Pacific Islands

E

Transportation and Communications

Most of the fragmented nations such as Fiji and Solomon Islands have well-developed shipping networks that carry cargo and passengers between the hundreds of inhabited islands and atolls. Many of the smaller islands can be reached only by ferries, copra boats, or other interisland cargo vessels. In most of the countries of Oceania, the major seaport and airport are located at the capital, which is usually the largest city. Examples of this type of capital include Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea; Papeete, French Polynesia; Pago Pago (which boasts one of the world’s finest natural harbors), American Samoa; Apia, Samoa; Honiara, Solomon Islands; Port Vila, Vanuatu; and Nouméa, New Caledonia. Among the larger island nations, only Fiji has its major airport and its seaport in different cities: the international airport is at Nadi, and the major seaport is at Suva, the capital and largest city. More than 800 ships call at Suva’s port each year, including many passenger liners and cruise ships catering to Fiji’s tourist industry.

Most Pacific Island nations are well served by satellite technology, and their access to telephone, television, and radio services is adequate to good.

F

Energy

With the exception of Papua New Guinea, Pacific Island nations do not produce any oil or natural gas. Most fuels must be imported. Some islands could produce their own hydroelectricity by building dams, but so far only Fiji and Papua New Guinea have done so. In rural households, wood from forests is an important source of energy. Annual per capita energy (electricity) consumption is quite low in the Pacific Islands: 259 kilowatt hours per person in Papua New Guinea, 599 in Samoa, 1,240 in the Cook Islands, 859 in Fiji, 1,752 in French Polynesia, and only 107 in Solomon Islands. These figures compare with consumption rates in 2003 of 12,574 kilowatt hours per person in the United States and 9,545 in New Zealand.

VI

Government

The Pacific Islands include ten independent nations (Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Samoa); three political units that are incorporated parts of larger nations (Hawaii is a state of the United States, Papua is a province of Indonesia, and Easter Island is part of Chile); six self-governing entities that maintain some association with their former colonial power (Cook Islands and Niue with New Zealand; the Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Palau, and Northern Mariana Islands with the United States); and seven territories administered by other nations. These seven territories are New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna, all administered by France; Tokelau, administered by New Zealand; Pitcairn Island, administered by Britain; and American Samoa and Guam, administered by the United States.

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The governments of the Pacific Islands vary widely. Generally, however, the independent nations have replaced hereditary chiefs of the past with constitutions providing for executives and legislatures. In several instances, the hereditary chiefs have been incorporated into the role of government. In Fiji, for example, the president is elected by a Great Council of Chiefs. The president then appoints a prime minister from the members of parliament, some of whom the president appoints and some of whom are popularly elected. One exception to this type of government is in Tonga, where politics are effectively controlled by a hereditary king, who serves as head of state and appoints the head of government.

Among the nations that have entered compacts of free association with the United States or New Zealand, the pattern is for local self-government with matters of defense overseen by the foreign power. The Marshall Islands, for example, operate under a locally written constitution providing for a popularly elected president and legislature. In 1983, voters chose to assign military matters to the United States. Since 1991 the Marshall Islands has been a member of the United Nations. The Federated States of Micronesia and Palau, which also maintain a compact of free association with the United States, are members of the United Nations as well.

Among the territories of overseas powers, internal self-government is also the rule, with popularly elected legislatures and executives. A small number of popularly elected representatives are also sent to national legislature in the overseas capital. For example, Guam sends one nonvoting member to the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., while French Polynesia sends one voting member to each house of the French National Assembly in Paris. The territories are typically extremely dependent on the mainland government for economic subsidies, and they often have little control over major political decisions. For example, despite widespread protests by French Polynesians, France continued to detonate nuclear bombs on uninhabited atolls in French Polynesia until 1996.

