The First Taint of Civilization: A History of the Caroline and Marshall Islands in Pre-Colonial Days, 1521–1885 9780824847173

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THE FIRST TMNT OF CIVILIZATION

PACIFIC ISLANDS MONOGRAPH SERIES Robert C. Kiste General Editor Linley Chapman Manuscript Editor Everett A. Wingert Associate Editor for Cartography EDITORIAL BOARD Deborah Waite Donald lopping Peter Pirie Norman Meller Alan Howard Renée Heyum The Pacific Islands Monograph Series is a joint effort of the University of Hawaii Press and the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, School of Hawaiian, Asian & Pacific Studîes, University of Hawaii. The series includes works in the humanities and social sciences that focus on the insular Pacific.

Pacific Islands Monograph Series, No. 1

THE FIDST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION A History of the Caroline and Marshall Islands in Pre~Colonial Days, 1521-1885 FRANCIS X. HEZEL, S.J.

Center for Pacific Islands Studies School of Hawaiian, Asian i? Pacific Studies University of Hawaii UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS • Honolulu

© 1 9 8 3 U N I V E R S I T Y OF HAWAII P R E S S A L L RIGHTS RESERVED P R I N T E D IN T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S O F A M E R I C A PAPERBACK EDITION 1 9 9 4

16 15 14 13 12

11 10 9 8 7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hezel, Francis X. The first taint of civilization. (Pacific islands monograph series ; no. 1) Includes bibliographical reference and index. 1. Caroline Islands—History. 2. Marshall Islands— History. I. Title. II. Series. DU565.H49 1983 996'.6 83-10411 ISBN 0-8248-0840-1 ISBN-13: 978-0-8248-1643-8 (pbk)

University of Hawai'i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

To my family, friends, and students, most of whom have taught me more than they have learned from me

Editors Note

We are quite fortunate to have Francis X. Hezel's The First Taint of Civilization as the first volume in the new Pacific Islands Monograph Series. Of all the world's culture areas, Micronesia has been one of the most extensively studied by anthropologists. At the same time and with the exception of Guam, these tiny islands have been almost entirely neglected by historians. Indeed, in an editorial in the second volume of The Journal of Pacific History, H. E. Maude was moved to write that Micronesia's "varied and often exciting history has been ignored as if by some tacit agreement. . . . One wonders that American historians have apparently no contribution to make to the historical study of an American Trust Territory." Hezel has ventured into the void, and his efforts have yielded what I am certain will be recognized as a major contribution to Pacific history. Focusing on the Caroline and Marshall islands, Hezel's work spans over three and one-half centuries. He begins with Magellan's discovery of Guam and details the history of the islands up to the establishment of the German Protectorate in the Marshalls. Hezel's history reads like the good tale that it is, and it should appeal to the general reader as well as the academician. Events in the Western world are skillfully intertwined with those in the islands. The quality of the historical scholarship in these pages is impressive, and with regard to understanding the actions of Micronesians, Hezel has the insights that anthropologists hope to achieve. This work will be the standard reference for this period of Carolinian and Marshallese history for years to come. ROBERT C . KISTE

Contents

Maps

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xv

1

The End of a Long Seclusion

1

2

Mission to the Palaos

36

3

On the Road to China

60

4

Two Worlds Grown Closer

87

5

A Nest of Rogues and Runaways

109

6

The Powers of Darkness and Light

132

7

The Reopening of the West

171

8

Christianity and Copra in the Marshalls

197

9

The Emergence of a New Order

227

10

The Contest for Commercial

263

11

Colonial Rule

Control

290

Abbreviations

319

Notes

321

References

337

Index

355

Maps

1

Sixteenth-Century Voyages

5

2

The Moluccas or Spice Islands

7

3

The Philippines and the Moluccas

11

4

Herrera's "Descripción de las Indias del Poniente," 1601

21

5

Klein's Map of the Palaos, ¡696

38

6

Cantova's Map of the Carolines, 1722

52

7

Western Caroline Islands

56

8

Palau

70

9

Early Nineteenth-Century Naval Expeditions

89

10

Eastern Caroline Islands

98

11

Ponape

123

12

Kosrae

160

13

Yap

183

14

The Marshall Islands

198

Preface

in the western Pacific, strung out over nearly three thousand miles, lie the islands of the Caroline and Marshall groups. The term Micronesia, which came to be used to designate these groups and their neighboring archipelagoes, suits them well, for the islands are no more than tiny specks in a twomillion-square-mile expanse of ocean—"like a handful of chickpeas flung over the sea" as one European put it (Hernandez

J U S T NORTH OF T H E EQUATOR

1955:37).

Small as the islands are, they are today the home of more than a hundred thousand people. Their inhabitants, who are still known as Micronesians, stand at last at the threshold of political selfgovernment, after almost a century of colonial rule by four world powers in turn: Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United States. As the wheel of history turns once again, bringing the age of decolonization to the Pacific, the Caroline and Marshall islanders will have moved full circle, back to the autonomy that they knew before the coming of the Westerner. But not quite so. For just as Europeans gave the archipelagoes their names (the islanders themselves almost never thought in terms of such groupings!) they also established their boundaries. These boundaries, which often owed less to geographical or cultural divisions than to historical accidents of European political and economic incursions into the area, have been one of the chief legacies of Westerners, from the age of early Spanish exploration through the political partitioning of the Pacific in the late nineteenth century and beyond. The names and boundaries often stuck, shaping the course of events in the islands and determining, at least in part, their destiny in today's geopolitical world. We have only to look at other parts of Micronesia to find illus-

xii

Preface

trations of this. The Mariana Islands, lying to the north of the Carolines, shared a good number of cultural features with their southern neighbors, but their early colonization by the Spanish in the seventeenth century brought about a pervasive Hispanic influence throughout the next two hundred years and led to a radical break with other peoples in the area. Whaleships, trading brigs, and naval cruisers played a decisive role in the history of the Carolines and Marshalls, but were insignificant in the Marianas, where the impact of the Spanish colonial government was overwhelming. On the other hand, the Gilbert Islands and Nauru (both of which are also considered Micronesian) shared with the Carolines and Marshalls many of the Western influences that swept into the area during precolonial days; but both have had distinct colonial experiences during the last century and have become autonomous island states in recent years. For these reasons, they, like the Marianas, have been excluded from the scope of this book. Political divisions were not the only legacy of the Westerner. Every bit as important was the cultural imprint of foreign seamen, traders, missionaries, and roustabouts on the islands that they visited and sometimes resided on, long before the first colonial administrators came to rule in the name of their European sovereigns. The first taint of civilization—at least, what Westerners understood by "civilization"—was carried by such men decades, even centuries, before foreign flags were hoisted over the Carolines and Marshalls. Civilization, of course, meant a great deal more than the establishment of European governments. It embraced a wide range of Western products—not only the obvious material artifacts that surprised and delighted the islanders, but the skills, customs, beliefs, and values of those strange beings who peddled them to the local people. In the long run, it implied not just adoption of the Westerners' technology or even their systems of religious belief; but a recognition of the supremacy of their law. Colonial rule was an outgrowth, almost the natural consequence, of years of extensive contact between Micronesians and Westerners. It was an imposition, to be sure, but it was not only that. In a very true sense, colonial rule was as much an acquired taste as the rice, pipe tobacco, and calico that became such a part of islanders' lives in the course of their dealings with the foreigners who visited their shores. The establishment of colonial rule was an event that can be seen quite legitimately as the culmination of the process of "civilization."

Preface

xiii

Some would say that the story of civilization—in the truest sense of the word—should begin thousands of years ago with the coming of the first islanders, the real discoverers of the Caroline and Marshall islands. Undoubtedly so, but this part of the tale is buried beneath the land and the sea—and the elements do not easily yield their secrets. Let us begin, then, with the European—that benefactor and despoiler, that cultural catalyst par excellence— who sailed halfway around the world to meet the island people in their own sheltered homelands.

Acknowledgments

BOOKS SUCH AS THIS ONE are the product of many people's contributions. Authors need to be pointed to sources that would otherwise have gone undetected, but they require, even more, an intellectual ambience and occasional encouragement to sustain them in their long quest for what can often appear to be a will-o'-thewisp. I have received all this and more from friends and colleagues throughout the world and I gratefully acknowledge their generous assistance. Harry Maude in Canberra and Saul Riesenberg in Washington, DC deserve special mention here. Both opened their files to me and graciously shared the wealth of a lifetime's research, always with a gentle humor and patience that sustained my own enthusiasm, naive as it often must have been. Other friends furnished information that I could not have done without. Lt Cdr C M Stuart in London, Theo Wettstein in Zurich, Frank Reiter in Berlin, Larry Lawcock in Guam, Renée Heyum and Len Mason in Honolulu, and Mary Browning, formerly on Kwajalein, were especially helpful in this respect. Robert Langdon, Norah Forster, lima O'Brien, and Robyn Walker in Australia came to my aid on more than one occasion, and the staff of the Micronesian Area Research Center on Guam, under the able directorship of Dirk Ballendorf, an old friend, provided a constant flow of information on new materials and suggestions for this book. Fr Tom McGrath, Dan Peacock, Alfred Capelle, and Kathy Kesolei made available Micronesian materials that they had located. Teresa del Valle and Felicia Plaza opened the doors to the treasures in Spanish archives; Ken Martin helped in the search through whaling records; Judy Casassa did translation of German works that

xvi

Acknowledgments

my rudimentary knowledge of the language could not see me through; and Charles Reafsnyder and Mac Marshall shared precious bits of information on just about everything. Mark Berg, my colleague on another book, offered helpful advice on this one. So also did Ken Martin, Robyn Walker, Paul Ehrlich, and Fr Charles McCarthy, the others who read the manuscript and commented upon it. Don Topping and Bob Kiste, both of the University of Hawaii, offered their encouragement and practical assistance in seeing this through the press. Gigi Gallares and Elsa Veloso typed the manuscript and patiently bore the abuse that frustrated writers unloose on their secretaries. The entire community at Xavier High School deserves a word of thanks for their cheerful support during the years that this book was in the making. I also wish to express my appreciation to Dr David Stowe of the United Church Board for World Ministries and to Dr Rodney Dennis of the Houghton Library for permission to quote from the ABCFM Letters.

CHAPTER 1

The End of a Long Seclusion

The Defenses Breached SHORTLY A F T E R DAYBREAK on 6 March 1 5 2 1 , the lookout aboard the Trinidad sighted a lofty island ahead and then, soon afterward, another, and a third. The long, shrill cry announcing land, more a prayer of gratitude than a statement of fact, rang the length of the ship and brought the dazed crew to their feet. It had been ninetynine days since the three Spanish ships, the remainder of Magellan's fleet, had emerged from the strait that was later to bear his name and entered that vast sea that Magellan himself first named the Pacific. Only two islands, both deserted spits of land, had they sighted in this time. Now, as the ships coasted down the shore of the more southerly island in search of a safe port, the half-starved mariners gawked at the coconut palms, breadfruit trees, and plantains amid the tangle of rich green vegetation that promised them a hearty meal at last. During the trying three and a half months of their passage across the South Sea, they had been reduced to eating worm-ridden biscuit, and, when even this ran out, gulping down sawdust and gnawing on oxhide to assuage their hunger. Even the flesh of rats was a luxury they usually had to do without, for rodents were in great demand as a supplement to the sailors' frugal diet and began selling for half a ducat apiece as the days wore on and bellies became emptier. The Trinidad and its two companion vessels finally found a sheltered harbor on the southern coast of Guam and as they were turning in to anchor, a flotilla of swift native prao, dugout canoes equipped with single outriggers and triangular or lateen sails, put out from the shore and raced for the ships. Within a few minutes Europeans and Pacific islanders stood face to face with one anoth-

2

T H E FIRST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION

er for the first time—the Spaniards in their dirty woolen pantaloons and tattered blouses, and the islanders in nothing but their swarthy skins. In a scene that was to be replayed hundreds of times throughout the Pacific for the next three hundred years, the islanders were in no time at all swarming all over Magellan's flagship helping themselves to whatever happened to catch their fancy: crockery, bits of rope, cloth, and, above all, iron. When Magellan found that he was unable to disperse the mob of light-fingered natives by more peaceful means, he ordered his men-at-arms to take aim at a few of them with their crossbows. The troublesome guests left in haste, but not before they had succeeded in stealing the captain's skiff from under the stern of the ship. The following morning, after his small fleet had regrouped in the harbor, Magellan and a landing party went ashore to forage for provisions and seek satisfaction for the injustice they had suffered. With an armed force of forty men wielding torch and sword, they attacked the first village they came upon. The islanders were quickly driven off, leaving behind seven dead, and could only watch helplessly from the woods as forty or fifty nipa huts and a number of prao were reduced to ashes. When the Spaniards returned to the ships later in the day, they brought with them the stolen skiff and a good supply of rice, fruit, and fresh water. They also carried a few buckets filled with the intestines of the slain Cuamanians to be distributed among the sick as a cure for scurvy. With his ships reprovisioned, Magellan had no reason to linger at Guam any longer. He was not the sort of person given to contemplating the strange flora and fauna that he must have found on Guam or to speculating on the remarkable customs of the Indios. He was a practical, hardheaded man with a clear mission bestowed on him—at his own insistent urging, it is true!—by the Spanish monarch Charles V. He had been charged to "discover islands and lands and rich spiceries and other things which may be to the benefit of the kingdom," and that he would do! (Cushner 1971:12). It was clear that these islands, which he contemptuously named Islas de Ladrones to commemorate the thieving ways of the inhabitants, were not the sort of lands his sovereign had in mind when he penned the royal capitulación 'contract' authorizing the voyage. It was with few regrets, then, that Magellan led his company out of Umatac Bay, just three days after his arrival at Guam, to continue the voyage westward. While his ships hoisted anchor, the prao set out from shore once again, and as they darted around

