Pacificism

“ He tapped his pipe out, and we sat watching the Pacific coming creaming in on the sands and round the rocks, the Pacific, that storm centre or Lake of Peace for the whole world, according to the way men may arrange their tribal differences and call upon intellect to balance instinct. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And so they went along in that fine, clear, Western morning, on the edge of the Continent, both of them young and strong and vigorous, the Pacific under their eyes, the great clean Trades blowing in their faces, the smell of the salt sea coming in long aromatic whiffs to their nostrils. Young and strong and fresh, their imaginations thronging with pictures of vigorous action and adventure, buccaneering, filibustering, and all the swing, the leap, the rush and gallop, the exuberant, strong life of the great, uncharted world of Romance. ”

“ But there are days also when the Pacific is like a lake. The sea is flat and shining. The flying fish, a gleam of shadow on the brightness of a mirror, make little fountains of sparkling drops when they dip. There are fleecy clouds on the horizon, and at sunset they take strange shapes so that it is impossible not to believe that you see a range of lofty mountains. They are the mountains of the country of your dreams. ”

“ Across the Pacific looms Asia, no longer a remote vision and a symbol of the unchanging, but borne as by mirage close to our shores and raising grave questions of the common destiny of the people of the ocean. ”

“ To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian Ocean and Atlantic; being but its arms. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The Atlantic is still the great historic sea. Even in its sunken wrecks might be read the record of modern nations. Who shall say that the Pacific will not yet become the great historic sea of the future—the vast amphitheater around which shall sit in majesty and power the two Americas, Asia, Africa, and the chief colonies of Europe. God forbid that the waters of our national life should ever settle to the dead level of a waveless calm. It would be the stagnation of death, the ocean grave of individual liberty.
GREATEST CONTINUOUS EMPIRE. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A river whose course serves as the boundary of two republics, and sweeps majestically across the largest empire of South America, as if it were, in very truth, the Pacific Ocean itself flowing out along its own canal into the Atlantic. ”

“ From the Northern wastes, where the hunter and the trapper pursue by force or guile the fur-bearing animals, to the ever-perfumed latitudes of the lemon and the myrtle,—from the stormy Atlantic, where the skiff of the fisherman rocks fearlessly under the menace of beetling crags amid the foam of angry breakers, to where the solemn surge of the Pacific pours itself around our Western continent, boon Nature has spread out fields which ask only the magic touch of Labor to wave with every harvest and blush with every fruitage. ”

“ Nevertheless its very mystery and vastness give to the Pacific a peculiar charm, which changeful Orient seas, and even the turbulent Atlantic, never can impart. Instinctively we stand uncovered in the presence of the mightiest ocean on our planet. ”

“ 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? ”

“ And how much more difficult our task to describe the sempiternal beauties of this favoured locality?
Immediately beneath on the left the placid waters of the harbour lie sleeping in drowsiness, sinuously wending their course along through and among sandbanks and rocky isles, bluff headlands and receding bays, until absorbed in the great Pacific they cease to be recognised. Away to the right the majestic ocean spreads, its limitless bosom wide open to the gaze, so that far as the eye can reach any object on its surface can be descried. ”

“ Looking off towards the Spanish coast, a few white sails intervened to give character to the maritime scene; while a large steamship was making the passage of the straits, leaving behind her a long line of dense smoke. How suggestive was that expanse of waters, the most interesting of all known seas: its shores hallowed by associations connected with the entire progress of civilization; the cradle, as it has been aptly called, of the human race, the battle-field of the world, and still the connecting link between Europe, Asia, and Africa. ”

“ In three voyages out of five, the North Pacific, too big to lie altogether idle, too idle to get hands about the business of a storm, sulks and smokes like a chimney; the passengers fresh from Japan heat wither in the chill, and a clammy dew distils from the rigging. That gray monotony of sea is not at all homelike, being as yet new and not used to the procession of keels. ”

“ Yet, beneath this vast expanse of waters, new continents are preparing, for occupation in future ages. Myriads and millions of little builders are busily at work beneath the waters, rearing their coral piles, the pillars of a new Pacific world. Deep are the foundations laid, and slow does the structure rise, but it is ever progressing, and, by and by, its head appears above the waters,—an island: many such heads appear,—a cluster of islands; and groups are gradually compacting into continents, the dwelling places of nations yet unborn. ”

“ The Atlantic washes the shores of the most powerful, intelligent, and Christian nations; but a pagan or a heathen people in the countries to which the Pacific gives drainage are like the sands upon its shores for multitude. ”

