Its dimensions are staggering. It occupies almost one entire hemisphere. Looking westward, from Panama, and from where Balboa stood on his high peak in the Isthmus of Darién, across to the first encountered landmass of the eastern Malaysian coast, there are more than 10,600 miles of uninterrupted sea. From north to south, from the fogs and shivering waters of the Bering Strait down to the ice cliffs of Marie Byrd Land in Antarctica, is nearly nine thousand miles. The sixty-four million square miles in between fill almost one-third of the planet’s surface. Forty-five percent of the planet’s total surface waters are found in the Pacific Ocean, and seven miles down, it has the earth’s deepest trenches. In short: everything about the Pacific, the last ocean to be found by Western man, presents an unchallengeable superlative.
It is also not easy to get into, or out of, and this difficulty insulates it from the rest of the world’s oceans. Except for vessels bold enough to try the Bering Strait, between Russia and Alaska, or the gale-whipped seas that fringe the Antarctic, the Pacific enjoys no entranceway that is more than three hundred miles wide. Ships trying to enter from the Indian Ocean must make their way through a litter of islands scattered between Malaysia and Australia, the so-called Maritime Continent. Except for the Strait of Magellan, far down south, there is no natural entrance whatsoever on the American side. Only the Panama Canal, that narrow funnel gouged artificially through the isthmus in the early twentieth century, permits carefully sized ships from the Atlantic the luxury of a quick and easy transit.
The vast distances inherent in the Pacific’s geography have consequences seldom known elsewhere. Consider the Republic of Kiribati, for instance, once the British-run Gilbert Islands. Its one hundred thousand inhabitants are spread over fully 1.35 million square miles of ocean. Two thousand miles from Tarawa, its administrative capital, lies Kiritimati Island—the Christmas Island where the British tested their atom bombs back in the 1960s, without evacuating any of the locals. Not only are these five thousand Kiribatians inconveniently distant from their country’s capital, but they also are on the other side of the equator from Tarawa, and live on the day-before side of the International Date Line. So a summer Sunday on Tarawa is a winter Saturday on Christmas. Small wonder Kiribati struggles, having to cope with such logistical madness. It is one of the world’s poorest countries: the seaweed and copra and fish it harvests are too expensive for most locals, so many of its menfolk are obliged to work abroad or to crew on long-distance cargo ships, remitting their paychecks home, both to keep their families in victuals and in the hope of keeping their country’s pitiful economy alive. Size can be impressive, or it can be an impressive nuisance.
The Pacific is an ocean of secrets. Castaways, runaways, fugitives of all kinds people its recent history: the first islands that a sailor heading north from the Strait of Magellan encounters are those volcanic relics of the Juan Fernández group—where the Fifeshire buccaneer Alexander Selkirk was marooned for four years, his adventures later memorialized by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe.
Much of the dirty business of the modern world has been conducted within the confines of the Pacific. The nuclear testing—by the United States in the Marshall Islands, by Britain on the Gilbert Islands, by France in its remaining Polynesian possessions—is well enough known. In 2008, when a secret American reconnaissance satellite got into trouble in orbit and needed to be shot down, the military ordered a navy ship specializing in missile attacks to bring it down over the Pacific, supposing the ocean to be so vast that it would be harmless there. The Marshall Islanders complained about what they saw as the Pentagon’s cavalier attitude, insisting that they lived in the ocean, as did millions of other islanders, and it was not some empty space on which any dangerous test might be performed at will. As it happened, the satellite was brought down locally, and the hydrazine rocket fuel hurt no one.
Still other experiments of equivalent unpleasantness have taken place on the U.S. Navy’s tiny islets of Johnston Atoll, some seven hundred miles southwest of Hawaii. United 154 flies above them, though they are seldom pointed out, and there is even less notice of what has gone on there. For years, any passing yachtsman, in mid-ocean, was confronted by huge signs warning him to move on—nothing to see here, “Deadly Force Authorized”—and patrol boats stiff with heavily armed naval guards would cruise offshore, keeping all the curious at bay.
Strange things went on there. Rockets carrying atomic weapons accidentally exploded, contaminating the island with plutonium and americium. Almost two million gallons of Agent Orange from Vietnam were stored there, and then their storage carboys split open, adding to the toxic mix. The atoll was next used for testing biological weapons, and after another accident a quantity of the bacilli that cause tularemia and anthrax were released upwind, and the island was contaminated once again. Then, in 1990, a huge incinerator was built that would destroy such chemical weapons as the United States still admitted to possessing. According to Pentagon statements, the list included: “412,000 bombs, mines, rockets and projectiles . . . four million pounds of nerve and blister agents . . . 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