Category Archives: Pacific

by Joel | 16 October 2026 · 6:36 am

Japan’s Homeland Disasters in 1944-45

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 394-397:

BY THE MIDDLE OF 1944, the anticipation of worse things to come on the home front led to a new policy. The government, still under Tojo’s leadership, announced an evacuation program for primary schoolers from thirteen metropolitan cities. The children, ranging in age from eight to twelve, were moved to the countryside, where they lived in large groups; for many, it was the first time away from their parents. They were usually put up in extremely rudimentary and overcrowded rooms of Buddhist temples or traditional inns. In all, about eight hundred thousand city children experienced this collective evacuation, characterized by perpetual hunger, homesickness, and spartan living. It would form a major part of their generational memory.

Newspapers and magazines saw the evacuation program through rose-colored glasses; they reported that the children were enjoying fresh country air and featured photos of their smiling—though clearly undernourished—faces. One photo showed a group of small boys squatting on the bathroom floor in a big circle, each scrubbing the back of the boy in front of him. They look to be having fun, but their astonishingly skinny naked bodies make one wonder how they had any energy left for smiling, let alone back scrubbing.

Without access to food other than whatever little was given them, the evacuated children suffered from hunger first and foremost. The greatest pastime for them was to draw food. “Sponge cakes, dumplings, pastries, shortcakes, caramels, rice crackers … we drew them all—absolutely every snack in this world one could remember,” one woman recalled. “Then we showed them to one another and enjoyed discussing how wonderful they would taste if we really were to eat them.” Complaining, unhappy letters home were systematically discouraged, and their teachers checked all mail before it was sent out. State censorship and confiscation of correspondence, legalized in October 1941, were exercised even at this level voluntarily.

This haphazard evacuation program was a direct response to the threat of a U.S. landing on the Japanese mainland, which seemed especially likely after the United States captured Saipan, fifteen hundred miles south. The island fell on July 7, 1944, and more than 55,000 Japanese, including civilians, died there. (Made a Japanese mandate by the League of Nations in 1920, Saipan had a Japanese population, including colonial Taiwanese and Koreans classified as Japanese, of 29,348 in 1943.) Vice Admiral Nagumo and other navy commanders ordered their soldiers to “die a hero’s death” and to become the “Pacific seawall” against the United States. Nagumo set a precedent by committing suicide on July 6, before the island’s conquest. The same “ultimate sacrifice” was also expected of civilians in the absence of any protection offered by the military. Too many chose death over surrender, sometimes coaxed by the remaining Japanese soldiers, who made sure that nobody was to suffer the shame of being taken captive.

The haunting proof of patriotic allegiance was captured on film by the U.S. Marines. Civilians, many of them women and some with babies and children, stumbled toward the edge of volcanic cliffs to make their final leaps. One can feel their slight hesitation and momentary fear as they looked down into the abyss of black seawater. But by sheer force of determination, they overcame their fear and jumped. “Banzai!” (“Live forever!”—or, more accurately in this case, “Long live the emperor!”) was often the last word of those loyal subjects of the empire. More civilians would commit suicide on the islands of Tinian, Guam, and Okinawa in the face of the U.S. advance. Japanese losses in the Pacific were so great that they could not be kept a secret any longer. The Saipan calamity was reported to the Japanese nation on July 18, 1944, along with the resignation of the Tojo cabinet. Two days after Tojo’s fall, on July 20, Operation Valkyrie, the most nearly successful of all the assassination attempts on Hitler, was carried out. With renewed fanaticism, the Führer would continue to lead Germany until his suicide.

…

Meanwhile, life had to carry on, and children continued to be evacuated. On August 22, 1944, about seven hundred children, in transit from Okinawa to Kagoshima, perished at sea. The U.S. submarines were already that close. The ill-orchestrated evacuation program ended in March 1945, and city families were urged to make individual arrangements to ensure the safety of their children. Family reunions were often brutally short-lived. Many children from Tokyo were sent back home just in time to experience the worst (but not the last) air raid unleashed on the city: the one in the early-morning hours of March 10, …

With the destruction of almost every Japanese city and the constant announcements of soldiers’ deaths, Japanese morale could not have been lower. Surviving death—from disease, hunger, or the incendiary bombs that grilled alive newborns and old people alike—had become the utmost national priority. A distraught mother who embraced her baby to the point of suffocation while seeking shelter during a bombing raid, a schoolgirl trying to float her way to safety down a river filled with dying people clinging to her, people navigating heaps of charred bodies as they looked for their missing family members—stories like these were becoming all too common. The Meiji Palace, where the imperial conferences had taken place, was burned down in May 1945, forcing the leaders to hold the final two imperial conferences before Japan’s unconditional surrender in an air-raid shelter.

