Surfing the Pacific: An ocean of history

STORYTELLER Simon Winchester remembers when 750 million people in the Pacific were governed by ‘outsiders and aliens’ . . .

I first encountered Simon Winchester in Hong Kong in 1985, while he was busy researching his Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons.   As curious as a cat, he was occupied in sifting through the history, traditions and culture of the Far East in general, and China in particular.
Now, with two dozen bestsellers behind him, he takes on the Herculean task of explaining the modern Pacific.
Pacific: The Ocean of the Future takes us on a highly selective and adventurous survey of the mightiest ocean on the planet.
It’s a bookend companion to Atlantic, Winchester’s 2011 exploration of that other big pond, which shaped so much of Europe’s future. In Pacific, Winchester has wisely avoided covering too wide a waterfront.
Instead, he has produced 10 lively chapters — or essays — on what he regards as pivotal events affecting the Pacific since 1950.
Across the decades, this bumper-size book swings back and forth between development and disaster as the Pacific Rim countries struggle to meet challenges presented by militarists, nationalists and killer scientists in a territory covering 2.5 million square miles of ocean.
Rich in anecdotes and revelation, it dramatically sets out the Pacific’s gigantic complexity — and the rosy promise of its trading future — against the backdrop of World War 2, the emergence of the atomic age, the rise and rise of China, and the rise, followed by perceptible decline, of Japan.
The great attraction of Pacific is the linkage it provides between key events – many unremarkable at the time — that in recent memory have powered the Pacific’s expanding influence and economic muscle. It does this effortlessly in the luminous prose which is the hallmark of Winchester’s journalism.
His gifts as a storyteller are on full display, and his vignettes are revealing.
For example, we learn how, in 1945, a now-forgotten US Colonel, Charles Bonesteel III, drew a grease pencil across the 38th parallel on a National Geographic map of Korea, thereby dividing the country into North and South and bequeathing future generations of Asians and Americans a full measure of war, misery and political stalemate.
Not surprisingly, the longest chapters (5 and 10) address the decline and fall of colonialism “when seven hundred and fifty million of the world’s peoples were governed by outsiders and aliens”.
Working his way down the map of East Asia, Winchester charts the unseemly exit of the colonial powers from the Pacific coastal states and islands which had been occupied by Europeans “in three centuries of uncontrolled imperial greed”. They included Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, British, Russians, Germans, French, Japanese, Americans, New Zealanders and “even the Norwegians”.
As might be expected, the British made the most dignified exit — from Malaysia (in 1965). In contrast, the French left Indochina in a hail of bombs and bullets which reached its bloody climax in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.
 Independence followed in quick succession for the island States — Tonga and Fiji (in 1970), the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (1976), the British and Solomon Islands (1978).
The French left the British-French condominium of The New Hebrides in a fit of Gallic pique when it became Vanuatu in 1980.
Their officials “stormed away from the islands with all their telephones, radios, and air-conditioning units in a display of official petulance seldom rivalled”. The French to this day cling to control of French Polynesia and Wallis and Fortuna, which are fully represented in the French Parliament. New Caledonia is expected to become fully independent by 2018, and puzzlingly “there is an uninhabited myster  island, Clipperton, off the Mexican coast”.  
Winchester’s painstaking attention to detail, informed by his  enthusiastic imagination, gives research a good name. Each chapter is a goldmine of quirky facts, historical oddities, and fascinating titbits of information.
Did you know that the brand name Sony is not Japanese, but an arbitrary word, invented for the American market?  
Sony’s co-founder, Akio Morita, was looking for something marketable — short, four-letter if possible, like “Ford”. The Latin word for sound — sonus — sounded nearly right. And, since 1928, Al Jolson had sung “Climb upon my knee, Sonny boy”. All that was needed was a small modification to spelling and pronunciation.
For 450 pages, Winchester continues to pile up the surprises:  the silver fork used by cannibals to eat the missionary Reverend Baker is still on display in the Fiji Museum; on Pitcairn Island until 1999 men had regular sex with girls as young as 10 because the islanders claimed they were following Polynesian custom; the famous Kon-Tiki theory that Polynesians may have rowed west from South America is nonsense – science now proves they came from original human stock in Taiwan; and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, at the ripe old age of 10, dreamed up the robotic “mass games” performed by thousands of youngsters.
