Fun in the Pacific Ocean and the Waterfall

Who named this vast ocean?

In 1519, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, in the employ of Spain, began a journey across
 the Atlantic Ocean to seek a western route to the Spice Islands via South America.

After braving perilous seas and navigating through what are now known as the Straits of Magellan,
his small fleet entered an unfamiliar ocean in November 1520. He called this body of water
pacific, due to the calmness of the water at the time ('pacific' means peaceful). He called it
Mar Pacífico, which in Portuguese means 'peaceful sea'.

When Magellan and his crew entered the Pacific Ocean after their long journey, they
thought that the Spice Islands were close at hand. Little did they know that their
destination remained thousands of miles away. The explorers had ventured into the
largest ocean on Earth.

Covering approximately 155 million square kilometers (59 million square miles) and containing
more than half of the free water on Earth, the Pacific is by far the largest of the world's
ocean basins. All of the world's continents could fit into the Pacific basin!


Who discovered the Pacific ocean? 

Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475-1519) was a Spanish conquistador who famously discovered the
Pacific Ocean after crossing the isthmus of Panama in 1513. An utterly ruthless adventurer and colonizer,

Balboa was  as much a danger to his fellow conquistadors as he was to the indigenous peoples he came across.


Balboa helped establish the town of Darién, the first permanent Spanish settlement on the American
mainland. Extracting gold from Panama and instituting slavery and forced labour to work on plantations,
Balboa was ultimately outwitted by a Spanish rival who had him tried and executed for treason.