Mix together John McPhee, Paul Theroux, and V. S. Naipaul—geology, travel, and history and politics—and distill the mixture, and one has a good idea of Simon Winchester’s particular gift. Like these three writers, Winchester wields intelligence, observation, and masterful narrative skills to portray the modern world in which we live, a world in which the center no longer holds, the sea of faith has retreated, and the ground below our feet is literally in motion. Empires rise, empires fall. Such a transition is now in progress, according to Winchester’s account in Pacific: “The future . . . is what the Pacific Ocean is now coming to symbolize . . . the inland sea of Tomorrow’s World.” In the process, Yesterday’s World, so to speak (the West), is sailing into the sunset of superannuated great powers.
Winchester made the same claim back in 1992, with Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture. A similar prediction was made in 1852 by the senator William H. Seward: “The Pacific Ocean, its shores, its islands will become the great theater of events in the world . . . henceforth European commerce, European thought . . . will sink in importance.” Perhaps it was for that reason that Secretary of State Seward negotiated the 1867 purchase of Alaska, fondly known as “Seward’s Folly.”
Since achieving widespread popularity with his 1998 bestseller, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (he is partial to long subtitles), Simon Winchester has leveraged this distillate of geology, travel, and history into several well-regarded books. These include The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (2001), Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (2003), The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (2008), and The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible (2013).
An underlying theme of these volumes is the tension between mankind’s civilizing mission, relentlessly shedding the encumbering past, and the obstacles that the natural world poses to this mission. Winchester is an admirer of man’s ingenuity, and as a master of the evocative simile, he writes a compelling story. Pacific, on the other hand, is short on admiration, and one has the feeling that Winchester has lost his narrative bearings in the large ocean. His next-to-last book, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories (2010) is a gauge of Pacific‘s shortcomings.
Both books are about man’s relationship with nature—in this case, with the oceans that occupy 71 percent of the Earth’s surface. Atlantic begins at the beginning, with the ocean’s origins, 130 million years ago. Along with the well-known story of the discovery of the Americas, the book ranges from Mediterranean man’s avoidance of the Atlantic to the gradual conquest of this body of water via intellectual and technological understanding. All of these subjects, even war (in the Falkland Islands), have over the course of several centuries linked disparate nations into an “Atlantic community” with similar, if often competitive, interests. By the new millennium, however, awe and terror have been replaced by ho-hum: For the modern traveler, the ocean has become little more than “an accommodating parcel of distance.” Winchester reminds us, however, that it is a living thing, moving “impressively and ceaselessly.”
Here is the kind of prose that has made his books so popular:
Think about that the next time you are flying over the Atlantic on a 747.
The problem in Pacific begins with the book’s structure, which Winchester acknowledges in his preface to have been inspired by Stefan Zweig’s Sternstunden der Menschheit (1927) narrative about hinge moments in history. (It begins with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and ends with “[Wood-row] Wilson’s Failure.”) This turns out to be a deeply pessimistic way of proceeding. Yet, alongside well-crafted, New Yorker-style essays that may or may not be historically decisive—e.g., the recovery of surfboarding in Hawaii, the scientific discovery of deep ocean hydrothermal vents, or the development of Sony’s transistor radios in 1954—only one chapter describes a global power shift and, perhaps, a true “hinge of history.”
This is the final, and quite sobering, chapter: “Of Masters and Commanders.” It begins with the eruption of a Philippine volcano in 1991, so disruptive that it led to the evacuation by the United States of its two major military bases in the Philippines. The resulting vacuum has been rapidly filled by the Chinese, as shown by the sighting in 2006 of a Chinese submarine in Philippine waters. By Winchester’s reckoning, October 26, 2006, serves as a reference marker for “the Chinese navy’s steady and relentless expansion” in the South China Sea and a policy, basically, of owning the Pacific. For instance, China is disputing the notion of international waters and claiming ownership of coral reefs and uninhabited islands all across the South China Sea, where “weather observation stations” are being built.
I don’t have the impression that Winchester welcomes this development, but throughout Pacific there is a kind of gloating concerning the loss of “[the West’s] hitherto unshakable belief in our own kingly virtues,” as illustrated by the capture of the USS Pueblo by the North Koreans in 1968; the destruction and sinking of the RMS Queen Elizabeth, the “greatest old ship of the British Empire,” in Hong Kong harbor in 1972; and the departure of the United States from Vietnam. (The onus for “the dire and dangerous irritation” of North Korea is, of course, on the United States.)
In Atlantic, Winchester wrote that the ocean had become “a fulcrum, around which the power and influence of the modern world has long been distributed.” From the evidence of Pacific, however, the prospect of the West’s withdrawal, and a redistribution in favor of the larger ocean, is mixed. If China does come one day to own the Pacific, will the other countries on the ocean’s rim consider themselves “Pacific nations” in the same way that Europe, the Americas, and even much of today’s Africa are “Atlantic nations”? What are the commonalities between, say, the goals of China (no mention by Winchester of the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s) and of the Muslim-majority nation of Indonesia (no mention of the mass killings there of suspected Communists in 1965)—or even of the west coast of South America?
What role do the only authentically Pacific countries play in this scenario—namely, the islands where the life of the indigenous peoples has been fashioned by geography: “Oceania” (Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, including Hawaii)? No such questions are considered. The chapter on Australia is Pacific‘s biggest missed opportunity: Winchester goes on at length concerning the opera house in Sydney, while condescendingly berat-ing the country for its failure to be a Pacific leader because of its “intolerant” refugee policy.
In any case, Winchester’s real interest lies elsewhere, in the environmental realm. Thus, the story of Pacific begins not with the ocean’s origins, but in 1950—at lunchtime on January 4, to be precise—when President Harry Truman alluded in his State of the Union address to his decision to authorize the development of the hydrogen bomb.
The year 1950 is also a scientific time marker, having been established as year zero (BP, or “Before Present”) by geologists and archaeologists for determining the age of organic materials by carbon dating. In part, this date was chosen because the atmosphere has since been polluted by decades of nuclear testing—for instance, by the Castle Bravo test of the H-bomb on Bikini Atoll in 1954, which is the subject of the first chapter, “The Great Thermonuclear Sea.” Winchester is at his best in describing the destruction that transformed Bikini’s islands and lagoon into “a hellish gyre of ruin and mayhem” and, because of the “cynically calculated negligence” of Alvin Graves, the director of the test, led to the failure to evacuate in timely manner residents of neighboring islands who were exposed to radiation.
But what is the lesson to be learned from this episode? Blame and outrage at such foul-ups are not enough. Going forward, especially in connection with protecting the ecological future of the ocean, Winchester simply recommends the acquisition of “Eastern wisdom and knowledge.”
Unfortunately, this kind of wisdom will not solve the problems Winchester addresses. A better tribute to his skills would have been a clear-headed investigation of the technological and scientific ingenuity that is now being applied to solve them. His past books indicate he is up to the task.
Elizabeth Powers is writing a memoir of the ascendance of contemporary liberalism.
