^* Statistics bear out the easily forgotten reality that whites—haoli, in the vernacular, a word uttered with some disdain—are a minority on the Hawaiian Islands. Their 336,000 (in 2010) are matched by almost half a million from countries around or within the Pacific Ocean, including 200,000 Filipinos and 185,000 Japanese. Eighty thousand only are native Hawaiians.

^* Tsingtao beer, its brewery long overseen by a German brewmaster, remains the most visible reminder of the kaiser’s historic influence in eastern China. While the beer retains the old Wade-Giles transliteration of its name, the city itself is now restyled Qingdao.

^* There can be few more impressive examples of German engineering than this eighteen-thousand-ton, thirty-two-knot (and exceptionally beautiful) warship, since she survived not only innumerable strikes by RAF bombers during the war, but also two nuclear tests in the Bikini atoll lagoon, where she was placed as a target for one air-dropped bomb and for a massive underwater weapon called Helen of Bikini. Still floating after the second test, but fiercely radioactive—all her crew would have died—she was towed to Kwajalein, developed a leak, and capsized, her enormous guns falling out of their barbettes and onto the seafloor. One of her screws has now been placed in a museum; the others remain visible at low tide. Prinz Eugen will never be salvaged, however, since her steel is still lethally contaminated.

^* Interestingly, the 1899 treaty never specifically mentioned the Marshall Islands, leaving some to argue about their legal status still today—arguments that, considering the amount of money involved for aid and compensation, are of more than mere historic interest.

^* Or, according to one Internet source, Waffle Nose. He had a remarkable similarity to the actor Karl Malden.

^* This evacuation was to be echoed two decades later, in the Indian Ocean, when the Pentagon wanted to use the British colonial possession Diego Garcia as a military base. Denis (later Lord) Greenhill wrote in an infamous memo that there were just “a few Tarzans or Men Fridays” living there. In fact, a vibrant community of more than two thousand people was shipped off against its will to Mauritius. It has been fighting for compensation ever since.

^* A number of weapons were also exploded on the nearby atoll of Enewetak, an atoll that suffered similarly but that for many reasons has never attracted quite the same attention. “A Pacific Isle,” a New York Times headline read in 2014, “Radioactive and Forgotten.”

^* The countdown and explosion were relayed by radio around the country and world. The BBC broadcast the test on the Light Programme, a station usually reserved for music and soap operas, but it was late at night in Britain, and static interference made the entire event well-nigh inaudible, with only “one word in ten” able to be understood.

^* When the German crew finally left their ship at Panama, the American sailors discovered they couldn’t work the Prinz Eugen’s boilers. Tugs had to be ordered, and the eighteen-thousand-ton ship had to be towed across the Pacific, bound for this vain attempt to destroy her.

^* The first true hydrogen bomb, code-named Ivy Mike, had been successfully detonated on the nearby Enewetak Atoll sixteen months before. But the hydrogen in that experiment had to be supercooled, making the combined bomb—it had to have a Nagasaki-like Fat Man bomb as a trigger—truly massive. It weighed sixty-two tons, so it was far too big to be used as a weapon. Castle Bravo, by contrast, used solid fuels and weighed in at only ten tons, and the success of the test convinced both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force that H-bombs could now be made in sizes that could be delivered by aircraft or missiles.

^* The very first Soviet A-bomb had been exploded in 1949, more than four years after the first U.S. test in New Mexico. But Moscow’s first thermonuclear H-bomb test came in August 1953, just nine months after the United States’ Ivy Mike fusion bomb on Enewetak.

^* Whether this was a deliberate employment of economy with the truth can never be known. But it is worth remembering that Strauss famously and wrongly predicted that nuclear fusion would allow for the generation of electricity “too cheap to meter,” and that he was also largely responsible for destroying the postwar career of the Manhattan Project’s leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, suspecting him, also quite wrongly, of being a Soviet spy.

