New Pacific Primer – I

My favorite friend these days is one who wrote from Washington to this effect: “A year in the Pacific Islands sounds like a dream. But you must have mixed emotions about leaving behind politics, the peace talks, urban unrest, the university situation, etc. This is a big year, maybe a turning point for the U.S.”

He has a point, that friend. Still my point is not to check out of the action, but rather to find how it relates to the largest geographical entity in the world, the Pacific with its thousands of islands and their people. So I keep thinking about the opening lines of James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. They go like this:

I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray and inner lagoons lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting…

But whenever I start to talk about the South Pacific, people intervene…

It is still that way. Beauty is a bonus for anyone who lives or travels in Hawaii or in the sweep of islands running south and west to Australia and the coast of Asia. Beauty and the tropical dream brought me and thousands of others to live in these islands. Yet people and the realities have always intervened and disrupted the languid dreams of anyone looking seriously at the Pacific. I am sure it will be that way for me this year.

In fact, people are already very much the point of things: I look at the multiracial students who in May staged a nonviolent but effective sit-in at the University of Hawaii administration building. One of their leaders in this search for student power and meaning is a young part-Hawaiian woman. Can they be compared in any way to the students at two new Pacific island universities in Fiji and New Guinea?

I see a young Micronesian grantee at the university’s federally supported East-West Center; he wears a T-shirt advertising Senator McCarthy for President and sympathetically ignites a symbolic piece of paper at a protest rally where draft cards are burned. He is not typical of the mostly reserved Pacific students here, but still.

One might wonder how this could ever relate to those New Guinea natives of the Cargo Cult who believe shiploads of American riches are on the way. One such group has been saving up to buy President Johnson; presumably to make sure they get their share.

More relevant now are members of the future status commission of the Congress of Micronesia. They are deciding what future they want for the vast Trust Territory the U.S. governs under mandate from the United Nations. But as they do, U.S. military teams are surveying the islands for big bases that may be used after we leave Okinawa. Is any status except close ties with the U.S. possible?

Turmoil in France and the reforms it brings may seem far from the Pacific. But you may also start to wonder how that news is read by members of a delegation from French Polynesia’s Territorial Assembly (Tahiti, etc.) who went to Paris in late March seeking more internal self-government. They got a cold reception and a turndown.

Not all the people who affect the Pacific live there, of course. Currently one of the most prominent is a government attorney in Washington named Robert Park. He is hearing examiner for the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board in the Trans-Pacific Route Case, the most important aviation proceeding in many years. Park has produced a 223-page report in a process that will be climaxed by a Presidential decision later this year. It could send a half dozen or more additional U.S. airlines winging around new or strengthened routes into and across the world s largest ocean.

And there are the tourists. They are the growth industry of many Pacific Ocean areas. Over a million came to Hawaii last year, and there is every reason to feel this flood will not only grow but increasingly spread out across the fabled islands. The impact will be great; it can also be partly tragic, unless lessons are learned.

Other people seem bound to intervene — many islanders of varying ambitions, sophistication, and cultures, colonial officials of five countries, businessmen and traders, long-struggling missionaries, U.S. Peace Corps and other volunteers, and the inevitable visiting scholars.

But the larger point may be that events — strategic, political and economic — are also intervening and focusing to bring a new time of change in this, the last of the world’s emerging areas.

The Outer Limits

Before one starts finding the Pacific, it seems almost necessary to limit what you attempt to survey. Thus my view of the Pacific Islands does not call for a detailed internal survey of Japan, although she was an island power before and during World War II and now her businessmen are increasingly active all over the area.

The Philippine islands are on the fringe of the Pacific. Filipino labor and immigrant groups have economic and cultural importance in Guam and Hawaii. But the essential Philippine focus as a nation of 30 million is inward and toward Asia.

So is that of Indonesia with its 110-million people and vast sweep of underdeveloped islands. Here, however, there is an important qualification: Indonesia now rules the former Dutch western half of New Guinea, and the reportedly uneasy situation there could raise problems in relation to the adjoining Australian-run territory, especially if an ambitious Sukarno-style government came to power in Jakarta.

Australia is a Caucasian continent-country, economically booming with its own great resources, trading much with Japan and increasingly concerned about developing new Southeast Asia security arrangements. More in than of the Pacific Islands, it is an important colonial power there and its business interests spread wide in the area.

New Zealand is also essentially a temperate-zone, European-run nation. But as the home of the Maoris it is also part of Polynesia. In addition, there are other resident islander minorities, small colonial attachments and business interests which link New Zealand with the Pacific Islands.

Isolated Easter Island with its 1,200 Polynesians is a resource less dependency of Chile, and the Galapagos Islands far in the east Pacific are a province of Ecuador populated by its people. In their irrelevant way they dramatize how far South America seems from the general Pacific picture, although it may be that new air links will change that.

Hawaii is obviously a Pacific Island community, with two qualifications: one is its relative isolation, geographically and in the sense that until recently Hawaii’s focus has been on being and becoming American. The other is its state of development, political, economic, and social; this can make it both an influence and an advanced example, for better or worse, for other island areas.

The Inner Limits

This, then, is the fringe of the Pacific Islands. If it does not seem to leave much, consider the fact there are still possibly 10,000 largely dependent and underdeveloped islands.

