For a transcript, see https://www.buzzsprout.com/197078
For photos, see greatmirror.com
For a transcript, see https://www.buzzsprout.com/197078
For photos, see greatmirror.com
An Irishman named James F. O’Connell survived a shipwreck in the 1820s. He found himself on Pohnpei, an island about 3,000 miles more or less west of Honolulu, and 2,500 miles more or less east of Manila, Pohnpei is mountainous and roughly circular, with a diameter of about a dozen miles—call it 15 if you measure from reef to reef. It’s the largest of the Caroline Islands, which take their name not from a woman or from a ship but from a king of Spain, Charles II. The islands got that name 150 years before O’Connell arrived, but the Spanish ignored the islands for a long time, and for the next 150 years Pohnpei was more or less left alone. Poor O’Connell, in other words, was left to the mercies of the islanders, who he thought were going to kill him. Instead, he charmed them by dancing a jig, and instead of killing him, they adopted him. As was their custom, they covered him with tattoos. They did excuse him from one other custom, the excision of a testicle.
O’Connell managed to escape in 1833 and a few years later was working for P.T. Barnum as “The Tattooed Man.” A few years later, he wrote a memoir published as The Life of James F. O’Connell, The Pacific Adventurer, Containing Startling Passages of Adventure and Hair-Breadth Escapes. In it, O’Connell introduced the phrase “Venice of the Pacific.” He was describing Nan Madol, a ruin on the east side of the island. The website of the U.S. National Park Service recognizes Nan Madol as a National Historic Landmark and calls it “the only extant ancient city built on top of a coral reef” and “the earliest known example of… centralized political power in the Western Pacific.” Well, that’s a puzzle: why would the website of the U.S. National Park Service recognize as a National Historic Landmark a place that’s not even in the United States? And, no, it’s not in a U.S. territory, either. It’s in an independent country called the Federated States of Micronesia, or FSM.
There is an explanation, of course, but let’s return for now to O’Connell’s captors. They warned him not to visit Nan Madol. In his book, he says that they told him: “You will die! You wish to see too much. You will die!” Was O’Connell just another author, pushing book sales? Maybe, but two centuries later, I met a young man on Pohnpei. He was studying agroforestry and had lived his entire life on the island. It’s a small island, and Nan Madol is very nearly Pohnpei’s only claim to fame, but this young man had never gone to see it.
You could argue that this is like growing up in New York City and never visiting the Statue of Liberty, but in 1907 Pohnpei was part of German New Guinea. The German headquarters was at the island’s only town, which the Germans, without an excess of imagination, called Die Kolonie and which is now called Kolonia. The small German cemetery there has a tombstone that reads: “Hier Ruht in Gott Victor Berg… 1862-1907.” Berg was the island’s district officer, its Bezirksamtmann, and he went to Nan Madol with a shovel. His Pohnpeian mistress warned him not to do this, but he dug up some bones, came home, went to bed, and died. The German press ascribed his death to heatstroke, which is certainly plausible, but an American historian working on the island as late as the 1970s reported that islanders still believed that Berg had been killed by rishla, or spiritual retribution.
Another German, the ethnographer Paul Hambruch, came to Nan Madol a few years later with four men. They told him they were Christians, but according to Hambruch, “an unconquerable fear of the haunting spirits (ani) kept them from entering the stone enclosures….”
The Treaty of Versailles came along and assigned Germany’s Pacific islands north of the Equator to Japan. A war correspondent for The Chicago Daily News soon visited. He was Junius B. Wood, and he wrote that his Pohnpeian host, who was a Christian, told him that he didn’t “believe those stories any more. It’s only what the old natives tell.” Still, Wood says, he couldn’t persuade his host or anyone else to accompany him on a visit to Nan Madol.
Well, this just gets curioser and curioser. First it’s the park service listing Nan Madol as an American national historic landmark, then it’s the aura of mystery around this place, and then it’s that almost nobody in the United States has even heard of Nan Madol, which was built when the Inca were dragging rocks up and down the Urubamba Valley. Everybody’s heard of them. The Inca ruins are magnificent, but Nan Madol is awfully impressive, too.
Of course Americans have never heard of Pohnpei or for that matter of the Federated States of Micronesia. What do you expect? Americans like to take vacations in places famous for vacations, but they don’t do geography. During and after World War II, they did have a modest interest in one of these islands. Most Americans of advanced age remember Truk, briefly famous for America’s destruction there in 1944 of a large part of Japan’s navy. Now it’s called Chuuk, and it’s one of the four islands of the FSM, along with Yap, Kosrae, and Pohnpei. All four islands, joined as the FSM, have been an independent nation since 1986 and a member of the United Nations since 1991, yet they rarely appear in the news. Perhaps this is a blessing. Several books have been written about them, but they’re all from the post-war period, when the islands were taken from the Japanese and placed in the newly created U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific. When the stars and stripes came down, American interest collapsed. I suppose that makes sense. People are generally more interested in stuff they own than in stuff that belongs to somebody else.
You might wonder why Pohnpei didn’t become another Bali or Mauritius, but Pohnpei has no beaches. Instead, it has lots of mangrove swamps, which sound exotic but aren’t great for picnics. There are also no golf courses, casinos, or luxury hotels, which may be surprising since Pohnpei’s mean monthly temperature is a balmy eighty-one degrees Fahrenheit year round, except for the hot weather, when, from February to May, the mean monthly jumps one whole degree, to eighty-two. That might have some appeal to some people, but the island’s half-dozen rain gauges report annual totals varying from one hundred and forty-two inches on the coast to three hundred and twenty-three inches in the interior. Perhaps it will help if I say that the driest month on Pohnpei is wetter than the wettest month in Miami. Now the island doesn’t seem so attractive, and you may even start to feel sorry for the island’s 35,000 residents, confined on their remote island.
