Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  Many who came to see the little boat seemed mesmerized by that view: a Japanese people who had configured themselves for centuries as Asian, since Asia lay at their back door, were now transfixed by a newer notion: that they were also a people connected with the ocean that lapped so temptingly at their nation’s front door.

  Now, after all the forays into the huge home ocean, the Hokule‘a is embarked on her malama honua voyage, one-quarter completed at the time of writing, and with the hope of transfixing the entire world. Hoping, on one level, to astonish outsiders with the thought that such navigation is possible; but also to remind them of familiar things—that there is but one world ocean; that there is just one world; and that all of us are one, passengers on the same planet, challenged by matters that are common to us all. Familiar messages—and I mean no disrespect by setting them to one side.

  It seems to me there is even more potent symbolism to the Hokule‘a’s journey, symbolism that relates quite specifically to the ocean where the boat was born, where her crew members revived and then learned their skills, and from where she came to venture out to the rest of the planet. The Pacific occupies a unique position among the world’s seas; the Hokule‘a’s journey has served as a reminder of why.

  I suspect that anyone who learns of this little boat’s past doings, and of her present journey, comes away amazed. The thought that hidden still within our present world’s technological triumphs (triumphs that most Eastern cultures are naturally eager to embrace), an ancient skill survives that can help humans perform a task of such infinite complexity must surely come as a revelation. The achievements of the navigators seem little short of miraculous. They cause us to pause and draw breath. We revere what they have done, revere and respect the existence of a kind of natural wisdom that we mostly imagined had been exhausted by time and progress.

  Yet the simple fact that it does still exist, and here in this one ocean, prompts a greater question.

  Mankind—or, more specifically, Western mankind, legatees of the belief that the planet is theirs by unchallengeable right—has spent his past three thousand years on a civilizing tear, ever bound toward the sunset. He has gone from the Fertile Crescent to the Nile, from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules, from the ports of the Old World to the shores of New. More recently, empowered by the mandates of Manifest Destiny, and careless of those who inhabited the newly found lands of the Americas, he lurched still farther on, to the shores of the Pacific.

  Balboa saw the ocean, Magellan embarked on its first crossing—and for the five succeeding centuries of relentless expansion, Western man sought to dominate, exploit, and own some or all of the vast new fetch of peoples and cultures and attitudes and gods who lived on and around this sea. A gathering of peoples who had been living there, and generally quite peaceably and contentedly, for the same thousands of years during which the Westerners planned and executed their own expansion.

  It is worth reminding ourselves that those in the East, be they Chinese or Japanese, Koreans or Filipinos, Australian aboriginals or long-distance-sailing Polynesians, seldom sought in ancient times, at least in any significant way, to make similarly expansive imperial journeys of their own. Extraordinary journeys, yes—the ancient Polynesian wayfindings most memorably of all. But these journeys were not as bent on conquest and dominion as were most of ours. We tend to deride them for this, for their demonstrable parochialism, for what we might see as complacent and incurious insularity. The rhetorical inquiries that follow—“Why didn’t the Chinese find us before we encountered them?” being the most familiar—tend to have a condescending presumption about them, freighted with the implication of a Western belief that our simply having journeyed to them is proof positive of our right to claim them and their territories as our own. So our empires flourished, our churchly missions grew, our wealth accumulated, and our assertion of a prescriptive right to rule held sway for centuries.

  Today, of course, much has changed. Empire has now become a tawdrier notion, many of the legacies of European rule have come to be seen as ruinous, and apologies have since been sought and occasionally given. Some religious zeal clings on: America’s Mormon Church, for example, is ever more active in the Pacific these days, with its elders energetic and everywhere, and with authoritative-looking texts to be quoted justifying their presence. And commercial enterprise is inevitably everywhere, too, peddling everything from iPads to Spam, Coke to Cheerios, and unstoppably. But otherwise we have largely withdrawn from our superintendence of the ocean’s western peripheries, and we are examining now, if somewhat reluctantly, the need to retrench and reconsider our hold on the waters of the sea itself. And as we do so, in the ebb tide we seem to be assuming a more contemplative take on matters.