^* The man who licked the falling dust lived into his eighties, and opened a dry-cleaning business, while another opened a tofu restaurant. All received the 2015 equivalent of five thousand dollars in compensation, once the United States formally took responsibility. The ship was hauled out of the water and now stands in a museum—not as a local monument in Yaizu, but in Tokyo, where she still gets national attention.

^* Akio Morita would remain connected to the family firm throughout his career at Sony, and returned without fail to the village to chair the Morita Company’s annual board meetings. He also saw to it that the family’s ancestral home and Buddhist temple were fully restored, to the delight of local villagers.

^* Beyond the electronic world, only Shockley’s name is now widely remembered, and that mainly because of his preternatural enthusiasm for the supposed benefits (much debated and derided today) of eugenics. He also performed, for the wartime U.S. government, cold-blooded assessments of the number of likely casualties in any invasion of Japan. His official estimate—that ten million Japanese might have to be killed and that eight hundred thousand Americans might die accomplishing this—is said to have influenced the decision to drop the two atomic bombs instead.

^* Joseph Needham (1900–1995) was a Cambridge biochemist who spent much of his life studying the origins of Chinese science. His story is told in my book The Man Who Loved China.

^* For a while, products were branded “Sony—made by Totsuko,” but in January 1958, Morita formally renamed the company Sony Corporation, despite opposition from Mitsui, the firm’s very conservative bankers. For many years afterward, Sony fought legal battles with the newly formed Tokyo-based makers of Sony Chocolate. It won.

^* Curiously, a term not to be found, at the time of writing, in the Oxford English Dictionary, the usually omniscient accumulator of the language. Consumer society is listed, along with consumer goods, consumer research, and an ugly phenomenon, consumer terrorism, a phrase first noticed in the Pacific in 1984 after Manila police found deliberately poisoned pineapples. Consumer durables is also listed, but an editor regretting (and vowing to reverse) the absence of consumer electronics noted that consumer durables was already sounding a somewhat dated combination.

^* With almost no marketing budget, the backers of the Walkman had to employ guerrilla tactics. Pretty young secretaries from the New York Sony offices were asked to stroll around Central Park, or to roller-skate through Union Square, while listening to their music, and wait for passersby to ask what they were doing, what they were listening to. The success is part of marketing legend.

^* A wave breaks when the depth of the shore water is less than one-seventh of the distance between adjacent wave crests. The drag at the base of the column of water slows this lower part, leaving the top of the wave speeding along—but unsupported from below. So it breaks, with the onrushing top curling over and beginning to fall down the wave’s leading face. The white mess into which all this eventually disintegrates is the surf—from the Anglo-Saxon term suff, indicating the inrush of water toward the shore.

^* Heyerdahl wanted to show that Polynesia could have been settled by South American boatmen who drifted with the currents, and that the cultural basis for the Pacific islands is thus all incontrovertibly Incan. Later research showed that Polynesians knew very well how to navigate without instruments, and had long sailed the often considerable distances between the ocean’s islands. DNA results disprove Heyerdahl’s theories, and show that Polynesia was settled from the west, from Asia. His 1947 expedition is seen now as little more than an amusing, though courageous, stunt.

^* The first of three, whose grandson, Hiram Bingham III, was an early claimant to finding the ruins of the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu, in the Peruvian Andes.

^* Ireland has tried hard, though with scant success, to claim George Freeth. A film, Waveriders, was made in 2008, to press the case; in the end it was the great waves off Ireland’s west coast, most notably at Mullaghmore in County Sligo, that caught most viewers’ attention, and helped place Ireland prominently among the world’s great surfing centers.

^* Sweet Caporal was Kinney’s best-known brand, with his factory in New York’s Chelsea making eighteen million a week until 1892, when a fire started by a suspended gasolier destroyed the giant building and its entire stock. The formidably wealthy Kinney was asthmatic, and eventually left for Southern California and clearer air.

