OUR OCEAN ENVIRONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19328, 15 May 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

OUR OCEAN ENVIRONS.

YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW. BY MATANGA. Our Governor-General is cruising in the Pacific, getting acquainted with our island dependencies. He will have sight seeing in plenty, but all who know the serious beat of his mind are aware that, it will lie daily full of memories and wonderings awakened by this contact with vast ocean spaces and verdant isles and profoundly interesting peoples. For much history has been made in these waters, and there is large elbow-room for prophecy. The Pacific! Was ever name common in geography so full of human concern as this ? Four hundred years ago a Portuguese navigator wrote it across the, chart in token of the welcome calm he met upon 'the waters westward of the Horn: and now it is engraved deep m the heart of the world, a name of solemn portents and hopes. Most of us met it first on the broad page of some atlas, a great expanse of blue dotted with a south-western cluster of names mostly underlined in ml. Almost like a lake it looked, with its sweeping shore stretching from the Horn right tip to the Arctic Circle, and then running down past China to Singapore—a shore unbroken save where Magellan found first his gateway, and man's ingenuity has cut the Panama Canal, and nature's old bridge from America to Asia was broken down when earth caught a chill. Flung out into the blue below Singapore were the East Indies and New Guinea, with Australia standing guard behind and New Zealand's twin sentinels set far out upon the right. Spreading north and east from that shelter, like playful children stealing out before dawn to discover the track of the rising sun, were the thousand islands decked with red and their few companions unadorned with such gay favours. To the south, almost completing the circle of this vast ocean-shore, the great white land of the Antarctic lay, where (look once went sailing to find a storied southern continent. The Changing Scene. There is a notion that a great whirling flake, still quivering and half-molten, went flying off from this side of the earth to make the moon. That may have been: the bed of this vast ocean could well have spared enough to form our mirror of the sun. Even yet, in the story of the man in the moon, that notion has an echo, and twice a day the waters that fill the vast depths left behind own openly a wish to follow. But, whatever the origin of the moop or of the fabled man in it, human interest has gone cold about them both ; while the fervour the Pacific attracts waxes more and more. To its island fastnesses that kept their footing on the deep oceanfloor came venturesome men, brownskinned and brawny, bringing with them thoughts and things shared in the world's more settled dwellingplaces. Here, the world forgetting, by the world forgot, they made them homes and hunting grounds, basking awhile in the sunshine and making forays across the vacant, sparkling waters, until white men from Europe found them in their distant pleasance. Keats, seeking a simile for his youthful joy at finding Homer, lighted upon that fateful happening: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout C'ortez when with eafde eyes He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien. Keats was wrong, however, about Cortez. It was not the conqueror of Mexico and the last Montezuma, but Balboa, following rumour's whisper of a great western ocean, ■who had that discoverer's rapt vision. Columbus, seeking a new ocean highway to far Cathay, found America blocking his path and turned back; Balboa, running away from his creditors in San Domingo, made Darien famous and the Pacific known. Soon, from east and west, European navigators came, and the Pacific's new era began. For fable, history: for vacant spaces, trade, routes; for idle, easy, carefree dallying with the hours, an eager enterprise of ownership and exploitation. Upon the dim stage of yesterday the curtain fell, to be raised again with incredible swiftness on a moving drama full of tense action. National Strivings. Nation vies with nation for foothold. Germany intrigues in the Isthmus where Dp Lesseps and the French Canal Company failed to make a way, and seeks to win strategic positions by trading companies, until the inevitable end comes iu the war the Prussian spirit precipitated and its " world-dominion " is sent packing. French penal colonies are established and the tricolour waves over ambitions leading to misrule. The Dutch establish themselves diligently in the East Indies, and move on to Papua. Portuguese and Spaniards essay fitful conquests in the offing of the China. Sea. and fail because of decadence at. home. America, losing sight for a while of the Monroe Doctrine in the dazzling glitter of this Newest World, lays hands upon the Sandwich Islands and the Philippines and cuts a gateway from the Atlantic. .Japan possesses ' herself of Formosa, and sends colonies of her fast-increasing people to California. And all the while, through good and evil report, the f nion Jack that Cook bore here and there across the watery wilderness in the eighteenth centurv wins grace, and favour. Its blended crosses, set. in the hoist of the proud white ensign of the Royal Navy, become the dread and envy of marauding selfishness. f'nder " government by commodore. " the island peoples learn to distinguish real friends from crafty exploiters, and crave the protection ot British sovereignty.

Not that Britain's influence is always exercised wisely or without thought of national gain. She, too. has her lilame for moments when the Pacific is no better than the world's backyard, and would consign her criminal rubbish—not alwavs so ugly and noisome as it seems—to it's outer darkness. Hut. blood tells; the mingled strain of Viking and Roundhead and Covenanter is soon impatient of dominion without decency, and where its red mingles with the ocean blue upon the map the brown man finds the white man may be trusted. Pioneers of Peace.

That does not come all at once. 1 here are pathetic splashes of real martyr red suddenly flecking the blue. Cook and Williams and Patterson are sacrificed upon the new day's threshold and many another done to death in the misunderstandings of its dawn. Yet, nation for nation, the British come to sovereignty through service, and when at last, the Great War over and the, Round Table of Goodwill set, it. is British statesmen and commanders who sit. with easiest, consciences when the fate of the. Pacific is to be discussed and mandates given for the care of its hallgrown island-peoples. There are forms unseen at that, Hound Table. Their voices whisper corupellingly. Their hands shape the judgments. To the New Pacific they contribute most of all, although their names may never have mention. Who are they? White men whose family cradle was girt about with love of liberty and love of God for many generations in lands looked upon as old. When the history of the Pacific Pact is fully written, when the problems of tfie peace for this great herni'sphere are solved, it will not he William Bligh or Theodor Weber or Bully Hayes that will lie remembered best, but men of Christi;yi insight ajid sympathy, sometimes nil gentleness, sometimes " merciful and fierce " like Cromwell—men of whom William MacGregor and George Brown are shining examples. What they thrillingly have clone makes possible the Pacific of a brightening morrow. We are in the morning twilight of it. The old perils, the old horrors, the old misunderstandings are not all gone. International differences are not. solved. Some readjustments are inevitable. The present partitioning is tentative. Some day it must lie faced anew.