1.
The Pacific
Mother of All the Oceans
I vividly remember the first time I sailed into the Pacific. It was in 1972, on a U.S. Navy cruiser, USS Jouett. She was a beautiful and modern warship of around 8,000 tons, with a length of about 550 feet, depth of 29 feet, and beam of 55 feet-a lot of ship as a general proposition, but not so much space internally when you considered there were nearly five hundred officers and men manning her.
At the time, I was seventeen years old and a very green midshipman, the lowest officer rank in the Navy, on my so-called youngster cruise out of Annapolis, which is what midshipmen did after their first year of academics instead of taking a summer break. Having grown up in a Marine Corps family (my father would eventually retire as a full colonel of Marines after combat service in Korea and Vietnam), I went to the U.S. Naval Academy with every intention of becoming a Marine infantry officer like my father. And so I went grudgingly to San Diego in the summer of 1972, grumpy about having to go to sea-like many Marines, my father's motto in service was "don't go near the water" (or the Pentagon either, but that's another story).
Jouett slipped her lines from San Diego's naval station and headed out to sea, past the beautiful shiny buildings of downtown San Diego, perhaps the nicest sea detail (the voyage from a pier to the open sea or the reverse) in the world. We passed under the Coronado Bay Bridge, passing the city skyline of San Diego to starboard and the large island of Coronado to port. I had been given the august responsibilities of Òline handler, fantail,Ó which meant that I was to report to the back end of the ship and help haul in the wet, heavy lines after they were slipped off the bollards on the pier. Immediately thereafter, I had been told to report to the bridge of the ship to take a turn learning how to handle the helm.
It was a sunny early summer's day, relatively early in the morning, a crisp Southern California day with a temperature in the mid-seventies, and by the time we were secured from the fantail, the ship was nosing out past Ballast Point and into the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately for my landsman's stomach, the seas were very calm, and as we pointed the bow due west, I made my way up several stories and stepped onto the bridge. As I emerged from the relatively dim passageways of the ship, I was simply stunned by all the sunshine and salt air and the vast ocean in front of me. Like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, I had an epiphany: I wanted to be a sailor. In all my life, we had not been a family particularly oriented to the water, but the Pacific grabbed me by the throat and said quite simply, "You are home." I've never looked back.
We tend to think of the Pacific as the mother of all oceans because of its size. The Pacific is massive, and I do not use that word loosely. Even the people living along its periphery, from Canada to Chile, from Russia to Australia, and everywhere in between, appreciate only a small aspect of its size. A simple Google search will show a surface area of nearly 64 million square miles. But such a large number obscures its meaning unless you measure it against other benchmarks. The Pacific Ocean alone is greater than the combined landmasses of the entire earth. In our country, where geography is no longer a widely studied discipline (to say the least), it is hard to appreciate that a traveler flying from Washington, D.C., to Honolulu will spend no more time flying to her connecting flight in California than she will from California to her final destination. And perhaps more impressively, there is not a great deal of landmass inside the Pacific Ocean. All of the nations that border the Pacific-and there are many-think of the ocean as a kind of endless back porch. The sea dominates the geography of the Pacific more than anywhere else on earth.
But throughout this gargantuan maritime expanse, it is worth remembering that there are small and not-so-small islands of all shapes and sizes, both inhabited and uninhabited, each with a distinct culture and often racial group, representing thousands of years of habitation-Tahiti, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea, New Ireland, New Georgia, on and on, an area of the world that is often referred to not by the names of the islands but by the term "Oceania."
In many ways, it is remarkable that these isolated pockets of life have human beings on them at all. To be initially colonized, someone in a distant past had to set sail, cross enormous distances, make landfall, and survive. Conquering such distances requires ingenuity, courage, and an inhuman amount of will. It would have been incredibly impressive if these islands were settled using the technology of a few hundred years ago: large-hulled ships with massive sails and complex navigation equipment like sextants-think of the HMS Victory, Lord Nelson's flagship in the late 1700s. Instead, humans found a way to conquer these distances ten thousand years ago. Using nothing but outrigger canoes with oars, the erratic currents, and the stars, mass migrations from Southeast Asia spread people throughout the saltwater expanse. These Austronesians, the Polynesians, Micronesians, and Melanesians who still inhabit the islands to this day, journeyed as far as Hawaii, more than five thousand miles from what most historians believe was their point of origin on the coast of East Asia. The migrations took many years as Austronesians island-hopped as far as their oars and the sea itself could take them, a drama that would unfold in reverse during World War II as Allied forces followed the island chains back toward the Asian heart of the Japanese Empire.
Soon after I was commissioned as a young ensign out of Annapolis, those primitive voyages were much in my mind when I first crossed the Pacific in the late 1970s. Indeed, what I remember most about my first crossing was simply the length of the voyage. Luckily I wasn't in a Kon-Tiki-like boat modeled on the ancient Austronesian vessels. It takes a week to get from the West Coast of the United States to the Hawaiian Islands, and that is merely the front door. From Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu in 1977, I sailed south to Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia-a long, long haul. We were in a small, three-ship squadron-just two new Spruance-class destroyers, Hewitt and Kinkaid, and a supply ship, the Niagara Falls. Crossing the Central Pacific from Hawaii south to the equator was a long, lazy sail with very little to do. There were basic chores in terms of maintaining the equipment and engineering plant on the ship, plenty of drills and practice events, underway replenishment wherein the smaller destroyers come alongside the larger supply ship and receive hoses to refuel-quite exciting at just a hundred feet between the ships. It was calm, hot, and flat, day after day after day.