The End of a Long Seclusion

3

and about the lumbering vessels, the islanders taunted the Spaniards and showered rocks on the decks of the ships, laughing convulsively all the while. For centuries, even for millennia, the inhabitants of those minute, scattered islands now known as Micronesia had lived in sheltered isolation from the outside world. Perhaps two or three thousand years before the birth of Christ, canoe voyagers from the Philippines or eastern Indonesia, bringing food crops and a few animals like the dog, first ventured into the unoccupied high island groups of western Micronesia—Guam, Yap, and Palau. A millennium or two later, probably about 1000 BC, later waves of travelers set out from the area around the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) to the south and moved up the Gilbert and Marshall chains, settling these groups and dispersing westward throughout the rest of the Caroline Islands—Kosrae, Ponape, Truk, and the dozens of atolls still farther west. The cultural and linguistic boundaries were clearly drawn from the very beginning. The peoples of the high islands in western Micronesia retained languages and cultures that were ancient by oceanic standards; those of the island groups to the east and the low atolls in the west shared a more recent ancestral tongue and many cultural affinities. In time, the relative seclusion of the island populations resulted in diversification of language and culture among the peoples of the east, even though some interisland contact continued, as did periodic drift voyages from outside Micronesia. No fewer than ten distinct languages were spoken within Micronesia by the time of Magellan's arrival. The tininess and remoteness of these islands, the only visible remains of a range of submerged volcanic peaks, had, for centuries after their settlement, served effectively to insulate them from the mainland shores of Asia and America. Micronesians had always lived in peaceful ignorance of Europeans and their ways. Indeed, how could it have been otherwise—Europe was half the globe away! But the defenses that had assured the isolation of the islanders were breached on this day. European ships had for the first time penetrated the very heart of the Pacific and would do so in even greater numbers in the years to follow. If Magellan himself could not gauge the impact his voyage would have on the people he visited on this early March day, how much less could the natives who watched the wake of his ships from their outrigger canoes! Neither could the natives of Sonsorol, a tiny island southwest of Palau,

4

THE FIRST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION

who looked out from the beach as a sail hove into view on 6 May 1522, have known that their island was the first in the Carolines or Marshalls to be discovered by Europeans (Stanley 1874:25-29). The ship that passed from a distance was the same Trinidad that had put in at Guam over a year before, now commanded by Gonzalo Gomez de Espinosa after Magellan's death at the hands of a band of warriors on Cebu (Map 1). No one at the time could have known the eventual impact that this remarkable voyage would have on the lives of those simple islanders. It would be centuries before much of its force would be felt at all, and even longer before it could be described. But the impact was real and its story forms the substance of this book. In Pursuit of the Fragrant Clove What was it that brought a band of plucky Spaniards halfway around the world into the uncharted waters of the Great South Sea? Perhaps the spirit of adventure that has seized countless individuals before and since and led them to test themselves against the elements of nature. Possibly the same kind of frontiersmanship that has always inspired certain souls to push back the limits of the unknown. The early sixteenth century, after all, was still very much a part of that optimistic age of discovery when it seemed that no corner of the globe would long remain inaccessible to European sailing ships. Undoubtedly, too, the desire to serve the majesty of both God and king and extend the domains of both helped to motivate a voyage such as Magellan's. All these forces played a role in the voyages of discovery, but when all is said and done, there was one simple object of their quest—the clove tree. The great riches of the Orient, which lured European ships across uncharted seas, were epitomized in the rare spices that were to be bought there, and the rarest of all was the clove. To understand why the powers of Europe should have sent their merchant ships at great expense to the ends of the earth to put cloves on the table, we must consider the problems that Europeans had in storing and preserving food. The farming communities of the time were unable to supply fresh meat during the winter months when snow and frost covered most of the grazing lands. As a consequence of the chronic shortage of winter feed for cattle, large numbers of animals had to be slaughtered every autumn and their meat preserved for winter consumption by being dried or

6

T H E FIRST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION

smoked. No more than a handful of the privileged who had the right to hunt deer could obtain fresh meat at this time of year; the vast majority of Europeans were compelled to eat tough and tasteless meat, much of it already spoiled. In the years following the return of the Crusaders from the East, Europeans had developed an insatiable craving for the spices that these knights of the Holy Rood carried back home with them. They found that the spices of the Orient not only made palatable the tainted meat they were accustomed to eat in winter, but also served as excellent preservatives, in addition to their recognized usefulness as important ingredients in medicines and perfumes. The traditional preservative had always been salt, cheap and readily obtained from Portugal. But the European palate had already been tickled by the tang of those zesty spices that could only be obtained from the East: pepper, grown in India and the East Indies; cinnamon from Ceylon (Sri Lanka); nutmeg and mace, found in the Celebes (Sulawesi) and a few other parts of the Indies; ginger from China; and, of course, cloves. The precious clove, the most sought-after of all the spices, was grown in the most limited area of all—five tiny islands off the west coast of Halmahera (now a part of Indonesia) that were, together with their tributaries, variously known as the Moluccas or Spice Islands (Map 2). Tidore and Ternate, the most important of these islands, are mere pinheads in the sea, no more than a few miles in length. It is difficult to believe that this cluster of seemingly insignificant islands—and the clove tree that grew so well there— should have inspired countless sea voyages under the most arduous of conditions, sparked off controversies between the naval powers of Europe and Asia for two centuries, and caused the deaths of untold numbers of Europeans. But so it was. When Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese subject who had sailed with Almeida's fleet of India-bound vessels a decade earlier, presented himself to the Spanish monarch in 1518 with a plan for reaching the Indies by a westerly route, Charles V gave him an attentive hearing. The young Charles, who had only two years before ascended the throne, was most eager to find an alternative route to the Orient so that Spain could claim a share of the lucrative spice trade. For years now, the only sea route to the wealthy Spice Islands had been in the hands of the Portuguese, Spain's bitterest rival. Throughout the fifteenth century, Portuguese seafarers had gradually worked their way down the coast of Africa in their

C A R T E P A R T I C U L I E R E DES ISIES M O E U Q U E S Kchelle

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Map 2. Early map of the Moluccas or Spice Islands, a group of clove-producing islands lying off the west coast of Halmahera (formerly known as Gilolo). (In map collection of Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii.)

8

THE FIRST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION

search for a sea-lane to the Orient. With Vasco da Gama's much heralded voyage to India in 1497, the Portuguese had acquired a virtual monopoly over the spice trade, and it was clear that they meant to keep it. In the two decades between da Gama's voyage and Magellan's audience with Charles V, the Portuguese had established a chain of ports along their route, wrested a good part of the Indies trade from the hands of the Moslem merchants who had long controlled it, and established an outpost in the Moluccas themselves. By 1518 the shipping route down the African coast and across the Indian Ocean to India and the strategic Malaccan Straits was the exclusive estate of John III of Portugal. The Portuguese had succeeded in creating a highly profitable commercial empire in the East, while the Spanish could do little but stand by and watch with covetous eyes. According to the famous Bull of Pope Alexander VI in 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas a year later, the Spanish were denied the right to explore and lay claim to any lands east of an imaginary line that lay well out in the Atlantic Ocean. Their zone of influence was to lie to the west of that line; the Portuguese were to have the exclusive right to colonize any areas to the east. In effect, this forbade the Spanish access to the sea route around Africa that within a few years would become the regular shipping lane for Portuguese vessels plying the waters between Europe and the Indies and peddling their precious wares in the markets of European cities. The Spanish were committed to search for a westward route to the Indies. Spain's early efforts to find an alternative trade route had led to Columbus' discovery of what he first took to be the Indies. "Sail west and the East will be found" was that mariner's repeated contention—one that he thought he had proved by his landfalls in the "Indies" in 1492 and after. Only later was his discovery seen for what it was—a gigantic land mass that impeded the way to the East. In their own right, the newly discovered Americas would in time become a vast source of wealth to fill Spanish coffers, but just then they were little more than a formidable barrier to the riches that lay well beyond—although how far beyond was anyone's guess! If the Spanish wanted to claim their fair share of the spice trade—and, for that matter, the trade in silks, Indian cotton cloth, and precious gems that also commanded very good prices in Europe—they would first have to devise some way to sail around or through the Americas.

The End of a Long Seclusion

9

Magellan's plan, then, could not have failed to interest the Spanish authorities in 1518. They listened keenly as he told them of his surmise that the western and eastern coasts of South America met at the southern tip of that continent where the two oceans joined. It was around this point that he proposed to sail on into the South Sea. Within a year they had outfitted him with five ancient ships and a store of provisions that was expected to keep him in good supply until he reached the shores of the East. When the Victoria, the smallest and only surviving vessel of Magellan's fleet, limped into Seville harbor in early September 1522, three years after the expedition had set out, Spanish hopes were rekindled. The stout little ship may have appeared a spectre, its sails tattered and its keel encrusted with barnacles, but its hold carried a rich cargo: twenty-five tons of cloves (Morison 1974: 352-355). At the market value of the day, these spices would have more than repaid the initial outlay for the entire expedition, a fact that bore out how little exaggeration there was in the popular saying that a merchant could ship six cargoes from the Indies and lose five, but still make a profit when the sixth was sold (Parry 1961: 38). To be sure, the costs of the voyage in human terms were very high: all but a mere 18 survivors from the original 267 members of the expedition. Nonetheless, the expedition had accomplished its main purpose; it had found a western sea route to the Spice Islands at long last and had returned with a sample of these islands' fragrant wares to prove it. Spain would have its rightful slice of the profitable spice trade after all. The Simplicity of the First Age Oddly enough it was not the Spanish but the Portuguese who made the first real contact with the people of the Caroline Islands, a vast archipelago to the south of Magellan's discovery that spanned two thousand miles of ocean. Magellan's voyage across the Pacific had stirred Portugal out of its complacency. Troubled by the inroads that Spain had made and most likely would continue to make into what had once been an exclusively Portuguese preserve, Lisbon took immediate action. The captain of the Moluccas received instructions to explore the surrounding waters and lay claim to any lands he might find, especially those known to lie to the north. Stories of the colorful lands in the southern Philippines had probably reached the ears of the

10

THE FIRST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION

Portuguese garrison in the Moluccas, for Moslem merchants were carrying on a brisk trade with Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago at the time (Map 3). Tales abounded of spice-bearing lands that were also rich in gold, silver, and other precious metals—lands just waiting to be taken by the first European power to discover them. Portugal would do well to find these lands and secure its claim before the Spanish sea captains who were sure to follow in Magellan's track could establish title to these lucrative domains. After all, the Spanish were known to have taken certain liberties with the line of demarcation that divided Spanish territory from Portuguese and were not above moving it a few degrees to the east or west when it happened to suit their purposes. The captain of the Moluccas dispatched Dioga da Rocha in 1525 with a small galley under his command, with the intention of having him discover and lay claim to any lands he might find in those uncharted waters to the north. Rocha wandered from island to island in the Moluccas Passage for a while, until his ship was caught in a severe storm and driven a full two or three hundred leagues (between 800 and 1200 miles) to the northeast. On 1 October, as they drifted about at nine degrees north latitude with a broken rudder, the hard-pressed crew suddenly sighted land. They named the island group that lay before them Islas de Sequeira after their pilot, Gomez de Sequeira. Anxious to make repairs on their ship, which had been seriously damaged in the gale, they made for the islands, where they were graciously received by the natives. For the next four months Rocha and his crew remained on the island, most probably Ulithi, an atoll in the western Caroline Islands. While waiting for favorable winds, the Portuguese learned something of the life of the islanders, some of which was later preserved in the account written by the Portuguese historian Jo5o de Barros. In words that were to be echoed in later descriptions of the Carolinian atoll-dwellers, Barros gives this portrait of the people: Both men and women were quite pleasant in appearance, with happy faces, quite friendly, neither thin nor fat, without a sign of physical ailments. The men had long beards like ours; and straight hair. Their dress consisted of woven mats, which were very soft and flexible, and which served them as our shirts do us. Above them they wore other mats more coarsely woven without any shape whatsoever, like merely a loose piece of cloth that covered them from the waist down. When the chief saw our men he expressed great happi-

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12

T H E FIRST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION

ness, and because of the easiness and mildness [of the natives] everyone thought that the people of the island were of simple rationality, without any malice, fear, or cautiousness, such as our men had seen in the islands of the Orient; wherefore it seemed to them that they were amidst the simplicity of the First Age. (Cited in Lessa 1975b: 38-40)

