Why is the Pacific Ocean called ‘Pacific Ocean’?

Answer

Incidentally, the first name Europeans gave to the water was ‘Mar del Sur’, Zuiderzee, in 1513. Vasco Nuñez de Balboa then crossed the Isthmus of Panama. About the same period, Portuguese (Serrao and de Abreu) ​​also first sailed along the western edge of the Pacific, around the Sunda Islands, but their journey was long kept secret contrary to Balboa’s account. Balboa noted that the water was salty, and that the large tidal range indicated a substantial ocean.

In 1519, Serrao’s nephew, Ferdinand Maggelaan, connected those two stories together, and got it done to cross that ocean in the service of the Spanish crown. When he rounded the southern tip of South America in November 1520, he found a relatively flat ocean, with favorable winds, especially in comparison with the stormy crossing of the Straits of Maggelaan: a mutiny crushed, one ship sunk , one ship defected back to Spain. Moreover, he was optimistic about the distance to his actual target, the spice islands in the Moluccas, something in which he miscalculated. All of this contributed to the naming ‘Vredevolle Zee’ (Mar Pacifico), but Maggelaan based his naming on the good fortune he had in not finding stormy weather in his path, and on the contrast with the bad luck he had before.

In Dutch it became ‘Pacific Ocean’, although Zuiderzee, Pacific South Sea and in English South Sea(s) also remained popular for a long time. A problem with those names was that there were other southern seas: the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands,…