MAKATEA’S FATE WAS SET in stone in 1896, a few years after France annexed the island and added it to its growing Pacific empire. That was the year when Sousa wrote “The Stars and Stripes Forever” for a country that had just committed to separate-but-equal. The year that Daimler built the first gas truck, Röntgen snapped the first X-ray, Puccini premiered La bohème, and the soon-to-be Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius published a paper showing how rising carbon dioxide levels would soon cook the planet’s atmosphere.