^* Prince Alfred was given the resurrected title to the dukedom of Edinburgh by his mother, Queen Victoria. His life was colorful: on the same transpacific journey that brought him to Hawaii, he was shot in the back in Sydney by a would-be assassin (who was hanged), and then one of his own sons shot himself during the duke’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebrations. The tiny capital of Tristan da Cunha, still a relic of British colonialism in the South Atlantic, is called Edinburgh, named after this most peripatetic of British royals.

^* George Orwell would be the first to introduce the term cold war, in an essay in the magazine Tribune, eight weeks later.

^* In fact, the Pueblo encountered a near-crippling storm on her first day at sea and, half blind, almost collided with a reef; she had to put in to a second U.S. base in Japan, Sasebo, for two days of repairs.

^* The plants were taken away as soon as the picture sessions were over; any left were urinated on by the prisoners, in an effort to make them look sickly for any future photo opportunities.

^* The vessel remains in North Korean hands, currently anchored in the Botong River in central Pyongyang and freshly repainted as a tourist attraction. From time to time there are vague hints that the ship might be sent back to the United States, in exchange for some unspecified high-level political or economic concession. Meanwhile, she is on the active roll of commissioned U.S. Navy vessels, and still sporting the initials USS to indicate her exalted status.

^* Nonetheless, the authority of the devastating 2014 report of the UN Commission of Inquiry into the alleged barbarities of the regime was somewhat challenged a year later when a key witness, Shin Dong Hyuk, admitted to some fabrications in his testimony. The commission chairman stood by the central message of the report, however, and insisted that the regime be held criminally accountable for its excesses.

^* The firm gave no thought to installing air-conditioning, however. Elizabeth did have a “cool air” system, but Cunard acknowledged, in a classic of British circumlocution, that both vessels were “not entirely comfortable” when berthed in a tropical climate. Moreover, both ships were too broad of beam to pass through the Panama Canal, so their possible destinations were severely limited.

^* During colonial times the Hong Kong authorities came up with some interesting rulings—one of the best remembered involved the violent death in 1980 of a twenty-nine-year-old gay policeman at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the territory. (It was legalized only in 1991.) His death was ruled a suicide, even though the officer had five bullet wounds in his chest. It was widely regarded as improbable that anyone could have shot himself there more than once, let alone five times. The court noted, however, that only one of the five shots was lethal, and that the officer had not shot himself in either the head or the heart. Death by his own hand would have been painful but not impossible.

^* Thailand, alone in the region, managed, by the skillful diplomacy of a succession of strong leaders, to retain its independence through all the years of foreign domination, never bowing to the demands of either the French to its east or the British to its west.

^* The Viet Minh’s leader, Ho Chi Minh, had issued his Vietnamese Declaration of Independence just two weeks before. It begins, famously, and familiarly to Americans: “‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ . . . Those are undeniable truths. . . . Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens.”

^* Gracey was later appointed commander in chief of Pakistan’s new army, following independence in 1947. He was made a full general, and with his knighthood and assorted honors, he ended his life in 1964 as General Sir Douglas Gracey, KCB, KCIE, CBE, with two Military Crosses for gallantry in the First World War.

^* Japanese journalists unfamiliar with the song had to have it sung to them by American colleagues, and committed it to memory.

^* As perhaps befits a country with 848 national languages, Papua New Guinea’s history is deliciously complicated. The southern half of the island’s east (the west belonged to the Netherlands) had first been annexed by a policeman from the Australian state of Queensland; the northern half, which had been German, was then taken also by Australia, during the Great War, and the annexation was ruled legal under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Both halves were then placed within the British Empire, but were run by Australia, and won their independence in 1975—with Britain’s Prince Charles presiding over the ceremonies.

