Truk, lying in the centre of the Caroline Archipelago 500 miles south-east of Guam, is a cluster of small volcanic islands enclosed by a single barrier reef of about 130 miles circumference. The peaks of a number of its 13 major islands are easily visible from beyond the reef, and there are several navigable passes furnishing access to a lagoon that has always been considered an ideal natural anchorage. But for all the geographical features of the island group that would seem to have favored the early development of intensive foreign contact, Truk remained relatively unknown to the outside world throughout most of the 19th century. Indeed, Truk enjoys the distinction of being the last major island group in Micronesia to have been opened to intensive contact with the colonial powers of East and West.

As late as 1880 Truk remained virtually insulated from the outside influences that had begun to alter the traditional patterns of life among most other Pacific islands, including its Carolinian neighbors. Ponape and Kusaie had become regular ports of call for whaleships since the 1840s and in the following decade had welcomed their first missionaries. By 1850 the extent of Ponape's contact with the West was considerable: there were 150 whites residing on the island, with 30 or 40 ships putting in there yearly.⁽¹⁾ Although Palau's volume of foreign ship traffic did not at all approach that of Ponape, it was regularly visited by itinerant trading captains from the middle of the 19th century. In 1843 the first permanent trading station was established in Palau, from which operations were extended to Yap and several of the smaller atolls in the Western Carolines.⁽²⁾ Even the Marshall Islands, which were relatively late in engaging in foreign trade, were ports of call for trading schooners by the late 1860s, and by 1875 German firms had set up permanent stations on the islands of Ebon and Jaluit. Of Truk, however, the Captain of the missionary packet Morning Star could still write in 1881: 'There is but one white man in all the Ruk [Truk] lagoon and worldly influences have not been felt'.⁽³⁾ Only in the 1880s did the obscurity that had for so long shrouded this island group finally dissolve under pressure of the first sustained contact.

Even if Truk was generally regarded by seamen as something of a mystery until late in the 19th century, the island group was not without its share of European and American visitors, a few of whom afterwards furnished considerable information on the land and its people. Its early contact history followed a familiar enough pattern. Like many another island in the Pacific, Truk was 'discovered' during the great era of Spanish exploration and then thoroughly neglected until the expansion of British and American shipping in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Early in 1565, Alonso de Arellano aboard the San Lucas sighted a group of high islands girt by an immense reef. Arellano reports in his relacion of the voyage that after he had brought his ship into the lagoon, the natives who came out to meet him in canoes invited him to enter the inlet near the large island of Tonowas⁽⁴⁾ . Adverse winds, however, and the alarming sight of numerous canoes from the other islands bearing down on his ship caused Arellano to turn about and make for the pass in the reef. Before he could escape, some of the canoes caught up with the San Lucas and Arellano's crew was forced to defend the ship's launch from the repeated attempts of the Trukese to cut it loose. Out of desperation the warriors hurled spears at the ship. The Spaniards replied with a volley, and in the confusion that followed the San Lucas slipped away from the canoes. Arellano and his men had to spend a troublesome night at anchor just off the inner side of the reef, but their grapnel held and their fear of a massive native attack by night never materialized. At daybreak the San Lucas inched its way through the western pass and after a brief skirmish with a dozen more canoes reached the open sea.

A day later when Arellano put in at Pulap Atoll, 80 miles west of Truk, he fared even worse than in Truk. When a landing party went ashore to take on wood and water, two of the crew were clubbed to death by the natives in full sight of the ship's company. 'Los Martires', as the atoll was subsequently named by Arellano in commemoration of his lost shipmates, thereafter appeared on European maps, although Truk did not.⁽⁵⁾ Neither the great 19th century chroniclers of early voyages, such as Krusenstern and Burney, nor any of the later explorers allude to Arellano's discovery. Thus, Arellano's visit-the only recorded contact with Truk until the early 19th century-was of no significance in making the Truk group known.

It was information from quite another quarter that was responsible for the first knowledge of Truk among European explorers and map makers. Drift voyages of Western Carolinians to the Philippines and Guam,as well as the first Spanish missionary expedition to the Palaus in the ship Trinidad in 1710, resulted in the first maps of the Caroline archipelago drawn from knowledge imparted by Carolinians themselves. On Fr Paul Klein's chart of 1706 the earliest of the three maps derived from native sources, islands or sections of islands more easily identified as belonging to the Truk group are shown at the eastern extreme of the Carolines ⁽⁶⁾ One is called Torres Island. A chart of 1710 sketched by Jose Somera, pilot of the Trinidad, from data supplied by the people of Sonsorol, depicts ' Ugulat' – also called 'Tomes' and almost certainly intended to represent one of the main islands in the Truk group-with this inscription beneath: 'It is larger than Panloc [Palau], inhabited by a peaceful people, and lies close to the Marianas '⁽⁷⁾ . On Fr. Juan Cantova's map of 1722 which was published with his well-known letter describing the Caroline Islands, the principal island of the easternmost of the five provinces in the archipelago is marked 'Torres or Hogoleu' and is said to be larger than Guam⁽⁸⁾ . From these early sources, then, a large island known as either 'Torres' or 'Hogoleu' and situated in roughly the position of Truk found its way on to European maps by the middle of the 18th century.⁽⁹⁾

By a common form of cartographical synecdoche, 'Torres' and 'Hogoleu'-no doubt originally the names of individual islands in or near the Truk lagoon-had become the accepted terms used to designate the entire Truk group. The origin of these names presents a problem to which no generally accepted solution has been found. 'Hogoleu' and 'Ugulat', as well as 'Lugulus'(the name given Truk on Don Luis de Torres's map and obtained from Woleaians who had sailed to Guam),⁽¹⁰⁾ are obviously cognates-perhaps, as suggested by Kramer, a West Carolinian corruption of 'Nukunoch',the Trukese name for Lukunor, one of the atolls in the Mortlocks.⁽¹¹⁾ 'Torres' the other name widely used of Truk before the French geographical explorations in the early 1800s, admits of different explanations. Freycinet made the natural assumption that a Spanish captain gave his name to the island although it is difficult to determine who this might have been.⁽¹²⁾ But the fact that the name 'Torres' appears on the earliest of maps drawn from native sources seems to substantiate the theory that this too was a West Carolinian corruption-possibly of Tonowas.⁽¹³⁾

Almost exactly two and a half centuries after Arellano's brief visit, European contact with Truk was resumed when Manuel Dublon brought his brig San Antonio into the lagoon on 10 December 1814. Unhappily, little more has survived of this trip than the permanent affixture of the captain's name to one of the main islands in the group. Dublon's own record of his discovery, if it exists, has never been found and such meager information as we possess can be traced back to Don Luis de Torres, the Vice-Governor of the Marianas, who apparently had met Dublon on Guam.⁽¹⁴⁾ During the 20 years prior to Dublon's voyage, several other ships reported sighting low islands in the vicinity of Truk, but whatever actual meetings may have taken place between seamen and islanders are not described in the terse journal entries. The earliest of these sightings is worth mentioning here: Captain James Mortlock's discovery in 1795 of the cluster of three atolls some 120 miles to the south-east of Truk which bore the name of Mortlock's ship Young William before it finally became known by the captain's own name.⁽¹⁵⁾ Such peripheral contacts aside, however, it is the great European scientific expeditions that must be credited with the real rediscovery of Truk in the 19th century.

