-Mer. That Vessel is returned, and altho' they failed in that Object, yet they acquired another of not less Value, namely, Sandalwood.” It had been long known, according to the Governor, that the aromatic wood “was a production of some of the Feejee Islands, which are a Group hitherto not much known.” He induced an expedition to survey, barter, and harvest some tons of the wood, pleased that “it may hereafter be an advantageous Object of Commerce with China.”

Iskandar Shah, the Sultan of Malacca, is today commemorated in a reconstructed royal palace with cast figures and courtiers attending him in royal splendor. He sits on a raised wooden platform surrounded by guards. The carved window frames and screens look out down a hillside where the hazy sea spreads away. That sea is narrow, a strait between the peninsula of modern-day Malaysia and the island of Sumatra. The Sultan's authority rests upon his control of a vital trading port, midway between the Indian Ocean with its domination by Indian and Arab traders, and the South China Sea and Pacific. The seas around Malacca are filled with merchants and tribute vessels, and by the Orang Laut sea people who serve as a patrol force, steering flotillas to shore for obligatory trade.

In its local history, Malacca (Melaka) is a powerful and wealthy city, spread across a river channel joined by a bridge. A palace rises on one side against the hills, while the opposite river bank is loud with activity from entrepôts, stockhouses, and trading companies. All year round, voices can be heard speaking in Malay, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi. In its busiest years, more than eighty different languages and dialects from the Arab world to India and from Asia and Oceania will be heard in the streets and trading pavilions.

In 1942, in northwest Papua, healer and prophetess Angganita Menufleur spoke of a new order and renewal of history. The islands and territories of Papua had for centuries been nominally ruled by the Sultan of Tidore for the Dutch Empire in the Indies, and the coastal clans subjugated to feudal exactions and plantation labor. Angganita preached against the foreign overlordship and foretold a time when the world would be upside down: trees would grow their fruit underground, black and white people would exchange skins, ancestors would return, and ships bearing cargo would bring the Papuans prosperity as never before.

Her followers danced and sang, spoke in tongues, and waited for Mansren, an old man who had long ago captured the Morning Star and been given magical powers. He had sloughed off diseased skin, become new, and, in the company of a young wife and miracle child, created the lands of Papua. His return would herald the new age.

At midnight on January 1, 2000, the world's attention turned toward an unlikely place: a small, uninhabited island, part of the Kiribati group in the Pacific. There, as the day changed across the International Date Line, President Teburoro Tito lit a torch and welcomed the world to the new millennium. Within hours, the Date Line would pass toward the western Pacific, triggering celebrations in New Zealand, the Melanesian Islands, and on toward Australia. In Aotearoa, Maori communities greeted the night with chants and songs. In longitudinal sections just hours apart, celebrations began in Sydney harbor with tall ships and fireworks, in Tokyo with the ringing of ancient bells, and in Hong Kong with cheering flotillas. It was a moment for the world.

As peoples of the Pacific celebrated the new millennium in great Asian metropolises and small island towns and villages, Kiribati pondered its future. The archipelago, encompassing the Gilbert, Ellice, Phoenix, and Line Islands, is officially the Republic of Kiribati. The islands are for the most part low lying atolls, but their encompassing waters are enormous, about the size of the continental United States. In the west, the capital, Tarawa, lies adjacent to the Marshall Island of Micronesia and north of the Solomons and Vanuatu of Melanesia. The republic stretches north of Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and the Cook Islands. The Line Islands at the eastern end lie between Hawai‘i and French Polynesia. The islands fall both north and south of the equator and in the eastern and western hemispheres, giving them a unique claim to focus the Pacific and the world.

Three hours north of Auckland, New Zealand, in the waters around Moutapere Island lies one of the most famous wrecked ships in the world. The Rainbow Warrior is today an artificial reef, encrusted with polyps and festooned with kelp and sea grass, the ocean home of schooling fish, fluorescent jewel anemones, and speckled moray eels. This seems appropriate for a ship once registered to Greenpeace, the globally activist environmental organization. How the ship came to be lying under more than eighty feet of ocean is a story that goes back at least to the final days of the Pacific War and engages the history of colonialism and decolonization, especially in the French and American territories.

On August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay passed over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped a single weapon, the “Little Boy.” As the atomic bomb exploded, some 70,000 Japanese were instantly killed and a square mile of the city incinerated. Much more of the city went up in flames and as many as 140,000 people staggered out with trauma and injuries, dying in the next few months. The blast collapsed buildings, melted steel, and left shadows on stone buildings where passers-by had been instantly vaporized. Survivors were left with disfiguring burns. The atomic bomb also brought something never seen before in warfare, with the power to terrify across generations: radiation sickness, and a growing documented record of leukemia, cancer tumors, birth defects, and deformities, some immediate, some developing over the course of years.

The Sophia was a 537-ton teak and yellow metal cargo ship built in 1819 in Calcutta, India, regularly chartered for work between Europe and the Pacific. In late 1828, she began two years of voyages unremarkable for exploring, yet which traced out the circuit of Pacific worlds increasingly drawn together. Launching from Dublin, her holds were filled with almost two hundred shackled male convicts, tossed on the months-long passage to the British prison colony in Australia. In Sydney harbor, the Sophia was chartered to Tonga by Captain Samuel Henry, who picked up another human load, this time laborers he recruited to sail with him to Melanesia, the island of Erromanga in the New Hebrides, to harvest sandalwood.

With its cargo, the Sophia sailed north to Hawai‘i, where news of the valuable wood excited the attention of the Oahu governor, Boki, who launched his own ill-fated expedition to conquer Erromanga, as sandalwood had already disappeared in Polynesia. He and most of his force perished at sea or died of malaria. The Sophia also returned to Erromanga, but by now found the risks and returns unprofitable and sailed back to England through the New Hebrides, Singapore, and Manila. The ship's surgeon, George Bennett, returned to Plymouth with a young Erromangan girl, Elau, a chambered nautilus, and a gibbon, all of which he conflated as examples of primeval nature, contributing to Victorian debates about natural history and the possibility of educating savages.

For two and a half centuries the Spanish galleons and their attendant marauders and rivals crossed the Pacific from Manila to Acapulco. Still, the great volta of Spanish transit was almost as remarkable for what it did not do. As Magellan had crossed from South America to Guam without making landfall, so the galleons followed winds and sailing routes that allowed them to never sight Hawai‘i, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Despite speculation that galleons of Juan Gaytan in 1542 might have stopped in the islands, no definitive case has been made that the voyagers of the Spanish Lake ever did more than pass by hundreds of miles to the north and south.

Separated from European contact and drawing on a voyaging heritage of Polynesian ancestors, Hawaiians developed richly complex cultures and political organizations. A number of small kingdoms dominated the islands, each led by a ruler assisted by chief ministers. Ranked below them were ali‘i, or chiefs, whose power depended upon their ancestral genealogies and personal mana. The famous kahuna were priests also skilled in traditional arts, building, and medicine.