In Search of Australia and the South Pacific [antikvár]

6 INTRODUCTIONThe Scattered Cultures of the South SeasThe Pacific is an ocean of wonders and superlatives. It plunges to greater depths than any other ocean and it spouts the greatest number of active volcanoes. Its storms are the most violent, its calms the most breathless, and its distances the most enormous, for it covers nearly half of the globe. It is the original deep, formed around 4 billion years ago when the young earth had cooled sufficiently for the superheated atmosphere to release its steam in the original flood. Earth became a water planet with one great land mass, which around 250 million years ago began to break up, the Americas drifting apart from Africa and Europe to form the Atlantic, and, with fragments dispersing as Antarctica and Australia, to girdle what now became the Pacific.It was this Australian chunk of the primordial supercontinent which was to give violent birth to the myriad islands of the world's most romantic region. According to the theory of continental drift, the continents ride on separate plates of the earth's fractured crust, and are kept in slow, constant motion by the seething, semi-molten interior. The oceans are similarly borne upon interlocking plates; in the case of the Pacific, four of them, wedged between the heavier continental plates of Eurasia and the Americas. Australia, continuing on the same drift path that sent a companion chunk, India, slamming into Asia to thrust up the Himalayas, has piled into the main Pacific plate, with similarly shattering results. The consequence is a great arc of earthquake and volcanic activity, the Ring of Fire, that can be traced by clusters of islands, and deep-sea trenches, along the lines of fracture. There are 200,000 islands - 80 per cent of all the islands in the world - scattered across the impact zones.New Zealand and New Guinea both lie along the edges of colliding plates. New Zealand clinging to the brink of the Pacific plate and New Guinea on the leading edge of the Australian plate. To the north, the Philippines are located where a shard of Pacific plate is crunching into the Eurasian plate. It is a mighty process of creation and destruction that is relentless: when the island volcano of Krakatoa blew up in 1883, the explosion could be heard in parts of Australia, and the atmospheric impact was worid-wide and long-lasting. The human history of this geologically tumultuous region is likewise one of sudden impact and lingering after-effect.The first colonists were the coral: tiny creatures that built upon the work of fire and water, laying down a skein of reef and atoll that provided sanctuary for hundreds of varieties of exotic fish and a precarious foothold for coconut palms. Mankind took possession by a process of island-hopping from the Asian mainland that culminated in the epic voyages of the Polynesians, who reached New Zealand and the furthest islands in historic