  We begin to encounter and appreciate such unexpected things as the mysteries of long-haul journeying. We begin to apprehend anew something of the miracles of the kind of knowledge and wisdom—Eastern wisdom and knowledge, we perforce must call it—that we have for so long quite overlooked, in our imperial rush, in our hitherto unshakable belief in our own kingly virtues.

  The Pacific is the ocean where, quite literally, East meets West—though the ironic reality of its geography has the East in the west and the West in the east, playing a kind of compass trick on us. It is a trick that adds to the slightly unsettling paradox that the Pacific is in fact the least pacific of all the oceans: storm and war and seismic mayhem have roiled it to a far greater degree than poor Magellan, its christener, ever imagined. Much in these parts, in short, is not at all what it seems.

  As we begin our slow backing out from this territory, much of what Westerners (Americans, most particularly) say and seem to believe presently displays a ring of defiance. We speak—indeed, this very book’s subtitle speaks, and it does so because this is a reality of today’s Pacific—of the fear of a coming collision between East and West, that there is challenge in the air, the sound of clashing swords and angry words. Some of us continue to cleave to the view that East and West are natural foes, peoples about whom Kipling so infamously said two centuries ago, “never the twain shall meet.”

  The existence of the entity we call Polynesia, with her generally peaceable past, her wealth of undiscovered skills, the long survival of her people, hints that such beliefs as ours, in the permanent immiscibility of far-flung peoples, is a racial assumption that need not be so. We should perhaps amend our view, allow it to evolve, or else discard it. The Pacific should perhaps not be a place where, after years of conquest and dominion, we now only fear confrontation and collision. There has to be another model. Our new and more contemplative take on matters suggests what this should be.

  With his long reach across this immense ocean, Western man, coming full circle, has now all but ended his journey around the planet. The two most historically divided peoples now stand face-to-face, wondering, waiting, evaluating, considering. Polynesia suggests that what those of us on the ocean’s eastern side should now be doing, rather than considering competition, is something radically different. We should be learning.

  Instead of aircraft carriers and pollution, garbage gyres and coral bleaching being the bywords of our presence, there should now be a fresh kind of lexicon. Respect, reverence, accommodation, admiration, and awe for much that the East stands for—all these should now be the new watchwords. For from these ancient, calming cultures, there is very much more to learn and absorb than there is to fear and resist. The benefits of Western modernity are quite obvious and should be sought after by all. But the wise benefits of antiquity should not be discounted, either, and we should be readier to embrace them, as counterpoise, as leavening. This is what the Pacific should teach us.

  Meanwhile, the Hokule‘a lumbers her way slowly across the ocean, with half a world to cover before she heads for home. All the while, on her way back to the Pacific, she will be spreading the message central to us all, and which was born on this great sea, of malama honua: Take care of where we live. It is all we have or ever will have
. It is precious. Learn from it, respect those who know and sense it already, and take good care.

  The Pacific has the words for it: aloha and mahalo.

  1 The second attempt to reach Tahiti, in 1978, ended in tragic failure when the canoe capsized. A young Oahu surfer named Eddie Aikau tried to find help by surfing the ten miles to shore. While he was gone, a passing Hawaiian Airlines passenger jet saw the Hokule‘a’s distress flares and summoned the Coast Guard, who rescued everyone—except for Eddie Aikau, who was never seen again. To avoid such recurrences, the Hokule‘a has since always made her long-distance voyages with a support ship in distant attendance—in the case of her current circumnavigation, she was first followed some miles away by the Hikianalia, a similar-looking canoe, but one equipped with modern instruments and radios. For the Indian Ocean, an even bigger craft was chartered as a safety boat, and the Hikianalia was brought home.

