Fuller details of the books I mention here are to be found in the bibliography. However, on those few occasions where I mention that a particular researcher or institution (such as Woods Hole Oceanographic) has produced “many publications” that are relevant to a particular topic, I have decided to leave it to the interested reader to undertake the necessary Internet search. To include references to everything written would consume a great deal of valuable space.
PROLOGUE
Discussions relating to the creation of time zones and the positioning of the International Date Line in the Pacific Ocean are to be found both in Clark Blaise’s biography of Sir Sandford Fleming, Time Lord, and in the account Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude, by Derek Howse. For readers fascinated by the more technical aspects of the field, and by the robust arguments between the affected countries, these topics are also well covered in the published Proceedings of the 1884 Meridian Conference, held in Washington, DC.
The complicated and sometimes distressing condition of many native residents of some of the Marshall Islands (Kwajalein most notably) are bravely (and controversially) told by Julianne Walsh in her Etto Nan Raan Kein: A Marshall Islands History. The history of the early twentieth-century Japanese influence on islands in the western Pacific is to be found in Nanyo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, by Mark Peattie.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The definitive document calling for the establishment of January 1950 as the beginning of the standard reference year for dating purposes is the appeal by Richard Flint and Edward Deevey in the foreword to the 1962 issue of the journal Radiochemistry. Eric Wolff at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and Paula J. Reimer, the director of the Centre for Climate, Environment, and Chronology at Queens University, Belfast’s School of Geography, have also written on the topic, encouraging the acceptance of 1950 as the “present” in the new dating system that has replaced AD and BC with BP.
CHAPTER 1: THE GREAT THERMONUCLEAR SEA
Details of the crucial conversations between President Truman and his CIA director, Admiral Souers, which led to the decision to develop fusion weapons, later to be tested on Bikini and Enewetak atolls, can be found in Richard Rhodes’s classic study of the development of hydrogen bombs, Dark Sun. The matter of then selling the test program to the Bikinians is more than amply covered in Holly Barker’s Bravo for the Marshallese, Connie Goldsmith’s Bombs over Bikini, and Jack Niedenthal’s For the Good of Mankind—the last being the cynically persuasive argument put forward by the generals and admirals who came a-courting the eagerly patriotic islanders.
Jonathan Weisgall’s Operation Crossroads gives a full account of the principal Pacific tests of the postwar fission weapons; for the subsequent tests of the much more powerful fusion bombs, the best accounts are to be found in the official reports of what was then named the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency, particularly those relating to the dangerously mismanaged Castle series.
Film clips showing the spectacular upending of the entire twenty-six-thousand-ton battleship Arkansas, by the force of the Crossroads Baker shot, can be found at Sonicboom.com.
Work on the notoriously accident-prone “Demon Core” of plutonium hemispheres is meticulously covered by Louis Hempelmann in his paper on radiation effects, published by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1962.
CHAPTER 2: MR. IBUKA’S RADIO REVOLUTION
I found that of all the many works on the early days of the Sony Corporation, the best and most enjoyably disinterested is John Nathan’s Sony: The Private Life. Publications put out by the company itself, especially the two book-length obituaries of Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, certainly offer a useful and accurate catalogue of the firm’s milestones, but are understandably somewhat hagiographic. Miss Hiroko Onoyama, formerly Akio Morita’s assistant in New York, offered much private information, which proved most helpful. The company’s original prospectus, written by Ibuka, is on display at the Sony Archives in Tokyo.
The Bell Labs work that resulted in the invention of the transistor is lucidly explained in a paper published in the Journal of the American Physical Society, vol. 9, part 10, in 2000. The New York Times account of the warehouse robbery in Queens that put Sony’s early transistor radios on the map appears on page 17 of the issue of January 17, 1958.
CHAPTER 3: THE ECSTASIES OF WAVE RIDING
Few history books can be as beguiling or as seductive as Matt Warshaw’s The History of Surfing, which manages to be both beautiful in appearance and comprehensive in scope: I turned to it ceaselessly, until its pages were ragged with overuse. Scott Laderman’s Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing, is somewhat more sober, but I found it useful nonetheless. And Jack London’s writings, both in his Voyage of the Snark and in his famous essay in the Woman’s Home Companion of October 1907, are powerfully suggestive of the passion with which devotees took to the new sport.
