The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

The sovereignty of Castile being eliminated in this hilarious and harmless fashion, the hard headed legatees who wore the blue of the American navy sought to reform what had been a tropical paradise, where no man worked unless he wanted to, where simple, brown-skinned folk dwelt in drowsy contentment without thought of the morrow. The gospel taught by the late Captain Richard Leary as naval governor of Guam aimed to make these happy islanders more industrious and more moral according to the code of the United States. His successors have labored along similar lines and Captain Dorn, governor of Guam in the year of 1908, proclaimed such commendable but rigorous doctrine as this:

“Every resident of the island having no apparent means of subsistence who has the physical ability to apply himself or herself to some lawful calling; every person found loitering about saloons, dram shops or gambling houses, or tramping or straying through the country without visible means of support; every person known to be a pickpocket, thief or burglar, when found loitering about any gambling house, cockpit or any outlying barrio, and every idle or dissolute person of either sex caught occupying premises without the consent of the owner thereof, shall on conviction be punished by a fine of $250, or imprisonment for one year or both.”

A brighter picture of the life of these islanders was painted several years ago by W. E. Safford, who wrote of them in a paper contributed to the American Anthropologist:

“Everybody seemed contented and had a pleasant greeting for the stranger. It seemed to me that I had discovered Arcadia, and when I thought of a letter I had received from a friend asking whether I believed it would be possible to civilize the natives, I felt like exclaiming: ‘God forbid.’”

The same visitor relates of these people and their ways:

“There are few masters and few servants in Guam. As a rule, the farm is not too extensive to be cultivated by the family, all of whom, even to the little children, lend a hand. Often the owners of neighboring farms work together in communal fashion, one day on A’s corn, the next on B’s, and so on, laughing, skylarking, and singing at their work and stopping whenever they feel like it to take a drink of tuba from a neighboring cocoanut tree. Each does his share without constraint, nor will one indulge so fully in tuba as to incapacitate himself for work, for experience has taught the necessity of temperance, and every one must do his share of the reciprocal services. By the time the young men have finished their round the weeds are quite high enough once more in A’s corn to require attention. In the evening they separate, each going to his own ranch to feed his bullock, pigs and chickens; and after a good supper they lie down on a Pandanus mat spread over the elastic platform of split bamboo.”

A pleasant picture, this, of toil lightened by common interest; an idyllic glimpse of what work ought to be, perhaps worthy the attention of socialists, labor unions, and those that scorn the heathen in his blindness.

Almost a hundred years before Guam became a United States possession, the island was visited by a Salem bark, the Lydia, the first vessel that ever flew the American flag in the harbor of this island. There has been preserved in manuscript an illustrated journal of the first mate of the Lydia, William Haswell, in which he wrote at considerable length the story of this historical pioneering voyage, and his impressions of the island and its people under Spanish rule in the faraway year of 1801. As the earliest description of a visit to Guam by an American sailor or traveler, the manuscript has gained a timely interest by the transfer of the island from under the Spanish flag.

However arduous may be the restrictions imposed by the conscientious naval governors of to-day, the journal of First Mate Haswell of the Lydia shows that the islanders were released from a condition of slavery and merciless exploitation by the memorable arrival of the cruiser Charleston and the subsequent departure from the stone palace of the last of the Dons of Spain.

The very earliest experience of these islanders with Christian civilization must have inspired unhappy tradition to make them far from fond of their rulers. The Marianne or Ladrone Islands were discovered by Magellan on March 6, 1521, after a passage of three months and twenty days from the strait which bears his name. Among the accounts written of this voyage is that of Antonio Pigafetta, of Vicenza, which relates the terrible sufferings endured across an unexplored ocean. After there was no more food the crews were forced to eat rats, which brought a price of half a crown each, “and enough of them could not be got.” The seamen then ate sawdust, and the ox hide used as chafing gear on the rigging of the mainyards. The water was yellow and stinking. Scurvy devastated the expedition, and nineteen men died of it, while twenty-five or thirty more fell ill “of divers sicknesses, both in the arms and legs and other places in such manner that very few remained healthy.”