Life in the countryside was less pressed, though things were scarce. Toddlers innocently competed with one another to collect plant roots, a substitute staple for rice, and grasshoppers, an invaluable available source of protein and calcium for growing children. Students were sent into the forests for pine sap to make gasoline (which never quite worked), and all households were ordered to turn in their metal, including buckets and ladles, to make airplanes. “We must be losing the war,” said one farm boy at the time, deducing that the government wouldn’t otherwise sink so low as to take utensils from poor people’s kitchens. But uncomplaining, and with a degree of fatalism, the nation endured the horrid times as if it were dealing with a series of relentless natural disasters rather than man-made ones.

In the midst of all this, a very select group of Japanese, mainly military officers but also some filmmakers, university students, and other civilians, had a rare chance to see films that the British had left behind in Southeast Asia. One of them was Gone with the Wind. The Japanese were amazed by the quality, technical superiority, and glamour of the nearly four-hour-long saga. They wondered how they could possibly defeat a country that had managed to produce such an astonishing film. (Another film left behind was Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, whose quality far surpassed that of Japanese animation technology.)

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Filed under food, Japan, Korea, Micronesia, migration, military, nationalism, Taiwan, U.S., war

by Joel | 4 October 2026 · 6:05 am

Tojo’s Pessimism, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 29-30, 35:

Tojo, in his selective explanation of the events leading to Pearl Harbor, insisted that the war Japan had just initiated was a “defensive” war. He faithfully echoed Japan’s deep-seated feelings of persecution, wounded national pride, and yearning for greater recognition, which together might be called, for the want of a better phrase, anti-Westernism. It was a sentimental speech, and it was notable for what was left unsaid.

There had been no clear-cut, overwhelming consensus among the Japanese leaders to take preemptive actions in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Many remained hopelessly uncertain and ambivalent about their decision. True, Tojo is famous for having said, “Occasionally, one must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes, and jump off the platform of the Kiyomizu,” and these words, referencing a Buddhist temple in Kyoto known for a veranda that juts out over a cliff, are often cited as a sign of his rash adventurism. But even Tojo, vilified as a military dictator who blindly pushed Japan into war, felt torn, especially in the two months preceding the attack. Throughout the course of the government’s final discussions over going to war, Tojo was acutely aware of the small possibility of Japanese victory. As a result, at the last minute, he tried to conciliate those who argued for immediate war. When he became prime minister on October 18, 1941, the first task he set himself was to attempt to resurrect diplomatic options with the United States.

Some leaders were misguidedly hopeful, but none were confident of Japan’s eventual victory. Tojo’s predecessor, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, a civilian politician, was prime minister on and off for nearly three of the four years immediately prior to Pearl Harbor. His flirtations with a totalitarian style of leadership did incalculable damage to Japan’s international standing and helped to maximize the military voice in the government. But at the same time, Konoe was unmistakably against a war with the West. According to his aide and son-in-law, Hosokawa Morisada, upon hearing the news of Japan’s entry into war, Konoe barely managed to say, “What on earth! I really feel a miserable defeat coming. This [favorable situation for Japan] will only last two or three months.”

…

One should not, of course, underestimate the enormous pressure these leaders faced on the eve of Pearl Harbor. They felt they had to choose between waging a reckless war and giving up all of Japan’s imperialistic conquests of many years in order to stave off war. They tended to ignore that such extreme choices grew directly out of their own recent decisions and actions. As they made more diplomatic missteps and committed themselves to an impracticable war, claiming all the while to be more prepared than they ever were, their range of policy options both at home and with the outside world narrowed considerably. It was as if Tokyo had gotten stuck in the thin end of a funnel. The war option, it must have seemed to those leaders, provided the quickest and surest way of breaking free of that constricting situation. That they didn’t think about what would happen afterward was a tragic act of negligence.

