Fiji

Londoners flying to Fiji can go either way.  The International Date Line bisects the sovereign nation of Fiji, or would if they hadn’t swung it out to the East a bit to keep all the islands in the same time zone.  When that nice British couple returns home they might just as well make it a circumnavigation.  They are already halfway around.  But their fanny-busting, leg-cramping, endless flights and interminable layovers are well rewarded.

Hawaii consists of eight principal islands, seven of them inhabited, plus a handful of offshore islets and cinder cones.  The Fijian navigational charts disclose 330 habitable islands plus scads and scads of tidal sandbars, rocks, and about one-third of the reefs in the Pacific Ocean.  A hundred and fifty million years ago volcanic activity splattered up masses and masses of conical protrusions.  Erosion seeded reefs.  Reefs formed lagoons.  Lagoons protected beaches flanked by palm trees.  Palmy beaches attracted cruise ships and flights from London.  Tom Hanks and his volleyball came here twenty years ago to make a movie.  The locals have renamed their set Castaway Island.  

If you scissored Iowa out of the Lower Forty Eight and transported it to the southern Pacific Ocean, you could lower it down to cover the nation of Fiji like a down comforter on a bed.  Substitute salt water for corn fields and islands for every city and town and hamlet, and there you have Fiji . . . mostly ocean but a whole passel of islands.  The biggest one where Suva the capitol is takes a day to drive around.  Ninety miles top to bottom, sixty miles across.  The other big island is almost as big.  Everything else measures somewhere between modest and teeny.  Fiji is so big and so remote that the Fijian language has evolved locally into fourteen dialects unintelligible to the other thirteen.  No problem.  They all speak English, and with a proper accent because they were an English colony until 1970.

The olden Fijians benefitted from their isolation and also from their fierce reputation; the next-door-neighbor Tongans feared them as the most bellicose warriors of the Pacific, with skull-busting ironwood clubs and testy feelings about their territory.  Better if they killed you.  If you survived they ate your body parts while you watched.  So the Tongans and Micronesians and Samoans steered clear, as did Abel Tasman, Captain Cook, and William Bligh, all of whom sailed past without risking an encounter.

The navigational chops of those early Dutch and English adventurers still astound.  But they don’t astound as much as the much earlier unnamed Pacific voyagers who hop-scotched through this vastness of saltwater without the benefit of sextant or chronometer or Pole Star.  Just how in heck did those ancients navigate their double-hulled canoes to discover tiny dots in that vastness?  Open your coffee table atlas to the Pacific Ocean.  Hawaii.  Tonga.  Easter Island.  Pitcairn Island.  Samoa.  Fiji.  Puny dots every one of them.  But, and here’s the thing, puny dots with enormous signatures.

The wind blows across the face of the sea and creates little riffles, every one of them marching in the same direction.  When the wind is strong enough or the reach is long enough, those riffles consolidate into swells that coast along in placid progression until a chunk of land intrudes.  Then you get the Banzai Pipeline or Jaws or Mavericks where daredevils do impossible things on surfboards.  When those swells smack into an island, they rebound away in concentric rings, not unlike the rings you make by tossing a pebble into a still pond.  The ancient mariners under their tapa-cloth sails could read those rebounding traces through the wind-driven surface chop of the sea.  That way to land.

They didn’t have to see the next Island, only it’s leagues-wide echo wave signature.  Then they watched the sky.  Even I can distinguish the cloud billow fluffed up by the collision of damp air with an island from the higher atmospheric strata.

But, still . . .

Decades ago when I lived on Oahu and Kauai, I wondered why so many of the Polynesian people  are so large.  Someone offered an explanation.  Among their sea-going island-discovering ancestors, only the big ones survived.