Louis Duperrey's expedition aboard the Coquille brought him into Truk's waters on 24 June 1824 where he spent five days cruising just off the barrier reef⁽¹⁶⁾ Duperrey, who had served as a lieutenant on Freycinet's cruise five years before when the Uranie and the Physicienne had touched at three atolls west of Truk, was no stranger to the area; but Freycinet's ships had never raised Truk itself. Although Duperrey passed the entire five days without once entering the lagoon, he did take aboard natives who had come off one of the inhabited keys on the northern reef and was able to learn from them the names of several islands in the group.

The correspondence between many of the names the natives gave and those found on Cantova's map of 1722 left the party with no doubt that this was indeed the Hogoleu of the old charts. As the Coquille circled the barrier reef, Duperrey had his officers map the Truk lagoon. This was the first such attempt by a European explorer and established beyond any doubt the position of the Truk group, while furnishing an appreciable fund of geographical data on them.⁽¹⁷⁾ The maps that De Blois and the other officers aboard the Coquille drew, together with the Trukese place names that Duperrey recorded, would soon supplant Cantova's crude map of the province of Hogoleu which had remained the standard work for over l00 years.⁽¹⁸⁾ Duperrey's cartography was reproduced after 1830 by British map-makers-the likes of Imray, Norie and Steel-for the next 50 years, and in the 1851 edition of his Directory, the hydrographer Alexander Findlay could justly state that 'his [Duperrey's] survey still comprises the sum of our knowledge about these islands'.⁽¹⁹⁾ This remark would have been equally true another 20 years later.

Valuable as his geographic information may have been, Duperrey has almost nothing to say on the subject of culture contact. The journal account kept by his first officer, Dumont d'Urville, is not much more enlightening on this matter, noting only that knives were exchanged for bits of native cloth (probably banana fibre). We do learn from Dumont d'Urville that two Englishmen were put ashore on Truk at their own request, presumably to make their home there;⁽²⁰⁾ but they are never mentioned again in this or later records. The best source of information on the degree of acculturation that had taken place in the vicinity of Truk, particularly the atolls to the south-east, is Feodor Lutke, the commander of the next scientific party to visit this area of the Pacific. Although his ship the Senyavin lay off the Truk reef for only a day and Lutke had trading contact with only the few Trukese he could entice aboard his ship, the Russian captain had much more extensive dealings with the inhabitants of the Mortlock Islands during the three weeks he spent there.⁽²¹⁾ His observations on the Mortlocks afford some idea of the extent to which western influence had affected the entire area surrounding Truk. For even if Truk itself was not visited as frequently by western ships as the Mortlocks, foreign trade-goods were bound to have filtered into Truk via the Mortlocks by means of the frequent canoe voyages made from these atolls to obtain turmeric in Truk.

Everywhere he visited in the Mortlocks and in the atolls north of Truk, Lutke found indisputable evidence of previous contacts. At Lukunor he was greeted by a chief carrying a long, bone-handled knife who was persuaded to come aboard the Senyavin only when he was offered another to match it. At the time of his visit no stone or shell axes were in evidence on Lukunor; they had been entirely replaced by iron ones. A further mark of the sophistication of the Mortlock Islanders, and one that suggests a good bit of previous trading experience, is their disdain of glass and other trinkets that were presented to them and their request for grindstones, tinder-boxes and stone lighters. Lutke was surprised to meet two men in the Mortlocks who had learned a few words of Spanish, one of whom insisted on addressing him as 'capitan'. Later at Namonuito Atoll Lutke encountered a native who, inquisitive as to the flag he was flying, put the question: Tragatta Ingles? The Russians learned that he had been to Guam in quest of cuchillas (knives) and other ironware, and there also had apparently cultivated a taste for goose liver which he devoured with unfeigned relish in the galley of the Senyavin.⁽²²⁾ William Floyd, a Gloucester seaman who had spent 18 months marooned on Murilo before Lutke picked him up, related that cock-fighting had been introduced on that island long before he had arrived^.(23) There are a few documented visits by whalers and traders to atolls near Truk that would explain this acculturation-Juan Ibargoitia in the Filipino at Pulusuk and Puluwat in 1799 and at Pulap in 1801;⁽²⁴⁾ the Resource at Ulul in 1799;⁽²⁵⁾ Juan Baptista Monteverde in the Pala at Nama in 1806;⁽²⁶⁾ John Hall in the Lady Blackwood at Nomwin and Murilo in 1824;⁽²⁷⁾ William Worth in the Rambler at Nomwin in 1824;⁽²⁸⁾ Richard Macy in the Harvest at Namoluk in 1827;⁽²⁹⁾ Captain Callower in the Prudent at Murilo in 1827;⁽³⁰⁾ But probably as important a source of contact as the visits of these and the other unnamed ships that must have stopped there, are the canoe voyages that were initiated by the islanders themselves. It is well established that trading voyages from the central Carolines to the Marianas were carried on in pre-contact days, broken off during the Spanish suppression of the Chamorros, and intensified again later on-particularly during the benevolent vice-regency of Don Luis de Torres. In his historical introduction on the Carolines Freycinet tells of several canoe voyages to Guam, among them a trading expedition launched in 1807 by 15 Trukese who upon their arrival were frightened into turning back by a thunderous cannon salvo fired during a celebration.⁽³¹⁾ Even today sailing directions for the Marianas are handed down by the traditional navigators in the islands to the west of Truk as a survival of the days when the desire for ironware motivated regular trading voyages from the central Carolines to these islands.

When Lutke hove to at Truk on 14 February 1828, he mistakenly identified it as 'Quirosa', an island that had been sighted in 1595 on Mendana's second voyage and described as 'in full 6 degrees North latitude, nearly round, in circuit 30 leagues . . . with four low islands close to its west side'.⁽³²⁾ Because Ponape was still unknown at the time, Quirosa had usually been associated with Hogoleu, although occasionally appearing on European maps as a separate discovery to the east of Hogoleu. Lutke may have failed to identify properly Quirosa with Senyavin-a group that he had just surveyed and named before visiting the Truk area, and one that bears a much closer resemblance than Truk to Mendana's discovery-but through his published descriptions of Ponape and Truk he did eliminate a long-standing source of confusion by establishing once and for all that these were two distinct islands. During his short time at Truk Lutke also learned that the name 'Hogoleu' was not understood by the natives there; 'Ruk' was the name they gave their island group and a name that soon afterwards gained currency among Europeans through Lutke's influence.⁽³³⁾

Lutke's opinion of the people of the Mortlocks is decidedly favorable: 'We found them to be hospitable, good, reserved and well-mannered'.⁽³⁴⁾ His judgment was to be echoed by most later visitors to the Mortlocks. Unlike many another ship's captain of his day, he was able to make the statement that `during the whole of our stay we never saw a single example of [theft]'. Regarding Truk, however, Lutke expresses some reservations; he remarks that weapons were in evidence there as they had not been in the Mortlocks, referring no doubt to the slings that the people of Truk wore around their heads. On the whole, his experiences in Truk and its surrounding islands contrast sharply with his stay off Ponape where his sextant had nearly been stolen, his crewmen threatened, and their work interfered with. It is ironic that at Ascension Bay, which not many years later would become a favorite haven for whale ships and trading vessels, Lutke was set upon with such persistence by the natives that he was forced to depart at once, bestowing the opprobrious name 'Bay of Bad Welcome' upon the place. This is worthy of mention if only to counter the argument that the first foreign contacts with Ponape were uniformly more friendly than those in the Truk area, an argument that is sometimes used to explain Truk's relatively late emergence into the mainstream of western contact.

