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Ocean of information

By David North

Ocean Yearbook II is both a mix and a blessing, and sometimes a

mixed blessing.

This English-language compilation

looks at oceans from a world-wide per spective and from many points of view; if your field is diplomacy, naval warfare, underwater minerals, fisheries, conserva tion, or some other facet of the wet and the wild, there is something for you in this volume. As is often the case you may learn the most about what is at the edge of, or quite beyond, your field of inter est.

While this is a serious to somber vol ume, 676 pages long and mostly scholarly in tone, one can find enough maritime tidbits to keep one entertained on many a long summer night. I learned, for example, that: • Tonga has quite a navy, by island standards; • Much of the Northern Solomon Islands belongs to that country - and not to PNG - because of a century-old, three-way imperialist real estate deal focused on the Samoans; • Tuna boat captains, until recently,

routinely dropped bombs on dolphins;

and • Totally non-environmental consid erations have been helpful in the conservation of fishing stocks in Niue and other South Pacific Islands.

The Ocean Yearbook is with original articles on specific matters of interest, and closing with an appendix of statis tics, tabulations and full texts of international documents important to some, and useless to others.

Want to know what countries have rat ified the Law of the Sea (LOS) and when?

Check Appendix Table IH.

Want to know about the changing amount of chemical residues in Canadian seabird eggs over time? See Appendix Table IG.

But the blessing is often a mixed one.

The two tables just cited were the first two I noticed as I thumbed through the volume, and each carries the signs of editorial haste. The two pages of the list of LOS signatories appear in reverse order, not fatal but off-putting. The chemical residues found in the eggs of puffins, petrels and cormorants are DDE and PCB, nasty stuff, I am sure, but the non-chemist might like to know what those initials stand for, and maybe what it all means. (The residues in the eggs have, generally, decreased over the past two decades.) Further, there is at least one piece on US military policy, written by a captain in the US Navy, that sounds more like a Fourth of July speech by an American politician than anything else. One Pacific publication with a small staff has a way to handle such submissions; the Samoa News simply prints the item in question as is, and notes that it is a press release.

One often has the sense that the three Yearbook editors did a lot more assem bling - of usually interesting pieces than editing. But these caveats aside, there is much that is fascinating in this publication. Returning to the four items mentioned earlier, we find the following. • Tongan’s navy gets fairly high marks in the first article I have ever seen on “Constabulary Navies”, a nice term. This one is by another US Navy captain, Joseph R. Morgan. Tonga’s force, he writes “includes three Australian Pacific patrol boats, two smaller coastal patrol craft, and the royal yacht, which doubles as an auxiliary patrol craft. In addition, there are two landing craft medium (LCMs) and two logistic support craft ... the country comes close to having a sur veillance force with genuine capabilities...”

In contrast the author chides PNG: “with a population of about 3,500,000 and land area of 462,840 square kilome tres, [PNG] has ample reason to maintain a navy designed for coastal defence. It has not done so, however.” • Victor Prescott, an Australian acade

mic, writes about the development of the maritime boundary between PNG and the Solomons, a scene of some current tension because of the events in Bougainville. He notes the local bound ary change at the turn of the century, moving both Santa Isabel and Choiseul Islands from the then-German New Guinea to then-British Solomons Islands.

This is the bi-product of the briefly fierce rivalry among the US, Britain and Germany over the Samoans. When the dust settled, the Germans got Western Samoa, but modified the boundary in the Solomons, the Brits . withdrew their claims in on the Samoans in exchange for islands in the Solomons, and the Americans got the smaller eastern islands. (America, alone, remains in the area, and continues to pay some of Samoa’s bills.) But as is often the case in this volume, Prescott’s careful text refers to points on maritime maps which are missing, at least in this edition. • Alexandra Nadal Egea, who is with the prestigious Colegio de Mexico, has what many will find a detached view of the dolphin-tuna question; his country’s boats still seine tuna in the Eastern Tropical Pacific although America’s tuna boats, pressed by the environmentalists, have long since left the area. (If you net tuna in this part of the Pacific you are highly likely to kill the air-breathing dol phins.) But it is Nadel Egea who reminds us that the tuna boats’ helicopters used to drop small bombs on the dolphins to herd them out of the way of the fishing operations. • On a happier note, Canadian Scott Coffen-Smout, a one-time resident of Niue, writes about ocean management on that island, and tells how certain island practices, not related to conserva tion, have worked to preserve the near-shore fisheries stock. Traditionally, fishing was restricted by the villages after a death; similarly, but later, the mission aries decided that fishing on Sundays was sacrilege, and banned it.

In summary, if you have a serious interest in the ocean, get this book, and then drop a line to the editors urging a little more editing the next time around.

Ocean Year, Volume II Edited by Elisabeth Mann Borgese, Norton Ginsburg and Joseph R. Morgan; ISBN 0-226-06614-2; University of Chicago Press/Journals Division, Chicago, Illinois, (US) $77.00 676 pp.