The Bonins—isles Of Contention (Februrary 1968 | Volume: 19, Issue: 2)

The Bonins—isles Of Contention

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Authors: Gavan Daws

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Februrary 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 2

Matthew Calbraith Perry, the Great Commodore, home again in 1855 after his celebrated expedition to the Far East, brought with him not only a treaty of friendship linking the United States and Japan but also a powerful vision of what the future held for the seas between. “It is not to be supposed,” he wrote, “that the numberless islands which lie scattered throughout this immense ocean are always to remain unproductive, and under the mismanagement of savages. The history of the world forbids any such conclusion. How, and in what way, the aborigines will be disposed of—whether by just or unjust means—cannot be known at the present time; but that they are doomed to mingle with, or give way to some other race, is as certain as the fate of our own melancholy red brethren.”

Perry believed as an article of faith that his countrymen should take the lead in shaping the destiny of the Pacific, and he directed their attention to one place in particular among the numberless islands of the ocean—the Bonins. “In no part of the earth,” he wrote, “can be found a more prolific soil than in those parts of the Bonins that have been brought into thorough cultivation.” Perry proposed an American settlement there. A joint stock company could recruit young married couples and take them to their new home in whaling ships which would then cruise the Japan whaling grounds, returning loaded with oil. The Bonins would become a haven for shipping, and in addition they might serve as a base for American missionary work in Japan, Formosa, and other “benighted countries in that quarter of the globe.”

Anyone who took the trouble to find this prospective outpost of America on a map of the Western Pacific might have been pardoned for doubting Perry’s good sense. The Bonin Islands looked like nothing so much as a cartographer’s mistake, part of a tiny ink spatter left by some draftsman who took great pains over the coast of Japan and then absent-mindedly flicked his pen dry in a line running south from Tokyo Bay toward Micronesia, across seas wracked by typhoons and tidal waves. The largest of the Bonins is less than ten square miles in size, and most of the others are just rocks and reefs, stretching away to the Izus in the north and the Volcanoes in the south.

Perry knew all this and discounted it. He had begun thinking seriously about the Bon ins even before his expedition got under way; nothing he saw in the Far East led him to change his mind, and he came home more convinced than ever that he was right. In preparation for his voyage he had read everything lie could find on Japan and the neighboring islands, and he had talked to New Englanders who had been in the Western Pacific. He knew about typhoons and tidal waves, but other considerations seemed to him more important. Between