Perhaps “confined” is too strong a word. In 1968 and during the heyday of the U.S. Trust Territory, Air Micronesia, controlled by Continental Airlines, began almost daily flights from Honolulu with 737s modified to land on coral runways. The flights continue today on United, though only three times a week. The flights run between Honolulu and Guam, with a variable number of stops, including not only Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Chuuk but also Majuro and Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. The runways at all these islands are now paved, but worried about getting marooned the planes always carry a mechanic with a box of tools and parts. I see now that during the COVID-19 pandemic, flights have been reduced to one a week. And that’s it, unless you have your own plane or yacht.
I arrived back in the days of three flights a week. I had a reservation with a major car-rental company, but the charming agent apologized. She had my reservation but no cars. She called a no-desk, no-name company whose equally charming agent fixed me up with a car that almost at once began vibrating violently. I didn’t know how serious it was until one, then another, pedestrian started shouting. Sure enough, you could spin with your fingers the lug nuts on the right rear wheel. An hour later I had a profuse apology and a fancy new car at the same price. I cruised past my hotel before realizing that I had seen that building somewhere, the somewhere being the hotel’s website. Colonia is a town of six thousand people, and on an island with only a thousand tourists annually—most coming either for Nan Madol or for diving—signs are superfluous. It’s a little confusing but also endearing, like knowing your mail carrier’s name.
2.
On the theory of no time like the present, the next morning I drove to Nan Madol. There are almost no road signs on the island, but there are also almost no roads except one that circles the island and throws off some dead-end branches. The road, completed in 1985, was almost new when Lonely Planet published its first guidebook to the FSM in 1988. Still, the authors cautioned that driving the complete circle, fifty-four miles long, was nearly an all-day affair. “Try to avoid renting a low-riding sedan,” they advised. There hasn’t been another edition of the guide since 2000—Pohnpei has too few visitors to justify it—but the road has been improved and is now in good shape. It stays that way partly because few Pohnpeians have cars.
The road passes through what looks like a forest but is actually one domestic garden after another, with coconuts, breadfruit, taro, and yams. Protein comes from fish and from pork, commonly raised in backyard sties. The biggest surprise, at least for me, was the many cars that had broken down and simply been abandoned on the road’s shoulders, where they were soon entombed by vegetation. A century from now—maybe less—archaeologists will have fun discovering what’s under the green bumps.
About a quarter of the way around the island, clockwise from Kolonia at noon, I came to a junction. If there was a sign, I missed it, but I knew what I was looking for and so found myself on a narrow but still paved road, with Nan Madol three miles ahead. I never saw another vehicle on this road, either on my way in or out. And I came and went twice.
I came to another junction. Three old women were sitting on a log. They asked for a dollar and pointed to the right. (The dollar is another legacy of the U.S. Trust Territory. The FSM does not have its own currency.) I have no idea where the dollar went, because the FSM national government claims ownership of Nan Madol, but so does the Pohnpei state government. So does a family that has a deed issued by the German administration more than a century ago. In 1985, just before the Trust Territory ended, the U.S. National Park Service listed Nan Madol as a historic landmark, but at least Washington doesn’t claim ownership. Neither does UNESCO, which made Nan Madol a World Heritage site in 2016. The dollar went somewhere. There was no ticket or receipt.
The road came to an end at an empty parking lot with room for perhaps four vehicles. Just beyond it, there was an unpainted wooden building, apparently a house. There were no adults, but there were yapping dogs, a boy, and an older girl who asked for three dollars. By mistake I gave her a five and two ones. She immediately handed back the five, which I traded for a one and an apology. There was no ticket or receipt, and the girl gave no hint of expecting a tip.
She asked if I wanted a guide. I declined, and she pointed to a path that must have been built fairly recently. I say that because into the 1950s, if not later, the only way to Nan Madol was by boat. The path is a convenience, but it’s also a problem, because Nan Madol consists of a hundred islets, most covering less than an acre and scattered over almost two hundred acres of barely submerged coral. Build a path that blocks the tidal flow between the islets, and the channels will gradually silt up and turn into dry land. Nan Madol will no longer be James O’Connell’s Venice of the Pacific.
Piles of basalt columns were scattered along the path. They were roughly ten feet long, a foot thick, and so precisely hexagonal that they appeared milled. A couple of days later I would see an abandoned quarry on the other side of the island where a cliff wall was composed of the same naturally prismatic columns.
A cubic foot of basalt weighs about one hundred and ninety pounds, and so Pohnpeians have never used the rock as a building material, except for foundations. Someone else did, however. In Upon a Stone Altar, the historian David Hanlon writes that unknown Polynesian invaders took absolute control of the island about A.D. 1200. Whether by force or persuasion or a combination of the two, they induced the islanders not only to build Nan Madol but for four centuries to supply them with breadfruit, taro, yams, coconuts, fish, and—perhaps most important—fresh water. The ruler of these invaders was the saudeleur, the “Lord of Deleur.”
Nobody knows whether saudeleur rule ended with the arrival of new invaders or with a revolt, but the last saudeleur is said to have thrown himself off a cliff in 1628 and—on this there is complete agreement—turned himself into a small fish still found locally. The island’s society disintegrated into a handful of communities ruled by hereditary chiefs perpetually at war with one another.
The path ended at a canal with neither a bridge nor a causeway across it. The islet across the canal was unusual because it had no trees; it turned out to be the only islet where the government fights forest encroachment. It does so because this islet, called Nan Douwas, holds the graves of the first saudeleur and some of his successors.
Nan Douwas is a square roughly two hundred feet on a side, and its perimeter is traced by a basalt-log wall twenty-five feet high. As elsewhere at Nan Madol, the wall is composed of alternating rows of headers and stretchers—one row placed lengthwise above and below rows placed end-out for greater stability. The walls at Nan Madol are generally made this way, which means that they are ten feet thick.