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Filed under Japan, military, nationalism, Pacific, Southeast Asia, U.S., war

by Joel | 30 September 2026 · 6:21 am

Melanesian Obsidian in Micronesia

From Waka Kuaka | The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 131, no. 4 (2022):

OBSIDIAN POINT DISCOVERED ON KAPINGAMARANGI ATOLL, MICRONESIA:
IMPLICATIONS FOR POST-SETTLEMENT REGIONAL INTERACTIONS

TAKUYA NAGAOKA. Pasifika Renaissance
PETER J. SHEPPARD, Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland
CALLAN ROSS-SHEPPARD, McGill University
NINA KONONENKO, University of Sydney, Australian Museum

ABSTRACT: An obsidian point was discovered by chance by local people on Kapingamarangi Atoll, a Polynesian Outlier in Micronesia. In addition to use-wear and residue analysis to identify its use, pXRF analysis conducted on it demonstrated that it was brought from the Admiralty Islands in Papua New Guinea over about 900 km. The information on other Admiralty obsidian artefacts found in western Oceania and other associated phenomena suggest that those artefacts were brought from the source through an interaction network between Micronesia and Melanesia during the first half of the second millennium AD. They had significant social value as prestige goods in the peripheral areas of the Admiralty obsidian circulation, serving as chiefly heirlooms and grave goods. In addition to skilful Caroline Islands seafarers, Polynesian Outlier populations had an important role in the interregional interactions during this dynamic period in the western Pacific, which was possibly activated by Polynesian intrusion into the region related to a larger Polynesian expansion into eastern Polynesia circa AD 1000. Further, we argue that the Saudeleur dynasty of Pohnpei, which achieved the development of a famous megalithic politico-religious centre, Nan Madol, was influential in the interaction sphere during its height in AD 1000–1500. Thus, by using archaeological, linguistic, historical, ethnological, oral traditional and DNA data, the interdisciplinary analysis of this rare obsidian artefact has deepened our understanding of post-settlement interaction in the region.

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by Joel | 6 September 2026 · 5:53 am

First European Views of the Marianas

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle p. 242:

The first Spaniards reaching the remote Marianas islands noted how tall and fit they were, and recent examination of remains suggests they had a life expectancy of 44 years, much higher than in Europe at the time. The islands had been settled some 3,000 earlier, from either Luzon or Sulawesi, and had typical Austronesian characteristics such as a matrilineal system, weaving skills and megaliths known as latte stones, and a language, Chamorro, roughly comprehensible to Ferdinand Magellan’s Malay interpreter. Magellan (in Portuguese ‘Fernão Magalhães’, in Spanish ‘Fernando Magallanes’) was so impressed with their sailing skills that he called them the ‘Islas de Velas Latinas’ (‘Isles of the Lateen Sails’) after their small but remarkably agile sailing craft. The late sixteenth century Spanish document known as the Boxer Codex noted that their lateen sails were made of waxen palm leaves of many colours and designs. The boats could sail very fast whatever the wind strength and direction. The people were described as ‘thickset with large and stout limbs […] larger than we are’. They had a ‘pleasant appearance’ apart from filed teeth and widespread yaws – a disfiguring but not fatal skin disease common in the tropics. However, less appreciative Spaniards called them the ‘Islas Ladrones’ (‘Robber Islands’) on account of their sense of communal possession, a name which lingered long after they were renamed Marianas in 1668 after Mariana, widow of Spain’s King Philip IV. They are now divided as Guam, the largest, which is an unincorporated US territory, and the Northern Marianas, a US-dependent Commonwealth.

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Filed under labor, language, Micronesia, migration, Philippines, Portugal, Southeast Asia, Spain, U.S.

by Joel | 23 August 2026 · 7:45 am

Peopling Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Even at the lowest sea levels of the last ice age, there was deep water between Bali on the edge of the Sunda Shelf [SE Asia] and the Sahul Shelf [Australia, New Guinea]. But the distances were small enough for humans – though not for many animal species – to cross. It was during the last great glaciations that modern humans reached Australia, most likely arriving via Wallacea [between Borneo & New Guinea]. New Guinea was reached about the same time and became, around ten thousand years ago, probably the first place on earth – long before Egypt or Mesopotamia – where settled agriculture was practised.

