. . . only one recorded incident for every 200,000 man-hours worked.” Then, in 2000, all work was stopped, the plant was broken up and carted away, the remaining pollution was said to have been cleaned up, and Johnston Island, ten times as big (thanks to landfilling) as it was when it was first found, was abandoned and offered up for sale. That’s when it was invaded by a vicious type of ant. Nowadays, passing yachtsmen—initially lured to the island out of curiosity, since they would no longer be confronted by armed police—like to stop there, if briefly. The island has become a National Wildlife Refuge, a memorial to the utter despoliation of the sea.
All this, of course, relates just to the Pacific’s islands, to some of the speckles and shards of territory that lie within the confines of the ocean. The stories to be found here and in a thousand other islands not so far mentioned are complicated enough, as the strange island-hopping odyssey of United 154 suggests. But to get a sense of the ocean as a whole, into this patchwork need to be stitched the fantastic cultural diversity and enormous power and scale of the countries that lie around the ocean, along its famous—and famously volcanic, and so infamously unstable—Pacific Rim.
Thanks to the dominant cultural bias of modern history, there is a topsy-turvydom inherent in any description of the rim. On its western side are the Eastern peoples: Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians, Filipinos, and countless more if one chooses to push the ocean’s frontiers westward toward Indochina and India. On the eastern side are the national admixtures of the various migrated and now notionally Western peoples: Canadians, Americans, Central Americans, Colombians, Ecuadoreans, Peruvians, Chileans. Around the south and beyond to Oceania are the more newly settled outsiders of modern New Zealand and Australia. The aboriginal peoples—Native Americans, Aleuts, Inuit, Maori, Australian indigenes, the Canadian First Nation, and a host of others, all genetically Pacific peoples as we now know—remain dotted around or within the rim, where their recent experiences have become conjoined with those of the Polynesian islanders, the inhabitants of Melanesia and Micronesia, and so have been protected or decimated, exploited or revered (but never left alone), as the various histories of the newcomers have unfolded.
And to be stirred into this mix of peoples and cultures and politics and ambitions is a formidable array of other phenomena besides. There is the constant, complex, and often spectacularly violent interplay of tectonics, with volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis in deadly abundance. The lands, seas, and seafloors of the Pacific are home to all manner of exotic and unfamiliar and yet-to-be-discovered wildlife. Mineral wealth exists in and around the Pacific in quantities that are beyond the most extravagant of human dreams—wealth that, if exploited, would bring a raft of unanticipated consequences. The environment, fragile everywhere, seems somehow to display a more obvious fragility in the Pacific, with its thousands of square miles of delicate corals, with its all-too-vulnerably low-lying atolls, with its cyclones and typhoons that are so much more vicious and destructive than even the worst to be found elsewhere.
For all its apparent placidity, the Pacific seems today to be positioned at the leading edge of any number of potential challenges and crises—whether they relate to politics or economics, to geology, to weather, to the supply of food, or to the most basic questions about the number of people that this planet can support.
The future, in short, is what the Pacific Ocean is now coming to symbolize. For if one accepts that the Mediterranean was once the inland sea of the Ancient World; and further, that the Atlantic Ocean was, and to some people still remains, the inland sea of the Modern World; then surely it can be argued that the Pacific Ocean is the inland sea of Tomorrow’s World. What transpires across these sixty-four million square miles of ultramarine ocean matters, and to all of us. Hence the need to write about it.
But how? How best to corral all that is important about the new Pacific—and by this I mean the Pacific in toto, the ocean considered shore to shore, pole to pole, and not just the modern and very limited convention of “Asia-Pacific,” which I do not want this book solely to be about—into a single comprehensible and digestible volume? What structure might suit this ocean’s story best?
For months it all seemed to me to be too overwhelmingly confusing—the body of water too monstrous, its narrative too insuperably challenging in its variety and vastness. Until one day, and quite by chance, when I came across a slim volume which was published in Germany almost a century ago, and which seemed to offer me a way, a structural vade mecum.
I came across it while I was reading as much as I could about those two very early Europeans who had reached out first to see, and then to cross, the ocean that had hitherto existed only in their respective imaginations. The men have become legends: there was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who first sighted its blue gleam below him from Darién in September 1513; and there was Ferdinand Magellan, who seven years later made transit across Patagonia through the strait that now bears his name, entered the Pacific, named it mare Pacifico, and then sailed clear across it into history (and, as it happens, to his own unanticipated and violent death).
Not surprisingly, the stories of both men have been told by many. As I was doing my own reading I came quite by chance and in quick succession across two accounts, both by the same author, that seemed possessed of a certain luminous quality, and were markedly different from all the others in scope, in scale, and in style. Both were by the Austrian author Stefan Zweig—a 1920s writer mostly forgotten now, though his appearance as “The Author” in Wes Anderson’s 2014 movie The Grand Budapest Hotel has lately revived his memory, somewhat.
It was Zweig’s succinct and poetic account of Balboa that I found particularly alluring. It was contained in a book, published in 1927, that has perhaps suffered under more titles than any book deserves. In its original German it was Sternstunden des Menschheit, or Great Moments of Humanity. The first English translation was The Tide of Fortune, and then came Decisive Moments in History, and most recently, Shooting Stars. But whatever the book was called, its essence remains the same: it was a slender collection of ten ruminative essays, each one turned to perfection, about what Zweig considered to be seminal moments in the tide of human experience.
The writer chose his subjects eccentrically, but always interestingly. Balboa’s expedition across the isthmus was first; the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo another; Scott’s failed expedition to the South Pole, a third. He then wrote of Handel’s composing The Messiah, of the fall of Byzantium, the death of Cicero and the writing of “La Marseillaise.” He told also an extraordinary version of the saga of Lenin and the sealed train that had taken him through war-torn Europe to Finland Station, to stage his Russian Revolution. The result is a tumbling mélange of a book, quite charming and, even if perhaps lacking in academic rigor, one that quite transfixed me.
So after many attempts to corral the wealth of material about the Pacific Ocean into one manageable whole, I chose for this account to attempt to ape the master, to create a modified version of Stefan Zweig’s approach of almost a century ago. I decided I would sift through the events of the modern Pacific to try to find my own galaxy of shooting stars—of truly pivotal moments in the story of this vast acreage of ocean. I would choose a scattering of happenings each of which, to me at least, seemed to betoken some greater trend, and which might tell in microcosm a larger truth about the Pacific than the moments themselves suggest.
From a mass of such occurrences I could distill and weed and cull, and then decide which of the remainder truly said something significant about how the ocean, and the perception of the ocean, was developing and perhaps evolving: which events, in other words, indicated the direction in which the Pacific was shifting, as it moved to play its defining role in the future of the world.
So I made a list. I scoured newspapers and history books and databases and academic papers, and came up with some hundreds of more or less notable occurrences between January 1, 1950—a date chosen for a reason I will explain later—and the time I began to write this book, in the summer of 2014.
The cutting
