The amazing new exhibition, Strait Through: Magellan to Cook & the Pacific at the Main Gallery of the Firestone Library, Princeton University runs until January 2, 2011

The fascinating exhibition documents the drama of the unfolding European exploration of the Pacific Ocean that followed from Ferdinand Magellan’s transit of the Strait of Magellan. In rare historic maps and the original printed narratives of the main European explorers, the exhibition traces 250 years (1520s-1770s) of both national and personal maritime achievements, as the map of the Pacific slowly developed into its present shape.

Chronological maps of the Magellan Strait, Pacific Ocean, and Spice Islands (Moluccas) form the backdrop to exhibition cases devoted to individual explorers and explorer-pairs: Ferdinand Magellan (d. 1521), Alvaro de Mendaña de Neira (1542?-1595) and Pedro Fernandes de Queirós (d. 1615), Sir Francis Drake (1540?-1596), Jacques Le Maire (1585-1616) and Willem Corneliszoon Schouten (d. 1625), Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603?-1659), William Dampier (1651-1715), Jacob Roggeveen (1659-1729), Samuel Wallis (1728-1795) and Philip Carteret (d. 1796), Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729-1811), and James Cook (1728-1779).