… The sea rise also created a genetic and cultural rift. By modern times there was a clear racial divide between the Malay-Polynesians, speaking Austronesian languages, and Papuan-Melanesian physical types and cultures. Despite their remarkable east to west dispersal, the former left little trace in lands that were relics of the Sahul Shelf other than in the Bismarck Archipelago. However, some Melanesians remained further west. Findings from Niah cave in Sarawak dated to about 40,000 years ago and at Tabon on Palawan dated to 25,000 years ago have genetic characteristics similar to ancient Australians and Melanesians. So it is likely that the first Homo Sapiens in the region were of the same stock as the Australo-Melanesians who settled the forests and highland valleys of New Guinea and the bush country and great deserts of Australia. The Tabon caves were inhabited from around 30,000 BP, but while they now overlook the sea they were once on a hillside far from the shore. Thus far, no similar finds have been made on other islands, which may suggest that Tabon man walked there and that early man in that region had yet to gain sufficient skills to cross from Palawan to Mindanao or the Visayas.

The deep water gaps between Wallacea and the Sahul and Sunda landmasses had a huge impact on fauna and flora. Until later introduced by humans, large placental mammals never crossed that divide from Sundaland to Wallacea nor did large marsupials move in the other direction. Wallacea had its own separate but rather limited indigenous fauna and flora due to its weak links to the great landmasses and the distance in time since it had drifted from Gondwanaland [continental Southern Hemisphere].

The ending of the last ice age must have been a catastrophe for many of the people of Sundaland, the relatively flat land between what is now the Asian mainland and the coasts of Sumatra, Java and Borneo. While global warming enabled areas such as northern Europe to become habitable, in Asia it destroyed large numbers of human settlements in a region which previously should have been very conducive to habitation. By the same token, the creation of many islands and a huge expansion of coastlines produced the environment for the world of the Nusantarians, living on and by the sea, developing sailing craft and navigational prowess and building the coastal exchange networks which eventually evolved into ocean-spanning movements. They were behind the expansion of human settlement and of trade around half the globe. The same people, originating from Nusantaria, settled almost every island between Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Madagascar, between Taiwan and New Zealand.

Today, the majority of people from Nusantaria are defined as ‘Austronesians’ – a Greek-derived word meaning ‘southern islands’ but now applied to a language group. Austronesian is in the first instance a linguistic marker though also with shared genetic and cultural characteristics. As a language group it was the world’s most widely dispersed until Europeans settled the Americas 500 years ago. Austronesian expansion across the Pacific and Indian oceans was enabled primarily by mastery of the sea and driven forward by the confines of their many, mostly rugged, islands.

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by Joel | 29 July 2026 · 6:16 am

Forster’s About the Breadfruit

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 276-278, 282-283:

‘I would be far more useful to the world if I were to embark on another great voyage,’ he told a friend in November 1783, a few months after leaving the Rosicrucians. Weren’t there enough people who could sort, classify and regurgitate what had already been discovered? But if he couldn’t travel to distant continents and islands, he could explore them with his mind and imagination—and in Kassel in early 1784 he published his groundbreaking About the Breadfruit. In what was ostensibly a botanical treatise, he illustrated how the tendrils of botany reached into culture, ethnography, history, linguistics and human migration. A brilliant and original piece of scholarship, About the Breadfruit reveals George’s visionary thinking, the work of a man way ahead of his time.

George had first encountered the breadfruit during the Resolution voyage.* It was a tropical fruit which grew on large trees on many of the South Pacific islands they had visited. He had enjoyed the dishes made with the abundant breadfruit—cooked on hot stones or fermented into a dough which was baked like bread—but he had also noticed that they had been seedless. With no seeds, the breadfruit trees on Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna and Malakula, George explained in his essay, could only be propagated by cuttings from suckers that grow off the tree’s roots. During the many months they had spent in the region, George had not seen a single wild breadfruit tree—all of them had been planted by humans.