Here indeed was the very archetype of Rousseau's Noble Savage— humans in a primitive and uncorrupted original setting—a full two hundred years before the French thinker penned his first line! The Portuguese admired the swift native prao, similar in design and construction to those that had come off Guam to greet Magellan. When they inquired how these were made without the benefit of iron tools, they were shown the shell adzes with which the islanders hollowed out the canoe hulls. They learned that the language of the Carolinians who inhabited this atoll was not intelligible to the black slaves from the Moluccas that they carried with them on their ship. But most important of all for the profit-minded Portuguese was the information that no valuable metals were to be found on these islands. When one of the Portuguese showed some of the natives samples of iron, copper, tin, and gold that he had brought with him, he found that gold was the only metal of which they gave any sign of recognition. Gold, the natives explained through their gestures, could be obtained from a high mountain somewhere to the west, presumably in the southern Philippines. No doubt the Portuguese took the opportunity during their protracted stay on the island to teach the inhabitants a few prayers and some of the simple doctrines of their religion, and they may even have baptized a number. At length, as the monsoon winds began to blow, the Portuguese took leave of their kindly hosts, promising to return sometime in the future. On 20 January 1526, Rocha's galley sailed out of "Ulithi" on a homeward course for Temate, so ending the first encounter between Europeans and Carolinians. A Track to the West During the summer of 1525, at about the same time that Rocha was picking his way northward through the Moluccas Passage, a second major Spanish expedition was sailing out of Seville for the Pacific. At the head of the fleet of seven vessels was Juan Garcia Jofre de Loaysa, who had instructions to make for the Spice Is-

The End of a Long Seclusion

13

lands and take possession of them by whatever means he might. He carried with him a royal cédula 'decree' appointing him as the first Spanish captain-general of those lands. The year before, representatives from Spain and Portugal had met to try to settle the troublesome question of the ownership of those five spice-growing islands of the Moluccas, but to no avail. The Portuguese government argued that it had not only de facto possession of the islands—a point that was incontrovertible—but de jure title as well, since they lay well within the Portuguese side of that all too flexible meridian of demarcation. The Spanish envoys maintained that the line had been misplaced and if it were redrawn (according to Spanish charts, naturally!) the Moluccas would fall just within their zone. In despair of ever having Spanish claims recognized at the conference table, Charles V decided to move boldly and resolutely; he would seize the contested islands and resume the discussion of conflicting claims only after they were actually in the hands of the Spanish. The Spanish monarch could not have foreseen the catastrophes that would plague the expedition throughout, nor could he have known just how strong the Portuguese force in the Moluccas was. The enterprise was doomed from the very outset. It took almost a year before what remained of the fleet emerged from the Strait of Magellan, and within a week after entering the Pacific two more of Loaysa's vessels were lost in a storm, leaving only two ships of the original seven. Shortly afterward, when one of the two remaining ships was forced to put in at Mexico for repairs, the flagship Victoria was left to sail on alone. Misfortunes continued in rapid succession; soon Loaysa himself died, and within another four days his successor, Sebastian del Cano, was also dead. The command of this unlucky expedition next fell to Alonso de Salazar. As the Victoria struggled northward, an island was sighted that appeared green and inviting to the scurvy-plagued crew. The ship stood off for the night, intending to put ashore the following morning, but the Spaniards were unable to find bottom when they coasted the atoll looking for an anchorage the next day. Reluctantly they passed on, leaving the island with the name San Bartolomé in honor of the saint whose feast was celebrated that day, as was customary among Catholic mariners of the time. San Bartolomé, which would appear on European maps for generations afterward, was the first European landfall in the Marshalls. Next, the Victoria made Guam where it was hailed by a Euro-

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pean who came off the island in a native sailing canoe. The crew took the man, Gonzalo de Vigo, aboard and learned that he was the only survivor of the three seamen who had deserted from the Trinidad when it returned to the Ladrones after Magellan's violent death in the Philippines. For four years he had managed to keep himself alive on the islands, earning him the distinction of becoming the first European beachcomber in the Pacific. Salazar reprovisioned at Guam, as Magellan had done before him, and made ready to leave. He delayed just long enough to decoy eleven islanders who had come out to trade on board ship and impress them into service. His ship was short-handed and the crew was badly in need of a rest, so the Guamanians were forced to man the pumps on the passage to the Philippines, after which they were released. After a three-week layover in the Philippines, Salazar proceeded to the Moluccas, the real objective of his voyage. There he and his men found a strongly entrenched Portuguese force. After a valiant but doomed sea battle with them, the Spaniards burnt their own ship and took to the hills where they held out against the enemy for almost two years. In the end, however, they were captured and imprisoned. The Loaysa expedition had proved a dismal failure and the Moluccas remained as firmly in Portuguese possession as ever. Communications being what they were in those days, the fate of the handful of survivors from Loaysa's expedition did not reach Spain for years. Meanwhile, King Charles V, who probably labored under the illusion that the Spanish were actually on the verge of taking the Moluccas, ordered that another fleet be dispatched to come to their support. This time, however, the expedition was to be launched from the west coast of New Spain (what we now know as Mexico) to avoid the long and dangerous passage around the tip of South America. Accordingly, Hernan Cortes, the renowned conquistador and viceroy of New Spain, fitted out three vessels and selected his cousin, Alvaro de Saavedra Ceron, to command the company of 115 men. They set sail from Zihuatanejo on the final day of October 1527. In the end, Saavedra's expedition proved no more successful than Loaysa's, but it did discover several islands in the Carolines and Marshalls before it came to grief in the Moluccas two years later. On its track across the Pacific, the flagship Florida, which had lost sight of its two companion vessels some weeks before and was now sailing alone, came upon an island at which it could not

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find a suitable anchorage. Two days later, on 1 January 1528, the Florida raised another island group that the Spaniards dubbed Islas de los Reyes in honor of the feast-day. Here they anchored and went ashore to take on water. While they were on the island, two canoes landed and the four bronze-colored people who disembarked from them cautiously approached a couple of Saavedra's men. Saavedra himself badly wanted to get a closer look at these islanders (the only ones he would meet on his long passage across the Pacific) but they slowly backed off when summoned and soon jumped into their canoes and departed. All that he could learn from his men afterwards was that the islanders were "long-faced, bearded, and clad in small grass skirts woven of fine palm leaves." They were natives of the western Carolines, we know from the sailing directions and distances recorded by the commander himself, probably from the island of Yap. The first island sighted by Saavedra answers to the description of Fais, an island about two days' sailing distance to the east of Yap. Before leaving this island group eight days later, Saavedra carved a memorial of his visit in a large tree and left a letter relating details of his voyage sealed in a jar at the foot of the tree. As far as we know, the letter was never recovered. When Saavedra arrived in the Philippines some three weeks later, he learned the distressing news that the survivors of Loaysa's expedition, eighty men in all, were holed up in a makeshift fort on Tidore, defending themselves against the Portuguese and their allies. The odds against this brave little band were overwhelming, as Saavedra well realized, and there was little he and his ragtag crew of thirty men (for that was all he had left by this time!) could do to assist them. Still, he turned south toward Tidore to lend the beleaguered Spaniards a little moral support, if nothing more. Once in the Moluccas, Saavedra lost no time in refitting the Florida for the return voyage to New Spain. He had picked up a few Spanish stragglers in the Philippines, men who had served under Loaysa, and took on a cargo of spices in the Moluccas as reparation for his owners' losses. Convinced that he could not salvage the Spanish cause there, he reasoned that he might at least be able to find a return route back east across the Pacific, something that no one had yet done. With this in mind, he pointed the Florida on an easterly course in the hope of making New Spain, but even in this he was to be frustrated. After running along the northern coast of New Guinea and putting in at one of the Admiralty Islands, he

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bore north by east for some distance until reaching an island that he named Barbudos for the bearded natives who lived there. This island, which he records as lying at seven degrees north latitude some two hundred fifty Spanish leagues from New Guinea, must have been either Ponape or one of its outliers. The Florida struggled on in a northeasterly direction against the trade winds that blow steadily from that quarter during much of the year. Saavedra succeeded in climbing a few more degrees to the north before the winds proved too much to buck, and he was at last forced to head back to the Moluccas after six months at sea. Less than a year later, in May 1529, Saavedra left Tidore once again on his second and final attempt to recross the Pacific. Again he coasted New Guinea, touched at the Admiralties, and bore to the northeast; and again he sighted an island in or near seven degrees latitude, perhaps the same one that he had seen on his previous voyage. A week after this, in late September, while sailing in the vicinity of the northern Marshalls, he came upon the first of the two groups of islands that he would reach. As the Florida lay becalmed off an atoll that was probably Ujelang, several men came out in a canoe. Apparently irritated because Saavedra would not lower his sails in response to their signs, the islanders slung large stones at the ship, one of these missiles striking the hull of the Florida with such force that it cracked a plank. Completely unaware of the breach of etiquette that he had committed in failing to give the customary mark of deference to native royalty, Saavedra had a musket fired at the canoe, but without effect. The Spaniards, evidently more impressed by the tattooing that the natives wore than their unfriendly welcome, named the islands Los Pintados. Saavedra's next discovery occurred ten days later, on 1 October, when he anchored off another atoll about sixty-five leagues, by his reckoning, to the northeast. This island group, which the Spaniards called Los Jardines on account of its lush vegetation, cannot be identified with certainty, but the likeliest candidates seem to be Enewetak and Bikini, both of which lost their vegetation and achieved a different sort of eminence centuries later when they became test sites for US nuclear weapons. Saavedra was taken sick and the ship was forced to remain here for eight days, but they were not altogether unpleasant ones if we may believe the account of Vincente de Napoles, the chief chronicler of the Florida's voyage (Wright 1951).

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With the twenty or so Marshallese who came out to the Florida in their canoes was an old woman whom the Spaniards took to be a sorceress. She shuffled up to each of the crewmen and officers in turn and touched them lightly with her hands, apparently in an attempt to divine what sort of creatures these newcomers were. We are not told what conclusions she may have reached, but perhaps it really wouldn't have mattered anyway. The officers were already distributing presents to the islanders, and cordial relations were soon cemented between the ship's company and the natives. When the Spaniards eventually landed, they were welcomed at the beach by a retinue of natives who sang and danced to the beat of drums and accompanied them amidst great celebration to the house of the chief. There the guests were feted with a dinner that could not have consisted of much more than fish, coconuts, and fruit. In the conversation that followed—if the communication between parties who did not understand a word of each other's language can be called that!—the chief pointed to a musket that the captain was carrying and asked what it was for. To please his host, Saavedra had the weapon fired. Pandemonium followed immediately. At the loud report most of the Marshallese flew out of the house and dashed madly through the bush, many of them not stopping until they were in their canoes heading for safe refuge on another part of the atoll. The more courageous souls merely fell to the ground in a dead faint; but the chief, the most stout-hearted of the lot, remained exactly where he was, limbs trembling uncontrollably. The rest of the time on Los Jardines passed quietly, for the great number of Marshallese who had fled at the discharge of Saavedra's musket never returned. Those few who remained gladly helped the Spaniards fill their water casks and provided coconuts and whatever else the terrifying foreigners might desire. At length, Saavedra weighed anchor and resumed his voyage to the northeast, but his health soon worsened and within two weeks he was dead. His handpicked successor continued to climb to higher latitudes and reached the thirty-first parallel before he, too, died. This was a crushing blow for the dispirited crew of the Florida-, they had endured enough on their slow climb northward and could take no more. Even though they, unknowingly, had already reached the latitudes that would carry future galleons eastward to New Spain, they brought the ship about and returned to Tidore where they, too, threw in their lot with the badly outnumbered

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T H E FIRST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION

band of Spanish holdouts in their futile struggle against the Portuguese. At the very time that the Spaniards were getting ready to raise the white flag and put an end to their stubborn resistance in Tidore, the Portuguese and Spanish sovereigns had taken to the conference table once again and were just concluding an agreement that would finally put an end to the squabble over the Spice Islands. In return for three hundred fifty thousand ducats, Spain would cede its supposed rights to the Moluccas, according to the terms of the Treaty of Zaragoza that was signed in 1529 (Cushner 1971:29). Events had shown that Portugal's hold on the islands was tighter than the Spanish might at first have imagined. Spain's attempts to discover a western route to the Indies were hardly the spectacular success that was foreseen in the heady days following the return of Magellan's Victoria. Although the track west across the Pacific was well proven, the return voyage east had not been made successfully by a single Spanish vessel. Moreover, the expeditions had not proved commercially profitable; all that Spain had reaped for its efforts was the single cargo of spices carried by the Victoria. Of the fifteen ships in all that had put out on the first three expeditions, only the Victoria had returned, and its state of disrepair was such that it was soon after scrapped. None of the commanders of these three expeditions lived to see their homeland again, nor did any of the lieutenants who immediately succeeded them. As for the crews, of more than eight hundred men who sailed, only a mere handful (not more than thirty or forty, it would appear) ever made it back to Spain (Morison 1974:463-466, 478479, 491-492). In all, there was good reason for Spain to surrender its interest in the Moluccas. A full twelve years passed after Saavedra's death before the next Spanish expedition into the Pacific was mounted. When Ruy Lopez de Villalobos set out from Mexico in November 1542 at the head of a fleet of six vessels, his destination was Islas del Poniente or "the Isles of the West"—the Philippines, as Villalobos himself was to name them. Spain may have abandoned her claim to the Moluccas, but she had not by any means given up the idea of establishing a toehold in the Orient. If the door to the coveted Spice Islands was shut, then she would have to search out and colonize her own Spice Islands in another part of the East. The Moluccas were surely not the only source of wealth in the vast new

