Caroline Islands

• 1. Introduction

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  The Caroline Islands stretch across approximately 3,540 km of the western Pacific Ocean, a scatter of roughly 500 tiny coral islands that together form one of the most geographically spread-out archipelagos on earth. Most lie so flat and low they barely clear the waterline. Yet these fragments of coral and limestone have drawn Portuguese navigators, Spanish priests, German traders, Japanese naval squadrons, and American administrators into a centuries-long contest for control.

  The islands are known today under two political identities: the Federated States of Micronesia holds the central and eastern portions, while Palau governs the far western end. But that partition is recent. For much of recorded history, the Carolines were claimed, abandoned, fought over, and traded like a chess piece between European and Asian powers. How did a scattering of low atolls become the site of so much ambition? And what has life looked like for the people who have called these islands home all along?

• 2. A World Built on Water

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  Yap, one of the larger islands in the group, sits about 1,200 miles from Manila, a distance that gives some sense of the isolation these communities have managed for generations. The indigenous inhabitants speak a remarkable range of languages: Pohnpeian, Chuukese, Carolinian, and Kosraean belong to the Micronesian branch; Palauan and Chamorro are Western Malayo-Polynesian languages; and Yapese stands apart entirely, possibly related to the Admiralty Islands languages but not definitively classified.

  English serves as the shared language for trade and commerce among communities that do not share a native tongue. Daily life has long revolved around horticultural products, fish, several varieties of bananas, and taro, grown in either swamp or purple varieties. On some islands, houses are still built from coconut-palm thatch.

  Christianity spread through the islands over many centuries of missionary activity and is now the most commonly practiced religion. At the same time, many indigenous people hold to a belief in a supreme being called Yalafar and an evil spirit called Can, even if formal traditional rites have largely faded from practice.

• 3. Stone Money and Sea Roads

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  Inhabitants of Yap possess one of the most distinctive monetary systems ever recorded anywhere. Alongside ordinary shell money, they use enormous calcite or limestone discs ranging from 6 inches to 12 feet in diameter and weighing up to nearly 5 tons. Every one of these stones was quarried in the Pelew Islands, about 200 miles to the south, and brought back by native vessels or rafts; in later periods they were transported on European ships.

  These objects function less as currency that changes hands and more as tokens of acknowledged wealth. The discs do not circulate. They sit stacked around a chief's treasure-house and are understood to be public property. Ownership of a stone can transfer without the stone moving at all; the community simply holds a shared understanding that a particular disc now belongs to someone new. Some stones have not been physically seen for years, yet their ownership and value remain recognized.

  The navigational knowledge of these island communities was no less sophisticated. Mau Piailug, born in 1932 and from the island of Satawal, learned the traditional navigation techniques of the Weriyeng school. This body of knowledge survived largely because of Satawal's remoteness, which insulated it from the disruptions that erased similar techniques elsewhere. In the 1970s, Mau shared what he had learned with members of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, helping revive traditional Pacific navigation methods and giving researchers new insight into how Polynesian and Micronesian peoples had moved across the ocean. A study published in 1985 examined the specific origins of the sidereal compass used in the Caroline Islands, extending that scholarly inquiry further.

• 4. Pohnpei and the Saudeleur

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  Pohnpei preserves one of the richest oral traditions in the Carolines. Islanders divide their pre-colonial history into three named eras. The first, Mwehin Kawa or Mwehin Aramas, covers the era of building and peopling before 1100. The second, Mwehin Sau Deleur, spans the reigns of the Saudeleur rulers from roughly 1100 to around 1628. The third, Mwehin Nahnmwarki, runs from around 1628 to 1885, when Spain colonized the islands.

  Legend describes the Saudeleur as outsiders who arrived from beyond the islands and established the first organized government on Pohnpei. Their rule was absolute and centralized, and over time it grew increasingly oppressive. Their arbitrary demands and offenses against Pohnpeian deities built resentment. The dynasty fell when another outsider, called Isokelekel, invaded, overthrew the Saudeleurs, and replaced their centralized system with the more distributed nahnmwarki, or tribal chief, structure. That system persisted through the colonial era and still exists today, a thread of indigenous governance that survived every external power that followed.