That made him wonder where breadfruit trees originated and how they had arrived on the islands. Searching Göttingen’s vast library, George had then discovered several botanical volumes which contained descriptions of wild specimens with seeds and small fruits with little flesh from Indonesia and the Philippines. If Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna and Malakula had no indigenous breadfruit trees with seeds, the only explanation was that they must have been exported from Southeast Asia, travelling thousands of miles across the ocean to the South Pacific islands. For George this proved two things. Firstly, the sophistication of the islanders’ agricultural methods—as there was apparently no seedless variety in Southeast Asia, they must have bred and transformed the originally small fruit into the large nourishing crop he had tasted. Just as cereals and fruits had been domesticated through selective breeding in Europe, so the South Pacific islanders had used cuttings from trees with larger fruits to facilitate the slow changes over the centuries—‘bit by bit’.

His second conclusion was even more striking, for the history and movement of the breadfruit enabled George to develop a stunning understanding of Polynesian migration. The breadfruit’s journey, and its cultivation from a small fruit with spiky skin, seeds and little flesh, to the larger seedless variety found in Tahiti, Tanna and the other islands, was proof that the Polynesians had migrated east from Southeast Asia across the Pacific—a theory confirmed more than 200 years later by DNA and archaeological studies. As people had boarded their canoes to travel to distant islands, they had packed their most valuable crops and animals. ‘The breadfruit tree,’ George wrote, ‘could only have been brought eastwards by humans.’

About the Breadfruit also illustrates how differently George thought from other scientists and explorers of his day. During the Endeavour voyage Joseph Banks had also taken note of breadfruit trees but his interest was economic. Struck by the ease of cultivation and rich harvests—‘Bread fruit is procurd with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree,’ he had written in his journal during the Endeavour’s stay in Tahiti—Banks lobbied both George III and Parliament to send an expedition to the South Pacific to transfer breadfruit tree seedlings from Tahiti to the West Indies in order to feed the slaves on British sugar plantations. Where Banks saw a nutritious high-yielding food plant that could fuel the engine of the British Empire, George Forster saw evidence of Polynesian migration.

…

The differences George observed in the people of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, compared to those on more easterly islands, was the result of intermingling between the descendants of the first migration wave and later Polynesian settlers. George could have not known the complex details of these migration patterns, but more than two centuries ago he worked out the broad outlines by studying the diaspora of Polynesian languages and the history of the breadfruit tree. He could only guess their reasons—‘oppression by their own people, or foreign conquerors, or superstitious legends, or some other cause’—but he was convinced that these great ancient navigators and their families had set out on purpose to find new islands to colonize and had not drifted there by accident. ‘I cast a glance at a map of that part of the world,’ he wrote in About the Breadfruit, ‘I survey the vast Pacific Ocean, and find that the most distant, solitary, and scattered islands are not only inhabited by people, but occupied by the very same people… I confess, I cannot convince myself that a storm, or a series of similar coincidences, is sufficient to satisfactorily explain this widespread dispersion of one and the same people across such a vast ocean from New Zealand to Easter Island.’

The people of the South Pacific, George realized, were connected rather than separated by the ocean. Where others saw tiny islands spread across the vastness of the Pacific, he brought them together with the threads of migrations. Building on what he had seen as a young man, George had matured into a bold and original thinker. It would take more than two hundred years for the world to catch up with him.

As the first to publish the botanical description of the breadfruit from the South Pacific islands shortly after their return in 1775, George and Reinhold had their name attached to it for posterity—Artocarpus communis J.R. & G. Forst.

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by Joel | 24 July 2026 · 5:57 am

Forster’s Impressions of Easter Island

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 163-165:

Perplexed by the huge stone statues they found here—human figures with extremely large heads and no legs, several metres high—George suspected that they were held in veneration. They asked the islanders ‘and from what we could understand, we concluded that they were monuments erected to the memory of some of their areekees, or kings’*—ariki was the Polynesian word for chief (or ari‘i in Tahitian). Usually able to adjust his viewpoint, these statues seemed just too baffling to George to appreciate. ‘The workmanship of this figure was rude,’ he wrote, ‘a European artist would have been ashamed of them.’ Where he had thought Tongan woodcarvers the equals of England’s best craftsmen, these statues showed ‘the arts in their infancy’.