Oddly, the four corners of the enclosure are slightly swept-up. Frederick William Christian, a New Zealander who visited in 1896, thought they looked Japanese. Twenty years later, the Japanese found the idea tempting. Junius Wood from The Chicago Daily News reported that “the present governor has a big white book in which visitors, either after exploring Nanmatal [sic] or discussing it in the cool of his residence, are requested to write their opinion of its origin.”
To build Nan Madol, thousands of stone logs weighing a ton each were quarried and probably floated around the island while supported by cables of hibiscus fiber tied to flanking rafts. This was a herculean undertaking, but the foundations of the ruins are built of even larger stone logs, still hexagonal but four feet thick instead of one. Each of these foundation stones weighs about twenty tons, which may explain why James O’Connell wrote that the place evoked “deep yet vague speculation. The immense size of a portion of the stones in the walls, rendered it impossible that they could have been placed there without some mechanical contrivance superior to any thing I met among the natives; and no contemptible degree of architectural skill was manifested in their construction….”
Paul Hambruch, the ethnographer who reported that the islanders were too afraid of spirits to accompany him to Nan Madol, wrote that “a tremendous piece of work was carried out, of which we who live in the machine age cannot have any conception.” Similar things have been said of Inca stonework, but the real challenge for the builders of such places is not mastering levers and ramps but turning human beings into slaves in an industrial army. How this was accomplished on Pohnpei is anybody’s guess. I have no theories beyond shock and awe, by which I mean the usual blend of force and persuasion that keeps all civilizations ticking.
The canal was about twenty feet wide and the water was knee-deep, clear,
warm, and almost glassy. The canal stretched perfectly straight about five hundred feet to the north, past other islets. There was nothing to do but wade. The water was deep enough that I didn’t have to dodge mangrove roots, which rise in shallower water like spear tips in a medieval fantasy. On the other hand, the canals are said to harbor Moray eels. What fool was this, wearing shorts and cheap shoes, holding his cheap camera overhead, and hoping for the best?
There’s a well-maintained path around the perimeter of Nan Douwas. It, too, must be new, because the ethnographer Hambruch has a photograph from 1910 showing the perimeter thickly overgrown. Rather than walking around the islet, however, I went straight into the enclosure through a gap in the wall about ten feet wide. The rough ground led to the central, unmarked tomb of the first saudeleur. I saw no signs, no trash, no graffiti, and there was nobody else around.
The tomb of the first saudeleur is a stone-log box about twenty-five feet on a side. It’s made of basalt logs stacked about five feet high. A few steps lead down through an opening to what is now a floor of leaves and broken rock. The tomb used to have a stone-log roof and was dark enough that Frederick William Christian, the visitor from New Zealand in the 1890s, used it as a darkroom. (Some of his photos appear in his The Caroline Islands, published in 1899.) Subsequent excavations have opened the room to daylight. No casual visitor will ever again use it as a darkroom—or find relics to claim as souvenirs.
The best stuff was dug up in the 1870s by Jan Kubary, a Pole who mapped Nan Madol and unearthed enough relics to fill a hundred shipping crates. Kubary packed the stuff up and in the best scientific tradition put it on a ship headed to a German museum. Call it the Saudeleur’s Revenge: the ship sank, and nearly everything was lost. Kubary continued to live on Pohpei until 1896, when he hanged himself, apparently because of his wife’s infidelity. A few years later, the Germans honored him with a monumental grave in the shape of a pyramid of basalt logs. It’s been rebuilt since then, but the accompanying plaque is missing.
Kubary’s wife, who was fourteen when they married, remarried. Her choice was unfortunate, because the Germans hanged her second husband. She was still alive when Junius Wood of The Chicago Daily News came by in 1920. She told him about her life with Kubary. “[We] went everywhere—England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia—but so much has happened to me since and nobody here understands it that I have forgotten.”
I didn’t spot the other tombs in the enclosure, but I did scramble up the pile of stone logs at the rear wall of the enclosure. From that vantage point I got a spectacular view of two more walls, separated by water but parallel to each other. Breakers and the open sea lay beyond the second. I also saw from this vantage point the islet of Kariahn, which has another tomb enclosure. A hundred feet of water intervened—calm, clear, full of anemones and, one remembers, the occasional moray.
I wasn’t organized enough to get a canoe—it’s not like they’re sitting around with gondoliers at the ready—but I did muster my nerve on my second visit. The water was alive with anemones waving like butterflies. No morays, and the water wasn’t more than mid-thigh deep, but when broken into fist-sized bits, coral can offer wickedly unstable footing.
Kariahn’s foundation blocks, each four feet thick and placed end-out to form a hexagonal lattice, rose eight feet above the coral-gravel beach. Four pairs of standard-dimension headers and stretchers were stacked on top of that foundation. The entrance to the enclosure was semi-collapsed. It would have been easy to clamber inside but if a basalt log shifted onto my ankle I’d have been in trouble. I peeked inside and saw nothing. Offshore, a sunken Japanese freighter was almost buried in broken coral.
I waded back to Nan Douwas and re-entered the enclosure. Off to the right there was a small opening. It was about three feet high, three feet wide, and ten feet long. I scuttled through it to the perimeter walk and thought of the coal miners in George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, the ones with “buttons down the back” from repeatedly scraping their vertebrae against low roofs. I supposed for no good reason that this low passage was a drain, but John Whiting, an American anthropologist who worked on Pohnpei in the 1950s, writes that it was actually the entrance for commoners. Of course. How foolish of me. What could be more obvious? Little people scuttle. Shades of Leona Helmsley.
3.
If scuttling is the price of affluence, Pohnpeians will stick to poverty.
I realize that this sounds implausible, but consider these facts. When in 1986 the U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific became the Federated States of Micronesia, the new nation signed a compact of free association with the United States. Under its remarkable terms, Pohnpeians were and remain free today to move to the United States and work without a visa. They need only arrive at an American port of entry and show an FSM passport indicating birth in the FSM or marriage to someone born there. It could hardly be simpler. Plus, after forty years of American rule the islanders already speak English, which beyond the fourth grade is the language of instruction in the FSM’s public schools.