IT remained for Dumont d'Urville, whose second voyage concluded the era of great French voyages of discovery in the Pacific, to furnish the first description of Truk and its people of any length.⁽³⁵⁾ His is the fullest and most reliable report on Truk that existed until the Congregationalist missionaries arrived there in the 1880s, even if it never received the public attention that was given some of the traders' accounts in later years. Soon after his ships Astrolabe and Zelee slipped through one of the passages in the southeast part of the reef on 22 December 1838, several of the French party put ashore on Fefan and its adjacent islands to pursue their scientific survey of the lagoon. Each morning for the next four days several members of the expedition set out to explore various islands while trading activities with the natives were conducted aboard the two vessels. From their vivid first hand reports that are strung together in Dumont d'Urville's work, one can glean valuable information on the material culture of the Trukese: fishing practices and the construction of fishnets, canoe designs, household furnishings, and types of weapons employed in warfare. In regard to the last item, one of the Frenchmen reported that he had seen hanging from the rafters of a canoe-house 'bundles of spears tipped with stingray tails, war clubs of hard wood, and long cudgels, bulged at either end and painted yellow'.⁽³⁶⁾

The Frenchmen found the men of Truk helpful and friendly, though a bit cautious. The few women they met, however, would flee screaming into the woods at their approach. Most of the females, one of the officers writes, must have been hidden away or whisked off to another island well in advance of the foreigners' coming. It was only after one of the Europeans prudently declined the offer of a village beauty for the evening on the grounds that he and his companion were under a tabu that women were permitted to approach him. This extreme solicitude on the part of Trukese men for their women does not, as has been argued, necessarily imply earlier unhappy experiences with foreign sailors, for Trukese are inclined to be protective of their females even today. Overall, it would appear that the people of Truk at the time of Dumont d'Urville's arrival showed less evidence of previous western contacts than those of the Mortlocks during Lutke's visit. Although Trukese clearly appreciated the value of iron and eagerly bartered for it when they could, they did not refuse bracelets, necklaces, and trinkets, as the Mortlockese had. Moreover, the Trukese seem to have had no knowledge of firearms whatsoever prior toDumont d'Urville's coming. Honore Jacquinot, the captain of the Zelee, relates that when he brought a bird down with a shot from his musket, the initial fright of his native companions turned to shocked amazement as they saw the creature lying lifeless on the ground.⁽³⁷⁾ Six years earlier the captain of the barque Peru wrote that the Trukese aboard his ship were greatly frightened at the sight of hogs which they had evidently just seen for the first time. Their diffidence and uneasy behavior in the presence of the ship's company convinced the captain that 'they have had little or no intercourse with other nations'.⁽³⁸⁾

But there were surprises for the Europeans, too, in this inter-cultural exchange. One evening after being treated to a dinner of half-cooked fish and live crabs, Jacquinot and a fellow officer, Lafond, decided to spend the night in a canoe-house on Fefan, one of the islands in Truk's lagoon. Jacquinot lay perched on the platform of the canoe, with his gun in one hand and geological hammer in the other, and watched with growing apprehension as more and more natives crowded around the fire below.

Suddenly one of them, sounding a long wail, broke into a chant that ended on a shrill note. When he finished he pointed to Lafond, who was creeping closer to the fire so that he could hear better. Instantly my companion thundered out verses of the 'Marseilles', the songs of Beranger, and other pieces-much to the delight of his audience.

Then one of the natives, a large fellow, rose and began to dance in the most bizarre way to his own singing. The reddish light of the fire which reflected off his bronze features, the black shadow of the dancer that fell between the fire and myself, his strange contortions-all of this made the scene the most grotesque one imaginable. Then it was Lafond's turn to dance. He had just made a brave start when the natives demanded that he undress. Lafond thought it better not to refuse, and a moment later there he was in naturalibus doing the 'Cavalier seul' in front of the savages.⁽³⁹⁾

Unfortunately, Dumont d'Urville's visit did not conclude on so light a note as this; on the very next day, a small party that set out in the launch to conduct a hydrographic survey was attacked between Fefan and Dublon. At first a shower of oranges was unloosed on the Frenchmen from Trukese canoes. For a moment they took this for a practical joke, but were convinced otherwise when a volley of spears followed. In the battle that ensued, the French opened fire on the Trukese canoes killing ten or twelve natives. Dumont d'Urville was thus obliged to revise an earlier judgement of his that 'the natives live together in harmony and are by temperament gentle and peaceful'. His final words on Truk reflect his disappointment at the deceptive blow he had been dealt: 'The reputation of the Carolines has been tarnished, for we have found here treacherous and wicked people, however engaging their appearance'.⁽⁴⁰⁾

With the departure of the Astrolabe and Zelee, the age of scientific expeditions into this part of Micronesia came to an end. The net result of the French and Russian explorations there was certainly to furnish more exact geographical knowledge of Truk and its satellite islands-knowledge which was transferred onto British maps of the Pacific published after 1830. Otherwise, however, tucked away as it was in ponderous French volumes, this information appears to have had little effect on the practices of the Yankee whalers and traders who were by then plying the Pacific in swelling numbers. It was the regular visits of these whaleships especially that would play the decisive role in opening up Ponape and Kusaie to intensive contact with the West-beginning in the early 1830s on Ponape and a decade later on Kusaie. Even the coming of the Boston missionaries was in good part motivated by the desire to repair the evil done to the islanders by such unsavory contacts. Yet, in the very heyday of whaling activity in the Pacific-the period between 1840 and 1860, when Ponape was being visited by up to 40 whaleships a year-Truk was hardly touched by the influence of whalers. During this time, only two whaleships are known to have visited islands in the general vicinity of Truk; neither of them, however, visited Truk itself.⁽⁴¹⁾

Such was not the case, however, during the earlier years of the whaling industry's growth in the Pacific. In the l0-year period from 1824 to 1834 there were no fewer than 12 documented sightings or landfalls made by whaleships at Truk or its neighboring atolls.⁽⁴²⁾ The explanation of the flurry of early contacts in the vicinity of Truk and their sharp fall-off after 1835 lies in the historical patterns that the growing industry followed. Shortly after 1818, the year in which the Globe discovered the offshore grounds in the southern Pacific, whaleships began to move well off the west coast of South America and venture into the central Pacific. During the 1820s whaleships would follow any of several routes into the mid-Pacific and customarily spend at least part of their voyage 'cruising the line' in pursuit of the sperm whale. It is not surprising, therefore, that the 1820s should have been the decade of whaling discoveries in the Carolines, and that several of the islands in the Truk area should have been visited.⁽⁴³⁾ Even the islands towards the western end of the Caroline chain, which would hardly be touched by a whaleship again after 1835, were situated well within the equatorial cruising grounds and were liable to be visited repeatedly during these years. A seaman marooned on Murilo reported that he had seen several letters of testimony from whaling captains in the possession of people from Woleai whom he had met.⁽⁴⁴⁾

Towards the end of the decade, however, the enormous increase in the number of whaleships in the Pacific, combined with a more detailed knowledge of the migratory habits of whales, brought about alterations in the routes that the whaleships normally followed. In 1828 Lutke was told by Captain Folger of the whaleship Partridge, which was lying off Lukunor at the time, that with greater numbers of ships fishing the tropical waters near the equator, whales were becoming very scarce there. His own ship, he declared, was bound northward for the off-Japan grounds, an area that was becoming increasingly more popular among whaling captains.⁽⁴⁵⁾ With the discovery in the years after 1835 of the Arctic whaling grounds off Kodiak, near the Siberian coast of Kamchatka, and in the Bering sea, whaling activities near the equator were reduced still further. By 1846, the peak year of the whaling industry in the Pacific, whaleships sought the waters of the Eastern Carolines almost exclusively for the purpose of refreshment rather than for fishing. Ponape and Kusaie had by this time become established ports of call for whaling vessels. One can follow in a ship's logbook the cruise westward along the equator with a layover of a couple of weeks in Kusaie or Ponape or both; upon leaving Ponape the ship will then veer sharply north-west in the direction of the off-Japan grounds or else to the south-west for the waters off New Zealand-in either case bypassing Truk, which lies due west of Ponape.

