Ghosts of the Pacific

by Philip Roy

  Islands like Bikini are not easy to spot at sea because they are so small and flat. They don’t have hills or mountains, and, like Sable Island, are often surrounded by rocky reefs that trick even the most experienced sailors. How many thousands of sailors had been shipwrecked on gentle looking islands? The lucky ones would have made it to shore, if they were able to swim, then spent the rest of their lives as castaways. That’s what some people believe happened to Earhart: that she crashed close enough to an island to make it onto the beach, then lived as a castaway until she died. But maybe she crashed into the jungle of an island. No one will ever know—at least not until someone finds her plane.

  Bikini Lagoon was one place I just had to see, even though it was supposed to be the most contaminated place on earth, and you couldn’t eat anything that grew there, not even the fish. And you’d get radiation poisoning if you hung around too long. I was dying to see it. In 1946, the Americans sailed seventy-six warships there and moored them in the lagoon. Then they detonated a couple of atomic bombs. They wanted to see if a navy could survive a nuclear attack.

  Ten of the ships sank right away. Fifty-three were so hot with radiation they had to be towed to deeper water and sunk. One of them, the USS Arkansas, a huge battleship, was lifted vertically into the air during the explosion. Wow. The Americans set off over twenty atomic bombs on Bikini Atoll in twelve years. Then, they detonated a hydrogen bomb. That vaporized three islands. They don’t exist anymore.

  Twenty-three giant warships are still lying on the bottom of Bikini Lagoon, untouched since the bombs exploded. The biggest one, the USS Saratoga, was an aircraft carrier eight hundred and fifty feet long, just a few feet short of the Titanic. She was bigger than Sheba’s island. And yet she could cut thirty-three knots through the water. That was unbelievable. She would have looked like an island racing across the sea. Now, she was lying on her keel, her bridge just forty feet beneath the surface.

  I had to see that.

  Another thing Bikini Lagoon was famous for, according to my guidebook, was its sea life. Since all the Bikinians had been taken away and relocated somewhere else, and no one fished there because no one could eat the fish, the lagoon was so full of sea life it was like nowhere else on earth. That was ironic.

  All I wanted to do was sneak into the lagoon, have a look around and sneak out. It shouldn’t be too difficult to do. The lagoon was ringed with sandbars like a lasso but my map showed that there was open water on the south side between the tiny islands. The atoll was uninhabited, except for occasional tourists and divers. I planned to sail in at night, have a look around when the sun came up, then sail out.

  When the seafloor began to rise into a seamount I felt excited, even though it was a couple of hours before we saw anything. Hollie was excited too. He could smell land.

  Eventually I saw a few scattered trees that looked as though they were sticking out of water from the distance. Probably they were coconut trees. They grew in the sand. You wouldn’t know they were contaminated to see them. Now I could guess how the three islands had been vaporized. They were made of sand. The explosion just blew all that sand up into the sky, it drifted away in clouds, then rained down on the sea over hundreds or thousands of miles, like ashes from a volcano. That’s what I imagined, anyway.

  It was hours before dark but Hollie wanted out so badly that I dropped anchor off the sandbar, inflated the dinghy and rowed to shore. I was surprised there weren’t any old shipwrecks here, since the sandbar was invisible from the sea. Without sonar there was no way to know it was even here. On the other hand, how many sailing ships would have come across the Pacific this way? And if there had been any old wrecks they probably would have been vaporized too. In any case, there was nothing here but sand, and no sounds but the lapping of waves on the beach. Even the sound of our feet in the sand was swallowed up in the vastness and I couldn’t hear it. Hollie ran down the beach and he was the only thing that didn’t look like sand. In the other direction there was a coconut tree. I walked that way.

  It was hot! The sand was so hot I had to walk where it was wet. Seaweed landed on top of the coconut tree. Maybe the sand was too hot for him too. What a weird place. It was so quiet and empty. I stopped and turned around. This was the spot where over twenty nuclear bombs had been detonated. It was so peaceful now it was hard to imagine. Hollie started running towards me. He was still far away and he made no sound. This was surely one of the quietest places on earth.

