I was lucky enough to have lived in the islands of the South Pacific just before the end of their colonial era when the place was still full of tanned men with bloodshot eyes and murky pasts sitting in dingy waterfront bars, tormented by memories of those they left behind, or of money-making schemes which had come to nothing.
Somerset Maugham and James A. Michener saw only half of what I saw, although they had a better way of writing about it. What they still saw but I never did were those fabulous flying-boats which dipped so close to the waters of the Pacific Ocean that passengers could pick out coral formations, whales, and even the occasional shark from their windows.
On the famous Coral Route, passengers would hop from flying boat to island, and from island to flying boat, on a journey that took two and a half days and was nearly 5,000 miles long. The trip began in Auckland, New Zealand, travelling through to Suva in Fiji, the Cook Islands, and Tahiti. Stops to Samoa and then Tonga were introduced in 1952.
By the end of 1960, it was all over and the islands, touched for a brief period by seaplane magic, were brought abruptly back to normal.