VII

History

A

Origins of the Pacific People

The Pacific Islands were first settled by migrants from Southeast Asia. Although researchers do not know exactly when these migrations began, it is clear they took place sometime in the last ice age, during the Pleistocene Epoch (which ended 10,000 years ago). During the ice age, ocean levels were much lower than they are now, exposing the Sunda Shelf and the Sahul Shelf—continental shelves, or extensions of continents that lie only a few hundred meters beneath the surface of the ocean. The Sunda Shelf is an extension of the coastal shelf of Southeast Asia and includes many of the islands of western Indonesia, such as Java and Sumatra. The Sahul Shelf is an extension of the coastal shelf of Australia and includes New Guinea and the Aru Islands of Indonesia. When the Sunda and Sahul shelves were exposed, New Guinea was attached to Australia and to Indonesia’s easternmost islands by a land bridge, although it was separated from Indonesia’s central islands by water. Dark-skinned peoples, ancestors to the Australoids, sailed in early boats to New Guinea and other islands of Melanesia. Tests using radiocarbon dating on sites in the Bismarck Archipelago, near Papua New Guinea, show this group reached the area at least 30,000 years ago.

The next wave of migrants, Asian people who spoke a Malayo-Polynesian language, populated New Guinea and gradually spread to the southeast by means of oceangoing sailing canoes. They reached the islands of Fiji about 3,500 years ago. The settlers brought with them their own pottery-making style, pigs, and techniques for growing fruits and vegetables. Beginning perhaps 5,000 years ago another wave of migrants, taller and lighter skinned, journeyed eastward from Indonesia and the Philippines to the islands of Micronesia.

The last of the Pacific Islands to be settled were Polynesia. The Polynesians, with their Asian characteristics, almost certainly originated from Southeast Asia. (Some anthropologists have contended that early Polynesians may have arrived from the Americas. However, most scholars disagree, citing linguistic and agricultural similarities with Southeast Asia.) The Polynesian voyagers covered vast areas of the Pacific, using the stars as guides. They completed the settlement of Oceania with the discovery of Hawaii sometime between the 7th and 13th centuries ad, probably having departed from somewhere in the Marquesas and Society Islands. Because nearly all groups who populated the Pacific Islands passed through Melanesia, that area has experienced the greatest intermixing of peoples.

B

European Exploration and Colonial Rule

The first European to see the Pacific was Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513. Seven years later Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, sailing under the flag of Spain, rounded the southern tip of South America and thus became the first European to sail on the Pacific. He eventually reached the islands of Tuamotu and Guam. Other European explorers, including Dutch sailors Jakob Le Maire and Abel Janszoon Tasman, traveled through the Pacific in search of commerce beginning in the 17th century. Although all of these journeys advanced knowledge of the Pacific, it was English navigator Captain James Cook who did the most to open Oceania to Europe. Cook made three prolonged voyages to the region in the late 18th century, producing detailed maps and studies of plants and animals. Among many firsts, Cook was the first Westerner, in 1778, to reach the Sandwich Islands, later named the Hawaiian Islands.

Westerners brought both tragedy and innovation to the Pacific Islanders. Western diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, and measles devastated populations in Oceania, particularly in Polynesia. In some areas whole islands were nearly depopulated. Diseases did not finish running their course until the beginning of the 20th century. During the 19th century, France, Britain, Germany, and the United States annexed most of the islands of the Pacific that had not been previously claimed by colonial powers. Colonization brought great increases in trade, whaling, and missionary activity—and with them, tensions between Westerners and native peoples. In 1834 Fijians killed the entire crew of an American merchant ship, the Charles Dogett. Eventually, however, Westerners subdued the islanders. Many chiefs were converted to Christianity, and Western forms of government slowly replaced traditional forms, bringing great cultural changes. Again, Fiji was typical. In 1854 Cakobau, one of Fiji’s most powerful chiefs, converted to Christianity, bringing to an end Fiji’s centuries-old practice of cannibalism. Amid disorder and scattered uprisings, Europeans placed Cakobau in charge of a newly created national government, but when the disorder continued Cakobau requested Britain to annex the islands. By the 1870s Fiji was Britain’s headquarters in the Pacific.

Another negative impact of Westerners was a 19th-century practice called blackbirding. Natives, nicknamed blackbirds, were recruited or often kidnapped outright to work as laborers in Australia and South America. There, they were subjected to horrible working conditions often little better than slavery. The islands of Melanesia, especially the Solomons and Vanuatu, lost many inhabitants as a result of blackbirding.

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