Shortly after the real occupation of the Marianas by the Spaniards, about 1668, a casual census taken by the missionaries placed the population of those islands at fifty thousand. Of this number, the majority lived in the island of Guam. Taking the earliest reports of the island made public by the European explorers and adventurers, it may be safely assumed that this population was well nourished. They were noted for agility, endurance, and for seamanship. Although lagging and wordy in battle with men, they displayed remarkable courage in battle with nature, and there is record of voyages to the Philippines and even to Hawaii in outrigger canoes, not haphazard, storm-blown voyages, but regular semi-annual trips for purposes of trade. Communication with the Carolines and Pelews was frequent, and Yap was considered a next door neighbor.
Padre Delgado, a missionary-historian of the Pacific Islands who wrote in the eighteenth century, continues the picture of a race of plump, active, effervescent and, on the whole, happy people, who had never seen the necessity of taking thought for the morrow.
An abrupt and disquieting change occurred in 1768, and the Spaniards learned what must sooner or later confront every ruling nation—that a subject people may practice new methods, but seldom, if ever, assimilate new ideas. By royal decree, the Jesuits were banished from Spanish possessions, and their place was taken by the Augustinians. This change may or may not have affected the religious life and welfare of the Chamorros—probably not, as it seems hardly probable that they were particularly interested in the doctrine of predestination or were aware of even the name of Arminian. But it wrought a mighty change in the routine and welfare of the Chamorro's stomach. The Jesuits have always worked with their hands as well as their heads, and have shown remarkable aptitude for getting work out of others, and particularly out of the uncertainly converted. Under Jesuit leadership the Chamorros had learned a very fair amount of husbandry, and the island was well cultivated. Cattle had been a crown monopoly, cared for by corvee on crown lands. The natives had added many fruits and vegetables to their diet since the Spaniards came, and had learned to eat meat. The Jesuits left, and their successors, zealous for souls, paid no attention to bodies. The "parocco" no longer inspected the crop and demanded news of the harvest. No energetic overseer in black cassock superintended the ploughing and seeding or saw' to it that the cattle were regularly salted. And the Chamorros, with their newly-acquired appetite for the flesh pots of the conquering whites, not only reverted, but slumped, to ancestral type. There began an era of semi-hunger that has continued ever since.
The change in economic conditions was so rapid that it was the sudden ruination of one governor. Don Mariano Tobias found his prosperous and paying province suddenly bankrupt, his people ragged and fretful, and his taxes falling off. He was wise enough to see the reason, and he himself attempted to take up the agricultural leadership formerly held by the priests. This sudden entrance of supreme temporal authority into the natives' daily life brought friction and bewildered the farmers. Don Mariano threatened, and presumably called the newly arrived Augustinian friars to account for letting the commissariat take care of itself. At any rate, the only result was a complete estrangement of Don Mariano and the clergy, and the governor, accused of tyranny and oppression by one Abbe Reynal, was superseded by another and faced trial for misgovernment. Chamorros continued to learn to read, write and sing, neglect their farms and allow the cattle to run wild.
In 1828 Guam reached its low-water mark of endurance. There was nothing to eat, and no way of getting it. The stunted remains of the crown herds were now work-cattle. Typhoons had damaged the cocoanuts. There was not enough corn. And there was nothing else. The incumbent governor finally threw up his hands and asked for help. The governor general sent Don Francisco Ramon de Villalobos to investigate. As a result of Don Francisco's inquiry, the governor was relieved, Villalobos taking his place. Villalobos spent his first few years of office in a furious campaign against starvation, and through his efforts Guam learned to plant and to eat rice. He also tried to increase the beef supply, but with no enduring result. Then he attacked Guam's poverty, and met his Waterloo. He tried to start potteries as a money product, and strove for the production and sale of surplus crop in good years; but the idea of producing this year to compensate a possible shortage next did not filter through the happy-go-lucky brain of the Chamorro, and Don Francisco's only lasting monument in Guam is a taste for rice and an insufficient crop thereof.
In 1850 Don Pablo Perez grew weary of expecting the natives to help themselves. He knew Guam was fertile. He knew it could he made remunerative. He knew the natives would not look ahead. The old corvee had vanished with the Jesuit fathers, and Don Pablo put in a requisition for a shipload of Filipino convicts to work the crown lands for profit. Whether he would have succeeded in collecting the profit will never be known, for the convicts had hardly landed before they revolted, and Don Pablo was put to the disagreeable necessity of executing his best farm hands and sending the rest back home.
