Boston Athenæum

October 27, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. Just the smallest sampling from the Boston Athenæum’s special collections holdings provides a glimpse of the western world’s centuries-long fascination with the geography and cultures of the Pacific. The collections include: Jan Jansson’s mid 17th-century map Mar del zvr Hispanis Mare Pacificum which depicts the west coast of Central and South America to the Straits of Anian; James Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean published in 1784; Frederick William Beechey’s Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait [sic] from 1831; J.E. Partington’s Ethnographical Album of the Pacific Islands published in 1892; Will Sabin’s 1921 Hawaii U.S.A.: A Souvenir of “The Crossroads of the Pacific”; and the Book Club of California’s Pacific Adventures, “a series of six narratives of early exploration of the Pacific area, to be issued bi-monthly during 1940s.” ‘Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Com