The Pacific’s long swells carried the flotsam of frustrated Western colonial ambitions. The scattered failures of the English, French, Dutch, and Germans were announced by the mélange of place-names woven into the map, from New Britain, Hollandia, and Bougainville to San Cristobál, Choiseul, and the Bismarcks, and by the lack of civilization, or infrastructure. America’s legacy in the South Pacific was unwritten, but those who would begin to write it, for better or worse, were well on their way.