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world that had begun to open up to Europeans in the past three decades. Those "Isles of the West" that had been reached by the first three expeditions gave some promise of becoming what Spain had sought in the Moluccas. Reports had reached Spain that gold and cinnamon, if not cloves, were to be found there. It was to the Philippines, then, that Villalobos was sent with orders to explore, conquer, and colonize. Fifty-five days out of Mexico, on Christmas Day of 1542, Villalobos' fleet made its first real landfall, an island group somewhere in the Marshalls, to which Villalobos gave the name Los Corales. Here the Spanish took on wood and water, but met no people since they had all fled to another islet at the first approach of the ships. Less than two weeks later they reached another atoll, also in the Marshalls, which they thought to be Saavedra's Los Jardines. The fleet sailed on quickly, with fresh breezes from their rear quarter, to the western Carolines where they again sighted land. This time it was a small, pleasant-looking island that was said to lie at about ten degrees north latitude (the longitude could not be determined with any reasonable accuracy in those days long before the invention of a reliable chronometer). As Villalobos drew his ships close under the island, people came off in their canoes and, to the astonishment of the crew, greeted the Spaniards in their own language. "Buenos días, matelotes!" they called out, after which they made the sign of the cross over themselves. Leaving these islands with the name Matelotes, Villalobos passed on to another, much larger island, three days sail to the west, where the same salutation was repeated. The two islands at which Villalobos heard the Castillian greeting were very likely the same ones which Saavedra had visited on his voyage to the Philippines sixteen years before—Fais and Yap. Were the islanders, who must have been blessed with extraordinarily long memories, relating something that they had picked up from Saavedra's seamen? Or were these phrases the only evidence of a more recent unrecorded contact, perhaps with a vessel from the Philippines? We simply do not know, and if Villalobos ever found out he did not leave us this information. He did leave something of greater importance, however. In his company sailed one Antonio de Herrera, who was in due time to become the chief chronicler of the Indies for the king of Spain. Herrera published one of the earliest maps of the northern Pacific in his Historia General of 1601, showing all the islands discovered

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THE FIRST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION

by early Spanish captains. This work was one of the earliest and best-known maps of the Caroline and Marshall islands, and is reproduced here as Map 4. When Villalobos* fleet reached the Philippines in early February 1543, the Spaniards lost no time in mounting a campaign to subjugate the native peoples. It was not long, however, before Villalobos* company found themselves unable to get adequate food supplies from the villages, and were driven to tilling the soil themselves in what turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt to raise their own food. To make matters worse, a Portuguese crewman who came ashore off one of the three prao that one day appeared off Villalobos' campsite informed the Spaniards that Mindanao belonged to the king of Portugal by virtue of a Portuguese expedition that had reached there from the Moluccas five years previously. Villalobos was flabbergasted at this news. The Portuguese, it seemed, had once again beaten the Spanish in the race to extend their overseas empire. As the food shortage worsened week by week, Villalobos decided that he had no other recourse than to make for the Moluccas—against the express orders Spanish authorities had given him. His effort to colonize the Philippines during the year that he remained there had failed miserably, and he could only do what the survivors of the last two Spanish expeditions had been forced to do—deliver himself into the hands of the enemy. And so Villalobos surrendered his ships and the survivors of his expedition to the Portuguese, who thereupon, with reluctant generosity, guaranteed the hapless Spaniards free passage home via India. Villalobos himself was taken down with a fever and died the year before his men returned to Spain, breathing his last, tradition has it, in the arms of that saintly apostle of the Indies, Francis Xavier. In a Wake of Foam and Blood It was late 1564 when the next Spanish fleet left port to begin its voyage across the Pacific. Nearly half a century had passed since Magellan had first crossed those waters, and Spain had yet to found its long-desired colony in the East. There was a good deal that might have discouraged Philip II, who had succeeded Charles V to the Spanish throne in 1556. Besides the disappointing results of previous voyages, a new quarrel had arisen with Portugal as to which of the European powers should have jurisdiction over the

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THE FIRST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION

Philippines. Mounting evidence was beginning to persuade even the king's own cartographers that the Philippines lay outside the Spanish zone. Andrés de Urdaneta, the pilot who had sailed with Loaysa in 1525 and since then taken the habit of an Augustinian friar, wrote the Spanish king as much in a letter that must have caused a considerable stir in the court of Madrid. But the imperial designs were not to be lightly discarded. Pepper prices were soaring in Spain, and with them interest was renewed in finding a spice-producing colony in the Orient. Even if the archipelago that bore the name of Philip II should not quite live up to Spanish expectations as the new Spice Islands, it could become a depot for trade with other parts of the East: "The Silver Islands," as Japan was sometimes called, and Cathay or China, whose potential was still largely untapped. As the fleet of four ships watched the mountainous ridge of Mexico sink below the horizon, Miguel de Legazpi ripped open the sealed packet of instructions from the Spanish court and read his secret orders. He was to make for the Philippines and find out which of the islands grew spices; those lands he was to colonize, sending back to Mexico samples of the "spices and other riches" that might be found there. But it was not to be as easy as all that! Just ten days out of port, Legazpi was dismayed to find that one of his ships, the San Lucas under the command of Alonso de Arellano, had separated from the rest of the fleet and was nowhere to be seen. The San Lucas was easily the fastest sailer of the four ships and had pulled well ahead of the others on previous days, almost out of their sight. Legazpi had taken the pilot, Lope Martin, to task for this on more than one occasion, and could only conclude after he had lost the San Lucas that its maneuver had been intentional. It probably was! Martin, it seems, had concocted a sinister scheme with a few of his shipmates to gain control of the San Lucas after he had shaken off the other ships in the fleet. They planned to turn it into a pirate vessel, evidently hoping to steer for the waters around the southern Philippines where they could make raids on the richly laden merchant ships returning from the Moluccas. Until the opportunity came for the mutineers to make their move, however, they would have had to keep well out of the way of passing ships and, above all, prevent the San Lucas from accidentally being discovered by the rest of the fleet. With this in mind, Lope Martin brought the San Lucas down a few degrees from the usual track that Spanish ships followed to

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bring them directly to the Ladrones. This new course brought the small ship to a number of hitherto undiscovered islands in the Caroline and Marshall groups, on a voyage that was the most eventful one yet made through these waters. A month after it had parted company with the rest of the fleet, the Son Lucas was sailing before a stiff breeze one evening, when shoals showed up dead ahead. Martin dashed to the prow of the ship to size up the situation and was almost swept overboard by a breaker. Meanwhile, the ship was brought hard around by the helmsman and barely managed to clear some vicious-looking rocks. The San Lucas stood well off until morning when the Spaniards discovered that they had almost run aground on a group of low islands that were very likely those of Likiep Atoll in the Marshalls. On the next day, 7 January 1565, the San Lucas came upon another atoll where they found anchorage—Dos Vecinos or "Two Neighbors Island," possibly Kwajalein. A sail appeared in the distance; the Spaniards made for it and found a canoe manned by two husky men and a boy. When invited aboard ship, the Marshallese clambered up with no hesitation and received some small presents for their efforts. The Spaniards then followed them ashore to have a look around and, as it turned out, to meet their wives and children. On the following day the San Lucas came to still another island, this one smaller than the others and lying at about eight and a half degrees north latitude, perhaps Lib, an island twenty miles south of Kwajalein. As Arellano worked his ship in toward land, scores of islanders began swimming out. The Spanish captain might have taken this as a simple welcoming gesture on the part of a curious people, but a glance at the beach convinced him otherwise. Armed men swarmed all over the shore, brandishing spears tipped with the tail of the stingray, wooden clubs, and the slingshots that they used with deadly accuracy. With a force of only twenty men aboard the ship, Arellano thought it better to leave the disposition of the people untested and hoist sail immediately. Putting the Nadadores, as he called this last island, behind him, he left the Marshalls to continue his westward course through the Carolines. On 17 January, land again appeared off the port bow—this time a high island rather than the low coral atolls that the San Lucas had passed in the Marshalls. As the ship drew nearer, Lope Martin saw that it was in fact several high islands ringed by an enormous coral reef. The San Lucas had come upon the Truk lagoon. Soon

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after the Spaniards had worked their way through the reef's northeast pass, a large canoe drew up to the ship and four of its occupants boarded the San Lucas to have a look around and present the Spaniards with food: fish and a "dough-like food so foulsmelling that not a man aboard the ship could stay downwind of it"—very likely preserved breadfruit. The men made repeated signs to the Spaniards inviting them to put in alongside their island. When Arellano showed his willingness to comply with their requests, one of them remained aboard the ship to help pilot it through the shallows to the lee side of loloas, one of the larger islands within the lagoon. The Son Lucas had not quite made the anchorage when the Spaniards noticed with alarm hundreds of canoes full of men armed with lances, clubs, and slings, rapidly bearing down on them from the surrounding islands. The Europeans could only surmise that the host of shouting warriors making for them were angry that the Toloas people had beaten them to the punch and intended to take the ship as a prize. The San Lucas beat a hasty retreat through the shallow waters off Toloas, with one of the friendly natives who remained aboard taking the helm from time to time to help steer through the maze of reefs. When at last the ship had put a safe distance between itself and the pursuing canoes, the few Toloas natives who had stayed aboard helped themselves to spoons and whatever other pieces of iron they could find and leapt into the sea close by the barrier reef. But the worst was not over yet. Dusk was quickly falling and the San Lucas still had to pick its way through the reef-studded lagoon. With sail shortened now, the hostile canoes, which had by no means given up the chase, were closing in on the Spanish ship. The fastest of the canoes had already drawn up alongside the ship's boat and some of the warriors were busy trying to cut it loose, when Arellano ordered one of his men into the boat to drive them off. As the single seaman was trying to keep the Trukese from severing the tow-line, while warding off the blows of their clubs as best he could, the others in the canoes let loose with a volley of spears. Somehow they fell harmlessly to the deck without injuring any of the Spaniards but one of Arellano's men emptied his musket at the canoes just the same. In the turmoil and shouting that ensued, Arellano ordered the rest of the sail raised and the San Lucas slipped away into the gathering gloom. No one aboard ship slept that night. As the San Lucas crept

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through the dangerous waters, always within earshot of the thundering surf on the reef, the sailors would peer uneasily from time to time at the ominous fires that blazed on the beaches of distant islands and listen for the sound of the strange native chants. The night passed without incident. At daybreak the ship hoisted sail and made for the pass on the western side of the lagoon. To the surprise and delight of the entire ship's company, there were no native canoes to be seen—at least not until the San Lucas was passing Tol, the westernmost of the islands in the lagoon. The ship was pointing toward the pass, when about a dozen canoes came off the island, their occupants signalling the ship to turn about and put in for food and water. However, the weapons that the natives carried in their canoes were poorly concealed, and Arellano gave the order to load one of the ship's culverins with a stone charge and fire it at the lead canoe. The gunner scored a direct hit, at which the other canoes reversed direction immediately, leaving the San Lucas an unimpeded passage through the reef and away to the west. The Spanish ship was not long in making land again. The morning after it left Truk, it came upon three tiny islets arranged in a triangular shape around a lagoon: the atoll of Pulap. By this time the San Lucas was badly in need of wood and water, not to mention food; the ship hauled in under the lee of the island and prepared to send a boat ashore. Again the Spaniards saw what looked like the entire population throng to the shore with weapons in hand. Any fears that the Spaniards may have had, however, were dispelled when two of the native chiefs came aboard ship, offered the assistance of their people in helping them take on wood and water, and willingly remained on the ship as hostages while a young seaman went ashore with three canoes of islanders to fetch water. When the lad returned, he was so enthusiastic about the beauty of the island and the friendliness of the people that the ship's boat set out for shore with a party of ten men. The two chiefs in native canoes led the way, and when they had beached their canoes they made impatient signs to the Spaniards to land at the same spot. The officers hesitated when they came to a reef that they judged risky to cross with a fully loaded boat. A moment later their hesitation turned to apprehension when they watched the islanders split into small groups and take cover behind trees, with spears in hand. They could only suspect the worst and brought the boat about to return to the ship.

