This thesis traces the mariner’s oceanic experience in the journals of the voyages of Pacific exploration made between 1764 and 1780 by John Byron, Samuel Wallis, Philip Carteret and James Cook and the published narratives that derived from them. Situated within the emerging field of ‘blue humanities’, the thesis focuses on the account of the ocean and engages with problems of defining and describing the ocean. It examines how the mariners articulated their oceanic experience and how their narrative challenged wider cultural assumptions about the ocean and how it was then absorbed into literary narratives. It argues that the journals of Pacific exploration increasingly emphasized the experience of being at sea and, through the adapt...