  After we returned to the sub, we sailed to the south side of the lagoon and waited until dark. Once twilight had appeared, darkness came quickly. We stood in the portal and watched the sun sink into the sea. Pacific sunsets were more spectacular than any other ones I had ever seen. They turned from yellow to purple, with shades of orange, red and every other colour in between, but mostly yellow and purple. And the colours spread out in shapes like wings and sails and long rolling scarves. I wondered if there was so much colour because of the heat.

  When the last traces of colour disappeared I shut the hatch, submerged to periscope depth and entered the lagoon. I didn’t enter on the surface because I didn’t want any vessels that might be there to know by radar that we had come in.

  The floor of the lagoon was a hundred and eighty feet deep and was a smooth and sandy surface. I picked up what I thought was a rocky promontory on sonar but as we motored closer I realized it was one of the ships. I couldn’t believe how big it was. It was almost a thousand feet long, which meant it must have been the Saratoga. I felt butterflies in my stomach.

  I wanted to touch the deck of the ship, which was ninety feet down. Although I could dive a hundred feet, I only had one good arm. And there were lots of sharks around. And it was the most contaminated place in the world, or used to be, even though it didn’t look it. I also didn’t want to get spotted and chased out of the lagoon by a bunch of excited tourists in fancy speedboats.

  We hovered above the Saratoga and I hit the floodlights. I couldn’t see much, even though she was right outside the window. She was too big and we were too close. I decided to motor around and locate some of the other ships. There was an airplane next to the Saratoga, which must have blown from her deck or hangar when the bomb went off.

  I scouted around for a few hours, found two submarines and a bunch of huge ships which on sonar looked like monsters sleeping in the lagoon. There were so many of them. It was really spooky. I couldn’t wait for the sun to come up.

  When it did, I was sitting on the hull with the hatch wide open. We were right above the Saratoga again. There was no current in the lagoon so I felt no need to drop anchor. Besides, I didn’t want to get it tangled up in an aircraft carrier.

  Morning is when sharks like to feed, but sharks, as a rule, don’t make a habit of eating people, especially small to medium sized sharks. I wasn’t expecting to see any great white sharks here, though I’d be watching closely. Hollie was sitting at the bottom of the ladder looking up. He wanted another run in the sand, and he would get one soon. Seaweed was sitting on the hull. He looked like he was thinking, “What are we doing here?”

  “I just want to make a few dives, you guys. Then we’ll go.”

  I went inside, took off my t-shirt, sneakers and bandage. Ziegfried had said that, though the water here was contaminated, it wouldn’t hurt to dive a few times. I figured the salt water would be good for my wound. I went back out. The sun was coming up over the horizon. It streaked across the water. The water was so blue! I climbed down onto the hull and got a fright. The Saratoga lay beneath us as clear as could be and she was so enormous I couldn’t believe it. It looked as though I could just reach down and touch her. But there was movement in the water all around her. I slipped into the water and saw thousands of fish disappear in a flash, then return just as quickly. Schools of them turned together with lightning speed. I saw sharks further below over the edge of the deck. Further below that I saw the airplane sitting on the lagoon floor, one hundred and eighty feet down!

  The
water was thirty degrees Celsius, or eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. It was like a bathtub. I remembered falling in the Arctic Ocean and turning numb in less than a minute. Arctic water might be cleaner, but it sure would kill you a lot faster.

  The deck was ninety feet down but the bridge was only forty, off to one side. I decided to dive to the bridge first. I took some deep breaths, calmed myself and went under.

  My arm was still very sore, and I had to use my left hand more and kick harder with my feet. I swam about twenty feet in an angle towards the bridge, then up again. Now it was directly below me. I poked my head out of the water. There were no tourist boats around yet. I took a deep breath and went under.