The story of George Freeth, claimed in parts of his native Ireland to have been the original “king of surfing,” is very well told in a motion picture, Waveriders, made in 2008 by the Irish director Joel Conroy.
That California in the early years of the twentieth century so swiftly became America’s first mainland surfing paradise is a phenomenon chronicled in loving detail by William Friedricks in his 1992 book Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California. The strange story of Grubby Clark and his abrupt closure of Clark Foam, with all of its myriad unintended consequences, is told in many issues of Surfing magazine. Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor gear and clothing company Patagonia, describes his attitude to wave-dictated flextime in his amusing book Let My People Go Surfing.
CHAPTER 4: A DIRE AND DANGEROUS IRRITATION
I first came across the improbable story that North Korea had been almost accidentally created by no less than an American soldier, Colonel Charles H. Bonesteel III, in Dean Rusk’s otherwise rather dull autobiography, As I Saw It. Max Hastings fleshes out the yarn somewhat in his definitive The Korean War, still unarguably the best book on this miserable and pointless conflict, and which left so poisonous a legacy.
Jack Cheevers and Ed Brandt both wrote well-received books on the capture of the USS Pueblo; the ship’s captain, Lloyd Bucher, wrote his own account of his wretched months in captivity, Bucher: My Story. Lest anyone have doubts about the savagery of the successive governments that have ruled North Korea since the 1953 armistice, the Report of the [UN] Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, published in 2013, should be essential reading.
CHAPTER 5: FAREWELL, ALL MY FRIENDS AND FOES
I relied on the considerable storytelling abilities of the former journalist Brian Izzard, and his book Sabotage, which tells, in almost hour-by-hour detail, the tragic and fiery end of the adored Cunarder RMS Queen Elizabeth. Issue 189 of the Socialist Review, published in September 1995, offers a sweeping and coherent analysis of General Gracey’s near-unimaginable rearming of defeated Japanese soldiers to help him fight against Vietnamese nationalists in postwar Saigon. Those wishing further detail should know that the general’s extensive collection of papers is lodged at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College, London.
Two books in particular proved essential to my understanding something of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu: Ted Morgan’s Valley of Death and Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. The consequent Communist rout and conquest of the totality of Vietnam twenty years later is covered in exquisite and painful detail in Last Days in Vietnam, a film made by Rory Kennedy and released in 2014.
Few colonial territories now exist in the Pacific. One of the last to be returned to its rightful owners was the former British enclave of Hong Kong, written about in its new postcolonial identity by Jan Morris, in the classic Hong Kong: Xianggang.
The four Pitcairn Islands are all that now remains of Britain’s once immense Pacific empire. Dea Birkett managed to make herself most unpopular by writing the vastly informative Serpent in Paradise; and Kathy Marks confirmed the underlying rottenness of the place in her coverage of the sexual abuse trials, which I consulted to write this chapter.
CHAPTER 6: ECHOES OF DISTANT THUNDER
I made great use of Warning, by Sophie Cunningham, to build my account of the devastating Cyclone Tracy, following my own visit in 2014 to the now wholly restored and largely rebuilt Australian tropical city of Darwin.
Information on the formation and explosive growth of Typhoon Haiyan, which inflicted so much Darwin-like destruction in the Philippines four decades later, came largely from publications written by the team at the U.S. Joint Typhoon Warning Center at Pearl Harbor.
Kerry Emanuel’s large-format book Divine Wind, an analysis of the atmosphere’s endless capacity for high-velocity ferocity, proved invaluable for my writing of this rather complicated chapter.
Kevin Hamilton, director of the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii, has written numerous technical papers on the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO); and Mark Bradford, chief meteorologist on Kwajalein Atoll, is similarly to be regarded as a voice of authority on El Niño and its related complexities. JAMSTEC, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in the Tokyo Bay port city of Yokosuka, also issues streams of data on its El Niño researches.
Much science is being performed throughout the Pacific on this ever more crucial topic. Yet quietly, in the background of all this hubbub, stands the magisterial figure of Sir Gilbert Walker, the ultimate discoverer of the phenomenon: the lengthy entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography provides a justly sympathetic portrait of this eccentric and unforgettable, yet near-forgotten, figure.
CHAPTER 7: HOW GOES THE LUCKY COUNTRY?
Paul Kelly’s The Dismissal remains the finest account of the unprecedented sacking of the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam. Both Whitlam (The Truth of the Matter) and his nemesis John Kerr (Matters for Judgment) wrote their own, understandably partisan, accounts of the saga, adding to an immense literature on an event that is precious little known beyond Australia’s shores.