From 1855 to 1866 Don Felipe de la Corte attacked the problem from another side. He saw little necessity for a money crop. His ambition was to guarantee three meals a day, money or no money; and he built storage granaries, planted sugar cane, tried this crop and that, always with the idea of a food reserve. The best commentary on his success was written by himself at the close of his tenure of office. "I have an amazing faculty for making mistakes," he wrote quizzically. His ideas and methods would have raised a community of his native Aragonese to comfort and even wealth—but the Chamorro stolidly planted enough to eat for one year, and if that crop failed he did not eat until next seedtime. He saw no reason for working hard merely to fill the governor's granaries. If the government paid him for his crop, he might be induced to grow as much as five bushels extra for cigar money, but the community-storage idea passed over his head. Don Felipe failed, as did his successor, who revived Perez's notion of importing labor and brought in Japanese. Some of the Japanese died, and some of them got homesick. Of over a hundred, only one remained in Guam long enough to leave his name and blood behind him.
Guam has never returned to the state in which the Jesuits left it. Since 1828 there has been little actual starvation, but there has been constant and disquieting want. It has simply become a question of luck. In good years the people eat. In bad ones they tighten their belts. And so the first American governor found an island which lived, pig-fashion, any fashion, hand-to-mouth, alternating full stomachs with empty ones, but still self-supporting; for in the entire history of Spain's rule there is not one instance of the appropriation of one penny for its support or relief, and of the taxation of the islands a part went regularly into the treasury of the crown.
Where is Guam to-day?
Since 1902 there have been many men who have looked at Guam, either for a few days between passing ships or for several months from the governor's chair, and have unanimously admitted that the greatest obstacle for a military administration to overcome, the one almost insuperable obstacle, is provisioning. One after another has stated that Guam is not and cannot be made self-supporting!!!
Which would make it appear that with the coming of the Americans Guam has received its second economic body-blow. But how? We have not only spent every cent received in taxes for the betterment of Guam, but we have poured a million a year into the island. We have improved internal communications and have employed natives wherever natives could be employed. We have cleaned up the place at our expense, not theirs, and put everybody in a fair way to make money from the government payroll. There is evidently connection between our coming and the present helplessness of Guam, yet our effort since 1899 has been to prevent Guam's exploitation by our own people or any one else. What has made this lamentable change? We made it, brother officers, and the day may come when we shall dearly rue it. In time of war we can no longer support Guam with a monthly shipment of food; and we must depend on Guam to support us. Guam cannot at present support herself. Our outlook for a war ration is therefore rather nebulous. We did it, and this is how we did it.
First of all, steamer connection with the Philippines was stopped by the war, subsequently kept stopped by removal of the former mail subsidy to the steamer lines. Guam's mail now came from the eastward, carried in army transports. Moreover, with the agricultural growth of the southern islands, the Philippines had no ships to spare for junketing through the Marianas; and the Carolines and Pelews now flew another flag. Guam never shipped a great amount, but in Spanish times her shipments were the only source of money the island had. If money was needed, the planter shook off his drowsiness and dried copra or picked bergamot or raised coffee and cacao. In a few months he had good Philippine coins jingling in his pocket to bet in the cockpit or to buy a new suit of dungarees. We stopped this incoming trickle of silver and copper. The population of Guam is now around thirteen thousand, and of these the tax-books show about two thousand five hundred to be men between the ages of 18 and 6o—normally two thousand producing males. In the slack years of 1911, 1912 and 1913, when there was little government work beyond road repairs, the labor roll as submitted monthly showed a total of four hundred of these producing males working for the government at building roads. Twenty per cent of the island's productive power employed in spreading and rolling cascajo and gravel!! In busy years there have at times been 40 per cent so employed. We stopped the influx of silver and copper for which the natives were obliged to produce food. We opened the sluicegate of a flood of gold which they could receive only by stopping the production of food and selling their labor instead. In a community where every man owns his own patch of land and there are no large ranches, that meant an immediate stoppage of from 20 to 50 per cent in food production. The Chamorro could work on the road one week, run a bill at the Japanese trading-post for food and clothes, rest his tired bones for three weeks, and after visiting the pay office, pay his monthly bill and buy a cigar. Croesus knew nothing more satisfying than this. Work on the ranch? Foolish! And what ranch in Guam could hope to produce canned and barreled salmon, corned beef, white potatoes, hardtack, "dobie" cigarettes and beer? No, this is the life!
