America’s Pacific commonwealth began Remote Oceania’s first voyage
The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands joins fourteen northern Mariana islands as a U.S. unincorporated territory—183.5 square miles holding 47,329 people in 2020, mostly on Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. Guam is the archipelago’s separate southern hinge.
People from the Philippines reached the Marianas around 1500 to 1400 BC, the first human arrivals anywhere in Remote Oceania, and archaeologists suggested in 2013 that the crossing may have been the longest continuous ocean voyage made up to that time. Tinian may have been the first Pacific island settled. A second wave sailed in from the Carolines during the first millennium AD, and a third from island Southeast Asia by about 900 AD. The ancient islanders built their houses atop latte stones, rows of stone pillars capped with megaliths.
Magellan landed on Guam in 1521 and claimed the chain for Spain; when islanders took a small boat, following a custom in which needed items were not privately owned, fighting broke out and he left three days later. A Jesuit renamed the islands Las Marianas in 1668 after the regent Mariana of Austria. Disease and intermarriage cut the native population by 90 to 95 percent, and in 1720 Spain moved the survivors to Guam; Carolinian settlers, who call themselves Refaluwasch, arrived while the Chamorros were away, and both languages are now official.
Spain sold the northern islands to Germany in 1899, and Japan seized them early in the First World War, turning about 98 percent of Tinian into sugarcane fields. American forces invaded Saipan on 15 June 1944; fewer than 1,000 of its 30,000 Japanese defenders survived, and about 1,000 civilians leapt from cliffs. The following year the Enola Gay took off from Tinian for Hiroshima, and some 30 holdouts stayed hidden on Anatahan until 1951.
The islands joined the United States in 1986, giving residents citizenship, and elected a non-voting delegate to Congress in 2009. Pagan has been almost empty since a 1981 eruption.
Source: Northern Mariana Islands
