THE CAPE HORN ROAD, PART XIV
How the Races of Mankind Came Together in the Immense Mixing Bowl of the Pacific by Peter Stanford ost of the time we fl ew be low the clouds. T he pi ledup snowy masses ro lled westward like galleons of old under a press of strai ning canvas, propelled by the Trade Winds that blow from the east in a broad be lt fi fteen hundred miles or so nort h of the equator. These beneficent wi nds blow as steadily in the broad, incredibly empty reaches of the Pacific we were traversing, as they do in the same latitudes in the Atlantic, on the other side of America. The Atlantic Trades served to speed the passage of flow ing tides of people from the Old World of Europe to the New World of the Americas. In the Pac ific, these steady winds brought first the European voyagers and then the navigators of the new-fl edged American nations as we ll , into contact with anc ient kingdom s and long-establi shed civi lizations, com pleting at last the connections between disparate branches of the human race in the las t few centuries. But the original settlement of the islands th at freckl e the vast Pacific water pl ain ta king up full y one sixth of Earth ' s surface, was accom plished by remarkable navigators sai ling the other way, west to east from the Asian mainl and thousands of years ago. But fo r the sailing ships that opened up our world to human understanding and interchange in the last 500 years the Trade Winds were a magic carpet carrying mankind into new experiences. And from their sa iling a new picture of the world emerged, a picture radi call y different from the slow ly evolving idea of our planet that phi losophers had developed in the prev ious 5000 years, from the beg innings of literacy in the Midd le East around 3500 BC to the opening of the ocean world by E uropean voyagers ro unding the continent of Africa and reaching out to the Ameri cas just before 1500 A D.
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No thoughts of any of thi s were in my mind, I confess , as our US Navy group flew fro m Hawaii toward China in October 1945. The Pacifi c world was winding down from World War II, ended two months earlier. That was in my mind , very much so. T he other matter haunting my im agination was simp ly the vastness of the ocean expanse we traversed. I had never tho ught of anything like this expanse of sea. I had been in the Pacific since we embarked in a ship from San Francisco to Hawaii a couple of weeks earlier. A ship is a little world, with its own people and purposes , a planet cutting its own track across the sea. But an airplane, even a grey-painted m ilitary transport li ke the C-47 we were aboard, with its two noisy air-coo led engines and bumpy ride, was not its own world; it was more like a disembodied con sciousness hanging between sea and sky- and working at it. Now and then, beneath the cloud galleons overhead, we ran across lo wer ra insquall clouds, barrier reefs in the deep ocean of air our propellers pulled us thro ugh with noticeable effort. After hopping over one of these aerial sandbars the pi lot call ed back to us: "We' ve got a ship ahead! I' m going down fo r a look." And there she was! A west- bound transport beating out a broad , lacy track across the sea, making perhaps 15 knots to our 200-odd. Even so it took some time to haul her back across the sea, and the pilot th ro ttled back so that we passed over her at an easy lope, perhaps 80 knots. The soldiers sunning themselves on the shi p's hatches waved at us enthu siasti cally, and I remember our waving back through our open cargo hatch. A couple of months earli er she wo uld likely have fired at us, a strange pl ane hunting them down across the empty sea. 148.
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. MARIANA . ISLANDS
Hawaiian Islands
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KI RIBATI
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INDIAN OCEAN 20$
.... Elater Island AD 400
KEY TO 40$
EALAND
ROUTES
Possible routes of the Polynesians