George noted that the islanders here looked similar to the Tahitians except for their very elongated and pierced earlobes which almost reached their shoulders—‘in order to bring it to this size, they wore a leaf of a sugar cane, which is very elastic, rolled up in it like a scroll; by which means it was always on the stretch.’ They also had barkcloth, favoured red as a colour, had tattoos, and prepared their food not unlike those islanders the Resolution crew had met across the South Pacific islands. Their vocabulary revealed a common root with Māori and Tahitian words, he realized, and Hitihiti was delighted to be able to converse with them. Despite being thousands of miles away from New Zealand and Tahiti, George was certain that the islanders had ‘one common origin’.

Their faces were painted brown with streaks of white shell lime and some men wore large bushy caps made of brown gull feathers—almost ‘as large as the full bottomed wigs of European lawyers’. Some were dressed in tattered blue jackets and European hats, which they had traded with the Spanish explorers who had stopped here four years previously—‘indubitable testimonies of the visit which the Spaniards had made to this island’. Headdresses were regarded as sacred in Polynesia and the islanders snatched Hitihiti’s black cap as well as Hodges’ hat while he was sketching the statues. On another occasion, an islander grabbed Reinhold’s plant bag, and one of the marines shot and wounded him. Though Reinhold mentioned the incident briefly in his journal, George wrote about the moral implications—it was tragic ‘that Europeans too often assume the power of inflicting punishments on people who are utterly unacquainted with their laws’.

Trading proved difficult. Not only had the marine injured a man but the islanders had few provisions to spare. When the crew tried to bargain, the islanders tricked them by selling baskets of potatoes in which the bottom layers had been filled with stones. The islanders had no interest in beads or nails, but were keen on coconut shells and Tahitian barkcloth. Hitihiti once again advised the men to buy red feathers to barter with when they returned to Tahiti and purchased himself as many feather caps as he could find. The Resolution remained on Easter Island only three days because there was not enough food for them to stay any longer. Hitihiti added another stick to his journal bundle and ‘remembered Easter Island with this observation, tàta maïtaï, whennùa èeno, that the people were good, but the island very bad’.

* Today it is believed that the statues were carved between AD 1250 and 1500 as representations of ancestors and sacred spirits. Historians and archaeologists have speculated that the introduction of Polynesian rats and deforestation led to conflict, war, starvation and the societal collapse on Rapa Nui.

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by Joel | 18 May 2026 · 12:39 am

Bering Strait Mission Impossible, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 141-143:

Even while the Jeannette steamed north toward the Bering Strait, another world-renowned vessel was steaming south out of it, and down the North Pacific coast of Russia. It was the Vega, Adolf Nordenskiöld’s exploring ship. The world didn’t know it yet, but the Finnish-Swedish scientist and explorer had emerged, a month earlier, from his winter quarters in northeast Siberia and was well on his way to Japan, where he would announce his considerable accomplishment: Nordenskiöld had become the first navigator to make a complete Northeast Passage—that is, a journey across the top of the entire continent of Eurasia. Hugging the land for the most part, the Vega had successfully worked its way along the eight-thousand-mile coastline of the Russian Arctic.

De Long had guessed from the start that Nordenskiöld was safe—that, indeed, he had never really been in any danger. The Scandinavian didn’t need to be “found,” any more than Livingstone had needed to be hunted down in Africa. But Bennett had wanted his “De Long meets Nordenskiöld” moment, and that was the end of it.

But the timing of Nordenskiöld’s emergence from the ice was particularly bad for De Long. He had missed Nordenskiöld by only a week. By the time De Long approached Alaskan waters, the Vega was making for the Kuril Islands of Japan. As one Arctic historian put it, “Somewhere in the fog-wreathed Bering Sea between the Aleutian Islands and Norton Sound, the USS Jeannette and the ship she was supposed to look for passed each other on opposite courses.”

Meanwhile, another bit of rotten luck was brewing in Washington. Earlier in the summer, a schooner commissioned by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey had made its way out of the Arctic after an ambitious multiyear study of the North Pacific and the Bering Sea. The hydrographers and meteorologists hired by the geodetic survey had been conducting painstaking analyses of oceanic currents, depths, salinities, temperatures, and prevailing wind patterns. Specifically, the survey was interested in learning about the Kuro Siwo—the Black Current of Japan. Much of the data had yet to be analyzed, but already clear patterns were starting to emerge.