^* Though the French left their colonies in Indochina and the New Hebrides, they still retain ultimate control over two mid-ocean Overseas Collectivities, fully represented in the Paris parliament: French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna. There is also the Sui Generis Collectivity of New Caledonia, which has proved politically intractable because of the large number of French settlers, but is expected to become fully independent by 2018; and there is an uninhabited mystery island, Clipperton, off the Mexican coast.

^* In the 1980s a West Virginia coal mining magnate named Smiley Ratliff tried to lease Henderson Island to establish a mid-ocean colony. He promised to build an airstrip and to provide a ferry plying to and from Pitcairn, which would connect the island with the outside world. The British government gave his plan serious consideration, but it was pointed out that the rare and flightless Henderson rail as well as the fruit-eating dove, an endemic warbler, and a lorikeet lived on the island, and Ratliff was asked to look elsewhere. Some Pitcairners remain chagrined, and the British government now subsidizes an occasional ferry service out of the French-owned Gambier Islands, where there is an airport.

^* For many years only Falkland Islanders, Bermudians, and Gibraltarians enjoyed near-automatic right to British citizenship. Colonials from such territories as Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Saint Helena, the Cayman Islands, and Hong Kong were, so far as immigration to Britain was concerned, treated almost as Congolese or Brazilians. A more liberal policy was brought into force once Hong Kong had passed back into Chinese hands and the risk of London’s airports being mobbed by Cantonese multitudes had abated.

^* Clockwise-spinning cyclones in the Southern Hemisphere, counterclockwise typhoons (Chinese for “big winds”) in the Northern, and similarly configured hurricanes in the Americas comprise this Aeolian family, together with the plagues of tornadoes and waterspouts in the cadet branch.

^* The indigenous Muslim Moro people, living largely in Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, have been engaged in independence wars with various Manila regimes for many years. For many reasons—not least because the Moro leadership has openly allied itself with China—the United States has been offering the Philippine government military aid, with some U.S. personnel on the ground on the Mindanao battlefields.

^* It was left to Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, to take immediate issue with the admiral, by famously declaring that God was the only one with the authority to alter the world’s climate.

^* Normal sea-level atmosphere pressure is 1013.25 mbar—or, in the old style, sea-level atmosphere would typically support a column of mercury that rose 29.92 inches in a vacuum tube. The highest pressure is generally to be found in parts of Siberia, up to 1050 mbar. The lowest pressures at sea level are invariably to be found in the eyes of tropical storms.

^* Most of Tip’s two-week progress was through the open ocean, so casualties were lighter. But there were a number of collateral incidents—most notably at a U.S. Marine base near Tokyo, where the intense winds collapsed a wall that in turn dislodged fuel pipes from a farm of gasoline bladders. A river of fuel coursed down a hill and into a barrack block, and was ignited by a space heater. The resulting fire killed thirteen marines.

^* Some meteorologists now refer to this as the ENSO warm phase and to the reverse, what is still traditionally called La Niña, as the ENSO cool phase. The relative lack of ambiguity and confusion will be likely to widen this practice in coming years.

^* The warming rate slowed down dramatically in 2008, to the glee of those who believe that climate change alarmism is all piffle. Climate statisticians, who acknowledge the existence of a global warming hiatus, insist that this is merely a cyclical event, and that the upward trend will resume and continue so long as fossil fuels continue to be burned with such careless abandon.

^* Few of his predecessor premiers are today well remembered outside Australia, save perhaps for Robert Menzies, who held office twice, for a total of eighteen years. His successor in 1966, Harold Holt, is recalled for a curious reason: he vanished while swimming in the sea near Melbourne, his body never found. His governance of Australia ended once he was declared dead, a tragic end to a long political career—and to his reign, as it happens, as one of Australia’s best-dressed men.

^* The GCMG, the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, is a British order of chivalry traditionally given to British and Commonwealth diplomats. There are three orders, in ascending seniority, CMG, KCMG, and GCMG; they are popularly, if a little unkindly, said to signify “Call Me God,” “Kindly Call Me God,” and, as in the case of Sir John Kerr, “God Calls Me God.”