We taught class after class of boys in the schools how to be farmers. If any one of them had a desire to work his ancestral plot in the light of his new knowledge, one look at the tangled jungle growth that had swallowed the formerly lucrative cacao- -patch was enough. His stomach cried for the sardines of the Americanos, and so he drifted onto the government payroll at 48 cents a day—the price of 16 pounds of copra—and upward.
Like the Spaniards, we have introduced new appetites. Unlike the Spaniards, we have not made their appeasement depend upon excess food production, but directly upon diminished food-production. And some day a few of us are going to curse a scurvy diet of cocoanut and caribao meat, tighten our belts and split our last piece of hardtack with a hungry Chamorro baby. We did it, and when in that day we begin to hurl rocks at the shiftlessness of the Chamorro farmer, we may listen for the shattered tinkle of our own crystal walls.
Thus the matter stands. The Chamorros, thanks to us and to us alone, are as helpless as fattened guinea-pigs. If Guam is worth holding at all—and it seems unnecessary to debate that subject among military men—it is worth putting into self-supporting-, defensible condition. How can we do it?
We have tried, as the Spaniards tried before us, to make the Chamorros do it themselves, and the results are nil. Frankly, one cannot entirely blame, the Chamorro, as is instanced by the following true tale of four years ago:
The monthly transport came into the harbor with a month's provisions—and smallpox. Consequently, the month's provisions went on to Manila, undischarged. The American population, about a hundred and seventy-five, saw thirty long, meatless days ahead. Efforts were made to purchase native beef to tide over the emergency, and a very small amount was procured. It was passable beef, but was not Chicago or Australian beef by several degrees; and the next shipment was received with enthusiasm. It was then decided that it might be well to encourage native beef production, and negotiations were opened with the one considerable cattle owner of the island with a view to getting him to corn-feed a limited number of cattle monthly for naval station use. He asked what the station could pay, and was told that we usually paid from 8 to 11 cents a pound, dressed. His answer was as follows: "I can sell my cattle, grass-fed, on the hoof, in the city market, for a fraction over 10. I can sell at that rate all that my present herd can produce without depletion. To prepare cattle for you by corn-feeding, penning, dressing and storing, would mean that you will have to pay for it all of that extra expense over and above what I can get now, to enable me to break even. If you will guarantee to buy a monthly quantity, and that of considerable size, and guarantee that I will not get less net from it than the amount I can get now, I will increase my herd. But I won't do it on a gamble." And there you are.
At various times during the period which the writer served in Guam, gallant and unavailing efforts were made to stimulate the production of fresh vegetables and fruits. Production was not stimulated, and a planter gave me this reason. "One time I plant some radish and cucumber. Everybody say, yes, they like to buy if I will bring. Those radish got ready to eat one day on the 27th of the month. Nex' day I take into town to sell, and everybody say, Transport jus' come in, have got plenty fresh 'Merican vegetable. Come again.' Radish and cucumber spoil. I have sell 10 cents worth."
Mangoes and alligator pears cannot be brought from "'Merica," and these two items are conspicuously the only ones which the Chamorros will endeavor to supply. For the rest, we have allowed and continue to allow the Mare Island and army quartermaster contracts to outbid them on the very articles we. Demand that they shall produce.
But we have done more than that. The main item of the Chamorro's diet is fish of some kind. Not only has the government payroll made canned salmon imported from 'Merica obtainable, but it has taken the laborer out of his fishing-boat to work on the roads. In case he should want to fish on his holidays, we have levied a fisherman's tax of $2 a head—a week's salary gone for the privilege of going out in his own boat on the broad ocean and catching his supper when he grows tired of the tin-can variety. That price of to cents a pound on the hoof which we could not pay the cattleman was a direct result of a tax of over $400 a year levied on the island's one authorized butcher in order that he may be allowed to butcher. To meet this tax, the authorized butcher has been forced to levy a small rental for market-place stalls, formerly free, and the fresh-vegetable women had to quit their accustomed counters and benches. They spread their wares on the much-trodden ground, and the Americans, who were the only paying customers, refused to buy. So the fresh-vegetable women have gone out of business and have put their sons to work on the road.