The equally complicated and nuanced story of the building of the Sydney Opera House is perhaps best related in a long-forgotten BBC documentary film Autopsy on a Dream, made by the Australian director John Weiley. The film, highly critical of Sydney’s treatment of the building’s Danish architect, was shown in Britain, but before it could be screened in Australia, it was destroyed, chopped to pieces with a meat cleaver. Thirty years later a misfiled early cut of the film was discovered in London and sent to be shown Down Under, to a mixture of acclaim and cringe. Likewise, an Australian-made TV documentary provided me with some insight into the story of the brief rise to prominence of the politician Pauline Hanson: the ABC 60 Minutes profile of Miss Hanson, who was interviewed with rapier-like skill by journalist Tracey Curro, remains a legendary moment in television.
CHAPTER 8: THE FIRES IN THE DEEP
The tireless work of Alvin and her sister submersibles has been the subject of countless reports and publications issued by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. A fine summary of the main findings, of hydrothermal vents and of smokers, black and white, is to be found in Discovering the Deep, by Daniel Fornari, Jeffrey Karson, Deborah Kelley, Michael R. Perfit, and Timothy M. Shank.
I commend to readers Stephen Hall’s incisive essay on the deep-sea mapmaker Marie Tharp, published in the New York Times Magazine in December 2006.
Anyone with an interest in the finer points of tectonic theory, which underpins a science central to the formation of the Pacific, could do no better than to read Plate Tectonics, by Naomi Oreskes, published in 2002 and now a classic of the field.
Robert Ballard’s extended essay on deep-sea exploration, The Eternal Darkness, published in 2000, tells much about Alvin and her work. And Colleen Cavanaugh’s interview with the Harvard Gazette offers considerable information about the role of sulfur in the origination and sustenance of deep-sea life-forms.
CHAPTER 9: A FRAGILE AND UNCERTAIN SEA
Personal communications with coral expert Charlie Veron enabled me to fill out the picture of the disastrous beginning of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Iain McCalman’s The Reef: A Passionate History takes the story further, placing this enormous living creature, now very much a threatened creature, in a wider context, both biological and cultural.
Mary Hagedorn of MarineGEO in Hawaii, a Smithsonian-supported oceanographic research center, is behind a project to try to help coral populations survive the relentless rise in ocean temperature that seems to be doing them so much harm. Her publications, in aggregate, make for fascinating and informative reading. Similarly, papers put out by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority round out the story.
It was Mark Brazil’s excellent small book The Nature of Japan that first led me to the work of Hiroshi Hasegawa and his heroic rescue of the albatross population of Torishima. Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum publishes an excellent online monograph describing the Hawaiian ceremonial cloaks in its possession.
Jon Mooallem’s article on Larry Ellison’s purchase of and plans for the Hawaiian island of Lana’i in the New York Times Magazine of September 28, 2014, raised many hackles; much of what he observed confirms the impression I gained when I visited the island six months earlier.
CHAPTER 10: OF MASTERS AND COMMANDERS
Three books in particular set the scene for the current Chinese expansion of influence in the far western Pacific and the fretfulness it is causing in Washington: Bill Hayton’s The South China Sea; Robert Haddick’s Fire on the Water; and, by the always reliable Robert Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron. However, the situation in the region is changing so rapidly that all these studies are in danger of becoming dated—so that interested readers would do well to monitor the near-constant streams of publications from such bodies as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Asia Society, and the International Crisis Group, among others, to keep properly abreast.
The International Crisis Group Paper 229 (2012), “Stirring Up the South China Sea,” presents useful background; and for truly ultra-deep background, there are always new editions available of Alfred Mahan’s classic The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783—essential reading for those who might be curious about how these new naval challenges are likely to play themselves out.
And as a coda: the complexities of the Pacific as battle space are nicely explained in an essay in the Washington Post of August 1, 2012, by the paper’s defense writer Greg Jaffe.
EPILOGUE
The journey of the Hawaiian wa’a Hokule‘a is being reported until 2017, and in great daily detail, by the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Honolulu. Much background to the story can be found in Sam Low’s book on the Hawaiian Renaissance, Hawaiki Rising; in Ben Finney’s explanations of Polynesian navigation, Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors; and most fascinating of all, in David Lewis’s account, We, the Navigators.