Surveys suggest that if immigration to the United States was unrestricted, about one in three people in Latin America would move north, yet the last FSM census found a grand total of two thousand Pohnpeians living in the United States. That’s one in seventeen. It’s true that Pohnpei lacks murderous gangs, but per capita GDP across the FSM is less than four thousand dollars annually. Half of the people on Pohnpei survives on subsistence farming and fishing, and most of the other half is employed either by the Pohnpei State government or the FSM national government, which is headquartered on Pohnpei..
You don’t trust statistics? Fine. A good house on Pohnpei is a four-room rectangle of painted concrete blocks under a corrugated metal or tile roof. Windows are simple aluminum frames, one pane sliding over the other. The interiors are simpler still, with only half of the island’s houses having either a flush toilet or a ventilated pit toilet. Most houses do have running water and electricity, but the island’s power station runs on oil and charges about fifty cents per kilowatt hour, among the highest rates in the world.
You’d expect Pohnpeians to pack up and move. Instead, the great majority either stay put or try the mainland for a few years, then return home. As Mark Twain wrote in another context, “I think it is a conundrum worth investigating.”
The explanation, I think, lies in the fact that within the space of a century Pohnpei was claimed by Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United States. The islanders were told to do this and then to do that, to speak this language and then to speak that one, to salute this flag and then another. They fought some of the outsiders. They ignored others. I think the islanders concluded that they weren’t interested in buying the civilization that, one way or another, all the outsiders were selling.
Right from the start, the outsiders treated the islanders with contempt—not a great strategy for any salesman. Frederick William Christian, the New Zealander who made a darkroom of the first saudeleur’s tomb, is a good example. He recounts this conversation with the chief whose territory included Nan Madol:
The angry old monarch turned to us and rated us sharply for our unhallowed work which he bade us cease once and for all…. At length he grunted out sulkily that he didn’t like white men, and that his people didn’t either, and was dismissing us with further threats and warnings, which, to his infinite wonder, I treated very lightly. ‘Tell your king there,’ said I, in the current Ponapean, to a chief close by, ‘that I will return in a year or two and bring with me a party of Irishmen with picks and spades and lamps and muskets, and we will dig where we please. By and by you will understand white men better.
Paul Hambruch, who as an ethnographer should have known better, wrote that Protestant missionaries from the United States had made the islanders “deceitful, sly, and selfish.” Hambruch’s particular target was Henry Nanpei, a mission-educated businessman who was also the grandson of an English sailor. Hambruch, whose work has been translated into English, wrote that the first German district officer on Pohnpei, Albert Hahl, “very soon saw through the cunning half-breed.” Surprised, I went back to Hambruch’s original: “Dr. Hahl durchschaute das gerissene Halbblut sehr bald.” The translation was spot on.
The outsiders did more than insult the Pohnpeians. By 1850, two American whaling ships were dropping anchor in Pohnpei’s waters every month. Whalers were still arriving at the end of the century, when the same district officer, Albert Hahl, boarded one. He remembered that the deck was
swarming with natives, especially women. The ship’s hatches were open and from them highly-prized wares were making their appearance: rifles, ammunition, dress materials, alcoholic drinks. Payment was in cash, or failing cash, the women made themselves available. I told Captain Montgomery quite frankly that this would probably be his last visit to the island, for by the following year I would have organized the forces necessary to put down this disgraceful trade.”
I still wonder at the islander’s eagerness to board Captain Montgomery’s ship, because in 1855 another whaling ship had anchored at Pohnpei and buried a sailor who had just died of smallpox. Two other men were put ashore barely alive with the disease. The ship left, the sick men died, and an islander took their clothes. Albert Sturges, an American missionary and a newcomer himself, implored the thief to burn the clothes. Too late. Three thousand people died of smallpox within the next five months. When the Germans arrived almost fifty years later, they conducted a census and found thirty-five hundred people on the island. They estimated the population in 1850 as fifteen thousand. Albert Hahl, by the way, gave a tour of the island to Robert Koch, the Nobel-laureate student of tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. Pity we don’t have a record of the discussion the two men surely had about smallpox.
I mentioned the missionary Albert Sturges. He had arrived in 1852, three years before the smallpox outbreak, and was one of two pioneers sent by the Boston Mission, formally the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions. This was the same Congregationalist organization that a generation earlier sponsored the first missionaries to Hawaii.
A history of the Board’s work was published in 1906 and contains a photograph of Edward T. Doane, a missionary who arrived on Pohnpei in 1855. In the undated photograph he is gaunt and gray. He sits next to fifteen students, all male teenagers. They are dressed in Western clothes: severely plain shirts, pants, and buttoned jackets. No skin is exposed except faces and hands. The caption refers to them as “Doane’s boys,” but there’s nothing boyish about them: they look like convicts. Doane sits cross-legged, comfortable in his authority.
I will offer a brief word in his defense. The Spanish, who in 1886 set up the island’s first colonial administration, announced that schools had to operate in Spanish and avoid any criticism of the Catholic Church. The American missionaries protested and were eventually expelled. One might think that there was general elation to see the backs of these teetotalling killjoys, but one of the missionaries soon received a letter from a chief. It read, in part:
As I was sitting there, some of the natives who were wandering around saw me, and where I was. Soon quite a number were gathered, and we thought we would have a prayer-meeting. We sang and prayed, but soon everyone was crying. We tried to sing again, but they cried harder and harder. We remembered every one of you, and wished you could be with us.
Why would such a letter be written except to express genuine heartache? It is, to borrow from Twain again, a conundrum.
