Guam’s Chamorro settled Remote Oceania first—and longest
Guam, a U.S. unincorporated territory in western Micronesia, calls itself where America’s day begins near the Date Line. Chamorro people, Austronesian kin to Philippines and Polynesia, made the Marianas humanity’s first Remote Oceanian landfall—and its longest ocean hop of that age.
The capital is Hagåtña, though Dededo has more people. The Chamorro name Guåhan comes from guaha, to have, glossed as we have, meaning the island supplied everything needed. Ancient Chamorro society had four ranks with chamorri chiefs at the top, along with shamans and plant healers, and belief in ancestral spirits called taotao mo’na persists. Homes stood on latte stones, capped megalithic pillars found only in the Marianas.
Magellan sighted the island on 6 March 1521, but Spanish colonisation began only on 15 June 1668, when Diego Luis de San Vitores founded the first Catholic church. War, typhoons in 1671 and 1693, and smallpox in 1688 cut the Chamorro population from 50,000 to under 5,000. Guam served as a stop for Manila galleons from Acapulco and, from 1823, for whalers.
After Spain’s defeat in 1898 the United States took the island and placed it under the Navy, while Spain sold the Northern Marianas to Germany. A cable station opened in 1903 for the first trans-Pacific line, and in 1917 the German raider Cormoran, interned at Apra Harbor, was scuttled by its crew when war was declared.
Japan invaded on 8 December 1941, hours after Pearl Harbor, and renamed it Ōmiya-jima, Great Shrine Island. During nearly three years of occupation about 1,100 Chamorros were killed, by congressional testimony, and some historians estimate a tenth of the 20,000 residents died. The United Nations still lists Guam as a non-self-governing territory.
Source: Guam