• 5. European Arrivals

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  A summer storm in 1525 carried the Portuguese navigators Diogo da Rocha and Gomes de Sequeira eastward from the Moluccas by way of Celebes, and they ended up among several of the Caroline Islands. They stayed for several months, departing on the 20th of January 1526. Less than a year later, on the 22nd of August 1526, the Spanish explorers Toribio Alonso de Salazar and Diego de Saavedra arrived and recorded sighting the Island of San Bartolomé. On the 1st of January 1528, Alvaro de Saavedra Cerón claimed the Ulithi Islands for the Spanish crown and named them the Islands of the Kings, after his patron and the Three Wise Men of the Catholic feast of Epiphany.

  Spanish visits continued through 1542, 1543, and 1545. In 1565, the first governor-general of the Philippines, Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, paid a brief visit. Europe then largely left the islands alone until 1686, when Francisco de Lezcano arrived in Yap and gave the whole archipelago its lasting name: Las Carolinas, in honor of Charles II of Spain.

  The name initially covered a broader area than it does today. Lezcano's designation was later extended to include the Palau Islands and what British explorers, arriving between 1788 and 1799, would call the Gilbert Islands and the Marshall Islands. Spain's formal grip on the Carolines tightened slowly. A royal decree on the 19th of October 1707 authorized missionary expeditions. In 1731, one of those missionaries, Juan Antonio Cantova, was killed, and Spain cut off relations. When contacts resumed in 1787, the focus shifted to trade.

• 6. Sovereignty Contested

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  In 1852, a Spanish colonel named Coello proposed to the Spanish government that formal occupation of the Carolines would strengthen Spanish trade links with the Philippines, Australia, New Guinea, and the Americas. His argument was initially ignored. By 1885, a Spanish representative named Butron signed an agreement with the tribal chiefs of Koror and Artingal establishing Spanish sovereignty, and Spain moved to collect customs duties on commercial activity in the region.

  The move provoked immediate resistance. Germany and the United Kingdom both had missions on the islands, established during Spain's long absence, and disputed Spain's right to collect those duties. The dispute was referred to Pope Leo XIII. He ruled that Spain held customs rights on islands west of the 164th meridian east, while Germany held them on the Marshall Islands. Germany was also assigned the right to maintain a naval station in the Carolines, though it never used that right.

  The settlement held only until 1898. After the Spanish-American War, Spain sold the Carolines and the Northern Marianas to the German Empire under the German-Spanish Treaty of 1899 for 25 million pesetas, equivalent at the time to 17 million goldmarks or close to one million pounds sterling. Spain retained the right to establish a coal mine in the area. Germany administered the islands as the Karolinen, associating them administratively with German New Guinea.

• 7. Mission, War, and Independence

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  The transfer to Germany in 1899 disrupted the missionary infrastructure Spain had built. Spain had contributed more than $5,000 a year to the mission and had compelled children to attend school. Germany offered no financial support and left school attendance voluntary. Church attendance fell, and enrollment dropped. On the 7th of November 1904, the Propaganda Fide decided to replace the Spanish Capuchins with German missionaries. On the 18th of December 1905, the two separate missions were merged into a single Apostolic prefecture; the Very Reverend Father Venantius of Prechtal, Germany, was appointed its first prefect Apostolic.

  By 1906-24 missionaries were working at 13 stations, and sisters from Luxembourg had taken charge of 10 primary schools with a total of 262 children enrolled. The same year, the mission counted 1,900 Catholics, a small number of Protestants, and more than 11,600 inhabitants who had not converted.

  Japan changed everything. In 1914, Japanese forces occupied the Carolines as part of a campaign to seize German colonial holdings during World War I. The Western Carolines fell under Rear Admiral Matsumura Tatsuo; the Eastern Carolines under Vice-Admiral Yamaya Tanin. In 1920, a League of Nations mandate confirmed Japanese control over the Caroline and Marshall Islands. During World War II, Japan operated a major base at Truk Lagoon for expansion into the southeastern Pacific. Allied forces neutralized it in Operation Hailstone. After the war, the islands became American trust territories. The Federated States of Micronesia gained independence in 1986, and Palau followed in 1994, closing a four-and-a-half-century chapter of external rule.