The Pacific

Donald B. Freeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136604157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this fascinating and exciting overview, Donald B. Freeman explores the role of the Pacific Ocean in human history.

Covering over one third of the globe, the Pacific Ocean plays a vital role in the lives and fortunes of more than two billion people who live on its rim-lands and islands. It has played a crucial part in shaping the histories of the different Pacific cultures, towards which it has appeared in a variety of different guises. Exploring the ocean's place in human history, this wide ranging book draws together the long and varied physical, economic, cultural and political history of the Pacific, from Prehistory through to the present day. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to show the changing viewpoints of those who explored, exploited and settled the Pacific, including the inhabitants of its Asian and American rim-lands.

The book draws on new research in a variety of areas, such as early Pacific migrations, impacts of European colonization, the effects of climate change, and current economic and political developments. It provides a uniquely broad overview that will be of vital interest to students and to all those with an interest in World History.

Chapter 1

Comprehending the Pacific: environmental influences and effects

As explained in the Introduction, our present level of comprehension of the Pacific as a water hemisphere with a complex environment took centuries to acquire: myth and misinformation were widespread until relatively recently. Researchers acknowledge that there are still large gaps in our understanding of physical processes affecting the ocean and its interaction with the human and other biological communities in its rim-lands and islands, while certain misperceptions still persist in human attitudes toward it. Improving our understanding of the influential role of the Pacific in human history, as well as of the changes in attitude toward it as knowledge has advanced, requires an appreciation of some key aspects of the natural environment in the ocean hemisphere. This chapter focuses on the most salient of these physical influences — geographic, climatic-oceanographic and tectonic — and on the interplay among them as a dynamic setting for subsequent discussions of Pacific history and development.

GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES

A comprehensive depiction of present-day Pacific geography, including the sea and land features, modern nation-states and not-yet-independent territories, is given in Map 1. This reference map may be a useful adjunct to the discussion of important geographical aspects such as the vast scale of the Pacific in comparison with other oceans and seas, its inaccessibility and remoteness from the earliest foci of human civilization (making it one of the last and most isolated frontiers for exploration and settlement) and the galaxy of tiny, often fragmented and insular communities that comprise scores of struggling Pacific nation-states. Most of these were former colonies; some include incompatible groups forcibly united by colonialism, for example Papua-New Guinea and the Solomon Islands; many face an uncertain future. Integral to the discussion of geographic influences in Pacific history, as previously noted, is the consideration of regions of the eastern and western Pacific rims as well as the archipelagos of high islands and atolls within the Pacific basin itself. Discussion of this vast and varied geographic realm necessitates its subdivision. This book adopts a threefold partition of the Pacific into the central-south Pacific, the Asian Pacific rim, and the American Pacific rim. The decision to include the rim-lands as well as ocean basin features is based on a simple but important fact: events and historical influences that have affected and continue to affect the Pacific cannot be understood without a concomitant understanding of the regions surrounding the ocean basin, areas that over time have helped to shape the human history of the Pacific. The three-way geographic division used here is a matter of convenience, however, and does not assume that each sector is unique or that events and influences in one have no relevance for the others.

Vastness and remoteness of the Pacific

The Pacific is the largest and deepest of the world’s oceans. Its surface area of about 166.3 million square kilometres (64.2 million square miles) occupies roughly one third of the Earth’s surface, containing over 45 per cent of the total surface waters of the planet. From space, the Pacific has the appearance of a water hemisphere. Its eastern rim is an almost continuous continental barrier — the Americas — extending from the Arctic almost to the Antarctic, while the western borderlands comprise the coasts of east and south-east Asia, the almost continuous island chains of Indonesia and Melanesia, and the east coast of Australia. Until the southern ocean surrounding Antarctica is reached, there are few gaps in the Pacific rim greater than 500 kilometres in individual extent. Gateways or openings into the Pacific northward of about 40 degrees south latitude are few and constricted. Only one attenuated strait — the Bering Strait — connects it to the Arctic Ocean; a few narrow and mostly shallow straits such as Malacca, Sunda, Lombok-Makassar, Sagewin and Torres lead to it from the Indian Ocean; and only the human-engineered Panama Canal leads directly to it from the Caribbean and the Atlantic. Pole-ward of about 40 degrees south latitude, the most usual gateways for entry to the Pacific are via Bass Strait and the Tasman Sea on the west, or through Drake’s Passage, Magellan Strait or the Strait of Le Maire on the east.