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It was not long before a number of Pulap men came out to the ship to inquire why the Spaniards had not come ashore. They insisted that they carry the water jugs to the island in their canoes so that they could fill them for the sailors—but they wanted a few of the Spaniards to come with them. When they agreed to leave a couple of their people aboard the ship as hostages, three of the Spaniards, confident now that there was no mischief afoot, jumped into the canoes and headed for shore with the islanders. Two of the Spaniards in the lead canoe had already reached the island and gone ashore when the canoe carrying the third sailor was just approaching the opening in the reef. The seamen in it suddenly saw his two crewmates dash out of the woods to the water's edge with a number of Pulap men in close pursuit. He watched in horror as they were clubbed to death in the shallow water and their bodies dragged back ashore. Panic-stricken, he seized a paddle and began swinging wildly at the natives in his canoe, yelling at them to turn the canoe around and make for the ship. When they came at him with clubs, he pulled a dagger from his belt and killed two of them; the others leapt out of the canoe in terror and swam for their lives. The sailor turned the canoe around and made for the ship amid a hail of stones hurled by the islanders in nearby canoes. Meanwhile, the two hostages on the San Lucas, who were only too well aware of what was happening, sprang overboard and swam desperately for shore. A few Spaniards bounded into the ship's boat in pursuit, but the agile swimmers had too much of a head start on them; only a lucky musket shot through the head stopped one of them. The men in the boat then picked up the injured sailor, still paddling for the ship, though by now more dead than alive. Feeling ran high among the Spaniards at the loss of their shipmates, and almost every man aboard the San Lucas volunteered for the landing party that was to go ashore with Arellano to avenge their deaths. Again the ship's boat put out, but after skirting almost the entire length of the reef, the Spanish officers concluded that the boat could not get through without running the risk of having its bottom ripped out on the rocks. Arellano had no recourse but to return to the ship, weigh anchor and sail on, leaving his two dead crewmen unavenged. Their spilt blood might be unpunished, but their memory would be honored in the name of the island as it appeared on future charts—Los Martires. Some small measure of vengeance was soon granted the Span-

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iards, as it happened. When they sighted the small island of Sorol three days later, they were greeted by the usual sight of armed men along the beach, but by this time they were wary enough of island people to avoid the main island, and instead made for a tiny uninhabited islet close by. Although they had understandably developed a distrust of crowded beaches, they still were sorely in need of water and wood to continue their voyage. As they anchored, two canoes approached the ship from a distance, the occupants armed in the usual way. Even when Arellano signalled them that he wanted to take on water, the natives continued to shout and brandish their weapons. By this time the patience of the Spaniards was wearing thin. But the resourceful Lope Martin, who was never without a ready stratagem for just such occasions, leapt to the poop deck, dropped a red jacket in the water, and bade the islanders to come pick it up. As one of the canoes pulled alongside the ship to do so, a crewman reached out and yanked up a young native boy by the hair. Almost simultaneously the muskets were fired at point-blank range at the canoe near the ship, while the culverin was emptied at the other canoe. The discharges did great damage, Arellano wrote, but "not as much as the natives deserved for their evil designs." In any case, the islanders, some of them seriously wounded, abandoned their canoes and swam for shore, while the Spaniards seized the canoes and the weapons in them for firewood, which was still in short supply aboard the San Lucas. As for the captured young man, his hair was cut, he was given the Christian name Vincent and a pair of pants to make him decent, and he was soon occupied in learning his prayers—and a few other things besides—on the remainder of the voyage to the Philippines. While the San Lucas was dodging shoals and hostile islanders in one harrowing escapade after another on its voyage through the heart of the Caroline and Marshall islands, Legazpi was leading the other three ships of the fleet on a less-troubled passage west. Just four days after Arellano's first landfall in the Marshalls, Legazpi's fleet came upon an island at which most of the Spaniards went ashore—much to the terror of the native population, who fled in panic. In time, however, the natives returned to receive presents from the hand of the Spanish commander and to carry on trade with the ship. Entirely unknown to the islanders, Legazpi's grandson, Felipe de Salcedo, and the Augustinian Friar Urdaneta were ashore taking formal possession of the island in the name of the king of Spain (CDI 1887:76-79). When they returned to the

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ship later in the day, they carried with them branches of trees and some vegetation that they had cut in token of the occupation of this "Isla de los Barbudos." On successive days Legazpi discovered four more island groups in the Marshalls, all of them seemingly uninhabited, and passed on without incident. His ships then climbed to the latitude of the Ladrones, making Guam on 22 January 1565. There Legazpi himself went ashore to take formal possession of the island on behalf of the Spanish crown and to attend a Mass celebrated by Urdaneta to solemnize the event. Unfortunately, the inhabitants of Guam could not be persuaded to behave like loyal Spanish subjects. In the days that followed they persisted in filching nails and whatever else could be removed from the ship, thus confirming in Legazpi's mind the reputation they had earned as thieves during Magellan's stay on the island. Each day the uneasiness of the Spaniards grew, the more so as their landing parties returned with regular reports that they had been stoned while looking for water. Finally a young seaman who had been left ashore accidentally by a landing party was found murdered, his body pierced with spears and his tongue ripped out. Vengeance was swift and brutal. With a party of a hundred armed men, Legazpi put to the torch all the palm-thatched huts and outrigger canoes that he saw and summarily hanged the four Guamanians who were unlucky enough to be caught by his party. On this unhappy note, the Spanish commander ended his eleven-day visit at the islands that he had just claimed for his sovereign and departed for the Philippines. Arriving at Samar in the eastern Philippines on 13 February, Legazpi spent the next two months scurrying about searching for food, inquiring where valuable spices were produced, making diplomatic overtures to petty chiefs, and deciding where he should establish the command post for the new colony that he was to found. In late April his fleet reached the coast of Cebu, the island that he had chosen to be his capital, where he was met by two thousand armed warriors. A display of his artillery quickly dispersed the force that had gathered to oppose him, and Legazpi landed without opposition to take possession of the archipelago in the name of Philip II of Spain. Thus began a colonial rule that was to endure for more than three centuries (Cushner 1971:53-54). Arellano and the San Lucas never did fall in with the rest of the expedition. The San Lucas had arrived in the southern Philippines just two weeks before Legazpi's ships, but had run down the coast

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of Mindanao to seek anchorage in the Davao Gulf, where they lay waiting for the fleet for over a month. In early March, Arellano brought the ship northward through the Philippines on a fruitless search for the rest of the fleet. Finally, on 21 April, the San Lucas cleared the Philippines altogether and steered to the northeast to find a sailing route back to New Spain. Within a short time, Arellano and his crew were driven by heavy winds as high as forty degrees north latitude, where the crude charts they carried showed them to be somewhere in the interior of China! There Arellano turned the ship eastward and sailed easily across the Pacific with the steady westerlies of those latitudes astern. Twelve weeks after it had departed the Philippines, the San Lucas reached the coast of North America, thus becoming the first European vessel to make the return crossing of the Pacific. It arrived two months ahead of Legazpi's flagship San Pedro, which the Augustinian friar-navigator Urdaneta had successfully guided along the same route. The San Lucas and the San Pedro had demonstrated the practicability of return voyages between the Philippines and America, and for two and a half centuries thereafter Spanish galleons would sail in the track laid down by these two ships. But the saga of the Legazpi expedition was not yet over. Soon after the return of the San Pedro, authorities in New Spain decided to dispatch another ship to bring Legazpi supplies, ammunition, and military reinforcements for his campaign in the Philippines. The San Jeronimo was taken out of dry dock, refitted for sea, and sent off on this mission under the command of Pero Sanchez Pericon. Captain Pericon was a forbidding soul—"a miserable melancholic enemy of kindness who delighted in solitude," in the words of one Martinez who served under him (cited in Sharp 1961:114), but, what was worse, he was thoroughly lacking in good judgment and a poor leader of men. To serve under him as pilot, the wily Lope Martin was chosen, not so much for his proven ability as a navigator as to provide a convenient excuse to get him back to the Philippines where he would have to answer to Legazpi for the separation of the San Lucas the year before. The mismatch of the ship's officers was obvious, and it must have been with some foreboding of what was to come that the San Jeronimo's company of 170 left Acapulco on the first day of May 1566. Pericon's harsh treatment of all the ship's company, soldiers and common crewmen alike, was even-handed, for the dour captain knew no favorites; but this did little to win their respect for him

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and his twenty-five-year-old son who sailed with him. The only apparent object of the captain's affection was a horse that he stabled in the bow of the ship and which, his men grumbled, received better treatment than any of them. None of the San Jeronimo's company grieved, then, when they were told on the morning of 4 June that the captain and his son had been killed in their sleep the night before. Behind the deed, of course, lay that master of intrigue, Lope Martin, and two fellow conspirators who supported his plan to seize control of the ship. At Martin's invitation, the soldiers chose their chief sergeant as the new captain of the ship, but his command was destined to be even briefer than Pericon's. Not three weeks after the mutiny, the newly appointed captain was clapped into chains while drinking in his quarters one evening, marched to the yardarm and hanged, and in a needless display of cruelty, cut down while still alive and thrown overboard. Lope Martin now became the self-appointed captain of the vessel and there was nothing to prevent him from carrying out his longcherished plan of bringing the ship down to the trade lanes near the Moluccas and preying off Portuguese shipping for a livelihood. Martin kept the San Jeronimo on a westward course and soon found himself in the Marshall Islands, as he had the year before with Arellano. First he sighted a small chain of uninhabited islands, then another group, off which a canoeful of natives came to gaze at the ship from a respectful distance. Two days later he found a third group, at which he anchored to get water and food and received the same kind of warm welcome, with singing and dancing, that Saavedra had been given at Los Jardines. That same evening the company returned to the ship and Martin pressed on toward Guam. It was near dusk on 6 July when the San Jeronimo lurched suddenly toward some barely visible reefs off its port bow. Martin seized the wheel from the helmsman and swung the vessel hard over, steering through a narrow passage into the Ujelang lagoon. The next morning the ship's company found themselves in calm waters surrounded by islands and reefs. The ship came to anchor off a particularly attractive little island where the men found deserted huts, a source of fresh water, and all the coconuts they could have wanted. Martin decided that this idyllic spot was a perfect place to refresh for a few days before resuming the voyage. All that the Spaniards needed to round out this pleasant existence were a few natives to do their fishing for them and a handful of

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women to serve their pleasure in other ways, but whenever Martin or any of the men made for one of the canoes that they occasionally spotted, the frightened islanders would sail off in great haste. The company of the San Jeronimo passed several leisurely days on their island paradise, soon to become for many of them a prison. Quarrels arose among the mutineers, as might be expected under the circumstances, and mistrust grew daily. One day two of the company who were out of favor with the mutineers duped some of the crew into taking them back to the ship, and once aboard, they joined forces with two of their supporters to retake the San Jeronimo. Within a matter of minutes they subdued the seamen who had been left to guard the ship, had the mutineers in irons down in the ship's hold, and were opening up the arsenal to arm themselves. The ship was theirs, and they shouted out to shore their intention to leave the mutineers stranded on the island. During the next four days those who had taken the ship negotiated with those ashore as to who would be permitted to leave with the ship. Food supplies were left on the island, in exchange for which the marooned mutineers handed over the ship's instruments and charts. Martin was helpless; nothing he could do would persuade those aboard to change their minds. With sinking hearts he and twenty-six others watched from the shore as the San Jeronimo crawled out of the Ujelang lagoon on the morning of 21 July and slowly dropped over the western horizon. The Close of the Spanish Century With Legazpi's successful attempt to establish a colonial outpost in the Philippines, the early period of Spanish exploration in the Pacific came to an end. Spain now had its "Isles of the West," the foothold in the Orient and the entrée to its rich markets that it had so long struggled to gain. Even if the vision of the Philippines as Spain's own "Spice Islands" was proving chimerical and the early Spanish colonists in those islands were learning what a disappointingly small return they could expect from their new possession, those islands were a door that opened to the untold wealth of the Chinese empire. Chinese trade junks had brought their wares to the Philippines long before Legazpi ever set foot there, and with the beginning of Spanish rule the volume of trade increased dramatically. Silk, precious gems, porcelain, tea, and spices were carried to Manila by Chinese merchants, and from there shipped by

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Spanish galleon back to New Spain. In exchange for these goods, the stout sailing ships brought to Manila silver that had been recently mined in Peru and Mexico. Almost immediately after the return of Legazpi's San Pedro in 1565, the lucrative galleon trade began and the heavily laden Spanish ships started their regular procession across the waters between Acapulco and Manila. Spain now had a settled trade route, and Manila was on its way to becoming a major entrepôt in European commerce with the Orient (Schurz 1939:26-34). Where there was freshly minted silver or gold, the English privateers who began to swarm to the Pacific in the late sixteenth century were also likely to be found. Francis Drake, the earliest of the English freebooters, called at Palau in 1579 after making several sorties into the Spanish Main. When he was repeatedly victimized by the light-fingered inhabitants there, he turned his muskets on them, leaving twenty dead, and called the place "Island of Theeves." Cavendish, Woodes Rogers, Anson, and Dampier followed after a lengthy interval, all of them spending some time in the Marianas close by the galleon route—but even the boldest and most successful of these did relatively little damage to the prosperous Spanish trade. The heavily armed galleons continued, almost without interruption, their annual run west to Manila, stopping at Guam long enough to take on water and provisions, and making their return crossing to Acapulco by way of the high latitudes. Even at the very time that the Spanish seaway to the East was settled, Spain's maritime explorers were dashing off over the seas again—but to a different part of the Pacific in search of other treasures. For years, even centuries, European geographers had speculated on the existence of Terra Australis incognita—that last great continent, still undiscovered, which lay somewhere in the southern ocean and balanced the land masses of the northern hemisphere. To these scholarly ruminations were added popular tales that the land of Ophir, from which came the gold of Solomon, was in reality islands in the Pacific. There were Incan legends that told of a chief who had long before sailed far out to mysterious islands from which he was said to have brought back gold, black slaves, and wonderful animals. All of this set afire the imagination of the prestigious Pedro Sarmiento de Camboa, astronomer, mathematician, and student of Incan tradition, who at length prevailed on the

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viceroy of Peru to equip a new expedition to find these wondrous islands (Beaglehole 1966:40-41). In November 1567, Alvaro de Mendafla left the port of Callao with Los Reyes and Todos Santos and steered for the southwest where the islands were reputed to lie. Mendafta and his company eventually came upon some islands, which they optimistically called the Islands of Solomon, but they soon began to wonder whether even Solomon in all his wisdom could have made a living there. Not only was there no gold to be found, but there was very little food as well. Gamely they sailed for six months, from one island in the group to another, always on the lookout for a more hospitable encampment, but the constant threat of starvation and repeated hostile attacks by the black-skinned natives finally settled the issue for them: they would return to Peru. Some days after crossing the equator on their voyage back, they came upon some small islands (San Mateo they called them) at about eight degrees latitude. When they landed to take on fresh water, they came upon some deserted huts and found a chisel fashioned out of nail and a piece of rope—all of which they thought to be the souvenirs of a Spanish ship's earlier visit to this lonely Marshallese atoll. Later chroniclers wondered whether they might not be all that remained of Lope Martin and the other mutineers marooned on Ujelang two years before. Spanish officials may have been disappointed with the little that Mendafla had to show for his two-year voyage, but Mendafta himself remained convinced that there were fabulously opulant lands to be won for Spain—if only they could be found. He was not alone in this belief; the fabled riches of Ophir continued to be a popular conversation piece for seamen and innkeepers in the coastal towns of Peru. Nevertheless, it was 1595 before Mendafta could persuade Spanish authorities to let him make another attempt to find those elusive islands. In June of that year, with four ships and four hundred prospective settlers, he set out once again to discover the real Isles of Solomon and found a Spanish colony there. This second voyage was, if anything, even more disastrous than the first (Beaglehole 1966:56-80). Mendafta died of fever after completing a fruitless search from the Marquesas to Santa Cruz, and his command passed to the chief pilot, Pedro Ferdinand de Quiros. The Spaniards found the Melanesian islands to which they had come as inhospitable to whites as ever; illness and starva-

