The history of Micronesia

The Federated States of Micronesia stretches for about 2,700 kilometres across the Caroline Islands of the western Pacific, joining four states with distinct languages and traditions: Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae. Austronesian voyagers settled the islands thousands of years ago, and their descendants built some of the most remarkable societies of the Pacific, from the ranked villages and stone money of Yap to the island kingdoms of Kosrae and the Saudeleur dynasty that ruled Pohnpei from the basalt city of Nan Madol. Spain, Germany and Japan successively claimed the islands from the 1880s to 1945, and after the Second World War the United States governed them as a UN trust territory. The federation adopted its constitution in 1979 and became sovereign in 1986 in free association with the United States.

The ancestors of the Micronesians reached the Carolines by sea more than two thousand years ago, and possibly much earlier on Yap. Settlers of the high volcanic islands grew breadfruit, taro, yams and bananas and fished the reefs and lagoons, while atoll dwellers lived on coconut, pandanus and the sea. Carolinian navigators were among the finest in Oceania, and voyages linked the islands to one another and to the Marianas, Palau and occasionally the Philippines; their star compasses and canoe-building skills belong to the same tradition as Polynesian navigation. The navigator Mau Piailug of Satawal in Yap State, who in 1976 guided the Hawaiian canoe Hōkūleʻa to Tahiti without instruments, carried this knowledge into the modern era.

On Yap, society was organised into ranked villages, and the highest villages of Gagil, Tamil and Rull were known as the three cooking stones that held up the island. Through a system of exchange known as sawei, the chiefs of Gagil received tribute of cloth, mats, coconut oil and shells from atolls stretching east as far as Chuuk, returning canoes, turmeric and protection in times of famine and typhoon. Yapese voyagers quarried great stone discs of calcite on Palau and carried them home by canoe; these rai stones, valued for their size and history, still change hands in customary exchanges. Chuuk Lagoon was divided among many rival clans and villages, with no single ruler.

Pohnpeian tradition divides the island's past into an era of peopling, an era of the Saudeleur lords from roughly 1100, and an era of the Nahnmwarki chiefs from about 1628. The Saudeleur, remembered as foreigners who brought the first centralised government, ruled the island's estimated 25,000 people from Nan Madol, a complex of 92 artificial islets built on the reef off Temwen Island and divided by tidal canals. From around 1180 workers stacked columns of basalt, quarried on the far side of Pohnpei, into walls up to seven metres high, enclosing royal tombs, priests' dwellings and ceremonial grounds. Rival chiefs were obliged to live there under the rulers' eye, and food and water had to be brought by canoe. Legend says the Saudeleur became oppressive and offended the gods until Isokelekel, a warrior who came from Kosrae, overthrew them with Pohnpeian support. His successors divided the island into chiefdoms under paramount chiefs, the Nahnmwarki, a system that survives today, and Nan Madol was gradually abandoned.

Kosrae, the easternmost island, was unified under a single paramount chief whose capital was Leluh, a walled stone town on a small island in Lelu harbour, occupied from about 1250 to 1850. At its height it housed some 1,500 people in compounds of basalt and coral, with burial mounds for the nobility, and it ruled a strictly ranked society of chiefs and commoners.

Portuguese and Spanish ships began passing through the Carolines in the sixteenth century, in the wake of Ferdinand Magellan's crossing of the Pacific, and the Spanish Empire claimed the islands from Manila without occupying them. Sustained contact came in the nineteenth century. Whalers and traders called at Pohnpei and Kosrae from the 1820s, beachcombers and deserters settled ashore, and missionaries from Boston and from the Hawaiian Kingdom arrived from 1852, spreading Christianity. Introduced diseases were catastrophic. Smallpox swept Pohnpei in 1854, and Kosrae's population fell from several thousand to a few hundred by the 1880s.

German traders moved into the Carolines in the 1870s, and in 1885 Germany raised its flag on Yap, provoking a crisis with Spain that Pope Leo XIII settled in Spain's favour, while granting Germany free trade. Spain then occupied Pohnpei and founded Santiago de la Ascensión in 1887, but Pohnpeians resisted, killing the first governor in an uprising that year. After its defeat by the United States in 1898, Spain sold the Carolines to the German Empire in 1899 for 25 million pesetas, and they were governed as part of German New Guinea. German land reforms on Pohnpei, which made new landholders perform unpaid labour, led to the Sokehs rebellion of October 1910, in which the district officer and three other Germans were killed. Warships shelled Sokehs in January 1911, fifteen rebels were executed in February, and 426 Sokehs people were exiled to Palau.

Japan seized the islands in 1914 during the First World War, and in 1920 the League of Nations made them part of the South Seas Mandate of the Empire of Japan. Japanese schools, companies and settlers transformed the larger islands, and across the mandate, including the Marianas and Palau, Japanese immigrants came to outnumber Micronesians. Pohnpei and Chuuk had thousands of settlers by the late 1930s, working in farming, fishing and trade.

In the Second World War, Truk Lagoon became the main forward base of the Japanese fleet. On 17 and 18 February 1944, American carrier aircraft attacked it in Operation Hailstone, sinking dozens of ships and destroying hundreds of aircraft; the wrecks still lie in the lagoon. The United States bypassed and bombed Yap, Pohnpei and Chuuk rather than invading them, and the cut-off garrisons and the islanders among them went hungry until Japan surrendered in 1945.

In 1947 the islands became part of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, administered by the United States together with the Marshall Islands, Palau and the Northern Marianas. American rule was neglectful at first, then from the 1960s brought schools, government jobs and dependence on aid. A Congress of Micronesia was created in 1965, and Micronesian leaders negotiated their future status. When the draft federal constitution was put to the districts, the Marshall Islands and Palau rejected it, and on 10 May 1979 the four remaining districts, Yap, Truk, Ponape and Kosrae, founded the Federated States of Micronesia, with Tosiwo Nakayama as first president. The Compact of Free Association took effect on 3 November 1986, giving the United States responsibility for defence and providing aid and the right of citizens to live and work in the United States. The trusteeship ended in 1990, the country joined the United Nations in 1991, and the capital moved to Palikir on Pohnpei.

The Compact was renewed in 2003, and its funding was renewed again in an agreement signed in May 2023. The country has relied on American grants, fishing licence fees and remittances from a large community abroad. Chuuk, the most populous state, has debated independence since a political status commission was set up in 2012, though a planned referendum has been repeatedly postponed. In 2016 Nan Madol was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and placed on the list of sites in danger because of silting and overgrowth. In May 2023 Congress elected Wesley Simina, a former governor of Chuuk, as president. The federation balances close security ties with the United States against relations with China, and like its neighbours it faces the threat of rising seas to its low-lying atolls.