How Guam and thousands of other isolated islands came to be inhabited has puzzled ethnologists to this day. Migrations from Southeast Asia gradually fanned out across the Pacific, into what we today call Melanesia and Polynesia, beginning about three or four thousand years ago, perhaps in light craft reminiscent of the outrigger canoes that advanced on Magellan’s fleet. Today’s Chamorros are a mixture of Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino, Mexican, and Spanish, and speak a distinct language, also called Chamorro. Whether the tribe whom Magellan first encountered that morning in 1521 was the direct ancestor of the region’s current inhabitants remains an open question.
Four hours after sighting land, the Armada de Molucca, surrounded by a welcoming party of outrigger canoes, entered a deep turquoise lagoon of exceptionally warm, clear water. As they approached, the sailors could see beaches, rocky cliffs, and steep, thickly forested slopes. The verdant landscape contained a paradise of springs, streams, and waterfalls: everything a sailor who has been too long at sea could want. The possibility of deliverance put the entire crew on edge. Jubilation alternated with watchfulness. The moment of contact between two societies, until now wholly ignorant of one other’s existence, had finally arrived.
At first, the Chamorros—hundreds of them in their small, maneuverable canoes—encircled the fleet. “Fearing nothing, they got aboard, and there were so many of them, especially in the flagship, that some of our men asked the captain to have them thrown out,” de Mafra related. The Chamorros, taller and stronger than the Europeans, boarded the flagship and stole everything they could—rigging, crockery, weapons, and anything made of iron—as the crew, in their weakened condition, pleaded with Magellan to force them to leave.
Eventually, one sailor summoned the strength to retaliate. “The boatswain of the flagship slapped one of those Indians for a small reason, and the Indian slapped him back. Insulted, the boatswain stabbed him in the back with a machete that he carried on his waist.” At that, the Chamorros—a “mob of barbarians,” de Mafra now called them—hurled themselves overboard. “Once they were aboard their shoddy boats they began fighting with their sticks, for they had nothing else. Some arrows were cast at them from the ships, but, being so many, the Indians managed to wound some of our men.”
In the middle of the fracas, a second wave of Chamorros skimmed across the azure water in their proas, and, to the Europeans’ astonishment, distributed food to the starving sailors. Once they had fed the Europeans, the Chamorros took up their sticks and began fighting again, this time more viciously.
De Mafra described how the Captain General narrowly averted disaster. “Magellan, seeing that the number of people was increasing, ordered those in the ship to stop throwing arrows; with this, the Indians stopped, the fighting subsided, and they resumed selling food as before, the kind of food in those islands being coconuts and fish aplenty, which were purchased in exchange for some glass beads brought from Castile.” Magellan’s show of restraint turned out to be just the right gesture. The modest yet historic encounter between the Armada de Molucca and a few dozen outrigger canoes contained in microcosm the conflicting impulses of the European colonialist adventure—from initial innocence and curiosity through confusion, fear, and bloodshed, all of it resolving in commercial activity.
If only matters had ended on this harmonious note. Unaccustomed to European concepts of trade and property, the Chamorros, while happy to feed the sailors, failed to comprehend that some things aboard ship were simply off limits. “Whilst we were striking and lowering the sails to go ashore, they stole away . . . with the small boat called the skiff, which was made fast to the poop of the captain’s ship,” wrote Pigafetta. To judge from the chronicler’s description, the Chamorros had made off with Magellan’s personal dinghy. The robbery could only be interpreted as an insult to the Captain General himself.
The next day, Magellan, “much irritated,” according to Pigafetta, retaliated. He was not about to let thieves make off with his personal vessel. He ordered forty men into the two remaining longboats. Rowing mightily, the crews pushed past the reef’s spume and reached the shore—the first landing by Europeans on an inhabited Pacific island. Then they went on a rampage. “The Captain General in wrath went ashore with forty armed men, who burned some forty or fifty houses together with many boats, and killed seven men,” Pigafetta related without comment. The sailors who remained on board the ships, many close to death from the effects of scurvy, implored the landing party to return with the internal organs of the slain Chamorros, which they thought would cure their scurvy. Their willingness to turn to cannibalism shows how desperate they had become.
During the rampage, the stunned Chamorros offered no resistance, and the Europeans held their fire. But their crossbows were brutally effective. “When we wounded many of this kind of people with our arrows, which entered inside their bodies,” Pigafetta wrote, “they looked at the arrow, and then drew it forth with much astonishment, and immediately afterwards they died. Others who were wounded in the breast did the same, which moved us to great compassion.” Amid the carnage, Magellan “recovered the small boat, and we departed immediately, pursuing the same course.”
Although Pigafetta mentions only a frenzied raiding party, he spent considerable time ashore over the course of the next few days, and recorded his carefully considered impressions of Chamorro society. “These people live in liberty and according to their will,” he remarked, clearly disturbed by the lack of a well-defined social order. Like Magellan, he felt at home in a hierarchical, authoritarian society in which loyalty to the king and the Church mattered most. During the mutinies he had faced, Magellan had always struggled to defend the social order and maintain his primacy over rebellious captains and crew members. But here, on the open waters of the Pacific, was a tribe that lived by different rules, or no rules at all. Chamorro society appeared to be assembled horizontally rather than vertically. If there was a leader, Magellan could not determine who it was. Subsequent Spanish visitors to the island learned that the structure of Chamorro society was actually intricate and subtle; it was matrilineal and heavily committed to ancestor worship. Chamorran women performed the central roles in family life, and although Chamorro men had appeared hostile to Magellan, their bellicose gestures were essentially ritualistic; they merely played at war.
Captivated by the Chamorros’ habits, Pigafetta recorded simple ethnographic details. “Some of them wear beards, and have hair down to their waist. They wear small hats . . . made of palm leaves. The people are as tall as us, and well made. . . . When they are born they are white, later they become brown, and have their teeth black and red.” Their teeth were stained from constantly chewing the betel nut, called pugua or mama’on by the locals. It grew on the areca tree, which resembles a coconut palm. They frequently chewed the nuts along with the betel leaf, pupulu, which tasted fresh and peppery. The islanders preferred the hard reddish nut variety called ugam, with its granular texture. It was their chewing gum, their tobacco, their coveted tradition.
This was the first time the men in the crew had laid eyes on women since their departure from the strait three months earlier, and they were a source of fascination. “The women also go naked,” Pigafetta was pleased to observe, “except when they cover their nature with a thin bark, pliable like paper, which grows between the tree and the bark of the palm. They are beautiful and delicate, and whiter than the men, and have hair loose and flowing, very black and long, down to the earth. They do not go to work in their fields, nor stir from their houses, making cloth and baskets of palm leaves.”