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The Role of the Beachcombers in the Caroline Islands
 
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Francis X. Hezel, SJ
1978 - Micronesian Seminar
Beachcombers are a much reviled class of men. Contemptuously dismissed as 'reprobates' or 'abandoned and degenerate characters', they have time and again been charged with infecting the islanders with whom they lived with a moral pestilence ultimately more destructive than the epidemics of smallpox and influenza that ravaged these populations. Yet as H. E. Maude has pointed out in his masterful survey of beachcombers,(1) that motley array of deserters, escaped convicts, castaways and wanderers that gathered on many a Pacific island must be credited with more positive contributions as well--not the least of which was their interpretation of Western culture to the native populations that served to prepare them for changes still to come. Aside from such important general roles as cultural mediator, beachcombers have served more specific functions that have varied with time and place, as Professor Maude clearly shows. In this essay, I propose to explore the uses to which beachcombers were put on those few islands of the Caroline group where they were found in any numbers during the nineteenth century: Palau, Kusaie and Ponape. The prominence of beachcombers and the roles they assumed differed considerably even among these three islands, as will be seen.
The classical era of beachcombing in the Carolines began in 1783 with the wreck of the East India packet Antelope at Palau and the involuntary three-month residence of its crew. Not that this was the first time whites had ever lived ashore in the Caroline Islands; there is an account of seven white men landing on Ulithi in 1684, most likely the survivors of a shipwreck,(2) and there were presumably others of whom no historical record remains. But these were isolated instances of a few whites living ashore over the span of more than three centuries. The founding of beach communities awaited the opening of regular ship routes through Micronesian waters, and that occurred only in the late eighteenth century.
The castaways from the Antelope received generous treatment at the hands of the friendly Palauans, we are told. But even after a romanticized account of their stay appeared in the form of a book, George Keate's An Account of the Pelew Islands, Palau never attracted a great number of whites.(3) The majority of foreigners who took up residence there for a time were, with a few notable exceptions, the victims of shipwrecks: the Antelope in 1783, the Mentor in 1832,(4) the Dash in 1834,(5) and the Renown in 1870;(6) and most of these remained for only a few months. The castaways were invariably well treated by the Palauans, it would appear. Even the survivors of the Mentor, whose tribulations were publicized in Horace Holden's Narrative of a Shipwreck, received considerate treatment and help in building the makeshift boat with which they intended to sail to the Indies; their misfortune, according to Holden, was to fall into the hands of the inhabitants of Tobi, an island some two hundred miles to the south-west of Palau. Despite the friendliness of their hosts to the castaways on Palau, only two of them elected to remain permanently on the island. They, together with a handful of other foreigners who were left by visiting ships, made up the small contingent of beachcombers who lived on Palau for any length of time before the 1875. Evidently something more than assurance of adequate food resources and good treatment by the islanders was necessary to turn an island into a haven for discontented whites.
But if Palau could claim few white residents throughout most of the nineteenth century, the other islands in the western Carolines had virtually none. The three seamen from the Duff who were put ashore at their own request on Satawal and Lamotrek in 1797 are about the only whites hardy enough to have made their home on any of the tiny, poorly endowed coral atolls in the region, and they were not heard of again.(7) The high island of Yap proved just as inhospitable to potential beachcombers, if for al together different reasons. Yapese, a strong tradition asserts, discouraged early visitors even to the point of massacring ships' crews whenever possible. The itinerant trading captains Andrew Cheyne and Alfred Tetens, the first foreigners known to have visited that island regularly, were both attacked there and did not feel that it was safe to leave a party ashore in their absence until l866.(8)
Madan Blanchard, one of the crew of the Antelope, was the first white who can be said to have chosen a beachcombers life on Palau, electing as he did to remain there as his companions put to sea one November day in 1783. Like John McCluer who gave up his command aboard the Panther ten years later to become the second voluntary white resident on Palau, Blanchard was adopted by Ibedul (one of the two paramount chiefs), liberally provided with native wives and property, granted chiefly status, and otherwise absorbed into the social system of the island.(9) To a much greater extent than did beachcombers on Ponape and Kusaie, Blanchard and those who followed him took on the ways of the islanders with whom they lived. Blanchard himself soon discarded his European clothes and was tattooed.(10) John Davy, who survived the wreck of the Dash in 1834 and chose to live out his years on Palau, must have done the same, for an officer aboard the U.S.S. Vincennes two years later writes with evident astonishment of finding him 'running as naked as his countrymen' (who, by all accounts, were quite naked indeed!).(11) Charles Washington, a deserter from the English man-of-war Lyon who had spent thirty five years on the island by the time of the Vincennes' visit, was said to have become 'as thoroughly savage as any of the savages'.(12) Deprived almost completely of the companionship of other whites, the handful of beachcombers on Palau would have lacked what we might now call alternative role models. In this respect they differed greatly from whites living ashore in the eastern Carolines who were usually part of a good-sized beach community.
Apart from shipwrecked seamen and an occasional deserter, there were a few foreigners who came to Palau as members of beche-de-mer curing parties in the 1840s and 1850s, but their residence too was ordinarily limited to a few months. The whites who stayed for longer than a year or two could not have numbered more than ten throughout the entire ninety-year period that spanned the arrival of the Antelope in 1783 and the establishment of the first company trade station by Hernsheim in 1874. This sprinkling of beachcombers cannot be said to have clothed the natives or anything else of the sort; in this regard, as we have just seen, they were more changed themselves than agents of change. Neither did they seem to have triggered a technological revolution among the islanders. In 1788 Palauans already carried 'iron adzes of European manufacture';(13) by 1875 they still had steel adzes and very little more. The beachcombers' main contribution was not their impact upon the material culture of Palau, but their effect on the continuing power struggle between the two competing alliances or federations of Palau. The role of the beachcomber in Palau, then, must be situated in the political context of an ongoing rivalry that has survived, although not in its bloodier forms, up to the present day.
Foreigners who took up residence in Palau immediately became the personal 'property' of either the Ibedul or the Reklai, paramount chiefs of the federations of Koror and Ngetelngal (or Melekeiok) respectively. Most wound up in the court of the Ibedul for the simple reason that the harbour of Koror provided better anchorage and so was more frequented by foreign ships, but a few--Washington, Woodin, and even the great naturalist Kubary --found themselves in the opposite camp. It was dangerous for any white to attempt to play both sides for his own profit, as Cheyne's murder at the hands of the Ibedul vividly demonstrated.
The office that beachcombers performed has been loosely described as 'interpreter to the chief', a title that poorly defines their actual function. Chiefs in Palau seldom, it seems, had to fetch their white retainers to carry on normal barter with a passing ship, but almost always did so when the matter under discussion was a punitive expedition against traditional enemies. The main role of the beachcomber, one concludes from the literature, was to intercede on his chief's behalf for military aid against the rival federation and thereby enable the chief to extend his power base. The success of this diplomatic mission depended in good part upon whether the 'interpreter' could persuade the man-of-war or merchant vessel that the opposing faction were rebels who originally owed allegiance to the kindly chief who was so generously furnishing provisions for the ship, or that his enemies had acted or were preparing to act against the interests of the foreigners themselves. The use of beachcombers in this way was, of course, no novelty in the Pacific. But in Palau, unlike Tahiti and Hawaii, consolidation into a single empire never took place, the result being that beachcombers continued to serve the same political-military function until the visit of the British warship Espiegle in 1883 when a peace treaty between the two federations was at last signed.(14)
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