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tion, on top of the frequent native raids on their camp, decimated the band of settlers in just the few months that they remained at Santa Cruz. Quiros had no choice but to seek assistance in the Philippines. During his northward passage, on 23 December 1595, he came hard upon the reefs surrounding an island and was barely able to avoid going aground. Natives came out to beckon the ship in, but by then Quiros was only too anxious to be out of those dangerous waters. From the description that he left, this discovery (which appears on maps as "Quirosa") was almost certainly Ponape, an island that would not be seen again for some two hundred thirty years. Passing Guam, Quiros' ship at last made the Philippines and, after months of recuperation, the company returned to New Spain. It is hard to think of Mendaña and Quiros as other than romantic visionaries who had outlived Spain's heroic age of exploration in the Pacific. Their voyages were, more than anything else, a postscript to the discoveries of those early expeditions that charted the north Pacific on their quest for the spices of the East. The great Spanish sea-lane was tested and proved before the first of their voyages, and the resounding defeat of the Spanish Armada off the coast of England had already signalled the end of Spanish sea power well before they had completed their explorations. Spanish galleons might provide a steady source of wealth for years to come, but the golden age of Spain in the Pacific had ended. In the future this sea would belong to whatever powers had the resources and daring to master it. And what of those tiny islands that so often happened to lie in the path of the early Spanish captains? Barbudos, Arrecifes, San Bartolomé, Los Reyes, Matelotes—all found their way onto Spanish sea charts and were promptly forgotten. They had no spices or gold to attract the interest of the Spanish, and the souls that there may have been to convert to the true faith were few indeed. The Spanish shipping lane lay at about thirteen degrees north latitude, too high for vessels to happen on any of the Carolines or Marshalls. These islands, with their treacherous shoals and reefs, came to be regarded as nothing more than navigational hazards that were best avoided. The people on the islands that had been visited, for their part, had little to show for their encounter with the Spanish: a few iron nails, a word or two of Spanish, perhaps a scar from a

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Seclusion

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musket ball, and invariably an interesting story to tell their grandchildren years later. Their lives were not changed by the occasional Spanish ship they had seen, and they could not have minded too much when they returned to the seclusion that they had known before Magellan's voyage.

CHAPTER 2

Mission to the Palaos

Cast Upon Distant Shores BY THE END of the seventeenth century, the Caroline and Marshall islands were still undiscovered as far as Europeans were concerned. The visits of Saavedra, Villalobos, Arellano, and the other Spanish sea captains of the century before were very brief, with contact usually consisting of little more than a friendly wave from a passing ship—or a musket volley, as circumstances may have dictated—and a logbook entry. When some of the islands recorded in these logbooks found their way onto Spanish maps, they were strewn practically at random over the vast uncharted waters of the northern Pacific. Yet the crudity of the maps is understandable, given that Spanish navigators had no way of reckoning the precise location of the landfalls they made. Europeans knew that there were some islands scattered in these waters, though no one had the faintest idea how many or exactly where they might be. And no one really cared—until a group of Carolinian voyagers who had strayed far from their own shores were introduced to a Spanish priest who took a personal interest in their homeland. One day in late December 1696, two strange-looking canoes appeared off the eastern coast of Samar, an island in the eastern Philippines. A villager who happened to be on the beach at the time spotted them and signalled directions to bring them safely through the shoals, but the panic-stricken voyagers brought their canoes around and made for the open sea instead. They could make no headway against the strong easterly winds, however, and began to drift shoreward once again. Seeing that the frightened sailors continued to ignore his signals, the villager plunged into the

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sea and swam to the canoes to guide them to the beach himself. Once safely on shore, the terrified band of natives huddled together, apparently resigned to becoming the prisoners of their deliverer. The villagers of Samar responded promptly and generously to the plight of the castaways. They brought coconuts, palm wine, and taro, all of which were greedily devoured by the strangers who, it was learned, had been adrift for over two months before reaching the coast of Samar. Only the boiled rice went untouched; the strangers, believing it to be worms, hurled it to the ground in disgust. The villagers hurriedly summoned two women, who had themselves drifted to Samar some time before, in the hope that they would be able to communicate with the strangers. At the sight of one of these women, several of the castaways, who recognized her as a relative, burst into tears. By the time the parish priest arrived at the spot, communication between the Filipinos and the band of Carolinians was well underway, with the two women serving as interpreters. Relaxed and talkative after their hearty meal, the strangers told the people that they had been blown off course as they were returning from Lamotrek to Fais (two small islands in the western Carolines separated by 500 miles of open sea) and had drifted for seventy days before reaching Samar. Originally they had numbered thirty-five, but five of their party had succumbed to starvation and exposure during the arduous voyage to the Philippines. They named thirty-two islands that made up their "nation," but when pressed again later made a rough map with pebbles on the beach showing eighty-seven islands, all of which they claimed to have visited. There were many others, they said, of which they had only meager knowledge. The information that they gave on these eighty-seven islands—their names and the sailing time between them—was copied down and eventually circulated along with a report of the castaways' landing (Map 5). The Carolinians were placed in the homes of villagers, who were rewarded for their hospitality by the continual amusement that their guests afforded over the weeks that followed. The tattooed Carolinians, clad in loincloths, treated the local inhabitants to the spectacle of their native dances, performed in long double lines with rapid hand and body movements and lively chants. Before appearing in public on ceremonial occasions, they would daub their faces and bodies with a saffron paste made from the tur-

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-

- -

- — — -

-

-

-

—

CyL UTE j i j a s NOUVELLES PHILIPPINES*—KA ART I I I UlEDWI P H I L I P P T N S C H »

-

ETLANBEK.

Map 5. Father Paul Klein's map of the Palaos, 1696. This map was drawn from information provided by the Carolinian castaways from Fais who landed in Samar. The map is found in AGI, Leg 15, "Cartas de las nuevas Philippinas (Palaos) descubiertas debajo del patrimonio de Philipe V." It was later published in Stöcklein ( 1 7 2 6 no 127), and in Krämer ( 1 9 1 7 : 1 7 ) .

meric plant; and to show their respect to the parish priest, whom they regarded as something of a potentate, they would take his hand or foot and touch it gently to their face. Their language, with its strange gutteral sounds, struck the missionaries as more akin to Arabic than to any of the local tongues. Grazing cows and barking dogs terrified the poor Carolinians, who had never before seen any quadruped other than the rat; almost any strange animal made them take to their heels, invariably provoking hearty laughter among the villagers. Samar was an entirely new world for the Carolinian castaways; here they were exposed to elements of Spanish culture that fasci-

Mission to the Palaos

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nated them 110 end. Majestic church ceremonies, songs and folk dances, firearms and gunpowder, and even the white skin of the Europeans whom they met were continual sources of amazement to them. However, nothing impressed them more than the iron tools they saw. When on one occasion they were brought by the parish priest to watch the construction of a trading vessel, their eyes bulged and they clucked in astonishment at the variety of iron tools that were being used. The Carolinians were already well aware of the superiority of iron to the shell and coral from which they fashioned their own tools. They had carried with them on their voyage to Samar a bar "of only a finger's length," a treasured keepsake perhaps from an earlier canoe voyage to the Philippines or the Marianas, and were most eager to obtain more. "Our yearning for iron," as an islander aptly expressed it to Father Victor Walter some years later, "is as strong as your longing for heaven." When each of them was presented with a piece of metal by the priest, their delight knew no bounds. So fearful were the Carolinians of having their precious gift stolen that they laid the metal under their heads whenever they slept. The castaways quickly won the hearts of their hosts. They were a light-hearted, cheerful sort of people; "neither heavy nor stupid, but with a great deal of fire and vivacity," as Klein typed them according to conventional psychological categories of the day. Their gentle and agreeable temperament (traits that were frequently singled out for comment by later visitors to the Carolines) must have made a favorable impression on the people of Samar and their Spanish pastor. Quarrels would sometimes break out among them, we are told, but these were quickly ended and order instantaneously restored by a definitive blow on the head. Caroline islanders, who lived out their lives in tiny communities where personal harmony was essential, were nothing if not tractable and eager to please. These qualities, along with a willingness to accept whatever quirks fate might have in store for them, must have stood them in good stead in Samar, for none of them, as far as we know, returned to their native island. Several of the men later married Visayan women and spent the rest of their lives amid the relatively comfortable surroundings of the island to which wind and sea had carried them (AGI, Leg 215, no 4:209-212). And there the whole matter might have ended—with the thirty Carolinians sinking into the same kind of oblivion that has swallowed up other hapless voyagers who have been cast upon those

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shores before and since—if an energetic and influential priest had not happened along at about this time. Father Paul Klein, the former Superior of the Jesuit Province of the Philippines who was accompanying his successor on a visitation to the mission houses, showed a lively interest in the castaways when he heard the story of their drift voyage. He summoned them for personal interviews, eliciting from them further information about their own islands, and wrote a lengthy letter reporting the whole episode to the Superior General of the Jesuits in Rome. In this well-publicized letter, Klein drew attention to the great number of undiscovered islands east of the Philippines, many more than the eighty-seven named on his chart, and suggested that this field might now be ripe for the harvest of souls. But before they could be evangelized, these islands would have to be found. The "Palaos," as the islands were commonly called by reason of the distinctive sailing craft that their inhabitants used (the name is probably a corruption of the Austronesian word for canoe, parau or prao), included all islands south of the Marianas and east of the Philippines. Their number and location were very much a mystery to both Europeans and Filipinos, and the several "Palaos" islanders who had been stranded on Philippine shores in recent years only served to intensify their curiosity about these islands. One of the islands had actually been sighted twice, when ships bound from Manila to Guam were blown off course. The discovery of "Isla de Carolina" by Lazcano in 1686 was confirmed by Rodriguez just a few months before the castaways landed at Samar. But where were the numerous other islands in that mysterious archipelago? Even "Panlog," depicted as the largest of the group and lying not far off the eastern shore of Samar, according to the map made by the castaways, was still unknown. Klein's letter sparked off an official inquiry about earlier groups of Carolinians who had suffered the same fate as the castaways on Samar. Interrogation of Spanish officials and missionaries turned up reports of similar mishaps on several previous occasions and some fragmentary information on the islands to the east that had been gleaned from the survivors. If the reports are to be believed, the traffic between the Palaos and the Philippines was heavy. In the year 1664 alone, as many as thirty canoes reportedly drifted to the Philippines; and Father Andrés Serrano claimed that he had personally seen boats drift in on eight different occasions. Klein's own houseboy was a Carolinian who had been carried to the Philip-

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41

pines with ten others some years before. This young man told the priest of six natives of Yap who had been blown to the Philippines, afterward returning to their home island with tales of the delicious new foods they had tasted and the kind treatment that they had received there. This may have been the same group of Yapese who were later reported to have brought back sweet potatoes and other crops to plant on their home island. Four other Carolinians drifted to Siau, one of the small islands between the Moluccas and the southern Philippines, where they were sold into slavery and chanced to meet a friendly Jesuit priest (Father Francisco Miedes) who took an interest in them and questioned them about their islands. Most of the earlier castaways took up permanent residence in the Philippines, either by choice or by constraint—one was a servant in the Jesuit College in Manila, another was living in a village in Caraga, and three young Carolinian girls were boarding in a convent in the town of Janda. From these and other survivors of drift voyages, Spanish officials were able to get bits of information about their islands, some of it obviously distorted. There were lists of islands in the vicinity (variously numbering 32, 50, 83, or 87) that were said to be "as populated as an anthill." Spanish investigators learned the name of the chief god and some of the lesser deities in the Carolinian pantheon, together with some details on the political organization of the islands. One of the more exotic tales concerned an island in the Palaos said to be inhabited by a tribe of Amazons who forbade the presence of any male there, but would sail once a year to nearby islands to enjoy male companionship for a brief period. Confronted with this potpourri of fact and fantasy, Spanish authorities by the end of their inquiry knew little more about the islands to the east than they had before. The Enchanted Islands Where there were undiscovered islands, there were also souls in want of baptism; and Jesuit missionary interest in the Palaos was now fully awakened. The year after Klein's letter was written, the Jesuits in the Philippines found the funds to outfit a leaky old hulk, on which a priest and a brother, along with twenty of the Carolinian castaways, were sent to bring the gospel. Hardly had the ship left port, however, when it went to the bottom in what was to be the first in a long series of ill-starred attempts to reach the Palaos.

