Jesuits and Music in Guam and the Marianas, 1668–1769

Home , History of Guam, Mariana Islands, Northern Mariana Islands

Chapter 9 Jesuits and Music in Guam and the Marianas, 1668–1769

David R.M. Irving

Guam, the largest and most southern of a chain of fifteen islands that make up the Mariana archipelago, shares many historical points in common with the Philippines, having been conquered by Spain, before passing to the rule of the United States following the Spanish–American War of 1898 and being occupied by Japan in the Second World War.1 The Northern Mariana Islands, on the other hand, were sold by Spain to Germany in 1899 and then passed to a Japanese mandate after the First World War. While the Philippines gained independence in 1946, the territory of Guam was held as a strategic northwest Pacific base by the US military, and like Puerto Rico, both Guam and the North- ern Mariana Islands remain US territories today. The Chamorro people, the original inhabitants of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, have a proud and vibrant culture and make their voices clearly heard in public discourse about the islands. Guam became renowned in the historiography of exploration as the first landfall in Ferdinand Magellan’s (c.1480–1521) pioneering voyage across the Pacific in 1521. Having spent three months and twenty days at sea, his men were easy targets for souvenir-hunting by the islanders (for whom this was the first contact with Europeans), earning the archipelago the disparaging name of “Islas de Ladrones”: Thieves’ Islands. Immortalized as such by Antonio Pi- gafetta (c.1491–c.1531) in his famous account of the voyage, this was the name that stuck in subsequent cartography. Magellan continued to the Philippine Islands, where he met his death after interfering in local politics. His landing in the Philippine archipelago was the first link in a chain of events that led to the conquest of those islands by Spain, beginning in 1565, and their incorporation into the Spanish colonial empire by 1898. From 1565 to 1815, Spanish galleons crossing the Pacific from Mexico to the Philippines regularly stopped off at the

1 Even though Guam itself is one of the Mariana Islands, throughout this chapter I refer to these islands collectively as “Guam and the Mariana Islands,” because this distinction reflects both the political division of these territories today as well as the primacy of Guam as the most significant destination for Jesuit missionaries among this archipelago.

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“Ladrone Islands” in order to reprovision for the final leg of the voyage; they made the return journey to the Americas by a more northern route. Thus the “Ladrones” became linked inextricably to a worldwide network of trade and communication forged by Spain. From an imperial perspective, their impor- tance lay in their geographical position, a key connection between Mexico and the Philippines, and a vital lifeline for galleons making the long voyage across the Pacific.2 Geographically isolated, culturally marginalized by the colonial power, and at the periphery of the early modern European worldview, the Marianas sud- denly rose to prominence in hagiography and evangelistic literature from the late seventeenth century, after a Jesuit mission was established there in 1668. The Jesuits’ arrival marks a significant turning point in the history of the islands. Before that time, the islanders’ contact with outsiders was limited to trading with visiting ships and defending themselves from violent incursions, as well as incorporating a limited number of castaways into their own com- munities. Franciscan missionaries had some contact in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,3 and other visitors made ethnographic commen- taries, but 1668 was the beginning of continuous European colonial establish- ment. From this time, traditional Chamorro culture began to be influenced and molded by Europeans, and the people were urbanized by missionaries (backed up by military support). Although there were fifteen islands in the archipelago, from 1695 the entire indigenous population was gradually removed, forcibly, to the three largest islands (Guam, Rota, and Saipan), and then to Guam and Rota alone, where their urbanization and religious conversion could be controlled by the Spanish colonialists.4 A few Catholic missionaries who preceded the Jesuits saw that indigenous Chamorro music was central to cultural life and religious expression, especial- ly in the performance of songs and epics. For instance, the primacy of poetry and affective public performance in indigenous Chamorro culture had been noted by observers such as Franciscan Juan Pobre de Zamora (d.1615) in 1604.5 Chamorro performance traditions were also remarked on by the Jesuit Charles

2 An annual supply ship sailed from the Philippine port of Cavite to the Marianas from 1683, but some years it did not arrive. Marjorie G. Driver, “Cross, Sword, and Silver: The Nascent Spanish Colony in the Mariana Islands,” Pacific Studies 11, no. 3 (1988): 21–51, here 35. 3 Robert F. Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1995), 18–19. 4 Horacio de la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581–1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1961), 457. 5 See Marjorie G. Driver, “Fray Juan Pobre de Zamora and His Account of the Mariana Islands,” Journal of Pacific History 18, no. 3 (1983): 198–216, here 211.