THE PAN-PACIFIC UNION 1920

Following World War I a major new phase of Reef research occurred throughout the 1920s, stimulated by the efforts of Alexander Ford (1868–1945), a prominent newspaper publisher in Honolulu, who, in the same idealistic spirit that motivated President Wilson, dreamed of a fellowship of the Pacific nations, united in a common bond of ‘friendly and commercial contact and relationship’. To that end he worked tirelessly to create a formal organisation to further his vision, which also sought to promote Hawaii as a centre of Pacific cultural and research activity. Ford's efforts were rewarded when in 1919 the government of the Territory of Hawaii, as it then was, incorporated the Pan-Pacific Union as a trusteeship of twenty-one nation members appointed by Pacific governments with a comprehensive charter ‘to unite the races and countries in and about the Pacific in closer bonds of fellowship’. The central activity envisaged was promoting knowledge of their resources and opportunities by means of periodic conferences on a wide range of matters of common concern.

In those same years a separate movement had been initiated by William Morris Davis from Harvard University, one of the more accomplished of the foreigners invited to the British Association meeting in Adelaide and Melbourne in 1914.