Pacific Geographies
Between its long temporality and its massive geography, the Pacific has attracted historians interested in large scales, and the possibility of synthetic histories organised regionally and geographically rather than nationally or politically.
As geographer Donald Freeman states in one such study, the scope of the Pacific is formidable. It is also, of late, fash- ionable.[211] One of the tasks facing Pacific historians is to recognise and navigate the many orientations of human activity in the region’s seascapes and landscapes. The plural cartographies of the Pacific, including its suite of names - Te moana nui a Kiwa (the great ocean of Kiwa), Oceanic, Mar del Sur, El Oceano Pacifico, the Great Ocean, Stille Ocean, the South Sea - signal multiple vantage points, each with an accompanying epistemology. Indeed the Pacific is so big that the four cardinal directions that historical actors and their historians have used to locate their business - like navigators - can be as confusing as they are useful. The American-oriented ‘Pacific North West’, for example, is in fact the Pacific North East, if we orient by the ocean’s centre (let’s say Hawai’i). Many a student has tried in vain to reconcile the Southwest Pacific with the Pacific North West. Likewise, Balboa’s mar del sur stretched for its great navigator, James Cook, from icebergs in the far Arctic north to icebergs in the Antarctic circle at 67 degrees south.[212] And yet such confusions in orientation in effect signal something much more meaningful: the literally different orientations, standpoints and ontologies of Pacific knowledge. There are as many axes across the Pacific as there are degrees in the compass or celestial markers. Six are particularly recognisable, and serve here to fix us in what is a very large historiographical ocean.First, for Pacific Islanders, the ocean stretches from Hawai’i in the north to New Zealand in the south, Micronesian Palau and Guam in the west to Polynesian Rapanui in the east.
For a Polynesian navigator such as Tupaia, the celebrated Rai’iatean who accompanied Cook on his first journey, the Pacific Ocean circled concentrically out from his central island home. Latterly, this was figured as ‘the Polynesian triangle’. Second, there is an historical and historiographical west-east axis across the middle of the ocean, from Acapulco to Manila. The so-called Manila or Spanish galleons sailed several times a year between 1565 and 1815, exchanging silver mined in Mexico for silk, porcelain and spices traded by Chinese merchants in the Philippines. The oceans and coastal economies of the world became meaningfully linked less with the Magellan-Elcano first circumnavigation (1519-22), than with this Spanish-Chinese trade. Manila was a critical entrepot of the early modern world.[213]And yet, remarkably, the Spanish galleons missed or avoided all the islands that Tupaia later mapped. These were connected in a third Pacific axis when eighteenth-century European mariners - whalers, British and French naval expeditions, commercial shipping companies - linked maritime South East Asia (the Netherlands East Indies and the Malay world), the coasts of New Holland and New Zealand with the South Pacific islands and coastal South America. We can see this vast South Pacific axis in Cook’s ‘Chart of the Great South Sea or Pacifick Ocean’.[214] In the process of navigating this domain, Cook became aware of the cultural polity at the centre of the South Sea: ‘how shall we account for this nation spreading itself so far over this Vast ocean?’.[215] He perceived, and was awed by, a vast Polynesian geography and history, even as his own navigations facilitated a reconnection between the islands that became Oceania.[216]
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Oceanie was first designated in 1812 and endures as a geopolitical and scholarly region. But it took some time to settle on mental maps, as on charts. Oceania often included Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania, as well as Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, a geopolitical definition still deployed by the United Nations.
In the nineteenth century, regionally based geographers (also writing histories) included some Antarctic waters and islands as well, as did Hobart-based Alexander Ireland in The geography and history of Oceania abridged, or, A concise account of Australasia, Malaysia, Polynesia, and Antarctica (1863).[217] And curiously, in other nineteenth-century maps, what came to be called Near and Remote Oceania was charted as Lesser and Greater Australia, while the continent retained the antique ‘New Holland’.Fourth, there is a North Pacific history and geography, reaching from East Asia northwards in an arc that takes in Kamchatka, the Bering Strait, the Aleutian islands, Alaska and the so-called Pacific Northwest in British Columbia. This is a coastal Pacific that extended to, and historically linked, Baja California, Alta California and the native societies in what formed the northern reach of New Spain. In this quarter of the Pacific, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, British and latterly American mariners battled for access to and influence over native traders of furs in particular. Multiple scientific expeditions were launched, in the manner of the earlier South Pacific journeys. Ryan Tucker Jones has re-oriented a familiar British and French historiography on natural history and scientific investigation to Russia and the North Pacific.[218] And David Igler’s study The Great Ocean (2013) details how a North Pacific rim, as well as a cross-Pacific Canton-Hawai’i-America route flourished, partly from whaling and fishing, largely from trade in furs, and latterly transporting goldseekers to and from California. His work has provided a much- needed integration of coastal North and South America into Pacific history.[219]
This work signals a fifth major geographical/historiographical orientation - the so-called Pacific rim, a construction often found in difficult scholarly and political relationship with the islands. The largest ocean on the planet also produces the longest coastline, and this geography has offered another, more recent way of comprehending the Pacific.[220] It is used often by scholars analysing US-East Asia geopolitical relations, including the Pacific War, and the increasingly linked economies of China, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States.[221] Another version includes coastal North America and South America into a ‘pan-Pacific’ history.
This recognises that the geopolitical ‘rim’ was reinvented in the politico-cultural sphere. Any number of associations and non-government organisations were regionally organised on this geography, from the Pan Pacific Science Congresses (from 1920) to the Institute of Pacific Relations (from 1925) to the Pan Pacific Women’s Association (from 1928).[222] Not incidentally, the first meetings and centre of organisational gravity for each of these pan-Pacific entities was Hawai’i. This had little to do with its Polynesian history, except in an antiquarian and later touristic sense, and much to do with its newer status as an apparent east-west crossroads, but one firmly under US sovereignty. The mythology of early twentieth-century Hawai’i as a model multi-ethnic community was safely propounded only because it was US territory.Finally, historians have comprehended the Pacific on a vertical axis, that is, oceanographically and meteorologically, from the depth of the sea-bed to its tumultuous surface to the trade winds above. Humans and their material culture end up under the sea and maritime archaeology has become a key adjacent discipline for all oceanic histories. Sea mammals and fish in the Great Ocean have both sustained humans and become a valuable resource for extraction, and historians have analysed aquatic life - tuna, sharks, corals, whales, sea lions, dugong, turtles - as economic history, ecological history and as the history of science.[223] Recently, signalling a broader interest in ‘undersea’ history, the Pacific has been historicised from an alternative ‘below’.[224] The phenomenon of a single Pacific basin below the waves has often offered a geological unity that reassures historians trying to systematise a dizzying cultural and political diversity on and above the waves.[225] But this vast watery space has other divisions that impact on humans and non-humans alike, over time: the North Pacific current, the Pacific South Equatorial Current, the Peru cold-water current. The climatological and meteorological phenomenon of El Nino has become a manner of marking temporal, even historical, periods in the Pacific region.[226] The environmental determinism so common in 1930s historical geography may be returning, in a fashion, in a new climate- aware historiography.