The missionaries certainly suffered for their faith. The earliest of them complained that the islanders didn’t know what money was and could be neither hired nor persuaded to help build a house. A grocery order from those early years begged the Mission Board in Hawaii to send one barrel each of beef, pork, flour, sugar, molasses, fish, hard bread, and lamp oil. As late as the 1880s, Lucy Ingersoll, with an M.D. from Yale, wrote a letter home in which she almost stamps her feet in rage because nobody will help her do the laundry in her small hospital. She refers in one letter to the arrival of the Mission’s supply ship. “I am not one given to crying but the tears—not tears of sorrow—fell from my eyes when I saw the dear old Morning Star in the early dawn of that October morning steam inside our harbor so unexpectedly.” Sick, she left Pohnpei to return to a conventional medical practice. Fifty years later, she was living in Riverside, California.
The Americans did devise an orthography for Pohnpeian and taught their converts how to read and write. In the late 1940s, one of those converts, Luelen Bernart, wrote a history of the island. (He wrote it in Pohnpeian, but it’s been translated into English as The Book of Luelen). The text mentions a saudeleur named Raipuinloko, who “ate the flesh of animals and the flesh of people.” Oddly, Bernart doesn’t mention the whalers and their smallpox, which makes me wonder if the saudeleurs, even though more historically distant than smallpox, cast a more ominous shadow.
4.
The Caroline Islands, including both the states of the FSM and the Republic of Palau to its west, are named for the Spanish King Charles II, and, though the islands were of no importance to Spain, the government in Manila was not amused when in the 1870s German companies established a trading post on Pohnpei. The Germans wanted dried coconut meat, or copra, which they had just recognized as a major source of edible fat. The Spanish decided they had better occupy Pohnpei. Their arrival was duly recorded in Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia for 1886:
Ponape is the headquarters of the American missionaries. There are 11 of them on the island and about as many traders… The exports are about 40 tons of copra…. In August naval Lieutenant Capriles was commissioned as governor… and sent in the steamer Carriedo to take possession, with an infantry lieutenant as his secretary, 28 soldiers, and 25 convicts to build stations. He was accompanied by four Spanish monks, who went to convert the natives.
The Spanish built a fort overlooking the island’s best harbor: this was the germ of the town now called Kolonia but which the Spanish called Santiago de la Ascensión. They also began the circle road around the island, presumably to strengthen their control of the islanders. The missionaries endorsed the road, but then the Spanish deported Reverend Doane and lost an interlocutor. Governor Capriles had by then been replaced by Isidro Posadillo, who directed that work on the road continue on a feast day. The islanders refused. Posadillo sent soldiers to enforce his order. The islanders killed them all and then went to Santiago de la Ascensión and for good measure killed Governor Posadillo. On paper, at least, the Spanish had been in charge of Pohnpei for one year.
Once the Spanish lost the Philippines to the United States in 1898, there was little sense in maintaining even the fiction of Spanish rule in the Carolines, especially because the Germans, still seeking copra, were willing to buy the place. The Spanish must have been delighted to leave: after Governor Posadillo’s death, they had stayed close to their fort yet continued to lose soldiers—eighty just in 1890.
In 1891, the last Spanish governor, Fernandez de Cordoba, welcomed his German successor, the same Albert Hahl who was going to put an end to whaling. Hahl stepped ashore with twenty-six Malays, twenty Melanesians, a doctor, a police sergeant, and a harbor master. Hahl said he needed nothing more, Governor de Cordoba “clapped his hands together and exclaimed that I would be dead within a week.”
In an effort to stay alive by presenting no threat, Hahl explored the island on foot without a military escort. He not only survived but was promoted to successively higher positions in the German Empire. I suspect that years later Hahl missed Pohnpei, where he had kept a Pohnpeian mistress, worn a traditional grass skirt at feasts, and allowed local women to rub his body with coconut oil. It doesn’t sound very German.
Hahl ordered the destruction of the Spanish fort and a cleanup of the fort’s moat, which, he wrote, was “filled with rubbish” and “crawling with scorpions and centipedes.” Almost immediately, he allowed the American missionaries to return, but they didn’t stay long, choosing to leave for good in 1907, when German Protestants arrived. The Germans stayed on Pohnpei until the arrival of Japanese Protestants from the Nan’yō dendō dan, or the South Seas Mission Board.
It wasn’t just the Protestants who shipped in and out: in 1903 the Spanish Capuchins left and were replaced by German Jesuits. A new church was built and was soon designated a cathedral. Years later, the Japanese would tolerate the Jesuits but eventually commandeered the cathedral for an ammo dump, which explains why American planes bombed the building, along with almost everything else in Kolonia. The bell tower and apse survive, but the stairs are impassible. Even the finest German steel has been no match for Pohnpei’s rain.
In 1907, the banker Bernhard Dernburg became Germany’s secretary of state for colonial affairs. He was determined to make his colonies pay for themselves, but Pohnpeians still had little or no money. Instead, local chiefs allotted and confiscated land as they pleased. In return, villagers gave the chiefs labor and food in the form of feasts. The American missionary Albert Sturges—the same man who had urged the thief to burn the smallpox-infected clothing—had many years earlier described the island’s economy as “a sort of socialism, quite destroying all our efforts to fix them in place and property.” That’s what I call an evangelist with a mission.
In 1907, Albert Hahl, by then the Landeshauptmann or governor of German New Guinea, returned very briefly to Pohnpei and, carrying out Dernburg’s orders, announced that each family on Pohnpei would get a few coastal acres marked with physical boundaries and accompanied by a written title. The family would be required to plant coconuts at the perimeter of the property and to turn over a quantity of coconuts to the government. The village men would also contribute fifteen days of paid labor annually for road-building. In exchange, homesteads would no longer be revocable at the will of a chief, and the villagers would no longer have to provide the chiefs with labor and feasts. The government would instead pay the chiefs a salary funded by the export of copra.
