Guam Past and Present by Charles Beardsley

Author:Charles Beardsley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4629-1325-1
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Either the letter had exceptional charm for the governor or else he had no defense against the visitors except courtesy, since the garrison at Guam was of small strength and very poorly outfitted. He answered Woodes Rogers at once, and, according to the privateer, ". . . with a present of four bullocks, one for each ship, with limes, oranges, and cocoa-nuts. And being now arrived at a place of peace and plenty, we all became indifferent well reconciled among ourselves after the misunderstandings at California which had been so much increased of late by our shortness of water and provisions."

The exchange of pleasantries from ship to shore seems to have put both Captain Rogers and the governor on the friendliest of terms. An entertainment aboard the Batchelor was arranged for the first citizen of the island and four of his Spanish friends ". . . where we all met, and made 'em as welcome as time and place could afford, with musick and our sailors dancing, when I, not being able to move myself [due to his wound from the Manila galleon incident], was hoisted in a chair out of my ship and the boat and into the Batchelor. . . ." Another entertainment took place later on the Duke, the Dutchess, and the Marquiss. The governor returned this signal honor with similar entertainments ashore. The height of this international amity was climaxed when Rogers and his officers, after indulging in a banquet of ". . . sixty dishes of various sorts," made the governor a handsome present of ". . . two negro boys dress'd in liveries together with scarlet cloth, serge and six peeces of cambric. . . ."

The following day Captain Rogers went ahead with wholesale food buying which included ". . . 14 small lean cattel, two cows and calves, 60 hogs, 100 fowls, with Indian corn, rice, yams and cocoa nuts." Well supplied, Privateer Rogers was ready to depart for the Moluccas.

Rogers was so pleased with the grace and beauty of the flying praos that he took one along with him in hopes of exhibiting it in London. (See Chapter 5—The Flying Prao.) This was some thirty years before Commodore Anson's account of the outriggers.

Captain Rogers missed very little in his coverage of the island. He portrays in his narrative the beauty of Guam, and the usual abundance of fruits and wild food plants is described. He noted with an economist's eye that money was very scarce and that the 200 soldiers garrisoned on the island were paid only once a year in coin from Manila which almost immediately all went out for supplies that their pay ship had brought—supplies controlled by the governor. To escape inclusion in this enforced poverty, the natives had begun to plant rice on a large scale and to depend on other agricultural sources for their sustenance. They did not care for the penury they saw among the soldiers, who worked for money they might handle no longer than one day a year and could never keep for the future.

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