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| Lahaina Roads, Maui |
A few weeks ago I wrote about Roosevelt Roads and why the word "roads" survives in that name when it has disappeared from almost every other American place. The answer was institutional: the Navy kept speaking an older language because it still had a use for the concept of an open anchorage. Since then I have stumbled across three more, and each one deepens the point in a different direction.
The first is Lahaina Roads, off the west coast of Maui. I have been to Lahaina. You stand on the beach and look out across the ʻAuʻau Channel toward Lānaʻi, and the water is calm, sheltered by the West Maui Mountains and the neighboring islands. It is a natural anchorage, and the U.S. Pacific Fleet used it as one through the 1940s. What I did not know until recently is that the Japanese took it seriously enough to scout it before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Scout planes were dispatched from the Kido Butai and I-class submarines were sent to reconnoiter the anchorage, looking for elements of the Pacific Fleet that might have been dispersed there rather than concentrated at Pearl Harbor. They found it empty. A recovered Japanese Navy chart of Lahaina Anchorage, designated "anchorage B" (Pearl Harbor was "anchorage A"), is held by the Naval History and Heritage Command. The Japanese understood what a "roads" was, even if most Americans had already forgotten the word.
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| Singapore Roads, viewed from Gardens by the Bay |
The second is Singapore Roads. I have been there too, and the thing you notice immediately is the ships. From Marina Bay Sands you look out across the Singapore Strait and see dozens of vessels at anchor, waiting. Approximately 2,000 merchant ships traverse those waters daily. Singapore's significance as a maritime chokepoint goes back centuries, to the 14th-century trading hub of Temasek. The British mined the strait during the Second World War. Today the Maritime and Port Authority divides the anchorage into designated sectors for different vessel types: general cargo, bunkering, petroleum carriers, warships, quarantine. It is a modern expression of the same concept that gave Hampton Roads and Roosevelt Roads their names, except Singapore never stopped using it operationally. The anchorage is not a relic. It is infrastructure.
The third is Bolivar Roads, at the mouth of Galveston Bay on the Texas Gulf Coast. This one is personal. In the spring of 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, my great-grandfather Hugh Rice was commissioned by the city of Houston to survey a proposed ship channel from the foot of Main Street to Bolivar Roads. That survey was the beginning of a project that would take nearly half a century to complete. In 1869, Thomas W. House, William Marsh Rice, and other leading citizens founded the Buffalo Bayou Ship Channel Company to dredge a nine-foot channel from Houston to Bolivar Roads. In 1870, Congress designated Houston a port of delivery and authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to improve the route. After the 1900 Galveston hurricane accelerated planning, Congressman Tom Ball proposed the "Houston Plan," the first federal cost-share agreement of its kind for a dredging project. The channel opened on November 10, 1914, when President Wilson pushed an ivory button at his desk in the White House, firing a cannon in Houston. What Hugh Rice surveyed in 1867 became a deepwater channel, 25 feet deep and 300 to 400 feet wide, reaching 50 miles from the Gulf into the interior of Texas. Today the Port of Houston is the nation's number one port by foreign waterborne tonnage.
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| Bolivar Roads, mouth of Galveston Bay (USGS, public domain) |
Bolivar Roads is a natural navigable strait, 45 feet deep, framed by two jetties extending into the Gulf. It is the gateway. Without it, the Houston Ship Channel is a canal to nowhere. Winston Churchill is credited with saying that World War II was "won on a sea of East Texas oil." The mechanism for getting that oil to the war effort ran through Bolivar Roads and the Houston Ship Channel. When German U-boats sank or damaged 73 of 74 oil tankers in a 22-day stretch, the government built the Big Inch pipeline from Longview, Texas, to the East Coast. But before the pipeline, and after the pipeline, the oil moved by water, and the water started at Bolivar Roads.
Each of these three places illustrates something different about why "roads" matters. Lahaina Roads shows that the military value of an open anchorage can be strategic; the Japanese understood that dispersing a fleet across multiple roadsteads is a basic defensive measure. Singapore Roads shows that a roadstead can be a living economic institution, not just a historical artifact. Bolivar Roads shows that the connection between an anchorage and its hinterland can shape the economic geography of a region for more than a century.
What I keep coming back to is how much the word tells you once you know what to listen for. It is not a port. It is not a harbor. It is a place where ships wait, where fleets gather, where the open water meets the decision about what happens next. That concept is as alive in the Singapore Strait today as it was in Hampton Roads in 1607. The word may be archaic, but the thing it describes is not.