Hahl returned to his headquarters at Herbertshöhe, now called Kokopo, on the island of New Britain, and underlings began distributing eleven hundred deeds covering about twenty-five thousand acres in holdings averaging about twenty acres. The Japanese economist Tadao Yanaihara later observed that not a single parcel was sold during the German period. Perhaps there was no market because only a third of the island—all of it near the coast—was privatized. Of that third, only a third was cultivated. Land sales might have been more common if land had been in short supply, which is to say if smallpox hadn’t killed most of the islanders.
The Germans lost Pohnpei in 1914, so it’s impossible to say whether they would have succeeded in making Pohnpei pay for its own administration, but the reform did not get off to a good start. Islanders were told that they had to dig holes every eight feet along their property lines. Each hole had to measure one cubic meter and had to be filled with a mix of leaves, sand, and soil. The same historian who tells of Governor Berg’s fatal digging at Nan Madol says that “the German secretary Gentner once berated a man in Kiti for not preparing his soil properly. The man threatened to kill Gentner if he ever returned, and Gentner never did.”
In 1909 a new Bezirksamtmann arrived. Somebody, perhaps a bureaucrat in Berlin with no knowledge of Pohnpei, had chosen for this posting a retired military officer who had just spent twenty-five years in Germany’s African colonies. Decades later, an American anthropologist on the island was told that the new man, Gustav Boeder, “used to question Ponapean tribesmen with a drawn revolver pointed at them.”
Once again, demands were made for the islanders to help build the island’s circle road. One man, judged insubordinate, was given ten strokes with a wire-wrapped rubber hose. A chief who dared to ask for a pay raise for his men was physically thrown out of Boeder’s office. When one man on a road gang was beaten for not working hard enough, the entire gang quit. Boeder decided to straighten things out in person. His staff doctor warned him that the islanders would kill him. Boeder replied, “They can’t.” Boeder was wrong. He was shot in the belly, then in the head, then ritually mutilated. Three months later, a telegram arrived in Berlin: “Böder, Brauckmann, Hollborn, Häfner, and five native boat boys murdered….”
Several months later the Germans launched a campaign against the rebels. Unable to catch them, the commander ordered the harvest or destruction of all food supplies, and within a few months the rebels surrendered. Shocked by his own tactics, the commander later wrote of the “Grausame Räuber, die wir waren,” the “cruel robbers that we were.” (The shocked officer was the young Edgar Freiherr Spiegel von und zu Peckelsheim. He went on to command a U-boat in World War I and on the eve of World War II was the German consul in New Orleans, where he probably sent information to Berlin about sailings to England. He ended the war on Heinrich Himmler’s staff.)
Of the five hundred men judged to be rebels, the Germans hanged the seventeen they considered most culpable. Among the seventeen was the second husband of the wife of Jan Kubary, the amateur archaeologist who had dug into Nan Madol. The Germans also pardoned one man who was allowed to remain on the island with his family because he had secretly dug up Boeder’s ritually severed hand and returned it to the Germans. All the other men were deported with their families to Palau, an island about fifteen hundred miles west of Pohnpei. They were forced to work at a nearby phosphate mine.
News of the rebellion eventually came to Albert Hahl at his headquarters. With extraordinary understatement, Hahl wrote that Boeder “perhaps did not know the character of the Pohnpeian people sufficiently well.” Had communications been better, Hahl might have warned Berlin that Boeder was not a good choice for this island. Instead, Boeder lies buried, with his hand, in Kolonia’s German cemetery.
Pohnpei’s next colonial ruler arrived in October, 1914. A German missionary wrote that the Japanese “troops had gone through everything and had ample opportunity to steal whatever they wanted, [but] not the least little thing was missing after they left.”
By 1922, an American observer writing in the first issue of Foreign Affairs judged that the Japanese
undertook the administration of the islands with commendable earnestness and energy. Experts and high officials visited the archipelagos in large numbers in the early months; the native chiefs were taken on visits to Japan; roads were built; additional cocoanut trees planted, navigation buoys placed, surveys made; a regular subsidized steamship service to the islands was established; and trade and commerce with Japan were furthered….
The same observer, George H. Blakeslee, a professor of history and international relations at Clark University, went on to say that
the most striking feature of the Japanese administration is the establishment of elementary schools. The Germans had no government schools, leaving the education of the natives entirely to American and German missions; but the Japanese Government, with much the same spirit which actuated the American Administration in the Philippines, is extending elementary schools as rapidly as possible and requiring the attendance, wherever the schools are available, of all children from 8 to 15 years of age.”
Blakeslee might have added that the Japanese introduced a tuna fishery. To preserve the fish until the boats could get back to the Kolonia cannery, the Japanese built a hydropower station a few miles from town and then built an ice factory. The dam is still there, along with some hopelessly rusted generators.
Under the Japanese, there would be no more taking local women as mistresses, no more grass skirts and coconut-oil rubs. There would be no more interviews with a pointed revolver. Pohnpei now had a colonial master intent not merely on controlling the islanders but on introducing Japanese colonists to grow rice on land reclaimed from mangroves. By 1945, there were 13,000 Japanese colonists on the island. They outnumbered the Pohnpeians.
The Pohnpeians did not revolt, perhaps because the Japanese stayed to themselves. As the economist Yanaihara Tadao wrote at the time, the Japanese on Pohnpei “live in the South Seas, [but] they know absolutely nothing about it.” This was particularly true for the Japanese living in Kolonia. The Germans had changed the town’s name from Santiago de la Ascensión to Die Kolonie, and the Japanese made it Karonia. They named the main street Namiki-dori, or “tree-lined street.” Ironically, they also widened the street by cutting down the mangoes that the Germans had planted for shade. An American visitor in the 1930s wrote that Namiki-dori had a “movie theater, shops, and a night club and geisha house called the ‘Sun and Moon.” What it did not have was shade.
Every building along Namiki-dori would be incinerated by American bombs, but on the nearby waterfront street a building that housed a Japanese department store survives, subdivided into several shops. It is a one-story affair of concrete. Its roof once had playpens and swings. A European resident of the island recalled that “the Japanese would leave their children up there to play while they shopped.”