Access to the Pacific from other water bodies, therefore, has always been difficult and circuitous, and this helps to explain why vast areas of this ocean were still a largely unexplored frontier less than 200 years ago. The reference map conveys an appreciation of the massive size of the Pacific, which has a north—south extent of 14,500 kilometres (from the Bering Strait to the Antarctic coast of Marie Byrd Land) and a maximum east—west distance of 17,700 kilometres (from Panama in the east to peninsular Malaysia in the west).

The challenges humans have encountered over several millennia in crossing the vast Pacific and settling its myriad far-flung islands and rim-lands are a recurrent theme in this book. Not all mariners dealt equally well with these challenges, however. As will be discussed in later chapters, the sheer scale of this ocean, which some early European explorers found so daunting, and which led to many deaths through scurvy and misadventure, seems not to have been so intimidating to other peoples such as the Polynesians who, over a span of centuries, confidently ventured across its huge expanses in their quest for new island homes. Different perceptions of its remoteness, inaccessibility and emptiness were also factors which shaped the varying attitudes of Western explorers and colonists as well as of strategic military planners in recent years. It was shunned as being too remote by some would-be settlers, for example the Dutch who came to the conclusion at an early date that further exploration in the far reaches of the South Pacific was a profitless exercise.

Most Europeans in the age of migration perceived the relatively adjacent North American colonies to be a less risky place for settlement than far-off Australia or Pacific islands such as New Caledonia. These tended to be viewed as places of permanent exile, and were chosen for this explicit reason — by the British and French governments respectively — as dumping grounds for criminals and political convicts. For those wanting to escape from their own past, or from retribution or punishment by pursuing authorities, the vast Pacific offered an opportunity to find an island hiding place beyond the reach of all but the most persistent and single-minded of pursuers. Stories of castaways, beachcombers, fugitives and voluntary exiles fed the common perception of the Pacific as a place in which it was possible to become irretrievably lost.

Vastness and remoteness became desirable characteristics for the military testing, by Britain, the United States, France and the former USSR, of weapons such as atomic and thermonuclear warheads and ballistic missiles, and for the disposal of dangerous materials. For example, although nuclear testing has been suspended for over a decade, in February 2008 the United States chose a part of the North Pacific as the preferred place to shoot down a disabled spy satellite containing hazardous hydrazine fuel, arguing that the debris would fall ‘harmlessly’ in the vast ocean. Such ideas about the appropriateness of using the ‘remote’ Pacific for such a hazardous exercise were not necessarily shared by the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, who feared that they were beneath the orbital path of the stricken spy satellite. Many other instances could be given of the ways in which the size and remoteness of the Pacific affect human perceptions and actions. A concomitant of the physical scale of the Pacific, for example, is the very long coastline of the Pacific rim, and its large number of fringing island archipelagos. These geographic facts have ensured that activities related to the sea and to its exploitation would become a part of many circum-Pacific cultures whose perceptions and attitudes to it are remarkably varied.

Inaccessibility and isolation

The inaccessibility of the Pacific to navigators, traders and settlers from elsewhere on the globe is one of the more obvious geographic influences on Pacific history, and one that will be illustrated in later chapters. Both physical and political factors have restricted access to the Pacific in times past, ensuring that the few straits, harbours and rivers that gave such access would become hotly contested features. On the Asian Pacific rim, the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok-Macassar and Dampier (Sagewin) straits were considered strategic in the eras of the spice trade and early colonial expansion. The few large rivers that debouch onto the fringing seas of the western Pacific, such as the Yangtze (the longest in Asia), Yellow or Hwang He, Amur and Mekong, as well as favoured harbours such as Hong Kong, Haiphong, Shanghai, Macau, Yokohama and Port Arthur, figured prominently in major conflicts in this region over several centuries. In the river valleys and adjacent coastal plains of this rim-land live about two-thirds of Asia’s population.

Wars have been fought, and political tensions aroused, over access to the Pacific from the interior of the continental rim-lands around both the western and eastern Pacific, as in the case of the Oregon country, along the Columbia River, and the former Bolivian corridor of Atacama. Control of the strategic isthmus of Panama and the Panama Canal has been an issue that justified armed incursion by the United States, most recently during the regime of Manuel Noriega. In the looming era of global warming and the melting of the polar ice cover, sovereignty over Canada’s arctic islands, and over the passages and seas that could soon become a year-round international shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, appears set to become a contentious issue in the decades to come. Already, ice-breaking shuttle tankers for use in arctic waters are being constructed in the shipyards of Korea and elsewhere.

