The June 1997 night of Hong Kong’s long-awaited “retrocession” from the British Empire was cold and rainswept, drenching the ceremonial and those who attended, and making for an unseemly end to Britain’s presence in the North Pacific.* [FormAsia.]
Once the flag was down, Hong Kong was no longer a British colony; and the governor’s formal telegram was transmitted to the queen, a relinquishment done, the retrocession achieved, the ills of the Opium Wars overturned and finished with.
No one said sorry, though—the messages were all merely of farewell, and of Godspeed, and good fortune for the future. Prince Charles had declined to bow to the Chinese and promptly left for his safe haven on Britannia, and as soon as was decent, and with Chinese warships watching every move (though with the frigate HMS Chatham escorting), he sailed west out of Hong Kong Harbor, bound for the Philippines, and home.
In the small hours of that postimperial night, Prince Charles wrote a diary entry, which was somehow leaked and which made it clear that he had hated every minute of the experience. “After my speech,” he wrote, “the president [of China] detached himself from the group of appalling old waxworks who accompanied him and took his place at the lectern. He then gave a kind of ‘propaganda’ speech which was loudly cheered by the bussed-in party faithful at the suitable moment in the text.” The goose stepping, said the heir to the British throne, was unnecessary and ridiculous.
The two British ships moved silently through the night and into the wind—with Hong Kong Island glittering on the port side, Kowloon and the blue remembered hills of the New Territories on the starboard. In the distance ahead were the lights of Macau, still as Portuguese a territory as it had been since the sixteenth century, but now due for its own peaceable return to China in 1999.
There comes a point, fifteen minutes into the journey, where there is a slightly awkward maneuver for any vessel outbound from Hong Kong. It occurs shortly before the steersman must begin the long and lazy turn to port that brings his ship down into the fairway and out onto the powerful Pacific swells of the South China Sea. It occurred that final June night—or was it actually July now, the pitch-dark start of a brand-new day?—when the two captains, one of the Britannia, the other of the frigate, had to make the well-known and very slight course adjustment, to avoid one well-marked obstruction, underwater.
This was the submerged wreck of the RMS Queen Elizabeth, thirty feet down and sunk there, by sabotage and fire, a quarter century before. The wreck had significance that night: the foundering of this great old British ship, the finest and grandest vessel of her time, could be said to have marked the beginning of the end for all the imperial powers in the Pacific.
But the yacht and the warship passed her by that night without remark, and then, with the sunken wreck falling fast astern, spooled up their engines to full ahead all and officially left Hong Kong and their remaining British corner of the North Pacific Ocean, forever.
1 The firm gave no thought to installing air-conditioning, however. Elizabeth did have a “cool air” system, but Cunard acknowledged, in a classic of British circumlocution, that both vessels were “not entirely comfortable” when berthed in a tropical climate. Moreover, both ships were too broad of beam to pass through the Panama Canal, so their possible destinations were severely limited.
2 During colonial times the Hong Kong authorities came up with some interesting rulings—one of the best remembered involved the violent death in 1980 of a twenty-nine-year-old gay policeman at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the territory. (It was legalized only in 1991.) His death was ruled a suicide, even though the officer had five bullet wounds in his chest. It was widely regarded as improbable that anyone could have shot himself there more than once, let alone five times. The court noted, however, that only one of the five shots was lethal, and that the officer had not shot himself in either the head or the heart. Death by his own hand would have been painful but not impossible.
3 Thailand, alone in the region, managed, by the skillful diplomacy of a succession of strong leaders, to retain its independence through all the years of foreign domination, never bowing to the demands of either the French to its east or the British to its west.
4 The Viet Minh’s leader, Ho Chi Minh, had issued his Vietnamese Declaration of Independence just two weeks before. It begins, famously, and familiarly to Americans: “ ‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ . . . Those are undeniable truths. . . . Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens.”
5 Gracey was later appointed commander in chief of Pakistan’s new army, following independence in 1947. He was made a full general, and with his knighthood and assorted honors, he ended his life in 1964 as General Sir Douglas Gracey, KCB, KCIE, CBE, with two Military Crosses for gallantry in the First World War.
6 Japanese journalists unfamiliar with the song had to have it sung to them by American colleagues, and committed it to memory.
7 As perhaps befits a country with 848 national languages, Papua New Guinea’s history is deliciously complicated. The southern half of the island’s east (the west belonged to the Netherlands) had first been annexed by a policeman from the Australian state of Queensland; the northern half, which had been German, was then taken also by Australia, during the Great War, and the annexation was ruled legal under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Both halves were then placed within the British Empire, but were run by Australia, and won their independence in 1975—with Britain’s Prince Charles presiding over the ceremonies.
8 Though the French left their colonies in Indochina and the New Hebrides, they still retain ultimate control over two mid-ocean Overseas Collectivities, fully represented in the Paris parliament: French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna. There is also the Sui Generis Collectivity of New Caledonia, which has proved politically intractable because of the large number of French settlers, but is expected to become fully independent by 2018; and there is an uninhabited mystery island, Clipperton, off the Mexican coast.