How does one account for the obvious preference shown Ponape and Kusaie over the high islands of Truk as a reprovisioning and recreation spot? Prior to the early 1830s the foreign contacts in Ponape and Kusaie, as in Truk, were confined to occasional calls by passing whaleships and trading schooners with a rare visit from a European scientific expedition. During the years of initial contact, moreover, there is little documentary evidence to support the claim that either Ponape or Kusaie enjoyed a reputation for extraordinary hospitality to foreigners. This is especially true of Kusaie where two whaleships (Waverly in 1835 and Harriet in 1843) and a trading schooner (Honduras in 1836) were cut off and their crews massacred in incidents well-publicized in New England shipping circles.⁽⁴⁶⁾ As for Ponape, Lutke's unpleasant experience in 1828 and the burning of the whaleship Falcon in 1836 might be expected to have been at least as strong deterrents to later whaling captains as the attack upon Dumont d'Urville in Truk, the only recorded incident of this kind that occurred there during the first 40 years of the 19th century. It is unlikely, therefore, that Truk was avoided by whalers owing to any particularly notorious reputation. Even if there were some truth behind Don Luis de Torres's warning to Dumont d'Urville as early as 1838 that 'the natives of Truk have a bad reputation, even among their own compatriots',⁽⁴⁷⁾ it is clear from the example of Kusaie that bad reports of early hostilities with the natives of an island did not necessarily prohibit the eventual use of the island as a popular layover spot for foreign ships.

If we are to look for reasons for the choice of Ponape and Kusaie as favorite ports of call, we might begin with the rather obvious suggestion that perhaps these islands were better able to provide those things that whaleships required. In the opinion of one well-travelled seaman, writing in 1858: 'Puynipet has been for some years past the chief rendezvous of the whalers in the Caroline archipelago because it is of all the islands the most accessible, has the best and safest harbors, and because fuel and water are procurable thence in unlimited quantities.'⁽⁴⁸⁾ What he says of Ponape may also be applied, mutatis mutandis, to Kusaie. Truk, on the other hand, lacks the abundant fresh water sources of both Ponape and Kusaie. Furthermore, its produce is more characteristic of low atolls than the richer and more diversified crops of most high islands. The first Protestant missionaries to Truk were later to expend considerable effort trying to promote the cultivation of new crops among the people, who depended almost entirely on breadfruit, coconuts and fish for their sustenance. Even the resourceful group of independent traders 'who had been trying for years to make Ruk their headquarters gave it up for Ponape for lack of food and water', wrote a missionary much later in the century.⁽⁴⁹⁾ But abundance of food, water, fuel and a good harbor is not all that was required of a whaling port of call. One further need that cannot be ignored is the availability of native women for the diversion of seamen who had been long deprived of female companionship. The strict surveillance put on Trukese women, as noted by Dumont d'Urville and many others, would have tended to make Truk an even more unlikely choice as a favorite recreation, spot for whalers.

OVERALL, one must conclude that the visits of whaleships to the Truk area during the 1820s and early 1830s, while they may have stimulated the desire for ironware and calico, did not lead to later intensive contact between Truk and the West. Nor were the whaling voyages any more consequential in publicizing the Truk group than were the European scientific voyages. Not a single news item relative to Truk could be culled from the American press for inclusion in Ward's American Activities in the Central Pacific, and only one from the adjacent islands.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Matters were not much different on the other side of the Atlantic: Horsburgh is typical of the hydrographers of the period in that he makes no mention of Truk in the 2nd and 3rd editions (1817 and 1836) of his India Directory. If any attention was drawn to the Truk group at all, this was accomplished mainly through the published and widely read writings of two traders, Benjamin Morrell and Andrew Cheyne. Cheyne who was particularly influential in maritime circles by virtue of his contributions to British hydrography, was in the end probably as much responsible for publicizing Truk's bad name as any other individual in the 19th century.

Findlay, whose description of the people of Truk in his 1851 Directory depends exclusively on the writings of Morrell and Cheyne as the only sources available to him, expresses justifiable doubts about Morrell's reliability. Morrell supposedly paid two visits to Truk, named by him 'Bergh's Group', on a trading voyage aboard the Antarctic in 1830.⁽⁵¹⁾ His paradisiacal picture of Truk-replete with nubile girls 'with eyes like the gazelle's and teeth like ivory', young men who easily lifted the ship's 600 lb bower anchor, and comments on the 'diligence and industry' and host of other virtues to be found in the people-is fantasy in Rousseau's best tradition. Whether Morrell actually visited Truk at all is dubious; the Antarctic's master was not Morrell himself, as he would have us believe, but a William Skiddy. The Antarctic did indeed layover at Truk for a few days in February and again in August 1830, as the ship's journal shows, but here the resemblance between Morrell's account and the journal entry describing an uneventful trading session and a fruitless search for beche-de-mer ends.⁽⁵²⁾

Yet Morrell's fanciful account of a trip that he probably never made cannot be dismissed out of hand. Factual or not, it was one of the few descriptions of Truk that reached the public: besides being quoted in Findlay, it appears in French translation as an appendix to Lesson's Voyage autour du monde and again in the British magazine, Westminster Review. (53)

Andrew Cheyne's grim picture of Truk presents a strong contrast to Morrell's romantic reveries. Cheyne brought the brig Naiad and the schooner Will O' the Wisp into the Truk lagoon in October 1844 for the purpose of collecting beche-de-mer. After an initial show of friendliness during which the natives willingly assisted Cheyne's men in erecting curing sheds on the beach, Cheyne took the brig to another village with the intention of setting up a curing establishment there. Not long after his departure, the Trukese launched a surprise attack on the schooner 'with an immense force, supposed to be not less than two thousand men'. The crew of the Will O' the Wisp successfully repulsed the assault, but not before six men had been killed and another five seriously wounded. Upon being informed of the incident, Cheyne took the customary retaliatory action of setting fire to houses and breaking up as many native canoes as he could find. He left Truk the same evening, wary of any future dealings with that 'cruel and treacherous race', but convinced just the same that the 'drubbing we gave them will make them more careful in the future'.⁽⁵⁴⁾