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  Fuller details of the books I mention here are to be found in the bibliography. However, on those few occasions where I mention that a particular researcher or institution (such as Woods Hole Oceanographic) has produced “many publications” that are relevant to a particular topic, I have decided to leave it to the interested reader to undertake the necessary Internet search. To include references to everything written would consume a great deal of valuable space.

  PROLOGUE

  Discussions relating to the creation of time zones and the positioning of the International Date Line in the Pacific Ocean are to be found both in Clark Blaise’s biography of Sir Sandford Fleming, Time Lord, and in the account Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude, by Derek Howse. For readers fascinated by the more technical aspects of the field, and by the robust arguments between the affected countries, these topics are also well covered in the published Proceedings of the 1884 Meridian Conference, held in Washington, DC.

  The complicated and sometimes distressing condition of many native residents of some of the Marshall Islands (Kwajalein most notably) are bravely (and controversially) told by Julianne Walsh in her Etto Nan Raan Kein: A Marshall Islands History. The history of the early twentieth-century Japanese influence on islands in the western Pacific is to be found in Nanyo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, by Mark Peattie.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The definitive document calling for the establishment of January 1950 as the beginning of the standard reference year for dating purposes is the appeal by Richard Flint and Edward Deevey in the foreword to the 1962 issue of the journal Radiochemistry. Eric Wolff at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and Paula J. Reimer, the director of the Centre for Climate, Environment, and Chronology at Queens University, Belfast’s School of Geography, have also written on the topic, encouraging the acceptance of 1950 as the “present” in the new dating system that has replaced AD and BC with BP.

  CHAPTER 1: THE GREAT THERMONUCLEAR SEA

  Details of the crucial conversations between President Truman and his CIA director, Admiral Souers, which led to the decision to develop fusion weapons, later to be tested on Bikini and Enewetak atolls, can be found in Richard Rhodes’s classic study of the development of hydrogen bombs, Dark Sun. The matter of then selling the test program to the Bikinians is more than amply covered in Holly Barker’s Bravo for the Marshallese, Connie Goldsmith’s Bombs over Bikini, and Jack Niedenthal’s For the Good of Mankind—the last being the cynically persuasive argument put forward by the generals and admirals who came a-courting the eagerly patriotic islanders.

  Jonathan Weisgall’s Operation Crossroads gives a full account of the principal Pacific tests of the postwar fission weapons; for the subsequent tests of the much more powerful fusion bombs, the best accounts are to be found in the official reports of what was then named the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency, particularly those relating to the dangerously mismanaged Castle series.

  Film clips showing the spectacular upending of the entire twenty-six-thousand-ton battleship Arkansas, by the force of the Crossroads Baker shot, can be found at Sonicboom.com.

  Work on the notoriously accident-prone “Demon Core” of plutonium hemispheres is meticulously covered by Louis Hempelmann in his paper on radiation effects, published by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1962.

  CHAPTER 2: MR. IBUKA’S RADIO REVOLUTION

  I found that of all the many works on the early days of the Sony Corporation, the best and most enjoyably disinterested is John Nathan’s Sony: The Private Life. Publications put out by the company itself, especially the two book-length obituaries of Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, certainly offer a useful and accurate catalogue of the firm’s milestones, but are understandably somewhat hagiographic. Miss Hiroko Onoyama, formerly Akio Morita’s assistant in New York, offered much private information, which proved most helpful. The company’s original prospectus, written by Ibuka, is on display at the Sony Archives in Tokyo.

  The Bell Labs work that resulted in the invention of the transistor is lucidly explained in a paper published in the Journal of the American Physical Society, vol. 9, part 10, in 2000. The New York Times account of the warehouse robbery in Queens that put Sony’s early transistor radios on the map appears on page 17 of the issue of January 17, 1958.

