Early Explorers: Three European Arrivals, 1606 to 1774

Queirós, 1606

Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, sailing for Spain, reached the island he took for the great southern continent and named it Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. He established a settlement at Big Bay on what is now Espiritu Santo. It lasted a matter of weeks before relations with the local population broke down and the expedition left.

Bougainville, 1768

Louis Antoine de Bougainville sailed between Espiritu Santo and Malakula and established that the land was not continental. The passage he used still carries his name.

Cook, 1774

James Cook charted the group on his second voyage and named it the New Hebrides, after the islands off Scotland. The name held for just over two centuries, until independence in 1980. Cook anchored at Port Resolution on Tanna, named for his ship, and climbed toward Yasur.

What the charts did not carry

These voyages produced coastlines and little else. The societies already established across the archipelago — with their own languages, land tenure and ceremonial order — appear in the records only as encounters. That gap is the reason so much of the archipelago's own history is held in kastom.

Three thousand years before any of it

The archipelago was settled from the west around 3,000 years ago by people carrying Lapita pottery, whose distinctive dentate-stamped decoration marks the expansion across Remote Oceania. Lapita sites have been excavated at Teouma on Efate, where a cemetery of more than sixty burials was found in 2004 — the largest Lapita burial ground known anywhere.

The Teouma remains established, among other things, that the first settlers were removing skulls and reburying them, and that they arrived directly from the west. Everything European voyagers later described was built on three millennia of that.

What Queirós believed

Queirós was not looking for islands. He was looking for Terra Australis, the great southern continent that European geography insisted must exist to balance the landmasses of the north. He believed he had found it, named it for the Austrian Habsburgs and the Holy Spirit, proclaimed a city called Nueva Jerusalem and appointed officials to govern it.

The settlement lasted about a month. Relations with the people of Big Bay collapsed, his own crew was mutinous, and the expedition sailed. He spent the rest of his life petitioning Madrid to fund a return.

Cook’s charts

Cook’s survey in 1774 was the first accurate one, and it held. He mapped the whole chain in about six weeks, named most of the islands, and produced charts that Admiralty vessels used into the nineteenth century. The name New Hebrides was his, and it outlasted him by 206 years.

Why the encounter record is thin

These voyages produced coastlines. Where they recorded people at all, they recorded incidents — a landing, an exchange, a fight. The societies that had been building land tenure, grade systems and ceremonial order across the archipelago for three thousand years are almost entirely absent from the documents, which is why so much of the history is held in kastom.

What came between the voyages

Between Queirós in 1606 and Bougainville in 1768 there is no European record of the archipelago at all — 162 years in which Spanish charts carried a coastline nobody revisited. The islands were not isolated in that period; movement and exchange between them and with Fiji and New Caledonia continued throughout. They were simply of no interest to Europe, and that indifference is itself part of the record.

Bougainville and the name that stuck

Bougainville passed through in May 1768 and settled the question Queirós had left open: this was an archipelago, not a continent. He named the strait between Santo and Malakula, and the Great Cyclades for the group as a whole — a name that lasted six years until Cook replaced it. His visit also produced the first European description of the islands written by a naturalist rather than by a captain hoping for a colony.