9 In the 1980s a West Virginia coal mining magnate named Smiley Ratliff tried to lease Henderson Island to establish a mid-ocean colony. He promised to build an airstrip and to provide a ferry plying to and from Pitcairn, which would connect the island with the outside world. The British government gave his plan serious consideration, but it was pointed out that the rare and flightless Henderson rail as well as the fruit-eating dove, an endemic warbler, and a lorikeet lived on the island, and Ratliff was asked to look elsewhere. Some Pitcairners remain chagrined, and the British government now subsidizes an occasional ferry service out of the French-owned Gambier Islands, where there is an airport.
10 For many years only Falkland Islanders, Bermudians, and Gibraltarians enjoyed near-automatic right to British citizenship. Colonials from such territories as Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Saint Helena, the Cayman Islands, and Hong Kong were, so far as immigration to Britain was concerned, treated almost as Congolese or Brazilians. A more liberal policy was brought into force once Hong Kong had passed back into Chinese hands and the risk of London’s airports being mobbed by Cantonese multitudes had abated.
[Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.]
Chapter 6
ECHOES OF DISTANT THUNDER
I am the Rider of the wind
The Stirrer of the storm.
—LORD BYRON, Manfred, 1817
At first there seemed little reason to fret. Darwin was a tough little frontier town, a hard-drinking, broken-jaw kind of place—Australia in the raw, ready for most kinds of trouble. Over the years it had suffered gamely through a variety of storms, natural and man-made. During the war, more Japanese bombs had rained down on Darwin than on Pearl Harbor, and the scores of subsequent Japanese raids made for a certain proudly held resilience of spirit, still evident toda
y in this far “top end” of Australia. That, and the weather—perpetually hot and humid; and during the summertime rainy season, which the locals still call “the wet,” it is often ripped apart by frequent and spectacular tropical thunderstorms.
When a gathering storm was first noticed out in the Arafura Sea, at the start of Christmas week of 1974, no one thought it was anything special. Cyclones were part of the usual patter of midsummer weather. It was coming up to the centenary of the opening of the Port Darwin cable station, which had first connected Australia to Java and the rest of the world, and over all the years since then, fierce tropical cyclones had regularly barreled in from the seas to the north and hammered the crude government shacks in which the first hundred had lived, and now hammered the tin-roof shanties that were home to most of the forty thousand present-day Darwinians. Old-timers would tell of the unique sounds of a Darwin cyclone—of the screechings of thousands of corrugated-iron roofs being gale-blown along the roadways, of the noise of breaking glass, of the endless howls of wind, of lashing rains, and, as basso continuo, of the furious pounding of ocean.
That was not likely to happen this time. Christmas 1974 would surely be hot and steamy, but peaceful enough. The storm out in the sea was just a small one, and it was heading south, well away from the city. It would press on down through the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf and make eventual landfall in the Kimberleys. There would be rain in western suburbs, perhaps, and fine displays of lightning. But that wasn’t unusual: Darwin always had rain and lightning at this time of year. Each season had a full dozen cyclone alerts, and each time the ABC sounded its sirens, the announcer went on the air with the usual warnings about tying down loose objects and filling the bath with emergency water. Everyone heard, but few listened. The ABC was crying wolf, people grumbled.
The weather bureau tracked the storm as it passed slowly to the west of Bathurst Island, heading south. Most in town remained complacent—it was Christmas, after all: there was church to attend, presents to wrap, trees to decorate, children to persuade to sleep.
This time, though, a very few suspected that something was up, mainly because the air in town felt somehow different. “Jerky” was how a Chinese shopkeeper described it. The songbirds had fallen strangely quiet; and according to the long-grass dwellers, the Larrakia aboriginal peoples who (then, as today) liked to camp in the tall grasses outside town, all the usual populations of green ants they would normally have seen seemed to have vanished. “Something dreadful is going to happen,” a woman named Ida Bishop said to her boss, the manager of a fleet of prawning boats. The gathering quiet was ominous. The clouds were too high, were strangely shaped, and were vivid with purples and greens, and with other bizarre colors that just shouldn’t be there. Some reported seeing what they described as a black velvet cloud hanging in the air five miles above the sea, rolling and pulsing, and blotting out the sun.
Then, out at sea, the storm changed direction. Quite unexpectedly, it made a sharp right-angled swerve to the east. At exactly the same time, it contracted, like a tightening sphincter, and to the growing consternation of officials, it began to bear down with withering accuracy toward the dead center of Darwin.
The storm was called Cyclone Tracy, and there has never been a more dreadful and destructive event in recorded Australian history. Once the Meteorological Office forecasters had confirmed the approach, ABC radio turned on its sirens. The chief announcer, a man named Don Sanders, whose voice was known for its confidence-inspiring depth and richness, was brought in to warn of the coming danger. It may have saved lives. It didn’t save the town.