Although we had access to some rudimentary electronic navigation systems, our principal navigation was done by sextant and paper charts. As the youngest ensign on the ship, I was expected to shoot the stars daily, as well as drive the ship, learn about the engineering plant, and mind my division of sailors (I had charge of the high-tech sailors focused on antisubmarine warfare, who had exactly zero to do in that vast submarine-less expanse). The most exciting thing we had to look forward to was the ceremony of "crossing the line," the day we would finally go past the equator and "enter the Kingdom of Davy Jones."
When U.S. Navy ships crossed the equator in those days, it was traditional to have a pretty rough hazing ceremony conducted by those who had crossed before (Shellbacks) at the expense of those who had not yet crossed (Pollywogs, or usually "slimy Wogs"). The ceremony consisted of being awoken well before dawn and herded up to the forecastle (the forward part of the ship) and sprayed with fire hoses and strewn with garbage. After a few hours of crawling around the rough decks of the ship (called nonskid, very abrasive), knees and palms are quite chewed up. It ends up with a crawl through a few canvas chutes full of very ripe garbage, dosed with this and that, before finally being made to kiss the well-greased stomach of a fat sailor dressed up as "Davy Jones" and being dunked (baptized) in salt water pulled up from the equator. It was quite a day, to say the least. Luckily for me, my commanding officer had never been across the equator before, so the hazing was sort of adjusted to a more gentlemanly level in his vicinity. I stayed close by his side.
Fiji is an interesting place, and as our ships pulled in, I was struck by its multicultural quality. At the time, about 50 percent of the population were Melanesian islanders, about 40 percent of Indian descent (from the indentured Indians brought by the British to work the sugar plantations more than a century earlier), and 10 percent East Asian or Anglo. The Melanesian percentage has gradually increased over the years, but it remains a multicultural society today. We arrived in the mid-1970s, shortly after Fiji had declared independence from the British crown.
I remember the clusters of islands as we approached Suva, the fairly primitive capital, where we spent several easy days on the beach and playing tennis on the grass courts at the governor generalÕs palace. Of note, today Fiji has an uneasy political climate, having just emerged from a military coup undertaken by a commodore, of all people (normally it is an army general who takes over a country, not a senior navy officer). But a recent election-largely deemed credible-seems to have put this small, beautiful archipelago back on a relatively stable footing, much to the relief of the Australians, who keep a close eye on the region and worry about refugees streaming out in the case of real violence.
We sailed on to New Zealand, spending time on both the North and South islands. The New Zealand of the 1970s was a lot like the United States in the 1950s-quiet, kind, sensible, and slightly boring but in a very nice way. The two islands that constitute the country are both spectacular and beautiful, ranging from the tropical reaches of the North Island to the high Alps of the South, where the Lord of the Rings films were made by Kiwi director Peter Jackson.
After a week or so of liberty and saddled with a colossal hangover from drinking New Zealand's spectacular Sauvignon Blanc at a wine bar, I was given the job of junior officer of the deck driving my ship, Hewitt, out of Auckland's harbor in a hard-blowing squall. It was pitch black and raining sideways, and the conning officer, a lieutenant junior grade who was even greener than I, was noticeably seasick, which did not enhance his already minimal ship handling skills. Our increasingly nervous captain watched us nearly swing the stern into a channel buoy in a too-tight turn and snapped at me to take the conn (drive the ship). That sobered me up swiftly, and with the help and oversight of the ship's operations officer (a very experienced and skilled mariner) we somehow got out of the channel and into the open sea without further incident. The Pacific was hardly pacific that night, to say the least.
We then pushed on to Australia, thus completing a crossing of both the equator and the Pacific from San Diego to the incredible natural harbor of Sydney. We were all in our dress whites and the sun was shining, with the iconic Sydney Opera House, whose gorgeous architecture to me conjures up white sails at sea, gleaming across the harbor as we tied up on Garden Island, a naval dockyard on a promontory jutting into the harbor. The Pacific Ocean seemed far behind us as we fell into the warm arms of the Australians, who maintain a keen sense of gratitude to the U.S. Navy for our efforts in the Second World War to keep the Japanese from finding their way south. In those days it was a good idea to wear a uniform ashore, perhaps not so much today. But it is worth noting that the Australians continue to be very close to Americans, and in the military context have stood alongside us throughout our missions to Iraq and Afghanistan. I encountered no better fighters than the Aussies in Afghanistan, for example, and they are a serious part of the coalition against the Islamic State today.
After the delights of Sydney, we began to work our way up the Australian coast, stopping over for a few days in Townsville on the Great Barrier Reef. Situated at the foot of the spikelike peninsula on the northeast coast of Oz, Townsville is a laid-back town of around 200,000 today, far smaller those decades ago. It is a gateway to the reef and a significant tourist destination. Drinking a Foster's Lager and looking across the perfectly gorgeous waters of the reef out toward the barrier islands and the Pacific was extremely relaxing, and I felt I was close to the end of the Pacific crossing. Then I remembered what was ahead: the Torres Strait.
The good news about the Torres Strait is that it is relatively wide as international choke points go. It is the body of water between the northeastern tip of the continent of Australia and the big island of New Guinea, and, as a result, one of the busiest sea passages in the world. But the bad news is that it is unusually shallow and filled with a maze of small, nearly submerged islands and delicate reefs. In the mid-1970s it wasn't particularly well marked with navigational buoys, and no one on Hewitt had ever been through it. Given the risky nature of the passage, the captain elected to take the conn and drive the ship himself, a quite unusual decision. As the sea detail junior officer of the deck, I was supposed to provide tactical navigational advice based on radar sightings, while the ship's navigator used traditional plotting of visual landmarks. Fortunately, we passed through in good weather on a bright day with relatively light traffic, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief as we headed fair from the Coral Sea of the western Pacific into the Arafura Sea of the eastern Indian Ocean.
Thus ended my first crossing of the Pacific, a voyage I have since duplicated many times over.
Copyright © 2017 by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret.). All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