The tyranny of distance: dispersed and fragmented Pacific territories

Probably more than in any other part of the globe, countries of the Pacific, from the most powerful to the most fragile, are beset by difficulties of internal communication and commerce occasioned by their widely scattered, fragmented and insular component territories. In some cases, as later chapters will make clear, this renders government and development of these fragmented states very difficult. Even for the most powerful Pacific nation — the United States — the costs of communication and interaction between the mainland and the distant states of Alaska and Hawaii are considerable. Similarly, the provision of government services, commercial interaction and surface passenger travel among the various islands comprising the nations of Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Papua-New Guinea involves substantial economic costs as well as political and social difficulties. These problems are multiplied many times when the fragmented nation-states are small and poor. The scattered islands in such Pacific microstates as Fiji, the Solomons, Vanuatu, Kiribati, the Northern Marianas and the Marshall Islands are separated in some cases by hundreds of kilometres of ocean and hampered by a lack of adequate communication links. Remote Pitcairn Island, the refuge of the Bounty mutineers, is almost as isolated and inaccessible today as at the time it was discovered by Philip Carteret in 1767. Around fifty descendants of the original Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions still live there. As the last remaining British-ruled possession in the South Pacific, Pitcairn remains a metaphor for geographic isolation.

Geographic variability in the Pacific realm

When discussing and illustrating human activities in such a large and varied environment as the Pacific, it is convenient to think of the oceanic realm as consisting of three geographical divisions. The first, the central-south facific basin, comprises abyssal plains overlain by very deep water together with shallow continental shelves such as the Tasman and Coral seas, and the volcanic, coralline or continental islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia scattered across its vast surface. The geographic province of the central-south Pacific thus embraces a huge area, roughly half of the entire Pacific region, extending both north and south of the Equator. The main island groups in the central-eastern part — the Polynesian Triangle — include a mixture of high volcanic islands and coral atolls. Here we find the Marquesas, Gambier and Tuamotu archipelagos, Line and Society islands, Austral and Cook islands, Tonga, Samoa, Niue, and the Tokelau Islands, together with the Hawaiian and Phoenix islands north of the Equator. In the western part — Melanesia — island groups such as Papua-New Guinea with its overseas territories of New Britain, New Ireland and Bougainville are regarded in geological terms as continental fragments made up of ancient crystalline rocks, as are New Caledonia and the main Fijian islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu. Landscape characteristics in these continental islands contrast with many mid-ocean, high volcanic archipelagos. In the centre-north — Micronesia — are more high volcanic islands, low atolls or raised coral platforms, including the Marshalls, Kiribati, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Northern Marianas.

The second major geographic division is the Asian Pacific rim, including the coast-lands and offshore islands of Siberia, Korea, China and Vietnam, and their fringing seas (Okhotsk, Sea of Japan, East China Sea, Yellow Sea, South China Sea, Tonkin Gulf, Gulf of Thailand, Java and Banda seas and the Philippine Sea). Included also are the more distant island archipelagos along the western edge of the Asian continental shelf, from Sakhalin Island, the Kuriles, the Japanese archipelago, Taiwan and the Philippines to Indonesia. These exhibit distinctively Asian cultural landscapes. Appended to this are the easternmost coastlands, offshore islands, reefs and fringing seas of Australia, which has a culture that is predominantly European.

The third major geographic division of the Pacific realm is the American Pacific rim, which includes the Aleutians, Alaska, the west coast of Canada (as well as associated islands such as the Queen Charlottes and Vancouver Island), the Pacific coast of the United States, Mexico and the central American isthmus. The Pacific coastlands of South America from Colombia to Cape Horn, which have a different geological history from North America, are nevertheless part of this geographic division. Offshore island groups such as the Galapagos and Juan Fernández Islands are included here as well.

The cultures of the American Pacific rim are predominantly of European origin, with Hispanic influences overlying Native American cultures throughout most of the southern parts, and Anglo-Saxon overlying Amerindian and Inuit cultures along the northwest coast. To the south, the Pacific rim continues beyond Drake’s Passage, comprising the Antarctic Peninsula and the adjacent coasts of Antarctica. These lack permanent settlements but are becoming increasingly significant as scientists examine changes to the Antarctic environment, such as melting ice shelves, a fluctuating ozone layer, and reductions in krill, penguin, seal and fish populations, in the current era of global warming.

