pacific history Archives

Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

A few weeks ago José Salvador Alvarenga drifted onto a small island in the South Pacific Ocean in a worn-out, 24-foot long, fiberglass boat, wearing nothing but a tattered pair of underpants. With the aid of a Spanish interpreter, Alvarenga explained to surprised locals that he had been lost at sea for at least sixteen months after his fishing boat was pushed out to sea off the coast of Mexico. He said that he stayed alive by catching and eating raw fish, turtles, and birds.

Media outlets around the world have rushed to tell Alvarenga’s amazing story of survival, but from the beginning they have doubted the veracity of the fishermen’s version of events. Underlying the media’s skepticism is the belief that it is simply not possible for a human to survive for so long at sea without food and fresh water.

Jose Salvador Alvarenga, who spent 13 months on a remote Pacific island, after being rescued. (Image courtesy of Mashable)

One Fox News article asked, “Was it all a mirage?” The Sydney Morning Herald described Alvarenga’s story as “a tale of ocean survival that smells a bit fishy.” Searching for holes in Alvarenga’s story, a number of reports pointed out that Alvarenga was rather plump for someone who had been through such an ordeal (Doctors later confirmed that his paradoxically bloated appearance is consistent with a state of long term starvation).

Could Alvarenga really have drifted for 8000 miles from Mexico to the Ebon atoll in the Marshall Islands? If we look into the history of the great Pacific Ocean, we find several stories of survival that suggest Alvarenga is telling the truth.

In his famous history of The Manila Galleon, William Lytle Schurz talked about the survivors of one of these large Spanish treasure ships that was lost crossing the Pacific from Mexico in 1693. Two men made it all the way to the Philippines in conditions similar to what Alvarenga endured (thanks to Steph Mawson for this reference). The Galleon‘s

fate was eventually learned from two men picked up long after near the town of Binangonan de Lampon. In the boat in which they had managed to reach the Philippines was the corpse of a dead companion. One of the two survivors had gone stark mad from his sufferings. Before the burning galleon had foundered six men put off from her side in an open boat and headed westward. After three weeks their food gave out and two of the starving men slid over the gunwales into the sea. Those who were left then ate their jackboots and their belts to stave of starvation. At last it was decided to draw lots as to which of the four should be eaten by the rest. One of the three preferred to starve rather than to turn cannibal. It was only the last two who survived these horrible experiences, one without his reason, the other broken by his sufferings and long under the shadow of the Church for having partaken of human flesh.

Maris Pacifici by Abraham Ortelius (1589), the first printed map of the Pacific and the Americas. (Image courtesy of Helmink Antique Maps)

Early 17th century map of the Pacific. (Image courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

Perhaps the most famous Pacific castaway is the British Naval Captain William Bligh. In 1789, Bligh and eighteen of his men were forced to disembark from Bligh’s ship The Bounty and climb into a 25-foot long launch boat; a tiny vessel intended for carrying people and supplies from ship to shore. The mutineers surely believed that their deposed Captain and his supporters faced a certain death. Yet over the next forty-seven days, Bligh used a quadrant and a pocket watch to navigate the very crowded launch from near Tonga to the Dutch settlement at West Timor, a 4350 mile journey.

Amazingly, only one man died on this voyage. Greg Denning’s history of the mutiny Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty wrote that:

“From [Bligh’s] careful record of every item consumed … the total food each man had in forty-eight days was this: seven pounds bread, one pound salt pork, one pint rum, five ounces wine, two and one-quarter coconuts, one banana, one pint coconut milk, one and one-quarter raw seabirds, four ounces fish … A sailor’s ordinary food allowance has been calculated at about 4,450 calories a day. On the figures I have given here a nutritionist estimates that the launch people were reduced to 345 calories a day. This would mean a possible daily energy deficit of 4,105 calories and a total weight loss of 56 pounds.

