North Pacific

“ In the first place, we may notice the fact that from the Old World the most approachable side of these continents lies on the west. Not only are the lands of the New and Old World there brought into close relations to each other, but the ocean streams of the North Pacific flow toward America. Moreover the North Pacific is a sea of a calmer temper than the North Atlantic, and the chance farers over its surface would be more likely to survive its perils. ”

“ The waters of the North Pacific are among the world's great fishing grounds, and the offshore banks of Washington, its salt water inlets and bays, and its coastal rivers are of leading importance in this region. Convenient to the coast of Alaska, the Aleutian chain, and the Bering Sea, Washington ports are outfitting, processing, and shipping headquarters for the whole vast Northern Pacific area. ”

“ Lying in the Pacific Ocean, in the temperate zone and not in the torrid, as many have the thought, it bends like a crescent off the continent of Asia. In the extreme north, near the island of Saghalien, the distance from the main land of Asia is so short that it is little more than a day’s sail in a junk. ”

“ The North Pacific coast is the most anomalous of the North American areas, and its history is in many ways unique. It is nearer in miles to the Southwest and Mexico than is the Northeast, yet agriculture and pottery never reached it. At the same time the Northwest culture is obviously more than a marginal [388] one. ”

“ Did his Grace imagine the Pacific Ocean alive with all descriptions of vessels sailing and steaming from our magnificent Colonies—New Zealand, Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales, New Holland, from Borneo and the West Coast of China, from the Sandwich Islands, and a thousand other places, all carrying the rich productions of the East, and landing them at the commencement of the West,—to be forwarded and distributed throughout our North American provinces, and to be delivered in Thirty Days at the ports of Great Britain? ”

“ I take an especial interest in all such links as seem to connect these isles with Japan, because I have a pet theory of my own, that all these fair Polynesian islanders have drifted here by a circuitous route via the North Pacific. The commonly accepted notion is, that all the groups in the East Pacific have been peopled by Malays, who found their way here by a directly eastward migration. It is difficult, however, to imagine why they should have come so far, when, in coming from that direction, Australia and New Guinea lay so much nearer to them. ”

“ The situation and resources of the Hawaiian Islands pointed them out to early navigators as destined to play an important part in the commercial and political affairs of the Pacific. Standing alone in the great ocean, the group must necessarily act as an outpost of the North American continent. Lying in the track of navigation from the central part of that continent to the great islands in the South Pacific, and in the direct course from the Isthmus of Panama to Japan and China, it was plain their harbors would become the resort of the shipping of the world. ”

“ While the Atlantic thus formed a long north-and-south rift across the inhabited world at the period of the great discoveries, the Pacific, strewn with islands and land-rimmed at its northern extremity by the peninsulas of Alaska and eastern Siberia, spread a nebula of population from the dense centers of Asia across to the outskirts of America. ”

“ With this picture of Pacific highways before us, it is barely possible to arrive at any other conclusion, than that the continent of Asia, in vastly remote ages it may be, was spread out over the greater portions, if not the whole, of what is now known as the North, North-West, and South Central Pacific. We may reasonably suppose it to have been inhabited by those races who in the first ages of their history sought the Rising Sun. ”

“ Europe is a part of the Atlantic coast. This is a fact so significant that the North Atlantic has become a European sea. The United States also is a part of the Atlantic coast: this is the dominant fact of American history. China forms a section of the Pacific rim. This is the fact back of the geographic distribution of Chinese emigration to Annam, Tonkin, Siam, Malacca, the Philippines, East Indies, Borneo, Australia, Hawaiian Islands, the Pacific Coast States, British Columbia, the Alaskan coast southward from Bristol Bay in Bering Sea, Ecuador and Peru.
As the earth is one, so is humanity. ”

“ Commencing at this parallel of 30o, therefore, in the North Pacific, and tracing thence the course of the northeast trade-winds, we shall find that they blow thence, and reach the region of equatorial calms near the Caroline Islands. Here they rise up ”

“ The United States, limited in their wish and endeavours to extend themselves on the north by the British possessions there, and on the south by the Spanish territories, and moreover drawn towards the interior and the shores of the Pacific by the grand natural navigation which the Mississippi and its numerous streams afford for inland commerce, and by the commercial access to the wealth of the East which the possession of the shores of the Pacific would open to them, have pushed their territories towards the west. ”

“ Whether a great continent ever existed in the Pacific Ocean since man’s appearance on the earth, or whether the great area occupied by Oceanica and the Coral Islands of the Central Pacific was once a continent, are questions which cannot now be determined. It is certain, however, as Professor Dana has shown in his study of the atolls and barriers of the Pacific, that if not a continent, at least a great archipelago measuring 6000 miles in length by from 1000 to 2000 miles in breadth, has subsided to a depth ranging from 3000 to 6000 feet. ”

“ These nations are at present the British, whose possessions of Canada secures them access to the north-western desert of America, the Americans, who have free access to the wilderness that lies between their territories and the Pacific Ocean, and the Russians, whose immense empire borders on the north-west coast of America, giving them ample opportunities, which they have duly improved, of establishing settlements on its shores ”

“ Pacific Ocean, the largest sheet of water on the globe, occupies a third of its whole surface, as much as all the land put together. It is a wide oval in shape, lying between Australia and Asia on the W., and North and South America on the E. Except from Asia it receives no large rivers. On its American shores the Gulf of California is the only considerable indentation; the Okhotsk, Japanese, Yellow, and Chinese Seas, on the Asiatic coast, are rather wide bays shut in by islands than inland seas. ”