CLIMATIC-OCEANOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES

A basic appreciation of salient climatic and oceanographic influences makes the discussion of topics such as human occupance, resource use and specific historical events more intelligible. Ocean currents, for example, have both aided and impeded navigation, and affected the exploitation of resources such as fish and whale stocks. Important climatic and hydrographic influences in the Pacific include the changing interplay of atmospheric and oceanic circulations, modifying prevailing trade wind patterns and warm and cold currents. These are now being recognized as a major mechanism of climate change across the world, exacerbated by human industrial activities. The effects of climate change — impacting on both rainfall and temperature regimes — on biological and human communities in and around the Pacific are increasingly noticeable in the twenty-first century. Climate change is threatening the very existence of coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef, as well as accelerating sea-level changes, invasions of tropical diseases and pests into temperate areas, and the speeding up of the El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle, which is treated in a later section. The ENSO phenomenon itself is now recognized as a major component of climate change. Its full effects, and its role in such events as parching droughts, devastating floods and destructive storms, are only now being fully understood.

Pacific hydrography

The waters of the Pacific Ocean basin, covering almost a third of the Earth’s surface, are constantly circulating in layers of different temperature and salinity. The surface salinity of the Pacific is the lowest of the Earth’s oceans (the Atlantic has the highest surface salinity). Acidity levels in the Pacific — historically quite moderate — are currently rising at a rate that may soon threaten some marine species such as corals, which are so important to Pacific environments. These environmental threats which are related to Pacific development are taken up in Chapter 8.

Gyres (circular systems of ocean currents) distribute solar energy from the warm surface areas of the tropical Pacific to high latitudes both north and south of the equatorial regions, but also between the surface layers of water and the ocean depths. This vertical mixing is termed the thermohaline circulation, and is part of what paleoclimatologist Wallace Broecker has dubbed the ‘global ocean conveyor belt’ comprising warm surface currents that convey heat polewards and then plunge at high latitudes to form cold, deep ocean currents (Broecker and Peng 1982; Linden 2006: 29). Both east-west and north-south movements and the mixing of streams of ocean water of different temperature and salinity are thus involved in oceanic heat transfer in both northern and southern hemispheres. The clockwise oceanic gyre in the northern hemisphere is composed of the north equatorial current, Japan current, north Pacific drift and the California current. The southern hemisphere counter-clockwise gyre comprises the south equatorial current, east Australian current, west wind drift and the Humboldt (Peruvian) current. Separating the two gyres along the Equator is the equatorial counter-current, while numerous branch or ‘feeder’ currents participate in mixing water of different salinity and temperatures in different regions of the Pacific. From time to time surface currents may temporarily slacken or even reverse direction, with far-reaching environmental and human consequences.

Pacific currents and the global heat balance

The Pacific, therefore, is a very important part of the global system distributing the heat received from the sun to all parts of the atmosphere, oceans and seas, and to the land areas of the earth. In the context of this book, it is important to understand the complex heat distribution system in the Pacific for several reasons. First, this system plays a vital role in establishing the ‘normal’ patterns of monsoons and trade winds on which so many Pacific peoples depend. Second, the way in which heat energy in the ocean hemisphere percolates and circulates has profound implications for diversity and change in human environments. Some environmental influences, such as the ENSO explained below, have far-reaching effects that have only recently begun to be understood and appreciated. Third, the heat distribution system, under conditions of global warming, can produce rapid and catastrophic changes in some areas while others are much less affected.

Although the amount of solar radiation received by the earth each day is virtually constant, its distribution throughout the water, atmosphere and land is highly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Pacific
• SEAS IN HISTORY
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editor's preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Comprehending The Pacific: Environmental Influences and Effects
• 2 Peopling The Pacific: From Prehistory to the First European Incursions
• 3 Claiming The Pacific: European, Asian and American Exploration and Annexation
• 4 Encompassing The Pacific: Revolutions in Transport, Navigation and Chart Making
• 5 Exploiting Pacific Resources
• 6 Contesting The Pacific: Military Activity, Colonial Struggle and Imperial Competition
• 7 Picturing The Pacific: The Ocean Hemisphere in Art, Literature and Film
• 8 Developing The Pacific: Political Independence, Economic Advancement and Environmental Protection
• Conclusion
• Selected bibliography
• Index