A History of the Pacific Islands by I. C. Campbell

Author:I. C. Campbell [Campbell, I. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Canterbury Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

MICRONESIA: INFORMAL COLONIZATION

Micronesia, the world of small islands, has for long been the forgotten zone of the Pacific. More remote than other island groups, and containing no large land areas, it has been studied less than other regions in the Pacific, and for much of its history has been less frequently visited.

In pre-European times it was, however, the most closely integrated of the Oceanic culture areas. Despite its being a collection of four or five separate archipelagoes, scattered across nearly eight million square kilometres of ocean, Micronesia was better known to its native navigators than Polynesia and Melanesia were respectively to theirs. As European contact developed, Micronesia was subject to the same influences as the other regions, but a major source of difference was its extreme resource-poverty. It had little to attract either the settler or the investor, and of the succession of traders who visited the region, most failed to find the visits worthwhile.

Sustained contact with Europeans did not come to most of Micronesia until the 1850s, although Spanish voyaging between America and the Philippines had located a great many of the islands in the sixteenth century. Guam and the Mariana group of islands in the west were discovered by Magellan in 1521; the Marshall group in the east was sighted by Saavedra in 1529; and in 1564 several discoveries were made in the Carolines. Few of these sightings changed the course of history: it was not until 1565 that Spain claimed Guam and the Philippines as its own, while the other Spanish discoveries were forgotten; and a century was to pass before Spanish. Jesuit missionaries in 1668 moved from the Philippines to Guam and northwards into the rest of the chain, now renamed the Mariana islands ( Magellan had called them Los Ladrones—the thieves). Mass baptisms quickly took place, and were followed almost immediately by vigorous, violent resistance to colonization. The resistance had to be subdued by Spanish soldiers, a process which was not finally completed until 1695, when the survivors were resettled on Guam to become a peonized peasantry, working under the centuries-long somnolence of Spanish colonial rule. Early in the eighteenth century, the Jesuits placed missionaries on Palau and Ulithi in the Carolines, where most of them were murdered, thereby causing the plans to be discontinued. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that Micronesia was again disturbed, but this time by a different influence.

Ships of the British East India Company, sailing between India and China passed through the western Carolines; one such ship, the Antelope, was wrecked on Palau, where its crew spent several months living with the Palauans while building a small vessel, and as a result the East India Company surveyed Palau in. 1791. At about the same time, the eastern side of Micronesia was placed on the map by two East India Company captains who, having transported convicts to help establish the British colony of New South Wales in 1788, sailed from there to China to collect a

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