Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  Kerry Emanuel’s large-format book Divine Wind, an analysis of the atmosphere’s endless capacity for high-velocity ferocity, proved invaluable for my writing of this rather complicated chapter.

  Kevin Hamilton, director of the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii, has written numerous technical papers on the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO); and Mark Bradford, chief meteorologist on Kwajalein Atoll, is similarly to be regarded as a voice of authority on El Niño and its related complexities. JAMSTEC, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in the Tokyo Bay port city of Yokosuka, also issues streams of data on its El Niño researches.

  Much science is being performed throughout the Pacific on this ever more crucial topic. Yet quietly, in the background of all this hubbub, stands the magisterial figure of Sir Gilbert Walker, the ultimate discoverer of the phenomenon: the lengthy entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography provides a justly sympathetic portrait of this eccentric and unforgettable, yet near-forgotten, figure.

  CHAPTER 7: HOW GOES THE LUCKY COUNTRY?

  Paul Kelly’s The Dismissal remains the finest account of the unprecedented sacking of the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam. Both Whitlam (The Truth of the Matter) and his nemesis John Kerr (Matters for Judgment) wrote their own, understandably partisan, accounts of the saga, adding to an immense literature on an event that is precious little known beyond Australia’s shores.

  The equally complicated and nuanced story of the building of the Sydney Opera House is perhaps best related in a long-forgotten BBC documentary film Autopsy on a Dream, made by the Australian director John Weiley. The film, highly critical of Sydney’s treatment of the building’s Danish architect, was shown in Britain, but before it could be screened in Australia, it was destroyed, chopped to pieces with a meat cleaver. Thirty years later a misfiled early cut of the film was discovered in London and sent to be shown Down Under, to a mixture of acclaim and cringe. Likewise, an Australian-made TV documentary provided me with some insight into the story of the brief rise to prominence of the politician Pauline Hanson: the ABC 60 Minutes profile of Miss Hanson, who was interviewed with rapier-like skill by journalist Tracey Curro, remains a legendary moment in television.

  CHAPTER 8: THE FIRES IN THE DEEP

  The tireless work of Alvin and her sister submersibles has been the subject of countless reports and publications issued by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. A fine summary of the main findings, of hydrothermal vents and of smokers, black and white, is to be found in Discovering the Deep, by Daniel Fornari, Jeffrey Karson, Deborah Kelley, Michael R. Perfit, and Timothy M. Shank.

  I commend to readers Stephen Hall’s incisive essay on the deep-sea mapmaker Marie Tharp, published in the New York Times Magazine in December 2006.

  Anyone with an interest in the finer points of tectonic theory, which underpins a science central to the formation of the Pacific, could do no better than to read Plate Tectonics, by Naomi Oreskes, published in 2002 and now a classic of the field.

  Robert Ballard’s extended essay on deep-sea exploration, The Eternal Darkness, published in 2000, tells much about Alvin and her work. And Colleen Cavanaugh’s interview with the Harvard Gazette offers considerable information about the role of sulfur in the origination and sustenance of deep-sea life-forms.

  CHAPTER 9: A FRAGILE AND UNCERTAIN SEA

  Personal communications with coral expert Charlie Veron enabled me to fill out the picture of the disastrous beginning of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Iain McCalman’s The Reef: A Passionate History takes the story further, placing this enormous living creature, now very much a threatened creature, in a wider context, both biological and cultural.

  Mary Hagedorn of MarineGEO in Hawaii, a Smithsonian-supported oceanographic research center, is behind a project to try to help coral populations survive the relentless rise in ocean temperature that seems to be doing them so much harm. Her publications, in aggregate, make for fascinating and informative reading. Similarly, papers put out by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority round out the story.

  It was Mark Brazil’s excellent small book The Nature of Japan that first led me to the work of Hiroshi Hasegawa and his heroic rescue of the albatross population of Torishima. Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum publishes an excellent online monograph describing the Hawaiian ceremonial cloaks in its possession.

  Jon Mooallem’s article on Larry Ellison’s purchase of and plans for the Hawaiian island of Lana’i in the New York Times Magazine of September 28, 2014, raised many hackles; much of what he observed confirms the impression I gained when I visited the island six months earlier.

  CHAPTER 10: OF MASTERS AND COMMANDERS

  Three books in particular set the scene for the current Chinese expansion of influence in the far western Pacific and the fretfulness it is causing in Washington: Bill Hayton’s The South China Sea; Robert Haddick’s Fire on the Water; and, by the always reliable Robert Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron. However, the situation in the region is changing so rapidly that all these studies are in danger of becoming dated—so that interested readers would do well to monitor the near-constant streams of publications from such bodies as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Asia Society, and the International Crisis Group, among others, to keep properly abreast.