The Kuro Siwo, the findings suggested, was not nearly as strong or as warm or as reliable as the Atlantic’s Gulf Stream. As it swept up from the coast of Japan and out into the open ocean, the Kuro Siwo frayed into numerous subsidiary currents, and its power steadily waned. If anything, the prevailing tendency at the Bering Strait was that of cold-water currents flowing south.

The survey’s final report would be written by an eminent Harvard-trained naturalist, William Healey Dall. Dall was a scientist of wide-ranging interests—he had published papers in the fields of ornithology, anthropology, oceanography, and paleontology and had conducted numerous meteorology studies for the Smithsonian Institution. Dall had traveled extensively in Alaska, and his name would become well known throughout the region.

Dall’s report on the Black Current was unequivocal. “The Kuro Siwo sends no recognizable branch northward, between the Aleutians and Kamchatka,” he wrote. “No warm current from Bering Sea enters Bering Strait. The strait is incapable of carrying a current of warm water of sufficient magnitude to have any marked effect on the condition of the Polar Basin just north of it. Nothing in our knowledge of them offers any hope of an easier passage toward the Pole, or, in general, northward through their agency. Nothing yet revealed in the investigation of the subject in the least tends to support the widely spread but unphilosophical notion, that in any part of the Polar Sea, we may look for large areas free from ice.”

By the time these devastating findings were released, De Long had sailed from San Francisco, and thus he never saw them. They called into question nearly all the scientific theories on which the Jeannette expedition was based—theories that had been endlessly reaffirmed in the popular imagination. (After the Jeannette set sail, the Herald had declared that it was “undebatable that a warm current of water from the Pacific flows into the Arctic Ocean at Bering Strait.”) But as the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey results were showing, there was no warm current tunneling under the ice cap. There was no thermometric gateway to the pole. And, likely, there was no Open Polar Sea. The theories of Silas Bent, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and the late August Petermann were resoundingly wrong.

While the Jeannette wallowed ever northward, scientists and bureaucrats in Washington slowly digested the new data. Everything they learned seemed to suggest that De Long’s voyage, before it had even begun in earnest, was a fool’s errand.

Another scientist who would closely study the survey data was a respected physician and chemist named Thomas Antisell. Dr. Antisell, in an address before the American Geographical Society in New York, was ruthless in his conclusion. The portal De Long was aiming for offered “no real gate of entrance into the Arctic Ocean,” he said. “The North Pacific Ocean has, practically speaking, no northern outlet; Bering Straits is but a cul de sac.”

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by Joel | 1 February 2026 · 9:46 am

Bengal Famine, 1943

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 112-114:

Most Bengalis lived an extremely precarious existence. Some ten million were utterly dependent on agriculture, but of these more than half held less than 2 acres of land and many none at all. There was charity and relief but no social welfare; they had to fend for themselves. Through the first half of 1943 food prices had increased dramatically. … This was due in part to the shortages in Bengal but also to increased demand for the feeding of troops in India, as well as demand from around the world. It was artisans who suffered first, because as poverty increased so the money available for goods dried up. Then the shortages hit the wider Bengali population, many of whom left the country for the cities. By the time Tom Grounds was on leave in Calcutta, the city was bursting with the influx of impoverished families searching for food.

Yet while the cost of food was certainly a factor, the biggest problem now facing the authorities was how to get food to Bengal and urgently. The state had already been an importer of food for over a decade and most of it had come from Burma, now closed to India. The loss of Burma had been disastrous for Bengal’s fragile economy and the subsequent cyclone had made it catastrophic. Where else could it be sourced? North America and South America were the obvious places, but the amount needed was enormous and would have required a major diversion of shipping at a time when the demands on such seaborne transport had never been greater.

That August, Churchill was not prepared suddenly to release shipping to take food to Bengal; however draconian that may seem, far away in Britain the problems of the Bengalis seemed less pressing than the urgent need to maintain supplies at a crucial moment in the war. Britain and America were fighting in Sicily – an island that could be supplied effectively only by ship; they were about to invade mainland Italy, which also required an amphibious operation and supply; they were preparing for the invasion of north-west Europe; and they were fighting the Japanese throughout the Pacific. Was Churchill really expected to interrupt the war effort, and current operations, with millions of lives at stake in theatres of war around the world? Who was to say what effect such a diversion of shipping would have on the eventual length of the war, with its implications for further loss of life? In any case, ships could not be diverted from the far side of the Atlantic, for example, at the drop of a hat. Churchill was not to blame.