When he asesses North Korea, Winchester is less than subtle: “… the country has evolved into a snarling, spitting, and ceaselessly hostile monster of a nation, an alien life-form that lurks menacingly in the folds of the East.”  
In a change of gears, we are informed that if Hawaii’s Duke Kahanamoku was the first world ambassador of surfing, the 1959 Hollywood movie Gidget was “the single greatest influence on introducing surfing, the Pacific Ocean’s most sublime and lasting gift to playtime, into the mainstream of life in America”.
Crossing to Asia, we learn that it was Communist China, not Taiwan, that bailed out Taiwanese tycoon CY Tung, after his multi-dollar investment in the Cunard liner RMS Queen Elizabeth literally went belly-up and sank in Hong Kong harbour.
This ensured that his son, C.H. Tung, would become the first China-appointed Chief Executive of Hong Kong when it reverted to China in 1997. Kow-towing to the Communist regime, C.H. Tung “was in China’s debt and he would be unfailingly loyal”.
China remains a prime focus of Pacific. It asks “But what does China want and what is it planning?”
One likely answer references the late Chinese Admiral Liu Huaqing, who believed that, by 2040, “the nation should have an active blue-water force in the region, with several aircraft carriers at its disposal”. With enough ships, China’s navy “could now project the boundaries of the nation’s outward and ever outward into the Pacific Ocean as the years went on. The concept of the First Island Chain was born….the need for China to secure the “green waters” within the Kamchatka-to-Borneo line and to do her best to deny access to any foreign military that would wish to be there”.
Ominously, at the beginning of 2016, China appears to be doing exactly that.
Pacific even offers a David Attenborough touch, in two chapters describing inter alia the fragility of the Great Barrier Reef corals, the phenomena of undersea hydrothermal vents (“smokers”), the Great Pacific Garbage Dump, and the plight of Hawaii’s bird population.
Not least are the problems afflicting tiny island nations like Kiribati, struggling to cope with over-fishing and steadily rising sea levels as the result of climate change. The European takeover and exploitation of the Pacific islands and their people makes painful reading; the chapter entitled “The Great Thermonuclear Sea” may reduce the reader to tears.
In the Marshall Islands, beginning in 1946, the US exploded a series of atomic bombs which reduced the idyllic Bikini atoll to “a hellish gyre of ruin and mayhem”. A US Navy
Commander sanctimoniously read to the Marshall islanders from the Book of Genesis to justify nuclear hell.
Bikini is still radioactive and its islanders are now re-settled in the southern Marshalls as “unwilling atomic exiles”. They may never be able to go home.
Pacific states: “The total of 1,032 atomic bombs that America has exploded since 1945 far exceeds the combined totals of all the other nuclear devices exploded by all other nuclear-capable countries in the world”.  Grim stuff, made all the more significant by North Korea’s recent nuclear posturing.
The book goes on to make an inarguable case for the Pacific Ocean becoming the busiest and richest marketplace in the 21st century.
China and Korea have taken over much of the industries that Japan once dominated. Seven of the world’s 10 largest container ports are Chinese, with Shanghai as the largest. And thanks largely to Silicon Valley and the growth of the Internet-driven electronics industry, the major two-way sea trade, worth billions, is now between the US and China, rather than Japan.
All of this Winchester explains in colourful detail. Unfortunately, he is not always even-handed and is, occasionally, too opinionated.
In confronting Australia, Winchester seems slapdash and out-of-date. He routinely re-visits the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam Government, and, with a nod to political correctness, predictably castigates the long defunct White Australia Policy, yesterday’s Pauline Hanson, and the highly successful Pacific Solution for managing refugee boat people.  
He then decides — quite incredibly — that Barry Humphries’ fictive Sir Les Patterson “is still quite recognisably emblematic of an Australian type”. And concludes, dismissively, that Australia is “A great place to live. But not a great country. Not yet”.
One can only speculate that his definition of a “great country” approximates good ole, gun-totin’, racially troubled  USA, his adopted place of residence.
Still, the history buff and casual reader alike will come to value Pacific as an important and provocative book. It’s a journalistic tour de force, well worthy of born teller of tales who, in the time-honoured traditions of the South
Pacific, cleverly blends geography, history, folklore, power politics and prophecy.

  “Pacific: The Ocean of the Future” by Simon Winchester [William Collins, 2015].