  The International Crisis Group Paper 229 (2012), “Stirring Up the South China Sea,” presents useful background; and for truly ultra-deep background, there are always new editions available of Alfred Mahan’s classic The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783—essential reading for those who might be curious about how these new naval challenges are likely to play themselves out.

  And as a coda: the complexities of the Pacific as battle space are nicely explained in an essay in the Washington Post of August 1, 2012, by the paper’s defense writer Greg Jaffe.

  EPILOGUE

  The journey of the Hawaiian wa’a Hokule‘a is being reported until 2017, and in great daily detail, by the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Honolulu. Much background to the story can be found in Sam Low’s book on the Hawaiian Renaissance, Hawaiki Rising; in Ben Finney’s explanations of Polynesian navigation, Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors; and most fascinating of all, in David Lewis’s account, We, the Navigators.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Armitage, David, and Alison Bashford, eds. Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People. New York: Palgrave, 2014.

  Bain, Kenneth. The Friendly Islanders. London: Hodder, 1967.

  Ballard, Robert. The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea Exploration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

  Barker, Holly. Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2013.

  Barlow, Thomas. The Australian Miracle: An Innovative Nation Revisited. Sydney: Picador, 2006.

  Barrie, David. Sextant: A Voyage Guided by the Stars and the Men Who Mapped the World’s Oceans. London: William Collins, 2014.

  Beaglehole, J. C. The Exploration of the Pacific. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1934.

  Bentley, Jerry H., et al., eds. Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.

  Bergreen, Laurence. Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe. New York: Harper, 2003.

  Birkett, Dea. Serpent in Paradise: Among the People of the Bounty. New York: Doubleday, 1997.

  Blaise, Clark. Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time. New York: Vintage, 2002.

  Borneman, Walter R. The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King—the Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea. New York: Little, Brown, 2012.

  Brandt, Ed. The Last Voyage of USS Pueblo. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969.

  Brazil, Mark. The Nature of Japan. Sapporo: Japan Nature Guides, 2014.

  Bryant, Nick. The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Grea
t Nation Lost Its Way. New York: Bantam, 2014.

  Bucher, Lloyd. Bucher: My Story. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

  Butler, Robert. The Jade Coast: The Ecology of the North Pacific Ocean. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2003.

  Cameron, Ian. Magellan and the First Circumnavigation of the World. London: Weidenfeld, 1974.

  Carson, Rachel, ed. The Sea Around Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

  Chandler, Alfred D. Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

  Cheevers, Jack. Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo. New York: Penguin, 2013.

  Chouinard, Yvon. Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. New York: Penguin, 2005.

  Collins, Donald E. Native American Aliens: Disloyalty and the Renunciation of Citizenship by Japanese Americans in World War 2. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

  Cooper, George, and Gavan Daws. Land and Power in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.

  Cox, Jeffrey. Rising Sun, Falling Skies: The Disastrous Java Sea Campaign of World War 2. Oxford: Osprey, 2014.

  Cralle, Trevor, ed. Surfin’ary: A Dictionary of Surfing Terms and Surfspeak. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1991.

  Cramer, Deborah. Ocean: Our Water, Our World. New York: HarperCollins/Smithsonian, 2008.

  Cullen, Vicky. Down to the Sea for Science: 75 Years of Ocean Research, Education, and Exploration at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Woods Hole: WHOI, 2005.

  Culliney, John L. Islands in a Far Sea: The Fate of Nature in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006.

  Cunningham, Sophie. Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2014.

  Cushman, Gregory T. Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

  Daniel, Hawthorne. Islands of the Pacific. New York: Putnam, 1943.

  Danielsson, Bengt. The Forgotten Islands of the South Seas. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957.

  ———. The Happy Island. London: Allen and Unwin, 1952.

  Dawes, Gavan. A Dream of Islands: Voyages of Self-Discovery in the South Seas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980.

  Denoon, Donald, et al. A History of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

  Dobbs-Higginson, Michael. Asia Pacific: A View on Its Role in the New World Order. Hong Kong: Longman, 1993.

  Dodd, Edward. The Rape of Tahiti. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1983.

  Dolin, Eric Jay. When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. New York: Norton, 2012.

  Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War Two. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.

  Durschmied, Erik. The Weather Factor: How Nature Has Changed History. London: Hodder, 2000.

  Dvorak, John. Earthquake Storms: The Fascinating History and Volatile Future of the San Andreas Fault. New York: Pegasus, 2014.

  Ellis, Richard. The Encyclopedia of the Sea. New York: Knopf, 2006.

  Emanuel, Kerry. Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  Etulain, Richard W., and Michael P. Malone. The American West: A Modern History, 1900 to the Present. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

  Evans, Julian. Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific. London: Secker, 1992.

  Fagan, Brian. Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.

