[Palter]

Pre Cook ping.

[Kenny Bunk]

For 150 years prior to Cook, Spanish ships traded between the ports of Acapulco, Mexico and Manila. The course they took had them passing the Hawaiian Islands by as close as 70 nautical miles!

With a prevailing Easterly against them, somebody must have tacked over at some time and spotted the islands. Either that or they stayed on the port tack all they way from the Phillippines to Mexico!