True, most are bits of land you can walk across in a few hours or even a few minutes. But many are of surprising size, with vast plantations, ranches, jungle rivers, rain forests of great timber potential, mineral riches and snow-capped mountains. New Guinea, the world’s second largest island, is over twice the size of Japan and far bigger then all other Pacific islands combined.

The area is awesome, more than 7,000 miles across. The Pacific’s 70-million square miles spread over a third of the globe. Just the more than 3-million square miles of the U.S. Trust Territory cover about as much area as the mainland states, excluding Alaska.

To be sure, there are not many people; excluding Hawaii, about three million (two-thirds of them in New Guinea) in the tropical area noted. But what’s lacking in number may be made up in variety. Besides the very different Pacific islanders, there are numbers of Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Filipinos, Europeans, and Americans. If Hawaii were included, the list would also have Japanese, Okinawans, Koreans, and Puerto Ricans. There is, in short, plenty to think about racially.

How to View it?

How to approach, divide, and compare these many and separated Pacific elements is a problem with no one satisfactory solution. The commonest way is ethnically, on the basis of the racial groups European explorers found when they first came to the Pacific in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is a system that still has its relevance and uses.

There are the Polynesians, numbering less than 400,000, tall, relatively fair, of more Caucasian stock, the South Sea Islander of centuries of dreams, although often far different from the books or movies. Polynesia (meaning “many islands”) is the triangle formed by Hawaii in the north, Easter Island (east of Tahiti) in the southeast, and New Zealand in the southwest. An important dividing line is between the kingdom of Tonga and the British colony of Fiji.

There are the Melanesians, of varying size and features but generally quite dark with fuzzy hair reflecting Negroid stock. Melanesia means “dark islands.” indicating perhaps as much the brooding look of the big lands as the color of the people. It begins at Fiji and stretches west to include New Guinea and north to the equator. In some ways the most primitive part of the Pacific, with some stateless societies that have no visible government system, it is also the largest (some 2.4 million) and most complex.

Micronesians, over 90,000 in number, are more akin to Polynesians but smaller and with Mongoloid strains that often give a Malay-like look. Micronesia (“small islands”) is largely that central Pacific area above the equator now designated as the U.S.

Trust Territory. However, true Micronesia stretches south to the British colonial area of the Gilbert Islands, which includes the World War II battleground of Tarawa, and tiny Nauru, the world’s smallest Republic.

Boundaries are naturally irregular in these three areas. There is a mixing of peoples along them, and inside (notably Hawaii and New Zealand) intermarriage continues to sharply lower the number of pure islanders.

The Pacific Islands can also be divided geologically. The division tells something of present economic potential and past cultural influences.

Scientists describe at least seven types of Pacific Islands, ranging from circular atolls built by coral plants and animals, to volcano- contributed masses, to large islands built of continental rocks.

But there is a significant dividing line, almost a half-loop running from above New Guinea eastward to include Fiji’s big islands and down to include New Zealand. North and east of this line are the oceanic islands, coral and volcanic up from the deep sea, relatively small, and short on natural resources.

Inside the loop, in the area called Melanesia, are the so-called continental islands, often larger and with richer mineral-bearing soils. A hundred million years ago they were a part of a continental platform of raised land and shallow seas that stretched all the way to the Asia mainland.

Politics And Change

Political control is probably the most relevant or at least most widely used standard in approaching the Pacific Islands today. The current breakdown goes like this:

The above political breakdown has been almost the same for two decades: isolated Hawaii gained U.S. Statehood; only Western Samoa and Nauru have joined the kingdom of Tonga in independence, and they have close links to New Zealand and Australia.

The picture still looks tidy and manageable enough. Yet it must be judged against the thought that this last major colonial area may be on the verge of major change, that for varying reasons the outside world is finally turning around in its direction. On the political level, for example, the two most strategic areas, Micronesia and New Guinea, both involve the last trust territory arrangements under United Nations mandate. Pressure is on for a decision on independence or some alternate future status.

Economic Influences

But politics, local and international, is far from all of it. A visiting Pacific scholar looked at the map as we talked and said:

“Politics and spheres of influence are going to be important, certainly. But think about the more informal foreign commercial patterns and the influence they can have. Fiji may be a British colony, but Australians control 80 per cent of the economy. In fact, Aussies are all over the Southwest Pacific. The islands are also important for economically troubled New Zealand, especially with its traditional British marked heading toward the Common Market.

“And Japanese business influence is coming up all over the place, mining and lumber in New Guinea and the Solomons, trading elsewhere. It’s not sinister, but they are interested and moving where the Americans are not, except in tourism.”

There is yet another way to think about the Pacific: in terms of transportation. The old shipping routes often ran more to mother countries than among the islands themselves, as indeed did the traffic in a similarly-Balkanized Southeast Asia before the Pacific war. Political boundaries, even those in the open ocean, are still transportation and communication barriers. But more and more with new shipping routes and especially the airplane in the jet age, that is being remedied. It may well change dramatically in the next five years.

That, then, is just part of the new Pacific. It’s why I keep thinking about my friend. I wrote him that my worry is those nodding palms, lovely lagoons, and moonlit volcanoes will not intervene enough when I try to tell him about the Pacific.

Received in New York June 10, 1968.

Mr. John Griffin is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Honolulu Advertiser, Honolulu, Hawaii. This article may be published, with credit to Mr. Griffin, the Honolulu Advertiser, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.