  It felt very strange touching the metal skin of such an enormous ship. The guidebook said that the Saratoga had been torpedoed several times yet survived. When the war ended she carried home more troops than any other ship: hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Then, she was ordered to take part in the atomic tests here. But she didn’t survive that. She might have if they had been able to climb inside and bail her and fix the leaks. But they couldn’t touch her; she was too hot with radiation. All they could do was sit back and watch as she sank. And it took eight hours before she slipped beneath the waves and settled on the bottom. She has been lying here ever since. Touching her gave me a creepy feeling, as if I were touching a mechanical giant from another planet. Maybe any moment her lights would come on and she would start to rise. Now that was a scary thought.

  It took forty-five minutes and six dives to reach her deck. It was a lot harder with only one good arm. When my feet touched the deck I looked up. Ninety feet above, on the surface, the sub looked so small. Schools of fish swam above me in walls of bright colour. When the sun streaked through the water they looked like they were on fire. Sharks glided among them like miniature black submarines, but calmly. This was a place with lots of food. The sharks were well fed.

  Back on the sub I sat on the hull and stared across the lagoon. Two thoughts ran through my mind. I loved machines. I was in awe of big mechanical giants like the Saratoga. They fascinated me. I thought they were beautiful in an odd way. This lagoon was full of them. It was like a museum of monstrous mechanical inventions. It was probably the oddest museum you could ever visit. That was one thought.

  The other thought was that all of these machines were designed to kill. They weren’t only designed to kill, but that was a big part of what they could do. Why was I so excited about things that were designed to kill? That didn’t feel right. What made them any different from the bad shrimp trawlers or the pollution that was killing the sea? All of these things were bad. And yet, I liked the machines. And that confused me.

  I remembered Ziegfried once telling me that there was a world of difference between weapons in the hands of people like Hitler, and weapons in the hands of people fighting against him. “If we hadn’t stopped Hitler, Al,” he had said, “we’d all be living in a tyranny. All the Jews of the world would be dead, so would millions of other people Hitler didn’t like. And in the Pacific, if we hadn’t stopped the Japanese Emperor, we’d all be servants of an autocracy. Freedom’s a precious thing, Al. Now, Japan and Germany are two of the richest countries in the world, and they’re free, like us. But we had to fight them back then, Al, when they were ruled by dictators. And we had to use weapons. We had no choice.”

  I wished I had pointed out that if there were no weapons in the first place, Hitler and the Emperor would never have become so powerful. But it only occurred to me just now. On the other hand, if we didn’t have mechanical machines, I wouldn’t have my sub. As I rested my head on my knees and stared across the lagoon at the sun sparkling on the tiny waves, I sighed. I missed Ziegfried.

  Chapter 20

  I WOKE FROM THE deepest sleep. For a moment I didn’t know where we were. Were we in the Arctic? I sure hoped not. No, we couldn’t be. I remembered the Saratoga. How long had we slept? I raised my head. Seaweed was sitting on his spot like a statue. Where was Hollie? I had the vague feeling I had lost him. Had I lost him? I looked under my cot. No, he was there, chewing his rope. Thank heavens. I lay back down. Then I remembered. We were outside of Bikini Lagoon. We walked on the beach for hours. I had got sunburnt. Hollie had too, or maybe it was sunstroke. Anyway, we had crawled into the sub, submerged a hundred feet off the beach, dropped into bed and fell asleep. That was fourteen hours ago. It was time to get up. It was time to sail to Saipan.

  I felt like an old man getting up and putting on the kettle. Seaweed shook out his feathers. That was his way of stretching. I stretched too. Then Hollie did, though he didn’t need to. He was already awake and ready to go. I looked up at my chin-up bar. Was my arm strong enough yet? I climbed up and hung from the bar. That felt good. I did three chin-ups before my arm felt too sore to continue. That wasn’t too bad. It was getting better.

  After breakfast I had my first small successful meditation, though it was probably only because I was still too sleepy to think about anything yet. Then we surfaced to greet the brilliant sunshine.

  But it wasn’t there.