^* Even though, near-uniquely, it does not have an international airport. Even Ottawa has one; though Monaco, Lichtenstein, Andorra, and the Vatican do not, and the Pacific archipelago of Tokelau, which is entirely without an airfield, has no capital, either, but rotates its administrative headquarters annually among its three main islands.

^* A template might well have been Hon. Russ Hinze, Queensland’s minister for racing, minister for main roads, minister for police, and supposed “minister for everything” in the 1970s. Fat, uncouth, and incorrigibly corrupt, Hinze is best known for having a state freeway diverted several miles to bring customers to a pub he owned. His genes almost outlived his reputation: his granddaughter Kristy Hinze went on to model for Victoria’s Secret.

^* Australia, still at the time clinging to the mother country’s apron strings, used British-style pounds, shillings, and pence until 1966.

^* By now the country had left the pound and was using the dollar, which was initially to be called the royal, but which ended up as the Australian dollar.

^* It was Goossens who, in 1942, with the aim of finding stirring music to help with the war effort, wrote to Aaron Copland asking for a composition. The result was Copland’s famous Fanfare for the Common Man.

^* H. L. Mencken liked the word, though it was an Australian who invented it, as a mild insult for a moral scold. Or, as the ribald twenties poet C. J. Dennis put it, “Wowser: an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder.”

^* Donald Horne’s famous book of this title was in fact a harsh critique, and his title suitably sardonic. So far as today’s boat-borne migrants are concerned, it is most apt. Few who come up against the harsh realities of today’s Australian immigration law experience good luck of any kind.

^* Though little of her original 1964 structure remains intact, she is still at work in 2015, much refurbished and retrofitted and more agile after half a century of work than she was in 1964, when she first left her factory in Minnesota.

^* The beauty of what was formally known as the U.S. Navy World Ocean Floor Map derives largely from its having been first painted in watercolors by a Tyrolean illustrator, Heinrich Berann, who was otherwise famed for creating a series of great mountain panoramas (Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Cascades) for the U.S. National Park Service.

^* Gut is a misnomer, since tube worms do not have a digestive tract: instead, there is an organ called a trophosome, which is inhabited by the bacteria that provide the tube worm’s energy.

^* As a teenage would-be geologist, I collected the beautiful yellow or brown sphalerite crystals that I once found littering a secret cleft in the moors in Cumbria, in northern England. I would trade them for other specimens (and occasionally for pocket money) to a rock dealer in London.

^* Rabaul is not a happy town. It had an exceptionally unhappy war—it was once a huge Japanese naval base, but after being essentially isolated by Allied air raids and almost unable to defend itself from attack, it was regularly pummeled by Australian planes and then totally overrun shortly before the Japanese surrender. Then, in 1994, the two volcanoes close by (Ring of Fire volcanoes) erupted, with lightning strikes killing residents and forcing the entire town to be evacuated and then abandoned after almost every building was destroyed or covered by ash. Though the volcanoes have been quiet in recent years, little economic activity has resurfaced in the ruined city.

^* Off Gladstone, the reef lies rather more than 125 miles from shore, and when in May 1770, Captain James Cook swept his tough little barque HMS Endeavour into the temptingly smooth waters inshore, he little knew he was entering a nearly fatal ship trap. For the reef crept closer and closer to shore as he and his crew slid ever farther north—until his ship slammed hard into a coral spike and stuck fast, holed and half wrecked. Superhuman efforts managed to warp the vessel off the razor-sharp coralline rocks; and Cook limped into a river mouth where the settlement of Cooktown now stands. Aboriginals on the hills watched him and his wounded vessel; probably they would not care that he named the headland off which he nearly foundered Cape Tribulation.

^* But not all. A few atmospheric scientists continue to question the link between climate change and reef destruction. They point in particular to Cuba’s pristine and well-managed, highly regulated coral reefs, and suggest that elsewhere local threats, especially in countries with less regulation, are the more likely culprits.