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Lacking the resources to mount another effort at their own expense, the Jesuits decided to carry their cause to the courts of Europe. They found an avid and able promoter in the person of Father Andrés Serrano, an influential Jesuit missionary who shared with Klein a personal enthusiasm for the new venture. Serrano and a companion were sent to Europe to present a plan for founding a mission in the Palaos to the Roman Pontiff Clement XI, for it was through the pope's influence that they hoped to obtain authorization from the Bourbon kings to equip a missionary expedition to those islands. In hand Serrano carried his "Breve Noticia" on the Palaos: a synopsis of Klein's letter that Serrano had liberally embellished with flourishes of his own pen in a calculated attempt to gain a ready hearing at Rome, Madrid, and Paris. For the benefit of those whose primary motives were apostolic, Serrano made a case for the easy conversion of the Palaos islanders "because they are neither idolatrous nor contaminated by the Moslem sect." For others whose aims were not as selfless, he conjectured that the islands might contain spices and precious metals "inasmuch as they are thought to lie on the same latitude as the Moluccas, Borneo, Mindanao, New Guinea, Papua, and other islands that abound in these things." In still another diplomatic touch, intended as a compliment to the reigning king of Spain, Serrano labeled the chart of the eighty-seven islands that was appended to his document "Nuevas Filipinas." Serrano's mission was an unqualified success. Pope Clement, obviously quite impressed with the plan, wrote letters to Louis XIV of France and Philip V of Spain urging them to support the endeavor and to receive the two Jesuit emissaries in a personal audience. This the Bourbon kings readily did. After Serrano had regaled Louis XIV with stories of the newly discovered islands for a full two hours, he was sent on to the court at Madrid where he received an equally enthusiastic response. When Serrano and his companion returned to the Philippines in 1708, the Spanish monarch had already ordered authorities in Manila to provide the necessary financial backing for an expedition to the Palaos. All that remained now was to find the islands which so far had eluded all would-be discoverers. The next two attempts to reach the Palaos, in 1708 and 1709, proved as unsuccessful as ever. The first of these vessels, with three Jesuits aboard, ran aground off the port of Cavite; the second, carrying several Carolinians who had drifted to the Philippines

Mission to the Palaos

43

just the year before, spent four months searching the waters to the east without sighting a single island. At last, in 1710, the islands that had been the object of so much futile searching were found. On 30 November, Francisco Padilla, who had been given command of the patache Santissima Trinidad, sighted the tiny island of Sonsorol and managed, after a fierce four-day battle against wind and currents, to bring his ship close under. The islanders turned out in their canoes to offer the Spaniards coconuts and fish, embracing them and kissing their hands the moment they reached the deck. Whatever misgivings Padilla may have had about dispatching a landing party to explore the small island were immediately dispelled at this friendly reception, and he sent a party of troops ashore. When they returned to the ship some hours later, the soldiers gabbled excitedly about their royal reception—how the people carried them from the boat to the very hut of the paramount chief where they were feasted, entertained with songs and dances, and presented with finely woven mats. Meanwhile, Padilla had been questioning a group of especially cooperative Sonsorolese about the location of other islands in the vicinity, and his pilot had sketched, with their assistance, a map of the Palaos showing forty islands (Kramer 1917:71). The next day the ship's boat put to shore again, this time with the Jesuit priests Cortyl and Duberron aboard. Before the boat could return to the ship, however, the Trinidad was driven out of sight of the island by the strong currents that are always so troublesome in those waters. For the next four days Padilla struggled desperately to regain Sonsorol, but to no avail. The two Jesuits had to be abandoned to their fate, and within a few days Padilla found himself some one hundred fifty miles north of Sonsorol, lying off the Palau group. Here at last was "Panlog," the largest and one of the most dominant groups in the Palaos by the account of the castaways. Visited only once in the late sixteenth century—by the English freebooter Francis Drake—Palau had remained virtually isolated from all European contact before 1710. Its people did not even have the acquaintance with the Philippines that other islanders had gained through drift voyages, for the inhabitants of this volcanic group had lost their navigational skills long before. Palau was the only island group in the expanse of ocean between the Philippines and Truk that was not tied into the vast trading network that linked the atolls of the western Carolines with one another.

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The welcome that Padilla received at Palau was a good deal less friendly than at Sonsorol. No sooner had the occupants of the first canoes reached the deck of the Trinidad than they began to carry off anything that they could lay their hands on. Most were busily engaged in a furtive search for nails and bits of iron, but one daring fellow reached through a porthole and was tugging at the bed curtains inside when he was frightened off by an indignant Spanish marine. Another was found straining to break off a piece of an anchor chain, while some of his companions were at work on the iron fastenings attached to the helm. Enraged at the impudence of the natives, Padilla had his men drive them off the ship into their waiting canoes. As the evicted Palauans were making for shore, they suddenly brought their canoes around and let go with a volley of spears. The Spaniards responded with a round of musket fire, at which the natives leapt into the water and swam to shore behind their canoes. Under the circumstances, Padilla was unwilling to risk putting ashore and left Palau the next evening. His impression of the dark-skinned and entirely naked people he had just met was decidedly negative—they were a "coarse and savage lot," he thought, a poor contrast to the "kind, polite, and cheerful" Sonsorolese he had visited a few days before. His was a judgment that others would reverse in years to come. Now that the Spanish had finally succeeded in putting missionaries ashore in the Palaos, the problem was in getting them off—or, at least, making sure that they were provided for. Padilla made for Sonsorol again after leaving Palau, and bringing the Trinidad as close by as possible, stood off the island for three full days. Without the ship's boat, however, he could not put ashore to attempt a rescue. Never did a canoe come out to the ship during that time, nor was there the usual commotion on shore that attended the approach of a sailing vessel to almost any island. The silence was ominous. Finally, after a consultation with his officers and the Jesuit brother, Etienne Baudin, sailing companion of the two stranded priests, Padilla decided to return to Manila without Duberron and Cortyl. The news that the Trinidad had been unable to rescue the two priests prompted Father Serrano to redouble his efforts to establish communication with the Palaos. His persuasive powers evidently did not fail him, for even after Spanish authorities had dispatched two ships early in 1711 in unsuccessful attempts tofindthe priests, the persistent Serrano was able to obtain permission to make a

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third attempt in October of that same year. The bad luck that dogged the Jesuit enterprise from the very beginning continued, however, and just three days out of port the ship foundered off the coast of Mindoro in a storm. The indomitable Serrano, along with two other Jesuits and all but three of the ship's company, went to a watery grave. Patience and funds were running low in the royal treasurer's office in Manila. It was undoubtedly with a sense of relief that Spanish authorities there received the announcement of the Crown's decision that thereafter Guam would replace Manila as the base for all further efforts to find the Palaos. The burden of equipping exploratory voyages would become the administrative responsibility of the governor of the Marianas, who, although under the immediate authority of the governor-general of the Philippines, was far enough removed from Manila to keep his own tally sheets. In the years following Klein's first meeting with the Carolinian castaways at Samar, at least eight ships had been dispatched to find the Palaos. Of these only the Trinidad had been successful in making any contact whatsoever. The quest for those elusive islands was beginning to look like an exercise in futility; perhaps there was some truth after all to the Carolinians' story of islands that disappeared under the sea whenever a foreign vessel drew near. Small wonder that they soon came to be called Islas Encantadas—The Enchanted Islands! When Bernardo de Egui, the captain of the Santo Domingo, was sent from Guam in January 1712 in a last desperate attempt to find the two marooned Jesuits, very few must have held out any real hope that he would succeed in his mission. In those vast uncharted waters he was looking for a coral island barely two miles in length. His only hope, he decided, was to shanghai an unwary native or two whom he might use to guide him to Sonsorol. This was uppermost in his mind when, after a week at sea, he came upon a cluster of twenty-eight low-lying islets which he called Islas de Garbanzos (Chickpea Islands)—a group that is today known as Ulithi. When the usual canoes came off to look over the ship, the Spaniards made frantic signs inviting the islanders to come aboard, but they must have suspected a trick, for none of the ordinary inducements—cotton cloth, iron nails, nor food and wine —could lure them onto the ship. Only when Egui agreed to put a Spanish hostage in one of their canoes would they finally climb on

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deck, and even then they could not be persuaded to remain for very long. One of the islanders alone, a high-spirited soul who had thrown caution to the wind years before, seemed willing to spend the night aboard the Santo Domingo, but Egui judged him too old and frivolous for his purposes. The next morning Egui tried again. More islanders came aboard, bringing with them wares to trade, and again the Spanish hostage took his place in the native canoe. As the morning wore on, Egui grew tired of waiting and resorted to the clumsy ploy of bringing the ship's boat around to cast off the empty canoes tied to the ship, thereby stranding the islanders aboard. The Ulithians, however, immediately sensed what was happening and rushed headlong over the side of the ship. Muskets were fired and three of the islanders were killed, while the Spanish seaman who had been serving as a hostage had his skull split by an oar. After this, there was little hope of persuading any of those people whom Egui had himself described as "cheerful and of a fine temperament" to approach the ship again; and so, with the one old man as a captive, the Santo Domingo moved on toward the south. Egui made Palau with little trouble a few days later. Here he found the natives even more suspicious than the Ulithians: they refused to board the ship at all and carried on their trade by throwing up taro, coconuts, and shell belts in exchange for the nails and hard tack that the crew tossed down into their canoes. At length Egui managed to lure aboard ship two young men, who were immediately rushed by the crew and subdued after a fierce struggle. The unlucky Palauans let out a loud, prolonged wail and made it known to the crew that they fully expected to be beheaded and eaten—the common fate, the Spaniards supposed, of prisoners taken by enemies on their island. Both were put in stocks for security until the ship was thought to be a safe enough distance from land, but the Spaniards had badly underestimated the swimming ability of their captives. No sooner was the first released from the stocks than he tore off the trousers that the Spaniards had given him, plunged into the sea and began to swim the thirty miles to shore. From Palau, the ship sailed on to the latitude of Sonsorol where the tiny island was actually seen two days later. As the ship passed in its lee, none of the crew could detect canoes, cooking fires, or any other sign of habitation. In a repetition of what had happened to Padilla's Trinidad two years before, the Santo Domingo was carried off the island by the strong currents and the Spaniards never

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again caught sight of it. With the two remaining Carolinian captives aboard, the ship steered for Manila to report its failure to find the two priests. The two islanders presumably joined the growing number of Carolinians who were forced to make a permanent home in the Philippines. Of the fate of the two Jesuits stranded on Sonsorol nothing certain was ever learned. After Egui's return to Manila, the search for them was given up as hopeless; it was assumed that they and the detachment of Spanish soldiers who had landed with them all met violent deaths at the hands of the Sonsorol people. This suspicion was strengthened by later information received about the character of Moac, the Carolinian castaway who had been guide and informant for the Padilla expedition and had been ashore at Sonsorol with the Jesuits. Carried to the shores of Palapag in 1708, Moac had been baptized at his own request and had played the part of a model convert all the while he lived in the Philippines. However, a later group of Carolinian arrivals revealed to one of the missionaries a different side of his personality. Moac was a scoundrel, they said, who had been responsible for crimes too horrible to mention and who would almost certainly turn out to be the avowed enemy of the missionaries once back in his own land. On the strength of these reports, Moac soon afterward came to be regarded as the villain of the piece who had turned an entire island against the two proto-martyrs of the Palaos. The Apostle of the Carbanzos By the time the second missionary venture into the Palaos began in the early 1720s, those islands had both a new name and a new administrative center. Las Islas Carolinas, as they were by then commonly known after the island Lazcano discovered in 1686 and named in honor of Spain's Carlos II, had been placed under the charge of the governor of the Marianas. Their transfer from Manila to Guam made a good deal of sense. The Mariana Islands had been subject to Spanish rule and missionary influence for over fifty years and the local people had been completely subjugated and pacified for the last twenty-five. Guam may not have been the most bustling port in the Pacific, but it was an established Spanish outpost with a good harbor and a reasonably strong military garrison. When Father Diego Luis de Sanvitores reached Guam in 1668 at the head of a band of six Jesuits, one of his first achievements

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was to bestow on Magellan's "Ladrones" the less derogatory name of Marianas. Although Guam was situated squarely on Spanish shipping lanes and had been visited by the annual galleon for a century previous to this, the Spanish had never thought it worth their while to establish a colony there. The first troops assigned to the island were the thirty-one soldiers and their captain who accompanied the first missionaries. As Sanvitores and his fellow Jesuits began moving about the archipelago preaching, they encountered violent opposition from the Chamorro people. A succession of attacks and uprisings, prompted no doubt by affronts the Spaniards gave them and fed by local political machinations, left six Jesuits and a dozen catechists slain before reinforcements from the Philippines established a temporary and uneasy peace. As was so often the case in Spanish realms, the troops commissioned to provide for the safety of the missionaries were probably more a hindrance than a help in the long run. In 1684, in any case, another series of uprisings occurred and six more Jesuits lost their lives. After the Spaniards had crushed the last Chamorro resistance in 1695, they herded the survivors onto Guam, settled them in villages, organized them into work brigades, and watched them succumb in alarming numbers to disease, famine, and ennui. Civil authorities and Jesuit missionaries on Guam were languishing through the tedium that peace brought to their lonely little island when an event occurred that would refocus their attention elsewhere. Another drift voyage, very similar in many respects to the one that swept the thirty Carolinian natives into the arms of Father Paul Klein, catalyzed a second missionary venture to the Palaos, or Carolines. On 19 June 1721, a vessel was spotted off the eastern end of Guam, "little different from the Chamorro boat, but higher so that at full sail it was mistaken for a frigate" (Cantova in LECC 1728: 191). The twenty-four Carolinian men, women, and children who soon afterward waded ashore from the canoe were every bit as frightened as the group in Samar had been. They all but fainted from fear when they saw the sword dangling at the side of the village chief who was hurrying toward them with a priest to render assistance; their end had surely come, they thought. Immediately one of the bolder castaways dashed to the feet of the priest and suppliantly held out pieces of polished shell and other small gifts. The priest accepted the presents and embraced the native, at