In A Description of Islands in the Western Pacific Ocean, published in 1852, Cheyne issues a stern warning regarding Truk proper: 'No vessel should visit this group for the purpose of collecting [beche-de-mer], unless well-manned and armed, as the natives . . . will be certain to attack any vessel which they may find in a defenseless state'.⁽⁵⁵⁾ The same caveat, supported by an account of the author's own unhappy experience in Truk, is found in Findlay's Directory and in an article appearing in an 1849 issue of Nautical Magazine.⁽⁵⁶⁾ The notoriety that the islands of the Truk lagoon attained subsequent to Cheyne's unfavorable notices was not completely undeserved. Alfred Tetens, Cheyne's business rival in the Western Carolines, reports that his ship Vesta was almost taken by the Trukese on a trading visit to this group in 1868.⁽⁵⁷⁾ The German missionary, Fr Laurentius Bollig, cites a number of legends preserved by the Trukese themselves regarding ships that had been cut off years earlier. Another missionary writes of the near ambush of the trading schooner Franziska by the inhabitants of Wena Island as late as 1884.⁽⁵⁸⁾

While Cheyne's cautions regarding the Truk group were later proved to have some foundation in fact, his equally severe judgement on the inhabitants of the Mortlocks seems thoroughly unwarranted. He advises against allowing the natives of these islands on deck as they 'would not hesitate to cut off a vessel provided they had a fair opportunity'. Yet there is no known instance of the Mortlockese attacking any foreign vessel, including his own. Indeed, just a few months before Cheyne visited the Mortlocks in 1846, Captain Wallis twice put in there to collect beche-demer and was able to report a pleasant stay each time with friendly trading relations.⁽⁵⁹⁾ In all, contacts with this group during the 19th century appear to have been as untroubled as anywhere in the Pacific. Cheyne's judgement seems to have been infected with a general mistrust of people in these parts a prejudice that is perhaps understandable in view of his unpleasant encounter with the Trukese and the commercial reverses that he suffered in other islands among the Carolines. His descriptions of the islands surrounding Truk proper ordinarily conclude with some admonition such as: 'Strangers should hold no intercourse with these natives'; 'by no means to be trusted'; or 'ships should be constantly on their guard'. It is largely through the adverse notices published in his important book of sailing directions that Cheyne made his singular contribution to Truk's widespread notoriety among seamen after mid-century. Hereafter until the turn of the century Truk bore a sobriquet that it earned in good measure through Cheyne's influence: 'Dreaded Hogoleu'.

Whether or not the warnings posted by Cheyne actually had their intended effect, the only documented ship contacts with Truk from 1850 to 1875, apart from Tetens's abortive trading venture in 1868, are the visits of two British naval vessels. In March 1862 H.M.S. Sphinx steamed into the Truk lagoon in search of the crew of the barque Norna, known to have been shipwrecked to the east of Truk some months before. When the crew of the lost ship were taken aboard the Sphinx, they told of how they were overtaken in their launch by canoes from Truk, boarded and brought to Fefan Island where they were reduced to virtual slavery. Shortly afterwards, four of the crew managed to escape to Tol, another of Truk's high islands, where the natives received them with kindness. Accordingly, the captain of the Sphinx presented the Tol islanders with gifts of flannel and serge, while at Fefan he razed a number of villages and burnt several war canoes 'as a punishment and also to deter them from such conduct in the future.'⁽⁶⁰⁾

When the next British warship, H.M.S. Blanche, put into Truk in 1872, it found the inhabitants there exceptionally timid and fearful. The first sailors who put ashore reported finding only 'their deserted houses and their cooked breadfruit they had left behind them'.⁽⁶¹⁾

It was two days before the first canoes could be persuaded to come out to the ship, and even then the Trukese showed extreme reluctance to come aboard. One of the officers aboard the British vessel notes that at the first call to raise anchor, the natives 'cleared away from the ship just the same as if we had sent a shot among them'. Such behavior on the part of the Trukese suggests that either they had been chastened by reprisals that armed ships, like the Sphinx, had taken or that they had been visited by one or more of the blackbirders that had lately begun to work the area. The main purpose of the Blanche's cruise was, in fact, to investigate murder and kidnapping charges against the infamous blackbirder Carl which had lately been active in Micronesian waters. Just six months earlier the Carl had visited Maiana, Mili, Kusaie, Pingelap and Ponape; it carried a human cargo of at least 50 islanders and had left another 14 dead. From Ponape the Carl was 'bound west', as a missionary on that island learned, 'to get a full cargo to take to Fiji'.⁽⁶²⁾

There is no conclusive proof that the Carl ever really visited Truk with the intention of making up its full cargo there, but it did call at Satawan and Lukunor in the Mortlocks. When the missionary vessel Morning Star, on the first of its visits to the Mortlocks, put in at Satawan in 1874, it was greeted with ominous silence.⁽⁶³⁾ Only later did the missionaries learn that their cool reception was due to the lingering memory of the visit paid them by the Carl some three years earlier when 20 men were , carried off to work in Fiji. A second labor vessel, this one German, had also stopped there and taken off a number of natives for five years of indentured labor in Samoa. Some of the Mortlockese conscripts were apparently repatriated within a year or two, for one of them was on hand to describe his experience of plantation life to the captain of the Morning Star -'Flog! Flog! Me Cry plenty'. Other of the native laborers did not return until nine or 10 years later; in 1881 several Mortlock Islanders were brought back from Samoa on the brigantine Shanghai, all decked out in European clothing and eager to tell of their adventures.⁽⁶⁴⁾ There could have been no large-scale population displacement in the Mortlocks, for the highest estimate of laborers taken off the islands is 80, with some sources placing the number at about 40-almost all of whom were eventually returned.⁽⁶⁵⁾

The visit of the Morning Star in 1874 marked the arrival of the first missionaries (three couples from Ponape) in the Mortlocks and provided a springboard for the extension of church influence to the Truk group five years later. The first foreign trader had come to the Mortlocks a year or two before; the Morning Star's missionary company were in fact greeted by a white agent living on Satawan, the only foreigner then residing in the Mortlocks. This event may be understood as signalling the start of the transition from peripheral Western contact to intensive contact with the outside world, for it witnessed the establishment in the Truk area of missionaries and traders, representatives of the two principal forces of permanent change. It is no accident that the first inroads made by traders and missionaries occurred in the Mortlocks, for these atolls had always appeared less forbidding in the eyes of foreigners than Truk or the low islands to the north and west of it. Visits by passing ships to the Mortlocks had been without exception friendly and more numerous than elsewhere in the area. Inasmuch as the Mortlocks had always maintained a firm trading relationship with Truk, supported by strong cultural and linguistic ties, they were an ideal stepping-stone for entry of foreign influences into Truk.

Both religious and commercial institutions appear to have flourished in this new soil. The Ponapean teachers in the Mortlocks won widespread acceptance within a short period of time, and in three years they had established churches on eight islands with a total membership of over 800 persons. The number of teachers, too, was rapidly being increased with each visit of the Morning Star to keep pace with the growing demand from islands for their own missionary. Meanwhile, the expansion of trading activity appeared to match church growth. While there had been only a single trader known to reside in the Mortlocks in 1874, there were no fewer than five permanent white residents by 1880.⁽⁶⁶⁾ One of them was able to boast that in his first two months on the island he had collected more than 15,000 lb of copra, on which he had cleared a profit of $140 over and above living expenses.⁽⁶⁷⁾