At the edge of town, the Japanese established a botanical garden stocked with tropical fruits and vegetables to test as crops for Japanese settlers. After the war, the Japanese horticulturalist in charge of the place, a Mr. Ono, came back and wept at the ruins. Things aren’t much better now. The three-story skeleton of the garden’s administration building survives, but it’s a graffiti-trimmed, spalling wreck. As for the garden itself, in 2001, a team of American experts visited and published this grim assessment:
most of the plantings at the station have been neglected and in some cases, abandoned…. The situation…is dire. The plantings of palms, fruit, timber, and other economic and ornamental trees… are a state and national treasure. They represent what once was the finest collection of useful and economic plants in all Micronesia and possibly the entire Pacific.
Within four months of the Japanese surrender, the Americans deported all thirteen thousand Japanese on the island. The town of Koronia got its third name, Kolonia, chosen with that spelling because there was already a town called Colonia on Yap, fourteen hundred miles to the west. The U.S. Navy remained in charge of the islands until 1951. During that time it sponsored a surprising amount of scholarly research, including the door-stopping Handbook on the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.
In 1951, the Navy handed administration over to the Department of the Interior, which remained responsible for the islands until the FSM was created in 1986. Under the Interior Department, the American official in charge of Pohnpei was called Distad Pohnpei, short for District Administrator Pohnpei. For many years the Distad Pohnpei was Hank Hedges, formerly the owner of a Chicago construction company. He was big, jovial, and colorful in his habitual Hawaiian shirts.
Until 1962, the only access to the island was by ship or military seaplane, but then an airfield was built with coral grit dumped in the water just north of Kolonia. Flights began with a four-engine DC-4 owned by the Trust Territory government. They continued until 1968, when Air Micronesia began the 737 service operated today by United.
Unlike the Japanese, the United States had no intention of colonizing these islands. The school built by the Japanese for Japanese children was converted to a hospital, but there were few other investments. Philip Toomin, a Chicago attorney who spent two years in the late 1950s as a judge on the Trust Territory’s supreme court, wrote that “we furnish a pretty awful road system… In road building and maintenance, we have never equalled the Japanese whose concrete roads and structures are in certain locations still usable.” Toomin was particularly miffed that he was living in a quonset hut that had been designed for three years of tropical service but was now in its thirteenth. He wrote that the United States was “a miser, too penurious to pay adequately for his assumed obligation.”
The Americans did finally complete the island’s circle road, and they established a new agricultural research station. The director had been an agricultural-extension agent in Spokane, but his work on Pohnpei didn’t end well. The islanders already knew how to produce all the breadfruit, taro, and bananas they wanted. They also knew how to grow yams too heavy for two men to carry. They hoped the extension agent could show them how to grow still bigger yams because growing the island’s biggest yam was a major source of prestige. He had no idea how to do that, but he must have liked the tropics, because he eventually retired to Hawaii.
5.
At one point on the branch road to Nan Madol, the forest has been cleared. There are no signs, but set back to the right about a hundred yards and on the top of a low hill there is a building the color of ripe wheat. The building is twenty-two bays wide, with two tiers of identical rectangular windows on its two floors. The central two bays have a projecting colonnade topped by a cross.
At the foot of the slope, a large house has a wide, shady veranda. On the other side of the road, a church has bells with “New York, 1911” embossed on their rusty surface. Beyond the church and down the hill to the waterfront, there is a dock, important in the days before the completion of the road from Kolonia.
The place was deserted, and it took me a while to figure out that I was at the home of the defunct Pohnpei Agricultural and Trade School, or PATS. If the school had had a tombstone, it might have read: “Born 1965, Died 2005.” It occupied the site of a two-hundred-acre coconut plantation set up by German Jesuits to support themselves with copra production.
PATS was the brainchild of the first American Jesuit to arrive on Pohnpei. The year was 1947, and Hugh Costigan was in his early thirties. He had been a bricklayer and plumber before entering the priesthood. Costigan first worked on building a new church in Kolonia to replace the bombed German one. In 1954, however, he moved out to the old German coconut plantation, and in 1965 he opened there the Pohnpei Agriculture and Trades School. He said he chose the name because he liked the sound of PATS.
Costigan soon had a visitor, E.J. Kahn of The New Yorker. Kahn reported that:
On his occasional Stateside visits, Costigan also makes a point of looking up his old friends in construction unions; a couple of years ago, the nearly fifteen hundred members of one Brooklyn plumbers’ local assessed themselves a hand tool apiece for the mission. Costigan’s otherwise austere bedroom at Tamori was furnished, when I last looked in on him, with a whole case of brand-new sixteen-ounce hammers.
Costigan stayed at PATS until his retirement in 1982. Five years later, he died back in New York. One obituary quotes him as saying that in PATS he had wanted “simply to teach students how to produce for themselves and their families.” It’s an odd goal, since the Pohnpeians already knew how to do that. Perhaps the school had prospered simply on the strength of Costigan’s dedication, but after his retirement the school, like many, many similar enterprises around the world, gave up the ghost.
As PATS declined, the Trust Territory was coming to an end. The United States government in those years built a home in Kolonia for Pohnpei’s state legislature. Set in cement at the front of the building there’s a small steel plate with a cartoonish image of a bee holding some tools and wearing a sailor’s cap. It’s the emblem of the Seabees, the Navy’s CBs or Construction Battalions.
The United States also built a capitol complex for the new national government of the FSM. The site chosen, a few miles west of Kolonia, was the village of Palakir, also the site today of the main campus of the College of Micronesia. The architecture of the capitol echoes the ruins of Nan Madol with fake basalt logs, a choice that may have made sense to American architects looking for the Micronesian equivalent of a Roman temple. I doubt that the islanders appreciate the gesture.