When the storm hit shore a little after midnight, it crushed building after building like a giant’s hand. Ten thousand houses (80 percent of the city) were totally destroyed. They were near-instantly demolished, reduced almost to matchwood and pulverized concrete. The process was identical, house after Christmas-decorated house: First, the roof was ripped off its stanchions and whirled away into the rain-soaked night. Then the windows shattered, slicing people with slivers of glass. The walls next blew out, one by one—people would speak of running in darkness and panic from room to room, locating by feel the bathroom doors and racing inside in the belief that the smallest room would be the strongest—only to find the outside wall gone and only the darkness beyond, a terrifying frenzy of gales and oceans of pounding hot rain.
Darwin was brought to its knees. Everything failed: The telephones were out. Electricity was down. Antennas were blown flat. Aircraft had been tossed about like chaff, smashed beyond recognition. Ships broke loose in the harbor and either sank or drifted far from their moorings, useless. Scores of people who might have been useful were away for the Christmas holiday. The broadcast stations had only skeleton crews, but no light or water—though one of them, the local ABC affiliate, did have a generator, and managed to get a message out to a remote sister station in the Queensland outback. This tenuous link provided the only communication Darwin had with the outside world for the first three days after the catastrophe.
Word got out late on Christmas afternoon. It was then that the rest of Australia came to realize that its most northerly capital city had been laid waste by a terrible storm. Ministers in Canberra, and others in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane, were roused from turkey- and mince pie–induced lunchtime slumbers to be told of the ruin and devastation thousands of miles away.
And when the first rescuers got there, they all made the same comparison: Hiroshima, or Nagasaki. The comparison is invidious, of course; the casualty tolls were incomparable—seventy-one were killed by Tracy, not even one-tenth of a percent of those who died in Japan—but the physical destruction of Darwin was total, and the images more than amply resembled the familiar photographs of the two postnuclear cities. Roads were no more than pathways through scores of square miles of broken rubble and splintered timber. People were wandering around glassy-eyed, bewildered. Hundreds of dogs, frightened and unfed, emerged from the ruins to forage, and the first rescuers to arrive were struck by their snarling presence, adding to the menace in the air. There was a real threat of typhoid and cholera. Police had to find guns (shotguns, mainly, from the nearby sheep stations) to deal with looters.
The near-total destruction of the city of Darwin by the unforgotten Cyclone Tracy, which struck on Christmas Day. Storms of this size and power are increasing in frequency and ferocity in and around the Pacific.* [Newspix/Getty Images.]
In the end, almost the entire city had to be evacuated. Forty-one thousand of the forty-seven thousand were without home, shelter, water, food, medicine, or communication. The government arranged shuttles of aircraft—slowly at first, because the ruined Darwin airport could accommodate only one flight every ninety minutes. Over the next five days, a total of more than thirty-five thousand people were flown or driven out of the city—and by the time the year ended, it had been all but emptied. More than half of those who left never came back.
Darwin is a wholly rebuilt city now, slick and modern, with most of its high-rise buildings apartment blocks rather than the banks and insurance companies that usually dominate downtowns. And everything now is claimed to be cyclone-proof—because, if nothing else, those who live at the top end of Australia learned from the disaster of the 1970s that the Pacific can be a place of extraordinarily violent weather.
There is more. The storms created in this ocean are coming to be recognized as the harbingers of the weather in the rest of the planet—the very first indicators of, maybe even the generators of, the swirls of wind, pressure, and humidity that sweep from west to east as the world turns beneath them. Since these cyclonic storms1 are said, both anecdotally and statistically, to be becoming ever more furious as the earth and its seas warm up, as the climate changes, as the oceans rise, the consequences for the world are at the very least potentially troubling, maybe even dire.
Time and history have their understandable ways of turning tragedy into statistics, and in matters such as storms, earthquakes, and eruptions, statistic
s often boast superlatives, turning contemporary misery into historical pride. The people in Darwin who were forced to hide for hours under their bathtubs in their utterly ruined homes and to fend off starving dogs as they tried to keep themselves safe and alive may not quite see it that way, but the fact remains that theirs was the most lethal miniature storm ever recorded.
For, in areal span, it was very small: it extended over only 24 miles, side to side and through its eye. It was quite Lilliputian when compared with monsters such as Hurricane Katrina, which was 400 miles across when it struck New Orleans in 2005. It was minuscule when set against Typhoon Tip, which roared across the tropical Pacific in 1979 with a record-breaking diameter of 1,380 miles and an eye not much smaller than the entirety of Cyclone Tracy, which could have been pushed inside it quite handily.
Pacific storms have clearly been getting ever more menacing in recent years. Cyclone Tracy in 1974 was close to the beginning of this development: Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines in November 2013, suggests how truly ferocious things can get. The four decades between these two storms saw two developing trends: bigger and increasingly troublesome storms and an ever-greater accuracy in pinpointing where they might make landfall. More lives were at risk from the storms’ gathering power; more lives were saved by the gathering boon of science.