^* There are still stirrings of life to be found in Hawaii’s many independence movements, and once in a while the leaders of these groups, all firmly committed to peaceful demonstration, take control of a government building or two to remind outsiders who it is that properly owns the islands. Lately the Chinese have shown a vague interest in offering them support. Each time the American government offers aid or weaponry to Taiwan—which China dearly wants back in its own fold—suggestions are offered in Beijing that China should similarly help the Hawaiian nationalists. Just now the exchanges are lighthearted, few taking them seriously. Just Chinese mischief-making, most likely.

^* The Hawaiian Islands were for many years the extinction capital of the Pacific, since mankind had imported so many cats, dogs, rats, and mongooses that land and seabird populations were being savagely reduced. A recent experiment in throwing a half-mile-long rat-proof fence across the neck of Ka’ena Point, at the very western tip of Oahu, has resulted in an explosion of new life, and the return in particular of large numbers of breeding pairs of the once-rare Laysan albatross. As with the short-tailed albatross in Japan, the experiment has shown that with effort and imagination, some of the damage done by man can occasionally be reversed.

^* One of the first Japanese to live in America, Nakahama Manjiro, was wrecked on Torishima in 1841, only to be rescued by an American whaling boat and taken to New Bedford, Massachusetts—where he went to an American school, learned English, and eventually returned to Japan to act as interpreter during the country’s reluctant opening up to the West. He was probably the first Japanese to take a train or ride in a steam-powered ship, or to take part in the California gold rush.

^* The calms here so slow down ships that, on passage through them, many sailors worked out what was called the “dead horse,” the period for which they had been paid wages in advance, so they celebrated by hauling a piñata-like stuffed horse up the mast and then casting it out to sea. Polluting this part of the ocean has a long history.

^* The Kiribatians are not alone. There are calculated to be 12,983 habitable islands in the Pacific Ocean. Were the sea level to rise by three feet, 15 percent of them would be effectively drowned, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Worldwide, a million and change would be displaced.

^* The self-contained electric microgrid that has made UC San Diego a poster child for this fashionable new technology has not been an unqualified success. After a statewide blackout in 2011, it took the microgrid five hours to recover—the city itself took thirteen. Early suggestions that, at a moment like this, a microgrid would prove “an island of light in sea of darkness” were not borne out. Washom is hoping that a similar test on Lana’i, after a decade of further fine-tuning, will be more of a triumph.

^* The biggest of the century occurred in 1912, on the Aleutian Range on the Alaska Peninsula, when the stratovolcano Novarupta began a five-month series of enormous eruptions that expelled more than three cubic miles of ash into the sky. In human memory, only Krakatoa and Tambora, which erupted in the previous century, were larger.

^* I climbed it in the 1990s, with a friend and two guides. As we neared the summit, a full gale blew up and the guides ran away in terror. The two of us pressed on, clambering the final few hundred feet to the crater lip on our hands and knees, drenched by rain and pummeled by high winds. We later found our guides huddled in a cave, quite incapacitated by smoking so much marijuana that we were obliged to reverse roles and guide them down to safety.

^* Some weeks later, when all residual activity had quieted, a photographer and I took a helicopter up from Manila to see the devastation. We brought along kayaks so we could explore the crater lake that now replaced the missing summit. As I made my way toward the lake’s center, the waters became hotter and hotter until, directly above the volcano’s mouth, the water bubbled and boiled, and the plastic of the boat began to soften and to bend under my weight. There were a nasty few moments of furious paddling back out into cool water. The kayak’s owner later complained about the distortion of his craft, though he could never rightly understand how it got that way.

^* There is an outer group, the Second Island Chain, passing from Japan through Guam and to the western tip of New Guinea, toward which China also entertains ambitions. And in the still longer term, there is on Chinese maps even a Third Island Chain, which passes from the Aleutians to New Zealand and includes the western tip of the array of islands that leads down to Hawaii.