  I felt the toss of waves even before I opened the hatch. When I opened it the wind howled above me and rain lashed against my face. Seaweed started up the ladder then went back down. I turned to look at the beach and saw the coconut trees bending in the wind. I couldn’t believe this was the same place where we had walked on the beach hours before without the merest breath of wind. Was this the start of a typhoon? If it were, I wanted to sail out of it. I didn’t feel like fighting with a typhoon. It would last for days. Nor did I want to keep the crew cooped up the way we were in the Arctic. Since the wind was coming from the east, I turned south and cranked up the engine. We would ride the surface as long as we could, then go under.

  We sailed twenty hours straight. Half that time we spent on the surface and half beneath. I rode the bike for a few hours, Hollie ran on the treadmill and Seaweed did a little too. I groomed Hollie’s fur, attempted to groom Seaweed’s feathers, meditated a little, spent some time reading, tried to reach Ziegfried and sent a message to Angel and hoped she received it. After twenty hours I went back to sleep.

  This time I set the alarm for four hours. I wanted to stay ahead of the storm, or rather, south of it, because the sky was darkest to the north. The winds were blowing steadily from the east. I believed we were escaping the worst of it by continuing south. But who knew what a typhoon would do?

  The second day was rough, though not as rough as it might have been. There was one remarkable difference between a storm here and a storm anywhere else: here it was warm, both the water and wind. It made everything feel a lot less dangerous. But that was deceiving. It didn’t feel threatening to fall overboard because you could float in the water all day if you had to, especially if you had something to hold on to. At least you wouldn’t die of exposure right away. But you would still die, eventually, in the vastness.

  Since we were sailing due south I figured we were cutting through the Ralik Chain, a string of seamounts and atolls on the western border of the Marshall Islands. But with the tossing and pitching of the storm, and poor visibility, I wasn’t actually certain where we were. All I knew for sure was that we were sailing south.

  We came close to an island once. Sonar told me to steer west of it or we’d smash into the reef. I wondered: were we on the north side of Namorik Atoll, or Pingelap? Was it somewhere else? I really didn’t know. I was confused because the wind had changed, but it was hours before I realized it had happened. Now it was blowing from the north. The storm was following us. Rats. We couldn’t keep running from it; it would just chase us all around the Pacific. I decided to head northwest, directly towards Saipan. I didn’t want to miss the circus. But first, I needed to sleep.

  We followed the rising seafloor upwards along a seamount towards a small atoll shaped like a horseshoe, though I didn’t know which one it was. If we could sail into the lagoon, not only would we have shelter from the storm, we might get out for a walk o
n the beach.

  The atoll was very small, just a couple of miles wide. I didn’t recognize it from my charts. It must have been outside of the Marshall Islands. On the west side I found a shallow channel that we could only enter in high tide. So, we waited. Once we entered the lagoon I scouted around before settling. If there were people here we’d sail out before the tide turned. But there weren’t. It was uninhabited. I was tempted to call it Ziegfried Lagoon.

  I tossed the anchor in fifteen feet on the west side of the lagoon, a hundred feet from the beach. I inflated the dinghy, rowed to shore with Hollie, climbed out and tied the dinghy to a tree. Seaweed stayed inside the sub. It was storming pretty hard but there was a line of coconut trees on the beach and they led to a small jungle on a small rise on the north side.

  Hollie was not the least bit put off by the storm, even though it blew his fur backwards and made it difficult for him to trot in a straight line—not that he was in the habit of trotting in a straight line. He stayed close to me and I stayed close to the trees. I was amazed at how much they bent in the wind, as if they were made of rubber.

  We went up the rise, which was maybe seventy-five feet at its highest point. A tsunami would roll over this island as if it weren’t even here. But there was a tiny area of jungle. It was only a quarter of a mile long and a few hundred feet wide, but it was a jungle. I had never actually seen a real one before.

  The trees were close together and there were bushes and plants with big fat leaves everywhere. I didn’t know if there were any snakes here, or spiders or dangerous animals. Probably not. We did see a large crab, and it was very aggressive. When Hollie sniffed at it, it lunged at him and he jumped back. That’s when I picked him up. The plants were too thick and tall for him to jump over anyway, and I didn’t want to lose sight of him. But even I had trouble getting through the bushes.