Wake Island

CXXX

The Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) on an old globe

Wake (U.S.) . . . 

Juan Trippe got out his beloved pins and string and began making measurements across the surface of the great globe that stood in his office. As he worked, he cast his eye across the empty half of the globe that was the Pacific Ocean, here and there noting other likely spots. 

Even on Trippe’s tremendous globe, Wake wasn’t much more than a pinprick. He pulled an atlas from his bookshelf and shuffled through the pages. There it was. Wake (U.S.). There was a listing for it, but nothing else. He looked up a few other places. Nothing.*

Returning to his desk, he picked up the phone and dialed a familiar number. Robert Walton Moore’s secretary answered, and in a few moments Juan was talking to the Assistant Secretary of State.  After some routine pleasantries and some necessary talk about the Black Committee, Juan got down to brass tacks (or pushpins, as it were):

Wake, today. PAAville is the old Pan Am passenger facility. Used successively as a coaling station, a prison facility, and an airport, Wake is currently a missile base 

--- Have you ever heard of Wake Island?   

--- No. I can’t say that I have. Where is it?

--- It’s in the mid-Pacific. It’s at least a thousand miles from anywhere.

--- That’s damned remote, Juan. 

--- Yes it is. The map says it’s American territory, but I don’t remember ever hearing of it either. Can you do me a favor?  Get whatever information you can on Wake for me. What is it like? Who lives there? Who’s in charge?  Does it have a Governor I can talk to? Those kinds of questions. Oh, also the same data on places called Howland, Baker, Johnston, Palmyra, Kingman Reef . . . and Midway. Midway’s interesting. It looks like it’s part of the Hawaiian Island chain but it’s listed separately in the atlas. 

--- What are you thinking of?

--- Maybe nothing. I’ll let you know after I have some answers. 

--- I’ll call the Navy Hydrographic Office. They should have information on islands in the Pacific. These are all American territories? 

--- Right.  Thank you. 

--- I’ll get back to you as soon as I have anything. Now you’ve got me interested.   

Trippe liked it when people moved fast, but even he was surprised when Moore called back in barely an hour.

Juan Trippe’s globe

--- Wake’s a coral atoll, Moore explained to Trippe. It’s actually three islands surrounding a lagoon. Low-lying. According to the Hydrographic Office it’s uninhabited. The same goes for the other places you mentioned, too. Just random rocks poking up out of the ocean. 

--- How’d it get an American flag on it? 

--- Wake was discovered by a British sea captain in the eighteenth century and the island was named for him . . . 

Juan tried to hide his disappointment. If the British were involved with Wake he knew he’d have headaches. Damned Provision H, again. --- Do the British have a claim on Wake? 

--- No, they don’t. Wake must really be a nothing in the middle of nowhere if the British didn’t bother to colonize it.**

--- How did we acquire it?

--- In the Spanish-American War.

--- The Spaniards had a garrison there?  

--- The Spanish had nothing there. It was just a plot of land we picked up in 1898 on our way to The Philippines. Congress authorized it under the Guano Islands Act of 1856. It’s a neat little piece of legislation that lets the U.S. seize territories that can be mined for guano. 

--- Birdshit Island?  Trippe was amused.

Both men laughed. --- There have been some Japanese fishermen who’ve used the island from time to time as a safe harborage, but nothing recent. If anybody is there now we don’t know about it, Moore continued. It seems to me, he said in a more serious tone, that the United States Government should be concerned over what use is being made of its minor outlying islands. 

Trippe smiled. Moore obviously knew what he was planning. Who has authority over Wake? ---  Juan asked. 

--- That’s the oddest thing, Moore said, frankly surprised. Nobody seems to. There’s no Governor, no Agency, no apparent U.S. authority over Wake at all. And that goes for most of the rest of the islands you asked about. They’re just deserted desert islands. 

Midway

 

--- What about Midway? 

--- Midway . . .  Midway is not part of Hawaii. It’s a coral island --- actually three --- like Wake, and even though it lies near the end of the Hawaiian Island chain geographically, it isn’t volcanic. What used to be the volcano is now the lagoon. So it isn’t part of Hawaii topographically.  Or politically. It’s excluded from the Territory. And again, there doesn’t seem to be any Authority in charge of the place. There is a transpacific telegraph and telephone cable station on one of the islands, but it isn’t manned regularly. They just come out when the system needs maintenance. 

(Top) Franklin Delano Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1913.

(Bottom) Theodore Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1898.

The cousins used the same desk

 

--- Do you think you could interest the President in putting these islands, all of them, under the authority of, oh, let’s say, the Department of the Navy? 

Moore smiled audibly over the phone --- Given the political situation in the far Pacific, I think it would be wise if he did so. I’ll suggest it. And I’m sure as an old Navy man himself  (F.D. Roosevelt had been, like Theodore before him, Assistant Secretary of the Navy before rising to the Presidency) he would see the logic of making certain that each island had support facilities for our naval vessels. Including flying boats.  

--- Thank you, Robert. 

--- Think nothing of it, J.T.

After the two men rang off, Trippe bounded out of his office chair and practically bolted into the main suite:

We’re flying across the Pacific!

*The specific dialogue in this post is largely invented, but the subject and details are authentic.

**Beyond the bare naked claim made by Captain Edward Taussig, skipper of the U.S.S. Bennington in 1899, and the raising of the Stars and Stripes, Wake had no government at all, and had, in fact, been forgotten by all the Presidents from William McKinley to Franklin D. Roosevelt and every Congress between the 56^th and 73^rd. Pan American Airways, afterward, liked to credit Juan Trippe with “discovering” Wake. To an extent it was true, much as Columbus “discovered” America irrespective of the native Americans and northern Europeans who’d been here first.