killed in Hawaii in 1779. The expedition made a second attempt at the Bering Strait, stopped at Kamchatka and China and reached England in 1780. Cook set a high standard of scientific exploration, showed that there was no large land mass in the southern ocean, mapped the two largest island groups in the Pacific, and by following the east coast of Australia and the west coast of North America closed the last gaps in European knowledge of the Pacific coasts. On his second voyage, Cook was accompanied by Johann Reinhold Forster and Forster's son Georg, who influenced significantly Alexander von Humboldt and his understanding of the Pacific, which Humboldt encountered in 1802–3. Several German-speaking navigators and explorers followed, most of them in the service of expeditions launched by Imperial Russia. After Cook everything was detail. Cook's rivals and successors Several governments sponsored Pacific expeditions, often in rivalry or emulation of Captain Cook. At the time of Cook's first voyage, in 1766-1769 Louis Antoine de Bougainville crossed the Pacific and publicized Tahiti, in 1767 Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret separately crossed the Pacific, and in 1769 Jean-François-Marie de Surville visited the Solomon Islands and New Zealand. In 1785-1788 Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse followed the American coast from Chile to Alaska, crossed to China, explored northern Japan and Kamchatka, went south to Australia and lost his life in the Santa Cruz Islands. The Malaspina Expedition (1789–1794) visited the American coast, Manila, New Zealand and Australia. In 1792-93 George Vancouver more thoroughly mapped the west coast of Canada. In 1803/6 Adam Johann von Krusenstern led the first Russian circumnavigation and investigated both sides of the North Pacific. In 1820 Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen saw Antarctica. A number of other voyages are listed in "European and American voyages of scientific exploration." Spain on the west coast of North America For Europeans in the Age of Exploration western North America was one of the most distant places on Earth (9 to 12 months of sailing). Spain had long claimed the entire west coast of the Americas. The area north of Mexico however was given little attention in the early years. This changed when the Russians appeared in Alaska. The Spanish moved north to California and built a series of missions along the Pacific coast including: San Diego in 1767, Monterey, California in 1770 and San Francisco in 1776. San Francisco Bay was discovered