  CHAPTER 3: THE ECSTASIES OF WAVE RIDING

  Few history books can be as beguiling or as seductive as Matt Warshaw’s The History of Surfing, which manages to be both beautiful in appearance and comprehensive in scope: I turned to it ceaselessly, until its pages were ragged with overuse. Scott Laderman’s Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing, is somewhat more sober, but I found it useful nonetheless. And Jack London’s writings, both in his Voyage of the Snark and in his famous essay in the Woman’s Home Companion of October 1907, are powerfully suggestive of the passion with which devotees took to the new sport.

  The story of George Freeth, claimed in parts of his native Ireland to have been the original “king of surfing,” is very well told in a motion picture, Waveriders, made in 2008 by the Irish director Joel Conroy.

  That California in the early years of the twentieth century so swiftly became America’s first mainland surfing paradise is a phenomenon chronicled in loving detail by William Friedricks in his 1992 book Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California. The strange story of Grubby Clark and his abrupt closure of Clark Foam, with all of its myriad unintended consequences, is told in many issues of Surfing magazine. Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor gear and clothing company Patagonia, describes his attitude to wave-dictated flextime in his amusing book Let My People Go Surfing.

  CHAPTER 4: A DIRE AND DANGEROUS IRRITATION

  I first came across the improbable story that North Korea had been almost accidentally created by no less than an American soldier, Colonel Charles H. Bonesteel III, in Dean Rusk’s otherwise rather dull autobiography, As I Saw It. Max Hastings fleshes out the yarn somewhat in his definitive The Korean War, still unarguably the best book on this miserable and pointless conflict, and which left so poisonous a legacy.

  Jack Cheevers and Ed Brandt both wrote well-received books on the capture of the USS Pueblo; the ship’s captain, Lloyd Bucher, wrote his own account of his wretched months in captivity, Bucher: My Story. Lest anyone have doubts about the savagery of the successive governments that have ruled North Korea since the 1953 armistice, the Report of the [UN] Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, published in 2013, should be essential reading.

  CHAPTER 5: FAREWELL, ALL MY FRIENDS AND FOES

  I relied on the considerable storytelling abilities of the former journalist Brian Izzard, and his book Sabotage, which tells, in almost hour-by-hour detail, the tragic and fiery end of the adored Cunarder RMS Queen Elizabeth. Issue 189 of the Socialist Review, published in September 1995, offers a sweeping and coherent analysis of General Gracey’s near-unimaginable rearming of defeated Japanese soldiers to help him fight against Vietnamese nationalists in postwar Saigon. Those wishi
ng further detail should know that the general’s extensive collection of papers is lodged at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College, London.

  Two books in particular proved essential to my understanding something of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu: Ted Morgan’s Valley of Death and Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. The consequent Communist rout and conquest of the totality of Vietnam twenty years later is covered in exquisite and painful detail in Last Days in Vietnam, a film made by Rory Kennedy and released in 2014.

  Few colonial territories now exist in the Pacific. One of the last to be returned to its rightful owners was the former British enclave of Hong Kong, written about in its new postcolonial identity by Jan Morris, in the classic Hong Kong: Xianggang.

  The four Pitcairn Islands are all that now remains of Britain’s once immense Pacific empire. Dea Birkett managed to make herself most unpopular by writing the vastly informative Serpent in Paradise; and Kathy Marks confirmed the underlying rottenness of the place in her coverage of the sexual abuse trials, which I consulted to write this chapter.

  CHAPTER 6: ECHOES OF DISTANT THUNDER

  I made great use of Warning, by Sophie Cunningham, to build my account of the devastating Cyclone Tracy, following my own visit in 2014 to the now wholly restored and largely rebuilt Australian tropical city of Darwin.

  Information on the formation and explosive growth of Typhoon Haiyan, which inflicted so much Darwin-like destruction in the Philippines four decades later, came largely from publications written by the team at the U.S. Joint Typhoon Warning Center at Pearl Harbor.