FROM the pens of missionaries on Ponape came more than one urgent plea during 1878 and 1879 that a mission be opened with all haste in Truk 'before opposing influences have obtained a strong foothold'. Finally in 1879, the long-contemplated missionary penetration into the Truk lagoon was accomplished, although through unforeseen circumstances. A chief from Uman (one of the high islands of Truk) who was visiting Nama in the Mortlocks chanced to hear the mission teacher there deliver his sermon one Sunday. Favorably impressed by what he heard, the chief invited him to start a church on his island and guaranteed his personal safety as well as that of any others who wished to come with him. When the Morning Star made its customary circuit that same year, it picked up the preacher and his wife and brought them to Truk to open the first mission in the lagoon. Their reception was a lot more encouraging than one would have expected in a place of Truk's xenophobic repute. As the missionaries were rowing ashore at Uman they were met by a throng of Trukese who 'came down into the water and seizing hold of the boat, literally bore it up onto dry land'; after which they were promptly escorted to a feast that the people had prepared in their honor.⁽⁶⁸⁾

Thereafter, the chief from Uman made good his word to protect his missionaries from harm, notwithstanding the continual threats on their lives of which we read in their early letters. When the Rev. Robert Logan, the first American missionary to Truk, arrived in 1884, he found churches already established on four islands in the lagoon and the chiefs from other islands clamoring for their own mission teacher⁽⁶⁹⁾ -an item that had by then become as prestigious as bone-handled knives or long-sleeved white shirts had been at the time of Lutke's visit. However much local jealousy and possessiveness may have prompted the chiefs' requests during those first years, the fact remains that missionaries were generally welcomed by the Trukese and became the first group of foreigners to establish themselves in these islands. This was by no means an insignificant occurrence if one recalls that throughout the whole century the total number of outsiders who had lived on Truk for any duration could not have come to more than half a dozen. The subsequent influence of the missionaries, though strong in many respects, was not decisive enough to halt the interisland warfare that had ravaged Truk from pre-contact times. Logan's letters are filled with allusions to the hostile raids that were made by one island or village upon another. On his numerous peace-making missions Logan soon took to carrying a black umbrella to identify himself-a badge of neutrality that was always respected, even if his efforts to restore peace frequently met with little success. The immunity conceded the person of Logan by warring Trukese is itself a measure of the influence that men like him had been able to gain during these first years of intensive contact.

THE incessant warfare that racked Truk probably had a great deal to do with its reputation for 'notorious inhospitality to strangers' and was very likely the major reason for the long retardation of intensive foreign contact. Besides serving to discourage traders, fortune seekers and the like from taking up residence there for reasons of personal safety, the continual fighting no doubt hampered food production and contributed to the chronic scarcity of which later visitors often complained.⁽⁷⁰⁾ Warfare, it is true, had been just as much the rule in Palau through most of the 19th century, but the two major alliances there-each under a paramount chief permitted traders to affiliate themselves with one side or another in a mutually profitable arrangement, thus establishing harmonious relations with at least half of the population and drawing on a sizeable segment of the entire community for trade labor. Truk, however, lacked the elaborate political organization that would have made it possible to safely establish trade relations with any appreciable fraction of the total lagoon population. Its social system was organized almost entirely around relatively small kin groups and lacked any effective type of supra-familial authority.⁽⁷¹⁾ The lack of political cohesiveness among the peoples of Truk meant, in the concrete, the continual realignment of factions and multi-sider hostilities; any alliances tended to be very fragile and quite likely short-lived. The greatest threat to the outsider in all this was not that he would be instantly cut down because his presence was resented or his goods coveted, but that once associated with a particular group he would unwarily find himself implicated in local quarrels and become the target of this group's enemies. Kubary observes of the Trukese that 'while almost any tribe would welcome a foreigner . . . yet he would be in the eyes of the natives identified with that tribe and could not have access to other tribes'.⁽⁷²⁾ This, in fact, seems partly to have accounted for the killing of at least three traders who had taken up residence in Truk after 1880.

These could hardly be called the ideal conditions for the establishment of lucrative trading operations, and it is easy to understand why the earlier trader-captains bypassed Truk for islands that posed far fewer problems. The 1870s, however, witnessed the rapid expansion of several large trading companies in the Pacific-Capelle and Co. extended its operations to Ponape; Godeffroy opened new stations on Ponape and Kusaie; and Hernsheim also expanded from Jaluit to the east Carolines. Meanwhile, Henderson and MacFarlane of New Zealand sought to open stations of its own in the Carolines and Marshalls. The pressure of competition among these firms forced them to explore as yet unopened fields, among them Truk, in the search for new sources of copra. It was only a matter of time, therefore, before the business advantages of establishing a station in Truk came to outweigh the risks involved. In a memorandum of 1874 outlining the trade prospects offered by several islands in the central Pacific, one agent enthusiastically concluded of Truk that:

…the first Europeans who can succeed in establishing a permanent agency upon Hogoleu will make their fortune in a very short period . . . This island presents to the commercial adventurer such an opportunity as is scarcely to be found elsewhere in the world, not alone from the valuable products of the land itself, but from the possession of so magnificent a harbor for shipping, whence could be extended the ramifications of a trade on a large scale throughout the whole great Caroline Archipelago.⁽⁷³⁾

Some may have demurred a trifle at this rapturous picture of trade possibilities there-Adolph Capelle, for instance, who won the trading race to Truk and commissioned two of his agents to establish a station there in the same year that the first missionaries came to Uman.⁽⁷⁴⁾ The attempt apparently ended in failure, for a year later the only trader in the lagoon was August Hartmann, who had set up an independent business there in 1874 and for some time had the entire field to himself. Trade schooners began to make occasional calls on Truk during the mid- 1870s, very likely to survey its prospects, but no other traders came to take up a permanent post in the island group until Captain Frederick Narruhn arrived in 1884. He was followed by a number of others after 1885, a year that was a watershed in trading activity on Truk. Throughout the next decade or so, however, the trader's lot appears to have been as unhappy as it was in Cheyne's day. Both Hartmann and Narruhn were killed in the village warfare that prevailed on Truk until the end of the century; a young American trader on Udot was forced to flee for his life after a residence of only a few months; and a Tasmanian who ran a station on Moen Island died of consumption scarcely four months after his arrival.⁽⁷⁵⁾ Their number, nevertheless, increased steadily until there were some 35 traders in Truk at the turn of the century.⁽⁷⁶⁾ The promises in the agent's memorandum may have never been quite realized, but the resident trader had become a permanent fixture in Truk and a strong westernizing influence.

With the establishment of both foreign traders and missionaries on Truk around 1880, there began the familiar irreversible cycle: the resident foreigners created new desires and expectations, which in turn gave rise to the need for still more foreigners to satisfy these desires. In Logan's day the accepted medium of exchange among mission help was calico, and elsewhere tobacco. Fifteen years later, traders were doing a brisk business in guns, dynamite, and liquor before the curtailment of such trade practices by the German colonial administration that assumed control of the Caroline Islands in 1899. Simple needs gave way to more sophisticated, and potentially more destructive, demands. But with the sale of weapons, which theoretically at least made local warfare far more dangerous than it had ever been before, the Trukese surely became more deeply conscious of the need for effective social controls that only a supra-familial authority could provide.⁽⁷⁷⁾

This was a need that their own social system had not satisfactorily filled, organized as it was entirely around lineage units and lacking higherlevel political institutions. The presence of foreigners, which at first intensified the need through the introduction of firearms, also offered a means of fulfilling it: submission to foreign political control. The German administration at the turn of the century promised a strong external authority that would for the first time check inter-island warfare and arbitrate future disputes. Hence, when the German warship Kondor steamed into Truk in October 1904 and demanded the surrender of all firearms as well as the immediate cessation of all warfare, the orders were quietly obeyed. Over 400 guns and 2,500 cartridges were confiscated by the Germans in a matter of weeks, and the warfare that had troubled the Truk Islands for as long as there are written records ceased once and for all.⁽⁷⁸⁾

It is curious that the two groups responsible for bringing Truk into steady contact with the western world should have so frequently seen themselves as representatives of competing interests when in fact each profited greatly from the other's efforts-more so than either customarily acknowledged. The missionaries, if they did not completely pacify the people, at least rendered them more tolerant of foreigners and relatively well-disposed to western ways, while instilling material desires of greater intensity than it was within the power of any passing trade captain to effect. The traders, on the other hand, by continually displaying the wonders produced by western technology, challenged the validity of the islanders' traditional beliefs, religious and otherwise, and provoked a growing dissatisfaction with the old ways. In all, the combined influence of these two groups was a powerful force on the Trukese that could not fail to work profound changes in their institutions; but surely its most abiding effect was to make more intensified contact with the outside world inevitable after 1885.