  Fall, Bernard B. Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. New York: Lippincott, 1966.

  Finney, Ben. Hokule‘a: The Way to Tahiti. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1979.

  ———. Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors. Bishop Museum, 2003.

  Fischer, Steven Roger. A History of the Pacific Islands. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.

  Fisher, Stephen, ed. Man and the Maritime Environment. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1994.

  Fornari, Daniel J., et al. Discovering the Deep: A Photographic Atlas of the Seafloor and Ocean Crust. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

  Freeman, Donald B. The Pacific. London: Routledge, 2010.

  Friedricks, William. Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991.

  Garfield, Brian. The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians. Fairbanks: Alaska University Press, 1995.

  Garnaut, Ross. Dog Days: Australia After the Boom. Melbourne: Redback, 2013.

  George, Rose. Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping. New York: Henry Holt, 2013.

  Gibney, Frank. The Pacific Century: America and Asia in a Changing World. New York: Scribner, 1992.

  Gillis, John R. The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

  Glacken, Clarence J. Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

  Glavin, Terry. The Last Great Sea: A Voyage Through the Human and Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2000.

  Goldsmith, Connie. Bombs over Bikini: The World’s First Nuclear Disaster. Minneapolis. Twenty-First Century Books, 2014.

  Greely, Adolphus Washington. Handbook of Alaska. New York: Scribner, 1925.

  Grimble, Arthur. A Pattern of Islands. London: John Murray, 1952.

  ———. Return to the Islands. London: John Murray, 1957.

  Gurnis, Michael, et al. Oceans: A Scientific American Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

  Gwyther, John. Captain Cook and the South Pacific: The Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768–1771. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.

  Haddick, Robert. Fire on the Water: China, America, and the Future of the Pacific. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2014.

  Haley, James L. Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii. New York: St. Martin’s, 2014.

  Hamilton-Paterson, James. The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds. New York: Random House, 1992.

  Harwit, Martin. An Exhibition Denied: Lobbying the History of Enola Gay. New York: Copernicus, 1996.

  Hastings, Max. The Korean War. London: Michael Joseph, 1987.

  Hattendorf, John B., ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History. 4 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

  Hayton, Bill. The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

  Henderson, Bonnie. Strand: An Odyssey of Pacific Ocean Debris. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2008.

  Hersh, Seymour. The Target Is Destroyed. London: Faber, 1986.

  Heyerdahl, Thor. Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature. New York: Doubleday, 1974.

  ———. Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft. New York: Rand McNally, 1950.

  Hill, Ernestine. The Territory: The Classic Saga of Australia’s Far North. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1951.

  Hinrichsen, Don. The Atlas of Coasts and Oceans. London: Earthscan, 2011.

  Holt, John Dominis. On Being Hawaiian. Honolulu: Kupa’a Publishing, 1964.

  Horwitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.

  Howarth, David Armine. Tahiti: A Paradise Lost. London: Harvill, 1983.

  Howse, Derek. Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

  Ienaga, Saburo. The Pacific War, 1931–1945. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

  Igler, David. The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

  Ilyichev, V. I., and V. V. Anikiev. Oceanic and Anthropogenic Controls of Life in the Pacific Ocean. Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers, 1992.

  Inada, Lawson Fusao. Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience. Berkeley: Heyday, 2000.

  Izzard, Brian. Sabotage: The Mafia, Mao, and the Death of the Qu
een Elizabeth. Gloucester, UK: Amberley, 2012.

  Johnson, R. W. Shootdown: The Verdict on KAL 007. London: Chatto and Windus, 1986.

  Kaplan, Robert D. Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific. New York: Random House, 2014.

  Kashima, Tatsuden. Foreword. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982.

  Kelly, Paul. The Dismissal: Australia’s Most Sensational Power Struggle—The Dramatic Fall of Gough Whitlam. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1983.

  Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Kerr, John. Matters for Judgment. Sydney: Macmillan, 1978.

  King, Ernest J. (Fleet Admiral). Official Reports: U.S. Navy at War 1941–45.Washington, DC: U.S. Navy, 1946.

  King, Samuel, and Randall Roth. Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement, and Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006.

  Klein, Bernhard, and Gesa Mackenthun, eds. Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. New York: Routledge, 2004.

  Kyselka, Will. An Ocean in Mind. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

  Laderman, Scott. Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

  Lal, Brij V., and Kate Fortune, eds. The Pacific Islands: An Encyclopedia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.

  Lavery, Brian. The Conquest of the Ocean: An Illustrated History of Seafaring. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2013.

  Levy, Steven. Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh. New York: Penguin, 1994.

  Lewis, David. We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1972.

  Linklater, Eric. The Voyage of the Challenger. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

  Linzmayer, Owen W. Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company. San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press, 2004.