WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD was no misty-eyed dreamer. It was whaling, or what he eulogised as “the chase of the whale over his broad range of the universal ocean”, that first drew his attention to the Pacific. He was a visionary, though. The man who became Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state in 1861 and bought Alaska from tsarist Russia in 1867 knew what America had to do to take advantage of the opening of the Pacific. It needed to build on the Gold Rush spirit in California; finish a transcontinental railway to carry people and freight from one side of America to the other; dig a waterway through Central America for ships to pass through; and acquire Pacific territories like Hawaii and Midway as maritime hubs of trade and security. All this was done either within his lifetime or within a few decades of it.
He was also itching to wield America’s nascent power and saw the Pacific as the place to do it. In a speech to Congress in 1852 he predicted that the Europe-centred Atlantic would decline in