---

1. Saul H. Riesenberg, The Native Polity of Ponape (Washington 1968), 4.

2. Dorothy Shineberg (ed.), The Trading Voyages of Andrew Cheyne, 1841-1844 (Canberra 1971) 14.

3. Isaiah Bray, `Report of the Voyage of the Morning Star, 1880-81', Letters and Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (hereinafter ABCFM Papers), IX, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, Houghton Library.

4. 'Relacion mui singular y circunstanciada hecha por don Alfonso de Arellano Capitan del Patax San Lucas del Armada del General Miguel Lopez de Legaspi . . .,' in Coleccion de documentos ineditos (Madrid 1887), III, 11-25.

5. Kramer's conjecture that a cryptic `Y de SY' inscribed over an island on Ortelius's map of 1589 might stand for `Ysla de San Yreneo' and mark Arellano's discovery of Truk is hardly defensible. For it is well documented that Arellano first sighted Truk on 17 Jan., while the feast of St Ireneus falls on 26 Aug. See A. Kramer, Truk (G. Thilenius (ed), Ergebnisse der Sudsee-Expedition 1908-10, II, B, 5, Hamburg 1932), 2.

6. Seville, Archivo General de Indios, Ultramar: Filipinas, Leg. 15, Carta de las Nuevas Philippinas (Palaos) descubiertas debajo del patrimonio de Phelipe V; Klein's map is also found in A. Kramer, Palau (G. Thilenius (ed.), Ergebnisse der Sudsee-Expedition 1908-1910, II, B, 3, Hamburg 1917), I, 17.

7. The whereabouts of Somera's original map is unknown, but a facsimile appears in Kramer Palau, 71.

8. Cantova's map was first published in L. Aime-Martin (ed.), Lettres edifiantes et curieuses concernant l'Asie, l'Afrique, et L'Amerique, avec quelques relations nouvelles des missions et des notes geographiques et historiques, XVIII (Paris 1728), 188-9.

9. Some maps however, show two large islands-one labelled 'Torres' and the other 'Hogoleu'; each of the alternate names supplied by Cantova for the principal island had become a separate island.

10. Some maps however, show two large islands-one labelled 'Torres' and the other 'Hogoleu'; each of the alternate names supplied by Cantova for the principal island had become a separate island.

11. See Ward H. Goodenough, 'Notes on Truk's place names', Micronesica, II (1966), 101-2, for a brief treatment of the derivations of these names.

12. See Ward H. Goodenough, 'Notes on Truk's place names', Micronesica, II (1966), 101-2, for a brief treatment of the derivations of these names.

13. Goodenough, op.cit.,102

14. s ee Kotzebue, op. cit., III,116-7.

15. A. J.Krusenstern, Beytrage zur Hydrographie der Grossern Ozeane (Leipzig 1819), 95.

16. The two multi-volume series that were published as narratives of Duperrey's expedition devote only a few lines to Truk: L. I. Duperrey,Voyage autour du monde . . . sur la corvette la Coquille, pendant les annees 1822, 1823, 1824 et 1825 (Paris 1825-30), I, vii-viii; Rene Primavere Lesson, Voyage autour du monde sur la corvette la Coquille (Paris 1839), II, 530-1. A slightly fuller day-by-day account of the time Duperrey spent in these waters is to be found in 'Journal d'un voyage autour du monde, entrepis sur la corvette de S.M. la Coquille sous les ordres de M. Duperrey,Lieutenant de vaisseau, par J. Dumont d'Urville', Sydney, Mitchell Library, B 1300.

17. Besides recording his own geographical data, Duperrey summarized the findings of earlier explorers in the area in his Memoire sur les operations geographiques faites dans la campagne de la corvette de S.M. Coquille pendant les annees 1822 . . . 1825 (Paris 1827), 66-8,101-2.

18. The detailed map of Truk, 'Carte des Iles Hogoleu,' is published in the Historical Atlas (pl. 31) to Duperrey's Voyage autour du monde

19. A. Findlay, A Directory for the Navigation of the Pacific Ocean (London 1851), 1088.

20. 'Journal d'un voyage autour du monde . . . par J. Dumont d'Urville', 306.

21. F. Lutke, Voyage autour du monde . . . sur la corvette to Seniavine (Paris 1835), II, 39-108.

22. Ibid., 101-2.

23. Floyd had been put off on Murilo (an atoll 80 miles north of Truk) by the British whaler Prudent. During the four weeks he spent with Lutke aboard the Senyavin en route to Manila, he was interviewed by the naturalist Mertens on the particulars of life on Murilo. The monograph that Mertens later published from his talks with Floyd is one of the fullest studies of any Micronesian island up to that time.-M. Mertens, ' Memoire sur l'archipel des Carolines', in Recueil des Actes de la Stance publique de l'Academie de St. Petersburg, 29 Dec. 1829-30, 95-186.

24. Duperrey, Memoire sur les operations geographiques, 70.

25. The Journal of the Resource is kept at the San Francisco Maritime Museum, San Francisco, California.

26. Freycinet, op. cit-, 87.

27. Duperrey, Memoire . . ., 68.

28. 'Discoveries of Capt. Worth,' in The Inquirer (Nantucket, Mass.), 7 Feb. 1829; cited by Edouard Stackpole, The Sea Hunters (New York 1953), 372.

29. Jeremiah N. Reynolds, Report of 1828 to the Navy Dept., 23rd Congress, 2nd Session, House Document No. 105; J. N. Reynolds, Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas (New York 1836), 218-9.

30. Lutke, op. cit., 151-2.

31. Freycinet, op. cit., 87.

32. The description of Quirosa is cited in J. Burney, A Chronological History (London 1806), 11, 170-1. Freycinet, op. cit., 77, identifies Quirosa with Hogoleu or Truk; so also does Chamisso (A. von Chamisso, Bemerkungen and Ansichten auf einer Entdechungsreise, unternommen in den Jahren 1815-1818 (Weimar 1821, 105). Lutke, who was actually searching for Quirosa on this part of his voyage, made the same erroneous assumption as these earlier explorers, although admitting that Hogoleu's 'similarity to Quirosa was imperfect'.-Lutke, op. cit., 92.

33. Lutke, op. cit., 93-4. 'Ruk'-or 'Chuk' as it is pronounced in some dialects-was originally neither the proper name for a particular island in the Truk group nor for the entire group; it is, as Kubary later observed, a general term used by central Carolinians of any elevated rocky land in contrast to coral reefs. See J. Kubary, 'Die Bewohner der Mortlock-Inseln', in Mltteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft in Hamburg (Hamburg 1880), 277.