^* In the late 1990s the British container vessel Cardigan Bay would sweep through the Paracel Islands every few months on routine passage between Singapore and Hong Kong, and the master was invariably asked to take photographs from his bridge of any new structures he saw. On one journey that I made with him in 1995, we were met at the container port by a Royal Navy intelligence officer, who took the film from the captain. “Most helpful,” he said. “Always good to know what our friends up there”—he jerked his thumb back toward the hills of China—“are up to.”

^* Though China’s systematic expansion began after Pinatubo, a scattering of earlier confrontations had occurred between China and the Vietnamese, most notably on reefs and islets in the western Paracels in 1974 and in the western Spratlys in 1988. In both cases, the Chinese, employing considerable violence, drove the occupying Vietnamese away. The Americans lent some early support to the South Vietnamese, including the loan in 1974 of a CIA officer, who was briefly detained by the Chinese. But once the Vietnam War had been lost, and all Vietnam became Communist, American policy reverted to “a plague on both your houses,” and steered clear of involvement, most notably during the Johnson South Reef Skirmish of 1988, which gave the Chinese their first real foothold on the Spratlys, three years before the Pinatubo eruption.

^* Right in the middle of the Spratlys is the island of Taiping, occupied since 1956 by the Republic of China and administered as a subdivision of a Taiwanese city. Six hundred officials live there, with power, water, public telephones, and Internet service, and with a cell phone signal inadvertently supplied from a Beijing-occupied reef nearby. Despite its political opposition, Beijing has made no moves to acquire the island, assuming that, as with Taiwan, it will revert naturally in good time. Its existence as an oasis is similar to that of Guantánamo, in Cuba, or of Russia’s Kaliningrad, on the Baltic.

^* But not all. On August 19, 2014, a Chinese fighter plane came to within twenty feet of a large American Poseidon surveillance aircraft operating in almost exactly the same area. The Pentagon said that the Chinese pilot had even passed the Poseidon’s nose with his plane’s belly in full view, as if to show the weapons he had aboard. Washington made an official complaint.

^* In one crucial sense Liu was very different from these two: he was the overall commander of forces during the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989, and had a reputation for ruthlessness that survives him to this day.

^* This “RMA” concept stems from the belief that warfare styles evolve in quick bursts that are the direct consequence of the introduction of new technologies (whether chariots or longbows, the blitzkrieg or nuclear weapons, EMDs or drones), each new development prompting a new kind of fighting. Proponents of the theory say that new technologies now available to China have significantly changed the metrics in the western Pacific theater, and that America needs to change in lockstep.

^* Seldom does one see an American ballistic missile submarine—unlike in Russia, where Delta-class strategic nuclear missile subs are plainly on show at the Russians’ North Pacific base in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. I was at Pearl Harbor when an enormous Ohio-class boat arrived, for unexpected repair. A massive security blanket was suddenly imposed; heavily armed sentries were posted all around the dock where the great black craft was moored. Cameras were forbidden, roads were closed, passersby were told to keep moving, nothing to see here . . .

^* The second attempt to reach Tahiti, in 1978, ended in tragic failure when the canoe capsized. A young Oahu surfer named Eddie Aikau tried to find help by surfing the ten miles to shore. While he was gone, a passing Hawaiian Airlines passenger jet saw the Hokule‘a’s distress flares and summoned the Coast Guard, who rescued everyone—except for Eddie Aikau, who was never seen again. To avoid such recurrences, the Hokule‘a has since always made her long-distance voyages with a support ship in distant attendance—in the case of her current circumnavigation, she was first followed some miles away by the Hikianalia, a similar-looking canoe, but one equipped with modern instruments and radios. For the Indian Ocean, an even bigger craft was chartered as a safety boat, and the Hikianalia was brought home.