ABSTRACT
The Pacific Ocean is a vast body of water. It covers an area greater than all of the land in the world combined: 9,200 miles separate Bering Strait in the north from Antarctica in the south. The Pacific Ocean is 10,400 miles wide at the equator, and over 12,000 miles wide at its widest point, from Singapore to Panama. In places it is devoid of islands for thousands of miles (Thomas 1963:7-38; Cameron 1987:24). Writer Ian Cameron typifies the attitudes of the modern inhabitants of the Pacific Rim when he reflects that, ‘Nowhere else on Earth are the distances so vast, the sense of loneliness and isolation so aching’ (Cameron 1987:24).
