Alma greeted us, and smiled when she saw I had brought my own fins and snorkel. John wanted to stay on the verandah and read; Alma and I would go to the reef together. She gave me a stick to help me walk over the shallow coral shelf with its razor-sharp branches, and then led the way – following a path which I could not have discerned, but which she clearly knew intimately, out to the clear waters beyond. As soon as the water was more than a couple of feet deep, Alma dived in, and, following her, I dived in too.
We moved past great coral canyons, with their endless forms and colors and their gnarled branches – some shaped like mushrooms, some like trees, being nibbled at by tetrodons and file-fish. Clouds of tiny zebra fish and fish of an iridescent blue swam through them, and around me, between my arms, between my legs, unstartled by my movements.
We swam through shoals of wrasse and parrot fish and damsels, and saw turkey fish, with rusty feather fans, hovering beneath us. I reached out my hand to touch one as it hovered, but Alma shook her head violently (later she told me the ‘feathers’ were quite poisonous to touch). We saw flatworms waving like tiny scarves in the water and plump polychaetes with iridescent bristles. Large starfish, startlingly blue, crawled slowly on the bottom, and spiny sea urchins made me glad my feet were protected by fins.
Another few yards and we were suddenly in a deep channel, the bottom forty feet below us, but the water so clear and transparent that we could see every detail as if it were at arm’s length. Alma made some gesture I could not understand as we swam in this channel; and then we turned back, to the shallower waters of the reef. I saw hundreds of sea cucumbers, some nearly a yard long, making their cylindrical way slowly across the ocean floor, and found these enchanting – but Alma, to my surprise, made a grimace, shook her head.
‘They’re bad news,’ she said, after we had come in and showered and were eating fresh tuna and a salad with John on the porch. ‘Bottom feeders! They go with pollution – you saw how pale the reef was today.’ Indeed, the corals were varied and beautiful, but not quite as brilliant as I had hoped, not as brilliant as they had been when I snorkelled off Pohnpei. ‘Each year it gets paler,’ Alma continued, ‘and the sea cucumbers multiply. Unless they do something, it’ll be the end of the reef.’[58]
‘Why did you gesture when we were in the channel?’ I asked.
‘That means it’s a shark channel – that is their highway. They have their own schedules and times, times I would never dream of going near it. But it was a safe time today.’
We decided to rest and read for a while, in companionable silence on the verandah. Wandering inside to Alma’s comfortable living room, I spotted a large book on her shelf entitled The Useful Plants of the Island of Guam, by W.E. Safford. I pulled it out – gingerly, as it was starting to fall apart. I had thought, from the title, that it was going to be a narrow, rather technical book on rice and yams, though I hoped it would have some interesting drawings of cycads as well. But its title was deceptively modest, for it seemed to contain, in its four hundred densely packed pages, a detailed account not only of the plants, the animals, the geology of Guam, but a deeply sympathetic account of Chamorro life and culture, from their foods, their crafts, their boats, their houses, to their language, their myths and rituals, their philosophical and religious beliefs.
Safford quoted detailed accounts of the island and its people from various explorers – Pigafetta, Magellan’s historian, writing in 1521; Legazpi in 1565; Garcia in 1683; and half a dozen others.[59] These all concurred in portraying the Chamorros as exceptionally vigorous, healthy, and long-lived. In the first year of the Spanish mission, Garcia recorded, there were more than 120 centenarians baptized – a longevity he ascribed to the ruggedness of their constitutions, the naturalness of their food, and the absence of vice or worries. All of the Chamorros, noted Legazpi, were excellent swimmers and could catch fish in their bare hands; indeed, he remarked, they sometimes seemed to him ‘more like fish than human beings.’ The Chamorros were skilled as well in navigation and agriculture, maintained an active trade with other islands, and had a vital society and culture. Romantic exaggeration is not absent in these early accounts, which sometimes seem to portray Guam as an earthly paradise; but there is no doubt that the island was able to support a very large community – the estimates all fall between 60,000 and 100,000 – in conditions of cultural and ecological stability.
Though there were occasional visitors in the century and a half that followed Magellan’s landing, there was to be no massive change until the arrival of Spanish missionaries in 1668, in a concerted effort to Christianize the population. Resistance to this – to forced baptism, in the first place – led to savage retaliation, in which whole villages would be punished for the act of a single man, and from this to a horrifying war of extermination.
On top of this, there now came a series of epidemics introduced by the colonists – above all smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis, with leprosy as a special, slowly smoldering gift.[60] And in addition to actual extermination and disease, there were the moral effects of a forced colonization and Christianization – the attempted soul murder, in effect, of an entire culture.
This…weighed so heavily upon phem]…that some even sacrified their lives in despair; and some women either purposely sterilized themselves or cast into the waters their new-born infants, believing them happy to die thus early, saved from the toils of a life gloomy, painful, and miserable…they judge that subjection is the worst misery in the world.
By 1710, there were virtually no Chamorro men left on Guam, and only about a thousand women and children remained. In the space of forty years, ninety-nine percent of the population had been wiped out. Now that the resistance was over, the missionaries sought to help the all-but-exterminated Chamorros to survive – to survive, that is, on their own, Christian and Western, terms – to adopt clothing, to learn the catechism, to give up their own myths and gods and habits. As time passed, new generations were increasingly hybridized, as mestizo children were born to women who were married to, or raped by, the soldiers who had come to subdue their nation. Antoine-Alfred Marche, who travelled the Marianas between 1887 and 1889, felt there were no longer any pure-blooded Chamorros in Guam – or at most a few families on the neighboring island of Rota, where they had fled two centuries before. Their bold seafaring skills, once renowned throughout the Pacific, were lost. The Chamorro language became creolized, admixed with much Spanish.
As the nineteenth century progressed, Guam, once a prized Spanish colony on the galleon route, fell into deepening neglect and oblivion; Spain herself was in decline, had problems at home, other interests, and all but forgot her colonies in the western Pacific. This period, for the Chamorros, was a mixed one: if they were less persecuted, less actively under the heel of their conquerors, their land, their diet, their economy, had become more and more impoverished. Trade and shipping continued to decline, and the island became a distant backwater, whose governors had neither the money nor the influence to change things.
The final sign of this decline was the farcical way in which Spanish rule was officially ended, by a single American gunboat, the USS Charleston, in 1898. There had been no ships for two months, and when the Charleston and its three companion vessels appeared off Guam, a pleasurable excitement swept the island. What news, what novelties, the ships might bring! When the Charleston fired, Juan Marina, the governor, was pleased – this must be, he assumed, a formal salute. He was stunned to discover that it was not a greeting, but war – he had no idea that there was a war going on between America and Spain – and he now found himself led in chains aboard the Charleston, a prisoner of war. Thus ended three centuries of Spanish rule.