“ All voyagers agree that for varied beauty of form and colour the Society Islands are unsurpassed in the Pacific. Innumerable rills, fed by the fleeting clouds which circle round the high lands, gather in lovely streams, and, after heavy rains, torrents precipitate themselves in grand cascades from the mountain cliffs — a feature so striking as to have attracted the attention of all voyagers, from Wallis downwards. Round most of the islands there is a luxuriant coral growth ”

“ One of those still, hot, sweltering days, so common in the Pacific, when Nature seems to have gone to sleep, and the only thing in water or in air that proves her still alive, is her long, deep breathing, in the swell of the mighty sea. ”

“ Search the whole Pacific—from Pylstaart, the southern sentinel of the Friendlies, to the one-time buccaneer-haunted, far-away Pelews; thence eastward through the white-beached coral atolls of the Carolines and Marshalls, and southwards to the cloud-capped Marquesas and the sandy stretches of the Paumotu—and you will find no handsomer men or more graceful women than the light-skinned people of Rapa-nui. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The lakes can never be separated from the Gulf, nor the Eastern from the Western Ocean. As the sun high advanced in the heavens illumes our flag on the Atlantic, its first morning beams shall salute our kindred banner-stars on the shores of the Pacific, the present western limit of this great republic. ”

“ North-East and North-West Passages, the name given to the sea-routes through the Arctic Ocean, the former by the N. of Europe and Asia and the latter by the N. of North America, which the northern nations were ambitious to open up into the Pacific, the access to which by the Capes in the S. was in possession of the fleets of Spain and Portugal; the attempts to achieve it cost much money and much life, and realised no permanent material advantage. ”

“ Issuing thence to the west and south, as a youth leaves the shelter of his parental house, this spirit found the way to the Indies, discovered the coasts of a new continent, and traversed at last the immensity of the great Pacific, rich in groups of islands remote and mysterious like the constellations of the sky. ”

“ But for me at this time to have quitted the southern Pacific Ocean, with a good ship expressly sent out on discoveries, a healthy crew, and not in want either of stores or of provisions, would have been betraying not only a want of perseverance, but of judgment, in supposing the south Pacific Ocean to have been so well explored, that nothing remained to be done in it. ”

“ On the farther side is America. We should have to go round the south point of America, called Cape Horn, to get into the Pacific. The Pacific is full of islands, generally a number of small ones together, then a wide open space, and then more islands. A ship may sail on, though, for days together and not see land. Some of these islands are very low, only just above the water, and are made of coral, and others have high mountains in them. ”

“ So far as the eye can reach over the wrinkling sheet of the Pacific, to where its giant swells beat against bare, brown cliffs and break in smothers of hissing foam, not a sail is seen, not a sign of life, save flocks of white-winged gulls and sea-mews, or herds of barking seals that swarm on rocky islets. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those who advanced that there was Passage between the Atlantick and Southern Ocean, by a Streight in the Northern and Western Parts of America, and very likely on a good Authority, have their Opinion opposed, all Accounts of Voyagers treated as fabulous, and for the same Reason that the Opinion of Asia and America being contiguous was rejected, as they could produce nothing further for it than Tradition, and as to which the Tradition now appears to have had its Foundation in Truth. ”

“ Down in the magical world of words, before the mind’s eye and ear, we should have seen the vast tropical Pacific, and the stars over it reflected in the lagoons of the far-scattered isles clad with coco-palms as if painted by the magical silver oils of moonlight. We should have heard the cry of the traders and seen the beachcombers’ ragged clothes fluttering by tossing waters, and paddled canoes filled with the swarthy faces of wild men, on the waves that were breaking over the shores of his wonderful pages. ”

“ In the wide Pacific, far from land, fewer modifying circumstances interfere with the regular course of the phenomena, than in the comparatively narrow sea formed by the opposite shoulders of Africa and South America. ”

“ So free is that ocean from storms that it has acquired the name it bears, the Pacific. Far out of sight of land, they are in no great danger of any accident, except that of losing their reckoning. They are very liable to this misfortune from the want of a compass, a knowledge which their ancestors probably possessed, but which they have lost. If they miss their course, which often happens, their lives are not much imperiled, but it is then almost impossible for them to regain their native isles. ”

“ For these records relate that your state once checked the advance of a mighty force which threatened all Europe and Asia, moving upon them from the Atlantic Ocean. For at that time this ocean was navigable; and beyond the strait [that of Gibraltar] , which you in your language call the Pillars of Hercules, was an island larger than Libya [Africa] and Asia put together. [8] At that time sea-faring men could pass from it to the other islands, and from them to the opposite continent, which extended [5] along the real ocean. ”