34. Lutke, op. cit., 63.

35. Dumont d'Urville's published work contains over 60 pales of detailed narrative of his visit to Truk. J. Dumont d'Urville, Voyage au Pole sud et l'Oceanie sur les corvettes l'Astrolabe et la Zelee. . – 1837-1840 (Paris 1841-46), V, 120-67, 3309-28.

36. Ibid., 138.

37. Ibid., 140

38. John H. Eagleston, entry for 5 Jan. 1832, `Journal of two voyages to the Islands in the Pacific Ocean in the Bark Peru . . .', Salem, Mass., Essex Institute, M 656, 1830, p. 2.

39. Dumont d'Urville, op. cit., 144-5.

40. Ibid., 165.

41. In 1846 the Chandler Price under Capt. John Pease visited Nomwin Island north of Truk; `Report of Capt. Pease' in Vinyard Gazette (Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard), 26 June 1847. In 1854 the Martha put in at the Mortlocks for a day; `Logbook of Ship Martha', New Bedford, Mass., Old Dartmouth Whaling Museum (PMB Microfilm 264, f. 269).

42. I am especially indebted to Dr Saul Riesenberg for providing information on British whaling voyages from Australian ports into the area, and to Mr Charles Batchelder of Boston for supplying particulars on several of the New England whaleships.

43. It was during these years that Richard Macy, one of the more careful observers among whaling masters, discovered Namoluk and several other islands in the Truk vicinity-for which he later received a commendation from the US Naval Dept. See Jeremiah Reynolds, op. cit., 19-20.

44. He also attributed the presence of white shirts and tobacco among Woleaians to the whaleships that must have visited the island with some frequency.-Mertens, op. Cit., 124.

45. Lutke, op. cit., 83.

46. Newspaper reports on the loss of these vessels are found in R. Gerard Ward (ed.), American Activities in the Central Pacific 1790-1870 (Ridgewood 1967), III, 541-73.

47. Dumont d'Urville, op. cit., V, 174.

48. Karl Scherzer, A Narrative of the Circumnavigation of the Globe by the Austrian Frigate Novara in the Years 1857-1859 (London 1862), II, 579.

49. Letter of the Rev. Albert A. Sturges, 28 May 1881, in ABCFM Papers, VIII.

50. A brief report of the whaleship Hash my' layover at Namoluk in 1833 is the single notice. -Ward, op. cit., V, 3-4.

51. Benjamin Morrell, A Narrative of Four Voyages . . From the year 1822 to 1831 (New York 1832), 376-91 and 421-35. Morrell's wife, too, has a few pages on Truk.-Abbey Jane Morrell, A Narrative of a Voyage to the Ethiopic and South Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Chinese Sea, North and South Pacific in the years 1829 to 1831 (New York 1833), 41-3.

52. John Keeler, `Journal, 1829-31, kept on board the schooner Antarctic of New York', Mystic, Conn., G. W. Blunt White Library.

53. Lesson, Voyage autour du monde . . ., II, 530. Apparently for lack of other information on Truk, Lesson inserted in his work the translation of an article that he found in the Westminster Review-`but without vouching for the accuracy of the facts that are recorded in it', he prudently adds.

54. Cheyne's own journal (D. Shineberg (ed.), The Trading Voyages of Andrew Cheyne, 1841-1844) breaks off just a few weeks before his visit to Truk. He supplies some of the details of his ill-fated trading venture, however, in A Description of Some Islands in the Western Pacific (London 1852), 126-8.

55. Ibid., 56.

56. Nautical Magazine, XVIII (1849), 24-5

57. Tetens, who disagreed with Cheyne on just about everything else, concurs with his former partner's low estimation of the inhabitants of Truk, calling them `treacherous, degenerate beings'.-Alfred Tetens, Among the Savages of the South Sea (Stanford 1958), 90-2.

58. Letter of Mrs Mary Logan, 24 Nov. 1884, in ABCFM Papers, vii.

59. Mary D. Wallis, Life in Feejee, or Five Years among the Cannibals by a Lady (Boston 1851), 183-5, 195-7.

60. Sir Edward Hobart Seymour, 'Papers relating to the search for the barque Norna, lost in the Pacific, 1861-1862', Sydney, Mitchell Library, Mss 557.

61. John Brazier, 'Notes: Cruise of H.M.S. Blanche through the South Sea Islands, 12 May- Nov., 1872', Sydney, Mitchell Library, B 512. Capt. C. H. Simpson, 'Reporting Proceedings. H.M.S. "Blanche", at Sydney, November 15, 1872', Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, L (1873),195

62. Letter of Rev. E. T. Doane, 13 Jan. 1872, in ABCFM Papers, V.

63. Letter of Rev. E. T. Doane, 29 Jan. 1874, in ABCFM Papers, V. Substantially the same account of the first visit of the Morning Star may be found in E. T. Doane, 'The Caroline Islands', The Geographical Magazine, I (1 Aug. 1874), 203-5.

64. John Westwood, Island Stories (Shanghai 1905) 126.

65. The British schooner Rupah, which visited the Mortlocks in 1875, reported that 40 men and women were taken.-Russell Robertson, 'The Caroline Islands', Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, V (1876), 52. Doane, 'The Caroline Islands', 203, places the number at 80 in all, and elsewhere states that 20 of these were taken from the island of Satawan.

66. Letter of Henry Worth, 10 Sept. 1880, in collection at Thomas Cooke House and Museum, Edgartown, Mass.

67. Westwood, op. cit., 100. Westwood, who lived on Lukunor for six years as a trader, is an important source of information on early trading activities in the Mortlocks.

68. Theodora Crosby Bliss, Micronesia: Fifty Years in the Island World (Boston 1906),95-6.

69. Annual Report of the ABCFM, 1886, 93-5.

70. See, for instance, E. T. Doane, 'The Lagoon of Ruk', in Missionary Herald, LXXVII (1881), 209.

71. Curiously enough, one missionary saw in the extremely limited influence of Trukese chiefs an advantage over the 'despotic power of Ponapean chiefs' inasmuch as the Trukese, he thought, could be more easily freed from the shackles of social custom and pagan beliefs (Letter of Rev. Robert Logan, 24 Sept. 1880, in ABCFM Papers, VII). His view seems to have been a minority one. Most foreign groups-whether missionaries, traders, or administrators appreciated the fact that a strong and well-defined chiefly system allowed them to gain far more extensive influence over the population with a minimum of social disruption.

72. Quoted in Letter of Rev. Robert Logan, 18 Dec. 1878, in ABCFM Papers, V.

73. H. B. Sterndale, 'Memoranda by Mr. Sterndale on some of the South Sea Islands', New Zealand, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1874, A-3B, 24.

74. An Englishman by the name of Vowell and a native from the Ellice Islands were sent to Truk in 1879, but seem to have left within the year. Report of the Cruise by HMS Espiegle; Statement by Savai', 10 July 1883, Sydney, Mitchell Library.

75. Letter of Rev. Robert Logan, 20 Mar. 1886; and letter of Mrs Mary Logan, 22 Mar. 1890, in ABCFM Papers, VII.

76. Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, XIV (1901), 634-5.

77. Marc Swartz, `Personality and Structure: Political Acquiescence in Truk', in R. W. Force (ed.), Induced Political Change in the Pacific (Honolulu 1965),17-40.

78. A. Kramer, Truk, 17.