Thomas Morlang, a German historian, has written that when the telegram arrived in Berlin in 1910 announcing the murders of Gustav Boeder and his staff, “even long-serving employees in the Imperial Colonial Office had to think about where it was.” So, too, Pohnpei has never been more than a blip on the U.S. State Department’s radar. In the post-2001 world of diplomatic bunkers, the U.S. did build a new embassy in Kolonia. It replaced one small enough to find a second life as a drugstore.
Still, in 2020 the United States provided over half the budget of both the Pohnpei state and the FSM national government. The American contribution, stipulated by the Compact of Free Association, amounted that year to about nineteen million dollars for Pohnpei and about a hundred million for the FSM. The Compact is supposed to be replaced in 2023 by a trust fund, but contributions to the fund are lagging so badly that the fund is unlikely to be able to replace the current subsidies. It sounds like a looming disaster. It probably won’t be. A new office block to house the Pohnpei state government tells the story, because it was donated by the Chinese government, which would be delighted to replace the United States as the financial mainstay of the FSM. To make sure that this doesn’t happen, the United States will probably continue to support the islands long past 2023.
After all, the United States isn’t a charity. The best statement of its position may have been expressed in 1949 by William Bascom. In later years a professor of anthropology at Berkeley and a specialist in West Africa, Bascom just after World War II was working on Pohnpei for the Navy. While there, he spoke at conference where he said: “We can, by an enlightened administration and by just and considerate treatment of the Ponapeans as individuals, maintain the reputation enjoyed by Americans… and gain the loyalty and gratitude of the people for whom we have assumed responsibility in the name of our own security and safety.” I cannot think of a sentence that more perfectly combines realpolitik with what I think is a characteristic American naivete.
6.
Alongside the scattered wrecks in Kolonia’s harbor I saw two working vessels. One was the Trinidad II, a purse seiner that began life in San Diego as the Lou Jean II. Her huge nets were drying on racks. They were woven so closely that nothing more than three inches thick could escape. The cord was so strong that nothing alive in the sea could break free.
The other was the Kota Kening, a container ship from Singapore. I’ve no idea what it had brought to Pohnpei, but freezers in the town’s two small supermarkets were stocked with Hiland ice cream, probably made in Tyler, Texas. A store manager told me she wasn’t sure if it had come via Honolulu or Guam, but it had definitely come by ship.
So, too, had the spam and the disposable diapers I saw not only in the supermarkets but in kiosks scattered around the island. So had the mountains of pig feed on display outside the town’s supermarkets. The Spanish had introduced pigs to Pohnpei, and pigs had now largely replaced roast dog, the islanders’ traditional source of red meat. Big signs outside the supermarkets advertised “Starter,” “Lactation,” and “Pig Grower,” all from Australia.
Some might argue on the basis of such evidence that Pohnpei has become part of the modern world. David Hanlon, the historian, has for example written that under American administration the islands of Micronesia were “remade into places that had the look, feel, sound, speed, smell, and taste of America.” It’s certainly true that I rented a car on the island and stayed at a hotel with air conditioning and wi-fi. It’s also true that outside one of the supermarkets I saw a bulletin board with an index card seeking a trained accountant, full-time. I should add that the advertised salary was six hundred dollars a month.
It’s also true that I never saw a traditional Pohnpeian house. James O’Connell, the “tattooed man,” describes those houses in detail: a well-made stone floor, a peripheral rim of squared-off logs and short vertical posts every five feet. The posts support an enormous roof that is steeply pitched and thatched with palm. It slightly overhangs the low walls of the house, which are faced with split bamboo. Such houses were photographed by the Japanese, and the U.S. Navy published some of the Japanese photos in the Civil Affairs Handbook for the East Caroline Islands, a book published in 1944 apparently in anticipation of an American victory.
There is an opposing view, however, and I think it’s more persuasive. Douglas L. Oliver, a Harvard anthropologist who coordinated an economic survey of the islands for the Navy, argued that “castoff dungarees, a smattering of English, and a mission handshake are not to be regarded as evidence of thorough Americanization.”
Albert Hahl, the Bezirksamtmann in a grass skirt, wrote something along the same lines. He was friendly with the senior Spanish Capuchin but spoke no Spanish. The padre spoke no German, so the two conversed in Latin. The padre then told Hahl that the pews were full on Sundays but that in their “hearts and among themselves they [his parishioners] held to the beliefs of their fathers.” The American missionaries had the same problem. When they returned to Pohnpei in 1899, after an absence of nearly ten years, they found that their teachings had been nearly forgotten.
So modernization on Pohnpei is half-baked. Still, the sad fact is that with the destruction of the island’s traditional houses means that there is no sign of a cultural landscape offering environmental freedom, at least none that I saw. The good news is that there’s still plenty. It’s rooted not in the cultural landscape but in what the island has offered since its first settlement.
When I visited the island more than a century later, I passed a funeral feast for a former state governor. The Germans may have reduced feasting, but they certainly hadn’t eliminated it. The circle road was so jammed with pedestrians that it took me an hour to go a mile. A roadside church was packed, but the real crowd was up the road. A live pig was lugged past, hanging by its feet from a pole carried by four men. A huge yam followed in a net suspended the same way.
I met a man who had spent several years in Oregon. He said he had a brother in Portland who would never return to Pohnpei. “Maybe he will,” I said, but apparently I was wrong. There had recently been a death in the family, and the brother had not returned for the occasion. That was it. No excuses about the cost of tickets or the demands of mainland jobs. The man I was talking to didn’t sound sad; he sounded scornful.
One day I walked up a peak to look at some Japanese gun embankments. At the trailhead I met a cab driver leaning against his unmarked car and waiting for a couple of foreigners to return from wherever they were going. He recognized that I was American and mentioned me that he had worked for a while as a chef in a Japanese steakhouse in Lexington, Kentucky. “Lots of rednecks,” he volunteered. I looked closely at his smile for a hint of resentment, but I saw none. His expression implied something closer to “poor b