would bear until the following year, thus wiping out a possible copra crop and a staple food source for the natives in a few terrifying hours, as well as often ruining whole "livelihood" groves of the trees forever.
Statistics vary on Guam's rainfall, although most opinions agree that there is seldom less than 70 inches of rain a year and in most recorded areas there is often as much as 100 inches or more. Taking the long view, from 90 to 100 inches is about average.
The hilly character of Guam's terrain does not allow rain to collect in any great quantity, even though a particularly harsh storm might bring down several inches of rain in a matter of two or three hours, leaving the lowlands temporarily inundated. By the time the storm has passed on, the sun is steaming the mists away from the coastal shores and most of the sudden rainfall has been swept into the sea, leaving only long red and yellow tendrils of mud reaching from the mouths of the streams into the cobalt sea as a reminder of its visit.
Rainy season covers the spring through autumn months, and generally the December to March period is relatively dry and windlessly oppressive. Good supplies of fresh water, however, have always been plentiful on Guam, and even today, with the population of nearly 70,000, by development of the Fena River Dam Project in the southern mountains, the piping of water to the dry northern savannahs too porous to hold water for themselves, and the miraculous continuance of underground rivers and springs, the supply for a demand greatly increased since aboriginal times is still sustained. The peculiar aspect of the highly porous northern plateau is that it absorbs water as readily as it falls. This makes for light vegetation except in shallow soil pockets where sediment has collected.
Interestingly enough, the northern plateau is a geological oddity—a raised coral platform penetrated in several places by low volcanic outcroppings seen as hills by Agassiz. No metal-yielding deposits of any consequence except layers of iron ore have been found there. There have been some small-scale findings of lignite and flint nodules, though nothing of importance.
In 1902 an earthquake in series raised the general level of the entire island, and although there have been many slight disturbances in the intervening years, none of these have been strong enough to raise the very extensive reef flats of the western coast another foot or two and add them as dry land to the shore line itself, as part of them now are when uncovered by low tides.
Guam's first appointed United States Naval chief, Governor Schroeder, gave the following account of the September 22, 1902 quake:
"The earthquake which occurred at 11:24 a.m. is the severest of which there is any record. From the government house terrace, during its continuance, there could be seen clouds of dust rising suddenly from the different quarters of Agaña as the masonry houses would fall. . . . The earth opened here and there in small places from which water would spout and subside . . . and innumerable fine cracks were observable everywhere. A dull grinding roar preceded and accompanied the shaking of the earth; sure-footed bulls were tripped up and fell to their knees . . . and [church] bells were rung by the vibration. In other parts of the island fissures 1 to 2 feet wide were made, those of Piti emitting strong sulphurous fumes."
Guam, of course, does not stand alone in the Western Pacific. It is the southernmost and largest of a group of fifteen small islands originally named the Ladrones by Magellan, and the largest island in the entire area between Hawaii and the Philippines and New Guinea to Japan. From Guam to the last northern island of the chain the distance is approximately 400 miles, and the combined land area total of all the other Marianas equals the area of Guam itself.
Though remote indeed in the day of Magellan from the rest of the world, today Guam is linked by air, ship, radio, and cable to the outside areas in perpetual contact. At the beginning of the century the island was designated as a way station on the route of the trans-Pacific cable, which is still maintained for communication here. Radio has further secured its inclusion in the world's news front, and even its physical separation from the mid-Pacific islands is no longer important. It lies 5,200 miles from San Francisco, some 3,000 miles from Honolulu, only 1,500 miles from Manila, and 1,300 from Tokyo. These distances mean little today in times of peace.
Most of the Marianas group, named in honor of Maria Anna of Austria, widow of King Philip IV of Spain, who endowed a Jesuit mission school at Agaña in the late 17th century, are habitable islands. Saipan, Rota, Tinian, and Agrihan are handsome emerald paradises, more Oriental than Western, since only Guam among the group was held by the United States previous to the close of World War II. From Guam north to the furthest island called Maug, the scenery is varied and absorbing—from the tableland of 1,600-foot-high Rota with its great horn-skinned iguanas to circular three-mile wide Agrihan with its astonishing central cone rising three thousand feet above the sea. Tinian, only 600 feet high, covers only 32 square miles; its central ridge of billowing hills runs the full length of the island and gives it two distinct climates. Saipan, about 180 square miles, rises 1,500 feet and was the seat of the Japanese government for the mandated islands before World War II. Now it rests in placid agricultural development after its grim service as the Americans' Tokyo B-29 bombing base during the late years of the war.
However, none of the Marianas has either the history of Guam, its booming frontier present, or its bright future. The newest territory of the United States, Guam is also its most distant outpost and, though topographically quite a contrast to the celebrated Hawaiian Islands' exotic commercial opulence, is possessed of an untamed, ageless character completely its own. Gently pressed by the trade winds. with a healthy holiday climate most of the year, and occasionally ravaged by furious typhoons, it nonetheless has all the essential elements of a tropical haven. These elements are its intrinsic interest and the quality which has withstood the hand of many conquerors and the lash of nature.
2
Plants of Guam
From August 1899 to August 1900, William Edwin Safford, a young officer in the United States Navy, was stationed on the island of Guam as vice-governor. Safford's field was ethnobotany, but his range of interest was extremely wide and profound. His absorption with Chamorro lore led him to prepare for the American Anthropology Series many papers concerning the Marianas, including the first serious handbook on the surviving Chamorro language. He also chronologized the early history of the island, cataloguing for the first time its extensive and exotic array of tropical plants, both those indigenous to Guam and those introduced by visitors and settlers.
When Safford died in 1926, he was still actively writing and associated with the United States National Herbarium as consulting economic botanist. His fascinating delineation of island plant life remains a standard guide to anyone curious about the flora of a tropical outpost. It would not be possible here to list even the most generally known of the plants growing on Guam, so I have deemed it best to feature some of the essential staple plants used in the aboriginal and more recent past for food, clothing and shelter, for medicine and paint. These accounts are taken from Safford's writings and more or less follow the pattern delineated by him. The array of plants is unusual indeed, including plants that are palliatives for leprosy, oranges whose skin can be lathered like soap, sea-voyaging beans from the futu tree whose pods cast themselves into the island's surf and are sometimes carried thousands of miles by ocean currents, and curative plants like the bastard currant—a bush with white flowers whose root was used as a remedy for syphilis, bronchitis, and even asthma.
Scientists who study the Pacific islands have been able to trace the ethnological distribution of various aboriginal races through the migration and arrangement of plant life on the various chains and groups of islands. On Guam several prime plants were cultivated which were virtually unknown in eastern Polynesia, for example, the betel pepper, the areca palm (betel nut), and rice. All evidence points to their Malayan origin; they even bear Malayan names and probably found their way to Melanesia after the departure of the people who spread over the islands of the Eastern Pacific, but some time before Guam's settlers left their parent stock. Most arresting proof is the resemblance that the Chamorro name for rice (fae, or fai) bears to the Javanese name (bai), rather than the Philippine name (palai). Numerous examples of this sort exist in the island languages, carrying weight where ethnological beginnings are concerned, and tying together racial origin with the origin and migration of plant life.
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