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.

C.

World Wars and Nuclear Testing

During World War I (1914-1918) Japan gained control of Germany’s possessions in Micronesia, and after the war the League of Nations divided the former German possessions among Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. During World War II (1939-1945) Japan turned the Pacific Islands into a battleground as it sought to expand its empire. On December 7, 1941, Japan opened the Pacific phase of the war by bombing Pearl Harbor, a large U.S. naval base in Hawaii. With the navy of its largest Pacific rival in ruins, Japan swept across the Pacific in late 1941 and early 1942. By mid-1942, the peak of the Japanese advance, nearly all of the Pacific north of Australia and west of the international date line was under Japanese control. Allied forces fought bloody battles to regain the islands, including desperate struggles in the Battle of Iwo Jima, the Battle of Midway, and the Battle of Kokoda Trail.

After the war, several of the world’s nuclear powers, motivated by the perceived emptiness of the Pacific, saw Oceania as a place to test their newly developed bombs. Oceania’s first atomic bomb test took place in 1946 under U.S. direction on Micronesia’s Bikini Atoll. Eight years later the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb on the nearby Enewetak Atoll. The United States discontinued its testing at these sites by the late 1950s, but as recently as 1996 France used atolls in French Polynesia to test nuclear devices. Resettlement of Bikini and Enewetak atolls began in the 1970s. In an attempt to halt nuclear testing in 1985, most Pacific Island nations, including Australia and New Zealand, signed the South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone Treaty (SPNFZ). The SPNFZ imposed a ban on the testing, manufacture, storage, or dumping of nuclear materials in the region. Several Western powers, however, have used the islands in recent years to dump hazardous wastes, including chemical weapons.

D.

Recent Developments

In the 1990s environmental issues have been a major cause of concern for island inhabitants. These issues include global warming; loss of ocean resources such as fisheries and coral reefs; continuation of nuclear testing and its aftermath; loss of forest cover, mangroves, and other natural vegetation and fauna; and natural hazards, especially destructive tropical storms.

The predicted global warming caused by the abundance of greenhouse gases is a great concern for Oceania. If earth’s temperatures should rise even slightly, ice at high latitudes could melt and cause sea levels to rise around the world. If this happened, all islands would lose some measure of shoreline, and low islands, especially atolls, could disappear altogether. Several nations in the Pacific region have held international conferences to address the issue. Australia in particular has provided resources for monitoring and scientific study of regional climatic change and global warming.

A related environmental problem is the decreasing level of protective ozone in the earth’s atmosphere. The drop in ozone, believed to be associated with a “hole,” or thinning, in the ozone layer over Antarctica, means more of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays reach the earth’s surface. For the countries lying within the tropics and other parts of the globe, this is often a cause of great concern. The government of New Zealand, for example, issues frequent burn warnings, instructing its citizens that it is dangerous to remain in the sun for more than 15 minutes during the heat of summer. New Zealand has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world.

Fisheries throughout the Pacific have been depleted by many causes, the largest of which is overfishing by huge fishing fleets from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Such nations have often ignored maritime boundaries and taken ocean resources claimed by the small nations of Oceania. Many nations also use indiscriminate fishing tools that kill large numbers of other animals. Drift nets, for example, can measure several kilometers long, and catch not just tuna but marine mammals such as dolphins. The fragile coral reefs that abound in the South Pacific are another marine resource increasingly threatened: tourists and tour guides often approach the reefs too closely, and pollutants such as fertilizer chemicals create runoff that damages reefs.

In order to combat these and other concerns, the Pacific nations, sometimes with larger Pacific Rim nations like Australia and the United States, have formed a variety of regional organizations. The most important such organization is the South Pacific Forum, formed in 1971. Composed of all the independent and self-governing Pacific nations and Australia, the South Pacific Forum signed a treaty in 1986 with the United States regulating the fish catch of various countries.