Not all India was facing famine – only Bengal and the north-east. One problem was that in 1935 the government had ceded considerable central power to the provinces, where the regional governments were all democratically elected. The previous year, 1942, these had all agreed to introduce trade barriers between one another. The central government of India now announced there should be free trade in grain, but plans to send relief to Bengal had been obstructed by local government officers, police and other officials who feared their own provinces risked suffering a similar fate to that of Bengal. Wavell, in one of his first acts as Viceroy-Designate, had forced the issue by threatening legal and even military action, and by August substantial amounts of grain had finally begun to arrive in Bengal. It was, however, too little too late to bring a swift end to the humanitarian disaster rising horrifically throughout the region. Relief kitchens hastily set up in Calcutta and elsewhere were simply not enough. With malnutrition came disease; those not dying of starvation were just as likely to succumb to typhus, malaria or cholera, and there were not enough hospitals or medical care to cope.

The famine had certainly been exacerbated by the war and by the fact that the Indian government had prioritized combatting the Japanese above all other matters. Yet the authorities, although slow to react, were certainly not immune to the horrors unfolding and, of course, while the tragedy of human suffering was truly appalling, the famine was yet another massive problem for the Allied command to overcome. It stretched already overstretched lines of supply, pushed the limited medical services to breaking point, affected food supplies to the troops, further sapped the morale of those who witnessed the starving, dying and dead throughout Bengal, and damaged the reputation of the British even more, and all at a time when there was a new Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief.

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Filed under Bangladesh, Britain, Burma, disease, food, Italy, Japan, migration, military, Pacific, U.S., war

by Joel | 16 January 2026 · 10:53 am

Last October, Jim Geselbracht posted on his Palauan Music blog an obituary titled “Sorry, I Really Must Go” with his memories and also a long list of musical selections to listen to from the life of a very productive Palauan singer, composer, and educator, who began composing when Japanese enka and evocative Japanese phrases permeated many Palauan songs. Some of the recordings are very faint, pieced together from old tapes, but well worth a careful listen.

This week we lost another insightful voice in Palauan music: Mengesebuuch Yoichi K. Rengiil passed away at the age of 84 in Guam. Yoichi, both a singer and composer, was born in 1941 and grew up in Ngeremlengui. In the early 1950s, he moved to Koror to attend the Palau Intermediate School and then left for Guam in 1956 to attend high school and start college. He returned to Palau in 1963 and taught social studies at the Palau High School. In the 1960s, he teamed up with Aichi Ngirchokebai, Hidebo Sugiyama and Julie Tatengelel to perform at Aichi’s theater in Koror and at village bais on Babeldaob. He left Palau again in 1967 to complete his college education at the University of Guam and then obtained a Masters in Education Administration at UH Manoa in 1973. Yoichi was an active member of the Modekngei, serving as the Principal at the Belau Modekngei School in the 1970s. His professional resume is deep, and I will leave it to others to remember that part of his life, but in this post I would like to acknowledge his contribution to Palauan music.

Yoichi and I met regularly via Zoom over the past five years to discuss Palauan music, language and stories and he was an important mentor to me in understanding the meaning behind the rich musical legacy of Palauan music. From our discussions, I learned of seven songs that he composed between 1963 and 1987:

Did er a Sechou, 1963 or 64

Oh! Somebody Me Keleng Saingo, 1968

Sayonara, But I Love You, 1968 or 69

Chellelengem ma Klungiolem, 1969 or 70

Decheruk er a Capitol Hill, late 1960s (co-wrote with John Skebong)

Merat el Kerrekar, 1970

Ng Di Kmedu e ng mo Ngemeded, 1986 or 87

The first song Yoichi ever composed has become a classic: Did er a Sechou. Named for the bridge in the jetty at Ngeremlengui, the song was not autobiographical, as many people think, but rather Yoichi telling the story of a man from Ngeremlengui who was heartbroken over the end of his relationship with his wife and children. The first recording of this song is from the Ngerel Belau Radio tapes, recorded sometime between 1963 and 1967, with Yoichi singing and backed by the VOP (Voice of Palau) band consisting of Hidebo Sugiyama on mandolin and Aichi Ngirchokebai on guitar.