In 1947, the intrepid Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdhal and five other men crossed the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia in a small, balsa-wood raft named “Kon Tiki” that Heyerdhal built with his own hands. The boat was a replica of a pre-Inca raft, and the purpose of this dangerous exhibition was to prove Heyerdhal’s theory that it was the South Americans who first discovered and populated Polynesia thousands of years ago using similar vessels.

Kon-Tiki raft, circa 1947 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

800px-Expedition_Kon-Tiki_1947._Across_the_Pacific._(8765728430)

A Kon-Tiki expedition across the Pacific, 1947 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Although the Kon Tiki’s voyage doesn’t exactly prove Heyerdhal’s origins theory, (which for most scholars doesn’t hold water), the fact that six men completed a 101-day long, 4300-mile voyage on a 40 square-foot raft was at the time, and continues to be, a pretty exciting feat. The raft didn’t have oars and couldn’t really be steered in any direction. Although the Kon Tiki was equipped with US army supplied food, the crew reported a rich supply of fish (and sharks!) in the warm-water currents that carried them to Polynesia. If you are interested in Heyerdhal’s adventure, the story of the Kon Tiki is told in Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s 2012 film, which is currently available on Netflix.

After reading this piece, you might agree that Alvarenga deserves an apology from the news outlets around the world who rushed to accuse the fisherman of fabricating his story. We historians of the Pacific world know that the history of this largest ocean is punctuated by amazing stories of survival that should be celebrated.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

by Michael Stoff

The Pacific is in vogue. After years of attracting little but scholarly attention, the Pacific Theater of the Second World War has captured the popular imagination in a string of books, feature films and an Emmy-award winning television series, aptly called “The Pacific” and written in part by University of Texas and Plan II graduate Robert Schenkkan. Now comes best-selling author Laura Hillenbrand with a new best seller, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.

Unbroken tells the story of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini’s ordeal as a Japanese prisoner of war. Captured in 1943 when his B-24, The Green Hornet, crashed in the South Pacific, Zamperini spent a then-record 47 days on a battered rubber raft in storm-tossed, shark-infested waters with two comrades, only to be plucked from the edge of extinction by a Japanese patrol boat and sent to the infamous Omori POW camp on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. Starved, beaten, and denied medical attention, Zamperini became the target of a sadistic guard nicknamed “The Bird.” The Bird was no tropical nestling but a vulture feeding off the pain of his helpless captives.

Miraculously, Zamperini survived. After months of recuperation, he returned to the embrace of his Italian-American family, married a debutante and, like many veterans, kept his story to himself. He devoted his days to regaining the athletic form that once made him a running prodigy but failed to win it back and spiraled into a well of depression and alcoholism. The saving grace of his faith, ignited by a fledgling evangelist named Billy Graham, sent him on a mission to spread the good news of the Christian Gospel and save others, among them young souls at risk of delinquency. That task suited Zamperini who had been something of a bad boy himself before the discipline of the track turned him from a would-be criminal into an Olympic competitor. Robust even in old age, draped in accolades, he rode skateboards, flew planes, carried an Olympic torch, and told of his ordeal in the Pacific to those in search of inspiration. In time, a reborn Zamperini returned to Japan and forgave his captors.

Hillenbrand has written a riveting tale of a terrible episode from a time when 132,000 Allied POWs, Americans but also British, Australian, Canadian and others, suffered unspeakable misery at the hands of the Japanese. More than one in four of them died. Their collective story has been told before, most notably in Gavan Daws’s Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs in World War II in the Pacific and Michael and Elizabeth Norman’s Tears of Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath. Instead, Hillenbrand gives us a single life depicted with verve and complexity.

In Hillenbrand’s deft hands, Louis Zamperini is all too human and so are some of his captors. The Japanese emerge not as a single type, cut only from the predictable cloth of the sadist Bird, but as men who behave in ways that complicate and at times contradict the cliché. To be sure, most are merciless, but a few are respectful and one even compassionate. Frequent digressions—on the development of the Norden bombsight, the Japanese code of Bushido, the psychology of prison guards, the fate of former Pacific POWs (who lost an average of 61 pounds and later died at a rate four times faster than other men their age)—put historical meat on Zamperini’s bones. The bulk of Hillenbrand’s prodigious research in the salient secondary sources and some key archival ones rests on hours of interviews with Zamperini and others. The outcome is a popular history with weight and mass.

