and, although one group of early explorers caught sizeable, edible fresh-water eels in Guam's streams, the natives disdained them as food, preferring their sea-food diet. However, the aboriginals did eat fresh-water shrimp from rivers and streams. In remote parts of Guam even today a few bamboo fish traps and primitive seines are used in coastal fishing. At the turn of the century a profitable business was carried on with this method on the southern coast, the fresh fish being shipped across the waist of the island to the Agaña market.
However, the Chamorros, over the several centuries of their known history, have come in from the sea. They no longer fish much from boats, almost never from canoes, and cannot swim today like the human dolphin Pigafetta describes in his narrative of Guam. The ancient custom of trawling from canoes for flying fish and bonito has died out; fresh and canned meats augment the local cuisine today. Still in some spots the natives employ an ancient method of stupefying fish with the crushed fruit of the futu tree, a strand tree whose seagoing pod is often found to have sprouted in the outcroppings of the live reef. When dry the fruit is used as floats for native nets. Safford cites its use in reef fishing at the turn of the century in a vivid description:
"The fruit is first pounded into a paste, inclosed in a bag, and kept over night. The time of an especially low tide is selected, and bags of the pounded fruit are taken out on the reef next morning and sunk in certain deep holes in the reef. The fish soon appear at the surface, some of them lifeless, others attempting to swim, or faintly struggling with their ventral side uppermost. The natives scoop them up in nets, spear them, or jump overboard and catch them in their hands, sometimes even diving for them."
Since this poisoning method of fishing was highly popular with the natives from aboriginal days and since it always killed a great many fish not necessarily eaten, the Spanish prohibited the custom. Safford states that after 1898 it was revived under the Americans, although at the present time the method has been superseded by the extremely dangerous technique of dynamiting the reef's holes for fish. This is also now prohibited but continues to be employed, sometimes fatally to the fisherman as well as the fish in the area of explosion.
Although Apra Harbor's complete industrialization has eliminated the beautiful mangrove-swamp shore line except at two or three wild, untouched points around its inner periphery, low tide can still produce a phenomenon Safford described with wonder in 1899:
"In the mangrove swamps when the tide is low hundreds of little fishes with protruding eyes may be seen hopping about in the mud and climbing among the roots of the many-petaled mangrove. These are the widely spread Periphthalmus koelreuteri, belonging to a group of fishes interesting from the fact that their air-bladder has assumed in a measure the function of lungs, enabling them to breathe atmospheric air."
The fauna of Guam range considerably beyond this brief chapter listing. Safford, because of his intense and careful study, includes other unusual tropical fishes, for example, which cannot be discussed here: hermit crabs, night-feeding land crabs, sea crabs, and a large variety of deep-sea fish occurring throughout the Marianas and in and about most of the lagoons and shores of other Pacific islands and atolls. The foreshortened attention given here to wild life of all groups has been purposely narrowed down to direct the reader's attention to the scene an inhabitant of Guam might observe in casual trips about the island, to what his untrained eye would naturally recognize as the moving faunal panorama which gives a startling and vivid dimension to the physical portrait of a characterful island.
4
The Aborigines
The Chamorros at the time of Magellan's Umatac landing were a proud primitive people, highly evolved for their type of civilization and radiantly healthy. They had built a picturesque society entirely self-sufficient unto the island and its neighboring chain, and they were apparently quite content with their resultant life.
Early descriptions of the aborigines are scarce. They are generally described as tall and robust, not too dark, with skin pigmentation somewhere between that of the American Indian and the Oriental. The men were handsome and powerfully built, and the women were usually opulent-busted and graceful. Although obesity and deformity are rarely sighted in the records of early-day observers, Padre Sanvitores did not agree with one of these omissions. "The Marianos," he wrote, "are in color a somewhat lighter shade than the Filipinos, pleasant with agreeable faces. They are so fat they appear swollen. They remain in good health to an advanced age and it is very normal to live ninety or one hundred years. . . ."
Notwithstanding this description, the Chamorros were extremely vain about their tawny physical symmetry, being more shapely than the Spaniards, which may have accounted for the persistent Spanish desire not only to reduce their numbers systematically, but to subdue and break this racial residue into a polyglot indolence.
The aboriginal Chamorros were a simple and poetic race, and their poets were considered preternaturally endowed in a class with their makahnas (sorcerers) who, being village soothsayers, were the nearest thing they had to priests. Therefore, with their uncomplex character and their natural, easy life, it is not difficult to understand why they looked upon their race with a peacock's vanity, considering their own breed the earth's most supreme. All other nations, in their eyes, were contemptible in comparison. This pride was doubtless based in the legend of their origin (see Chapter 7—Origin, Religion, and Legend), which taught them to believe themselves to be the earth's original people born of a mighty unseen force, and their language to be the prime instrument of speech in the world—all others being false mispronunciations of their own glorious tongue.
They possessed, according to one account, "great strength as fitting to their statures," and they bleached their naturally rich black hair to a yellowish shade, some of the men tying theirs in a knot at the base of their necks, and the women allowing theirs to trail down their backs, sometimes touching the ground. The Chamorros wore no clothes in Magellan's day, although the women did occasionally sport a small woven triangle apron (called a tifi) to cover themselves, or fringes of grass or leaves hung from a waistband. The men, however, used no such adornment and went entirely naked except for sunshade visors and full-brimmed hats made from pandanus leaves which they wore when farming or fishing. In accounts after Magellan, the Chamorro men are described as shaving their heads, leaving a small crest about a finger long on the crown. Some of them wore thick, short beards but are pictured as having extremely muscular, hairless bodies. The aborigines apparently did not tattoo themselves or pierce their ears or noses, although both sexes anointed themselves with fragrant coconut oil and washed their hair with the soap orange.
Being completely isolated from the rest of the world, not counting the probable occasional visits of the Caroline Islanders in their own times of social disruption, the native populace had remained remarkably free from disease, just as their thriving plants were free from blight. Their physical prowess, coupled with exuberant health, made their endurance almost legendary in quality. Padre García in his descriptive Life of Padre Sanvitores tells that even ". . . among those who were baptized the first year of the mission there were more than 120 who were past the age of a hundred years; owing perhaps to their rugged constitutions, inured from their infancy to the distempers which afterwards do not affect them, or to the uniformity and naturalness (naturalidad) of their food without the artifice which gluttony has introduced to waste the life which it sustains, or to their occupations necessitating plenty of exercise without too great fatigue, or to the absence of vices and worries—which are roses and thorns whose pricking and piercing put an end to man—or perhaps all of these causes combined contribute to the prolix age of these islanders. As they know few infirmities so they know few medicines, and cure themselves with a few herbs which necessity and experience have taught them to be possessed of some virtue."
On festive occasions the women adorned their heads with wreaths of flowers and necklaces of tortoise shell hung from a band of red spondylus shells—their equivalent of pearls. They made pendant belts of small coconuts,