“ Norway, and warming all within its influence. A similar stream in the Pacific, sometimes called the Japanese Current, having its origin under the equator near the Philippines and the Moluccas, amid no common heats, after washing the ancient empire of Japan, sweeps north, until, forming two branches, one moves onward to Behring Strait, and the other bends east, along the Aleutian Islands, and then south, along the coast of Sitka, Oregon, and California. ”

“ Japan, Korea, China, the Philippine Islands, French Indo-China, the Malay States, Borneo, Java, Sumatra and the Hawaiian Islands; across seven seas: the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Japan, the North China Sea, the Yellow Sea, the South China Sea, the Malacca Straits, and the Sea of Java; after visiting five wild and primitive tribes: the Ainu Indians of Japan, the Igorrotes of the Philippines, the Negritos of the same islands; the Dyaks of Borneo, and the Battaks of Sumatra ”

“ It is most surprising that so little is known of the great islands and the long line of coast from Puget’s Sound to Sitka, ample as its resources must be even for recruiting the transient commerce of the Pacific, independent of its immense intrinsic value. To the region bordering the Northern Pacific the finest maritime positions belong throughout its entire extent; and no part of the West of Europe exceeds it in the advantages of equable climate, fertile soil, and commercial accessibility of the coast. ”

“ We need hardly allude to the commercial advantages of the territory. Its happy position for trade with China, India and the Western Coast of America. The growing importance, however, of the islands of the Pacific is not so generally known or appreciated. ”

“ They saw our smoke, but the steamer was hidden from them by mist. Then suddenly we shot into view. All the while we had been in the clearest sunshine, the sea glassy and the flying-fish darting about. It was no place for speed. We moved just fast enough to leave the scene undisturbed. And thus we stole into Torres Straits.
Of all the numerous harbors I have entered in the Pacific, none, with the exception of the Inland Sea in Japan, is more picturesque than that at Thursday Island. Shelter, space, and depth, and stillness! One's eyes sweep round this pearly promise with greed for its beauty. ”

“ Within the last quarter of a century, discovery has turned to the islands of the Pacific, perhaps the most favoured region of the globe. Our great continental colony of Australia, its growing population, and its still more rapidly growing enterprise—its probable influence on our Indian empire, and its still more probable supremacy over the islands which cover the central Pacific, from the tenth to the forty-fifth degrees of south latitude ”

“ At all events, my book will serve the purpose if, even in a small measure, it contributes to the growing interest now apparent in the Pacific and its islands. I have often wondered why more people do not take the trip to the Antipodes and the Orient. Steamship rates are reasonable enough, and the service is high-class. Rich in folklore, in quaint peoples, in the beauty of reef and palm, the islands of the Pacific are certain to charm and enthrall the visitor. ”

“ Immediately on the coast of the mighty Pacific, with bays and rivers traversing our rich and fertile plains, affording the greatest facilities to commerce, and must, with the intelligent and enterprising Anglo-Saxons, in a short time, become one of the greatest commercial countries on the Pacific. ”

“ The wide Pacific now stretches beneath us,—away, away, till it touches the Eastern World, covering with its vast sheet of waters nearly one half of the earth's circumference, and separating the Western continent from the Old World by a much wider gulf than on the Atlantic side, as if to represent the greater difference in race and character between its inhabitants and the Asiatic tribes,—and as if, also, to mark the great boundary of the world's territory, and to show that here the circle of the habitable earth is complete. ”

“ By the time I am done with this cruise I shall have the material for a very singular book of travels: names of strange stories and characters, cannibals, pirates, ancient legends, old Polynesian poetry, - never was so generous a farrago. I am going down now to get the story of a shipwrecked family, who were fifteen months on an island with a murderer: there is a specimen. The Pacific is a strange place; the nineteenth century only exists there in spots: all round, it is a no man's land of the ages, a stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilisations, virtues and crimes. ”

“ Our settlements on the shores of the Pacific have already given a great extension, and in some respects a new direction, to our commerce in that ocean. A direct and rapidly increasing intercourse has sprung up with eastern Asia. The waters of the Northern Pacific, even into the Arctic Sea, have of late years been frequented by our whalemen. ”

“ OF A LEAF I The Pacific
THE Pacific is inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man. Sometimes it is grey like the English Channel off Beachy Head, with a heavy swell, and sometimes it is rough, capped with white crests, and boisterous. It is not so often that it is calm and blue. Then, indeed, the blue is arrogant. The sun shines fiercely from an unclouded sky. The trade wind gets into your blood and you are filled with an impatience for the unknown. ”

“ The fact that you cannot go anywhere without riding the waves, and that it takes two whole days by steamer to get from Fiji to Samoa, and four from Fiji to New Zealand, and then four again between New Zealand and Australia, a water-consciousness takes possession of you, and the islands become mere ledges upon which you rest occasionally. Something of the joy of being a bird on the wing is the experience of the traveler in the Pacific seas. ”

“ Something of the kinship of peoples scattered over the millions of square miles of Pacific seas becomes evident, not so much in their own features and customs as in the way in which they lend themselves to fusion with the modern incoming nomads of the West. ”

“ Is it that all the people of the world were first made men on land that is now beneath the waters of the Pacific,—men who, because of geological changes, fell back across Asia, leaving scattered remnants in the numerous island peaks now standing alone in that sun-baked world? ”

“ Everywhere it is fringed with bush and tall tree-ferns, except to seaward. There it is shut in by flax-swamp and grey sand-dunes, on the other side of which the long rollers thunder night and day. I don’t believe the Pacific knows how to ripple in gently over ribbed sea sand. There is always that dull roar sounding far inland—less at times, but always there. The road led past the wharf with its goods shed, and beyond this is the entrance to the lagoon—a narrow opening through which the tides surge in and out. ”