What is missing for historians is the larger context of the story and the historiographical framework within which Zamperini’s experience unfolds. What does his story or the story of any Pacific POW mean beyond being a narrative of “survival, resilience, and redemption”? How much do Zamperini’s experiences reflect change and continuity over time for cultures and captives in other wars? For Japan in this war? For the United States? To answer those and other historically minded questions, readers can turn to the growing body of literature that is shifting our attention from the war in Europe to the war in Asia and the Pacific (listed below in the recommended reading). To criticize Hillenbrand for these omissions is to pick apart a book she did not intend to write. She chose to tell a different tale and does so masterfully. Historians might learn a thing or two about storytelling from reading it.

The Pacific is very much in vogue as what some have called “The Greatest Generation” passes from our midst, and Asia and the Pacific Rim grow in contemporary importance. Such a vogue serves as a welcome corrective to the Eurocentric view of the Second World War too often seen in the West. With the best-selling Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand brings a small but important part of the Pacific War to a popular audience in the fascinating story of a man who rose to Olympic heights, fell beneath the contempt of his captors, and found his purpose in a life both human and heroic. More power to her, for any book that spreads the good news of history written as well as Hillenbrand’s is good news indeed.

Related Reading:

Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931-1945 (English translation, 1978)

John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1987)

Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs in World War II in the Pacific (1996)

Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman, Tears of Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (2009)

Related Viewing:

Flags of Our Fathers (d. Clint Eastwood, 2006)

Letters from Iwo Jima (d. Clint Eastwood, 2006)

City of Life and Death (d. Lu Chuan, 2009)

The Pacific (d. Tim Van Patten et al., 2010)

Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (2006)

On August 6, 1945, the United States of America became the first (and so far only) nation to use atomic weapons against an enemy. Since then, the world has wrestled with questions about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Did the A-bombs save American and Japanese lives by hastening Japan’s surrender? Could the war have ended differently, with less loss of life? Did the U.S. hope to strike terror in Stalin’s heart as much as in Emperor Hirohito’s? How much did President Truman know about the bombs, and what did he think about their ethical implications?

These questions do not belong only to armchair generals and academics. They belong to all inhabitants of this world of nuclear proliferation. How do we find the answers to these important, emotional, divisive questions? How do we separate facts from convictions and recreate the events that led to the destruction of two Japanese cities, the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, and the start of the Cold War?

For starters, we can read Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s magnificent page-turner, Racing the Enemy. Hasegawa gives us a riveting, month-by-month, day-by-day, and even minute-by-minute narrative of the end of the war in the Pacific. The story that emerges is very much a global one. Hasegawa gracefully moves us from Washington to the Crimea, from Moscow to occupied Manchuria, from Tokyo to the Kuril Islands. His assiduous attention to detail—to the treachery of time zones, to diplomacy lost in translation, to treaties made and violated—puts us in the thick of momentous and terrifying events. Rival factions in the Japanese bureaucracy debate how to end the war with honor, Stalin plots territorial acquisition, and the U.S. government rejects diplomatic overtures in favor of an unprecedented show of force.

And what of the A-bombs? According to Hasegawa, Japan surrendered primarily due to the threat of Soviet invasion; the shared fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki merely provided a palatable public rationale. The bombs signaled to Stalin that time was not on his side, and led him to hurriedly instigate the almost-forgotten final land battle of World War II. Truman could have profitably pursued a negotiated, conditional peace, but for political and personal reasons he tacitly supported the use of the weapons of mass destruction.

Racing the Enemy is high political drama grounded in Japanese, Soviet, and U.S. archival material. It will not be the final word on the end of the war, but it is a powerful and authoritative volume that all subsequent debate on the subject should reference. No one with even a passing interest in the Pacific theater, atomic warfare, or the early Cold War can afford to miss it.

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