The Island of the Colorblind

This…weighed so heavily upon phem]…that some even sacrified their lives in despair; and some women either purposely sterilized themselves or cast into the waters their new-born infants, believing them happy to die thus early, saved from the toils of a life gloomy, painful, and miserable…they judge that subjection is the worst misery in the world.

By 1710, there were virtually no Chamorro men left on Guam, and only about a thousand women and children remained. In the space of forty years, ninety-nine percent of the population had been wiped out. Now that the resistance was over, the missionaries sought to help the all-but-exterminated Chamorros to survive – to survive, that is, on their own, Christian and Western, terms – to adopt clothing, to learn the catechism, to give up their own myths and gods and habits. As time passed, new generations were increasingly hybridized, as mestizo children were born to women who were married to, or raped by, the soldiers who had come to subdue their nation. Antoine-Alfred Marche, who travelled the Marianas between 1887 and 1889, felt there were no longer any pure-blooded Chamorros in Guam – or at most a few families on the neighboring island of Rota, where they had fled two centuries before. Their bold seafaring skills, once renowned throughout the Pacific, were lost. The Chamorro language became creolized, admixed with much Spanish.

As the nineteenth century progressed, Guam, once a prized Spanish colony on the galleon route, fell into deepening neglect and oblivion; Spain herself was in decline, had problems at home, other interests, and all but forgot her colonies in the western Pacific. This period, for the Chamorros, was a mixed one: if they were less persecuted, less actively under the heel of their conquerors, their land, their diet, their economy, had become more and more impoverished. Trade and shipping continued to decline, and the island became a distant backwater, whose governors had neither the money nor the influence to change things.

The final sign of this decline was the farcical way in which Spanish rule was officially ended, by a single American gunboat, the USS Charleston, in 1898. There had been no ships for two months, and when the Charleston and its three companion vessels appeared off Guam, a pleasurable excitement swept the island. What news, what novelties, the ships might bring! When the Charleston fired, Juan Marina, the governor, was pleased – this must be, he assumed, a formal salute. He was stunned to discover that it was not a greeting, but war – he had no idea that there was a war going on between America and Spain – and he now found himself led in chains aboard the Charleston, a prisoner of war. Thus ended three centuries of Spanish rule.

It was at this point that Safford himself entered the history of Guam. He was a navy lieutenant at the time, an aide to Captain Richard Leary, the first American governor – but Leary, for reasons of his own, elected not to leave his ship, which was moored in the harbor, and sent Safford to act in his stead. Safford soon ‘gained a working knowledge of the Chamorro language and customs, and his respect for the people, his courtesy, his curiosity, made him an essential bridgehead between the islanders and their new masters.[61] The new American administration, though not quite as out of touch as the Spanish one it replaced, did not institute too many changes in Guam. It did, however, open schools and English classes – the first of which were conducted by Safford in 1899 – and greatly improved medical observation and care. The first medical reports of ‘hereditary paralysis’ and its unusual incidence date from 1900; the more specific term, ‘ALS,’ was used as early as 1904.

Life in Guam remained much the same as it had been for the past two centuries. The population had gradually increased since the genocide of 1670-1700; a census in 1901 found 9,676 people, of whom all but forty-six considered themselves to be Chamorros. Nearly 7,000 of them lived in the capital of Agana or its adjaacent villages. Roads were very poor, and the villages in the south, like Umatac, were almost inaccessible in the rainy parts of the year, and could only reliably be reached by sea.