Now, not only the garrison has got to eat in war-time, but the natives as well. We can depend on each Chamorro, when he has nothing else to do, to plant enough tough yams and taro to keep him alive until the war ends and he can get another job; but we cannot make him do more, for we demand that he do it as a losing proposition—work to get his hand in, in case we ever need his product, but work for nothing. And "camote" and taro will not sustain a white man. It is up to us to provide our own war-ration—and the war-ration of thirteen thousand Chantorros as well.
The best first-aid has already been applied, and a little of the crying need is eased by the recent placing of the U. S. S. Supply into freight-carrying service to and from Manila, giving an outlet to surplus products of the few—discouragingly few—who will raise them, and the coincident falling off of the monthly laborrolls, forcing a few more to raise crops for tax-money and clothing. But that is not enough. The " government payroll " menace to Guam's independence must be totally removed, and in as short a time as possible without causing distress, even at the expense of having all government work done by contract and temporarily imported labor. Incidentally, this method would probably prove less expensive than it would seem, for a contract laborer at $2 a day would accomplish quite as much as six of the average 48-cents-a-day Chamorros at any work requiring skill or thought. The objection to contract labor—that it makes the preservation of military secrets difficult—cannot weigh in this question, for in Guam there are none, and until we change our methods there can never be. At least two foreign governments possess better topographical maps of the island than we, and the masters of the copra schooners that run in and out know more of the island's characteristics than any American ever in Guam. With schooners drawing up to 12 feet, they regularly make use of bights and shelters around the island, the existence of which were unknown to even the American Government prior to 1913. I have known a schooner of a hundred and fifty tons to be in and around Guam for six days taking cargo, and her presence only made known to the American officials when she entered the harbor of Apra to demand her clearance papers. This is an island thirty miles by nine at the widest points. Cheering result of seventeen year's occupation and fifteen million dollars! No, the big work of preparing Guam in a military way must not depend on Chamorro labor. We must mount our own guns, build our roads by contract, and do our dredging and wharf-building either with our own or imported men. The Chamorros must again learn to feed themselves, and we can force them to learn in no other way.
Equally is it apparent that we must provide our own meat supply—and this, luckily, we can easily do at nominal initial expense by establishing our own herds of cattle and swine on our own government—formerly crown—lands. We have known that for some years. The cattle-ranch plans were prepared at least three years ago. I believe that to-day the government owns two bull caribaos and possibly a milch cow for the hospital. And we call the Chamorro shiftless!
We must provide ourselves with rat-and-insect-proof storage for the things that cannot be raised in Guam—flour, sugar, cocoa, salt, desiccated potatoes, for ourselves; salmon, flour and hardtack for the natives—and fill these storehouses. We know it. We have known it for years. Our preparations to raise vegetables against a possible siege of Guam have not as yet taken the tangible form of the purchase of one package of seeds. We have spent fifteen million dollars, and where has it gone? The records will tell you. Some of it has built roads, some of it has dredged a small boat channel. But 8o per cent of it has gone to the transport, storage, refrigeration and care of the monthly supply of food which we now insist on having from the United States. Encouraging to the local market and economical as this may be, it is absolutely true.
Do you see any advantage to be gained by keeping Guam? If so, do not forget that holding it is the navy's business, and it is up to the navy to make it tenable. Not only guns, docks and shops. First and last, there must be food. We have got to supply it, for we have put the power to supply beyond the Chamorro's reach. And supplying food for an isolated Guam means hard work and long preparation beforehand.
We have the experience of three hundred and fifty years to show us that the Chamorro cannot prosper after the manner of the Spaniard or the Saxon. We must make him work for himself, and only himself, Chamorro-fashion, where he can see the effect of every hand's turn of work on his own personal prosperity. If we make him till his land—and we can if we remove the easy money of "government jobs"—he will soon again be self-supporting.
Our problem will then be only war-ration for ourselves. With our own beef herds on Barrigada and Chachao, our own pork rooting through the jungle, and a year's dry provisions in the storehouse, Guam can face a war. Instead of exporting his coffee, chocolate and fruits, the Chamorro will sell to the garrison. With his main money crop—copra—blockaded, he will turn to the reserve supply of vegetable seeds we shall have in store for him, and we will not much miss the monthly transport.
But the navy must bring all this to pass. The Chamorro will not do it for us, and Congress has no time for such a trifle. You and I are the navy. Il nous faut cultiver notre jardin.