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which a perceptible sigh of relief swept over the castaways—they were in the presence of friends. A few days later the twenty-four Carolinians, natives of Woleai who had been lost for twenty days following a fearful storm, were joined by another six people whose canoe had landed at the other side of the island. They were all clothed, fed, and transported to Agafla where they were presented to the governor of the Marianas. There they also met the Jesuit missionary, Father Juan Antonio Cantova, who was to become their constant companion and benefactor throughout the rest of their eight-month stay on Guam. Cantova was also to play the decisive role in initiating the second missionary enterprise in their islands. During the weeks that followed, Cantova struggled to learn the rudiments of his neophytes' language in order to be able to instruct them in the Faith. Within a short time he had translated several prayers into their tongue and was giving his small flock regular catechetical lessons. Several children were soon baptized on the guarantee of their parents that they would be allowed to remain on Guam in the care of the priests even after their parents returned to their island. However, the adults were a different matter altogether; Cantova refused to receive them into the Church, no matter how much they begged for baptism, on the grounds that it was "morally impossible for them, without pastors in the midst of a pagan people, not to revert to their original heathenism" (LECC 1728vl8:203, Ca-dA). He wanted no Moacs among his converts: natives quick to request baptism while living in a Christian land, and even quicker to return to their pagan superstitions once they got home. The only sure way of evangelizing this people was to provide a pastor to live among them permanently on their own island. He himself would accompany them back, in one of their canoes if necessary, and become that pastor. The Carolinians were becoming more restless with each passing day and were anxious to leave Guam for their home island as soon as possible, but the governor, whom they were required to see for permission to depart, had ideas of his own. He planned to detain some of them on Guam as a means of inducing their fellow islanders to make regular canoe voyages to the Marianas. This would insure some continued contact between the Spanish colonial government and those distant, little-known islands that were supposed to lie within its jurisdiction. However, as the castaways renewed

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their appeals more frequently, often with tears in their eyes, he abandoned this plan and agreed to send them all back at the first opportunity. While he was having a vessel prepared for the voyage, Cantova went to his Jesuit Superior for permission to sail with the Carolinians and spread the gospel among their islands. They were not very far south of Guam, he argued, with more enthusiasm than respect for the facts, and it should not be difficult to get back and forth with relative ease. Cantova's request was denied at first. Authorities in Manila had had more than their fill of the expensive and frustrating chase after the Palaos a decade earlier, and Cantova's Jesuit Superior was unwilling to do anything that might give them the impression that he was supporting a renewal of this undertaking. In the end, however, he relented and Cantova was allowed to sail with the Carolinians when they left for their home islands in April 1722. Whatever misgivings officials in Manila had regarding Cantova's enterprise were only confirmed when high seas and gales drove the priest and the unfortunate islanders all the way back to the Philippines. The early pattern of costly misfortunes was being repeated once again, and it was not until 1731, ten years after he had first met the Carolinians on Guam, that Cantova was able to obtain permission from his superiors to make another attempt to reach their islands. Shortly before setting out from Guam in 1722, Cantova wrote a lengthy letter giving a detailed account of what he learned during the eight months he spent with the Carolinians (LECC 1728vl8: 188-246). This letter, which was much published and widely read in Europe, was the most remarkable ethnographical record up to that time and remained the best account of the Micronesian people until well into the nineteenth century. According to his report, the islands of the archipelago were divided into five "provinces," each consisting of several islands united in a loose political system with its own common language. The westernmost of these five is the Palau Group, whose cultural distinctiveness from the atolls in the western Carolines was confirmed by Cantova's information. Next is Yap where the people were said to mine silver, undoubtedly a mistaken reference to their custom of quarrying large stone discs, which they used as money. The two "provinces" of Ulithi-Fais and Lamotrek-Woleai comprise the numerous small atolls extending between Yap and Truk, including the islands from which the castaways themselves came. Toward the eastern end of the archipelago lies "Cittac" or Truk, whose principal island was said to be even

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larger than Guam. These "provinces" of Cantova's correspond quite well to the political-economic empires that endured from precontact days until the present. Along with his letter Cantova published a map that he sketched from the information given him (Map 6). Although it shows very few islands that had not already appeared on the charts of Klein and Somera, it is far more accurate in the relative location it assigns to the islands. In all, it reveals a surprisingly complete knowledge of an island world that, stretching over fifteen hundred miles of ocean as it did, must be considered large even for a seafaring people. Cantova's map added appreciably to the meager fund of European cartographical knowledge of the area, and it was still the best one available to the Russian explorer Kotzebue in 1817. The atoll-dwellers of the west and central Carolines were among the world's most skilled and daring sea voyagers. Their ocean-going canoes continually coursed from island to island along sea-lanes that bore names and were marked out by detailed sailing instructions. It was only when a navigator strayed from such a lane, as when the canoe was driven by a violent storm, that he was likely to become lost. In this event, he could not do much more than consign himself to the mercy of the wind and waves until he should happen upon some island. Resources on these minuscule islands were severely limited, and the trading network that bound them together afforded a means of obtaining aid when a typhoon or other disaster struck. It also provided islanders with a means of acquiring what could be called "luxury items": in precontact days, shell belts and the precious yellow turmeric paste that was used throughout the area to adorn the body; and in later times, iron and metal tools, tobacco, and a variety of foreign-made goods. The Carolinians were a well-traveled people who knew a good deal about their island neighbors, but they were as prone to ethnocentric bias as any Europeans. The castaways from Woleai clearly demonstrated this in the description they furnished Cantova of the inhabitants of other island groups in the archipelago, particularly the peoples of those seldom visited islands at the very periphery of their world. Beyond Truk, the eastern limit of their terra cognita, lay a large island of "Falupet" or Ponape, "whose inhabitants worship the shark and are negroid, and whose customs are savage and barbarous." The Yapese were judged no less harshly, as an uncivilized people who worshipped the demon in the form of a crocodile

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and in that way acquired the power to work sorcery on their enemies. As for the Palauans, they were the "enemy of the human race with whom it is dangerous to engage in even the smallest amount of commerce." Regarded as outright cannibals, they were shunned by Woleaians and other Carolinian atoll-dwellers. Perhaps the chief value of Cantova's letter lies in its broad, though often sketchy, description of the castaways' own culture. From the accounts of earlier travelers through the atolls of the western Carolines, a physical description of the islanders could easily be pieced together: a sturdy, well-built people of medium stature with skin color varying considerably; sometimes bearded; ears pierced, with lobes distended to hold ornaments; hair worn long and usually done up in a topknot; bodies and limbs tattooed in dark patterns; heads garlanded and faces smeared with turmeric on festive occasions; men clad in loincloths or short nipa skirts, sometimes with a cloak thrown over their shoulders, and women dressed in woven-skirts, occasionally with a short maro 'cape' on their shoulders. These same early accounts offer a glimpse of the weapons, canoe forms, houses, and kinds of food that were seen in the islands visited. But there was a good deal more that these visitors could not possibly have reported on—those less easily observed, but far more telling aspects of the islanders' culture. Here Cantova's account excels. He described some of the occupations of the island people. Men were engaged in farming, fishing, and canoe construction, while women did the cooking, helped the men plant root crops, and made sails of palm-leaf mats. Young men received lessons in practical astronomy and navigation, and were taught the twelve-point compass commonly used in those islands. For recreation the people pitted strength and skill against one another in spear-hurling and rock-throwing contests. On occasion, the islanders gathered in the evening to perform dances—men doing their standing dances in double lines, and women seated on the ground taking up a "sad and mournful chant, accompanied by the rhythmic movements of their heads and arms." When battles were fought, the combatants were arranged in three ranks, with men from the second and third ranks moving up to replace the wounded in the front line. The fighting was always done in single combat after warriors paired off against one another, and invariably ended with the winning side hurling jeers and insults at the losers. Cantova even noted the bathing habits of the islanders—"three times a day; in the morn-

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THE FIRST TAINT OF CIVILIZATION

ing, at midday, and in the evening"—and gave a detailed account of how they went about whale fishing when one of the leviathans entered their lagoon. Several observations on the subject of chiefly authority were scattered throughout Cantova's letter. Clan chiefs, he related, were distinguished by the long beards that they wore and the wooden houses, often decorated with paintings, in which they dwelt. Their chiefly authority was unquestioned and virtually absolute, according to Cantova, and people showed their respect by prostrating themselves on the ground in their presence. Among the chiefs' prerogatives were the ownership of all iron found on the island and the right to a number of wives—the paramount chief of Truk was said to have no fewer than nine. In this connection, the practice of prescribed levirate (the obligation to marry a deceased brother's wife) was mentioned in passing. Cantova's letter also delved into the religion and mythology of his Carolinian wards. He wrote of the dualistic animism that pervaded their outlook, the several different classes of spirits, and the honor paid to special ancestral spirits to obtain protection. The names of the principal deities, such as Lugeilang and Iolafath, were recorded, and a small sampling of creation legends and etiological myths were presented, among them the Promethean tale of the evil spirit who, after his expulsion from heaven, brought fire down to earth. Cantova noted the absence of "shrine, idols, sacrifices, or other external cultic forms" except in connection with burial practices. He then proceeded to outline the burial customs observed when a man of high rank died: the painting of the body with turmeric, the women's keening, the funeral eulogy delivered by a relative of the deceased, the kinsmen's watch over the corpse, the food offerings left for the spirit of the dead person, and the eventual interment in a marked grave-site that was often enclosed by a stone wall. Even after devoting page after page to the elaborate animistic beliefs that the Carolinians held, Cantova concluded that these people "have no notion of religion." In words that echo those of Serrano, he maintained that they would be the more receptive to Christianity because "their minds are in no way prejudiced by the unbelievable systems of so many sects." Cantova finally found the opportunity to test this judgment of his. In late February 1731, he and another Jesuit, Father Victor Walter, left Guam in a small ship piloted by Cantova himself and

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bound for the Carolines. After twenty days of sailing, the two Jesuits and the dozen Spanish soldiers who were to protect them landed successfully at Mogmog, one of the islets of Egui's "Chickpeas," otherwise known as the Ulithi Atoll (Map 7). Here the Spaniards remained for a day or two conferring with the chiefs before moving on to Falalap, a larger island in the same group, which they had chosen as the site of their first mission station. They were jubilantly received at Falalap; most of the island population turned out at the beach to cheer their arrival, and the two Jesuits were lifted out of the boat and carried on improvised palanquins to the nipa house that had already been prepared for them. After this auspicious beginning, the priests turned quickly to their evangelical work. The initial response of the people was heartening. A crowd would gather outside their house each morning to observe silently as the priests said Mass and would listen respectfully to the religious lessons that always followed. Constantly at Cantova's side was Digal, a native of Woleai who had served as an informant for the priest during his last few years on Guam and had accompanied him down to Ulithi. Digal had first come to Guam in 1725 when he and three companions were picked up by a Spanish vessel after their canoe lost its way on a return voyage from Yap to Woleai. The newly appointed governor of the Marianas, who happened to be on the same ship, took an interest in the bright young lad and kept him as a servant at his residence for the next four years. During his stay on Guam, Digal had acquired a fluency in Castillian as well as a reputation for being "very honest, polite, and a great worker." Impressed by the young man's fine character and solid piety, Cantova had baptized him just before their departure for Ulithi and given him the Christian name Gaspar de los Reyes. After two months on the island the priests could report that, with the invaluable help of Digal, they had made splendid progress. More than one hundred twenty children had already been baptized and about six hundred adult proselytes were receiving instruction in the Faith. There were problems, to be sure, the two most persistent being the rats that were devouring the corn planted by the padres and the opposition of the native priests to the new religion. Of the rats, Cantova wrote that they overran the island in such great numbers that the priests had easily caught fifty-five within three hours. There was some hope, however, that their traps

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might be able to keep the rodent population under control and perhaps even save their garden. As for the native priests who had opposed the work of the Jesuits from the very outset, they were beginning to lose some of their credibility among the people. First, the typhoon that they had conjured up to drown Cantova and Walter on a recent canoe trip failed to materialize. Then Cantova, while clearing his land, cut down trees that were supposedly sacred to the spirits, even after being warned that to touch them would mean death. The impunity with which he defied their taboos astonished the Ulithi people. But the greatest allies of the Jesuits in their struggle against the native priests were the small, newly-baptized children who would stand around and ridicule their incantations and rites, and then run off to report to the Spanish padres what was afoot. The letters written by Cantova and Walter in early May (the earliest surviving letters written from the Carolines) reflect a cautious optimism on the part of both Jesuit missionaries, but they also reveal a striking difference in personal attitudes toward the native people. Cantova, ever the buoyant enthusiast, portrayed the Ulithians as "peaceful, tame, docile, and very affectionate, speaking to the Fathers without reserve"; they were a cheerful people with a consuming passion for song that they constantly indulged "like a choir of Capuchins singing Matins" (Carrasco 1881:264, Ca-dlH). In Walter's eyes, the Ulithians were lazy and frivolous people who "waste many hours in sleeping, dancing, jumping and spreading on oil which the silly people think makes them all the more handsome." He had little good to say about the leisurely meetings with which they would "squander the whole morning" and the daily afternoon baths that he saw as making them "weak, sluggish, and disinclined to everything that brings the least amount of inconvenience with it" (St