Strangers in the South Seas: The idea of the Pacific in western thought
University of Hawai'i Press, $58.95 pb, 447 pp
Terrible longings
At the close of the twentieth century, in the tradition of countless Westerners before him, British travel writer Julian Evans travelled around the Pacific. At the Kwajalein atoll in the independent republic of the Marshall Islands, he found the resident US missile testing base to be efficient, clean and ‘tidy, quiet, ordinary: suburban trailer-park America at its best’. No Marshallese lived at Kwajalein, but 10,000 of them huddled on the small neighbouring island of Ebeye, whence they commuted to provide labour for the base. At Ebeye, nothing was ‘real nice’, as Evans described:
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