HOM.13.1731A.1

Summary

A letter from Rev. Fr. Victor Walter of the Society of Jesus, from the Upper German Province, missionary in the Caroline Islands, to Rev. Fr. Bernard Schmiz, missionary from the lower Rhine Province, of the same Society, written in Falalop Island, Ulithi Atoll on 10 May 1731.

Background

A Spanish vessel from Guam brought Fathers Juan Cantova and Victor Walter, along with 12 soldiers, to the Ulithi Atoll to begin missionary work on February 11, 1731. The Fathers' interest in going to Ulithi and converting the natives had been spurred by the arrival of a wayward canoe from the Atoll of Lamotrek, itself 500 miles east southeast of Ulithi. The Spanish ship returned to Guam in May of 1731 for provisions with Walter aboard. On June 9, 1733, the Spanish returned to Ulithi and learned from a native of the murder of Fr Cantova and the Spanish soldiers two years before.

In this letter Father Walter describes his initial impressions of the Islanders living on Falalop, Ulithi.

The Source Document

Reverend Father in Christ!

The present writing is a continuation of what I reported to Your Reverence before my departure from the Marianas for the Caroline Islands. The voyage, which I began with Fr. Antonio Cantova on 11 February, went off so successfully that we landed on the Lamoy Islands, or as the Spaniards call them, the Garbanzos, on 2 March without being bothered by the sea or winds. The location and characteristics of these, Cicer, as the Latins call them, or Chickpea Islands, is already known to Your Reverence. There are 33 of them, of which only 8 are inhabited, and these too are so barren that the poor inhabitants scarcely find the necessities for sustenance there. If the Father of all men, in His most wise providence, had not richly provided these islands, particularly the one from which I write, with palm trees, the unfortunate Falalep people would surely die of hunger. They know nothing of meat, since there are neither fowls nor cattle there. In many places they even suffer from a lack of fresh water, the absence of which is replaced by the juice of the palm nuts. These nuts have served them up to now for daily nourishment; now we have made an attempt and sowed Indian corn, in order to bake bread for them in the future. But we have to anxiously wait and see if that harmful vermin, the field mouse [rather rat], eats up the seed before it takes root, and there-by destroys our hope.

As far as these islanders themselves are concerned, they are a people who give many indications of a natural respectability and who hate the savage vice of formication; yet they go completely naked, except for the middle part of the body which they cover with a loincloth woven from the fibers of the bark of a certain tree. They show us much love and esteem. On our arrival they let us have a rather roomy hut as a dwelling, where, until the necessary wood for a better lodging is brought in from elsewhere (as none of that sort is to be found here), we have erected two altars and celebrated the Holy Sacrifice of the mass daily, with no small pleasure and admiration of these heathen, who appear at the door of the hut in numbers, attend our divine service with reverence, and afterwards listen attentively to Christian teaching. Since they have neither idols nor idol temples or priests, we permit ourselves the hope that their conversion will not be too difficult, specially with the youth, who bring more ability and also more eagerness to our holy doctrine. There are already many of these little ones who have grasped the lord's Prayer, Hail Mary, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and much else in a short time. This was greatly aided by the fact that we taught them all our mysteries in their mother tongue, namely in songs, which they now sing at home, in the streets, on the sea and everywhere.

Through the help of God we have instilled in them such a great loathing of the superstitious practices of this country that they openly laugh at these, forcefully restrain their parents from participating in them, and thereby appreciably check the service of the Devil. These little apostles will be the blessed instrument with which we hope to spread the holy Faith in many of the remote islands that we ourselves cannot visit. Since they already understand everything necessary, we will soon undertake the first baptism of these young catechumens, with special pageantry to be sure. Although they already show no aversion to the holy Faith, but rather an eager desire for it, it will proceed somewhat more slowly with the older people, partly because of their accustomed superstitions which they renounce with difficulty, partly because of their inconsistency which constrains us to extend holy baptism to them with greater discretion. In the meantime, we have already baptized 127 children, whom they themselves brought to us, with the water of salvation as the first-born of this new Christian community.

This happy beginning gives us extraordinary courage to boldly face all the hardships that are before us on these very toilsome islands and all the work that the painstaking cultivation of this earth full of thorns inevitably demands, and we will endeavor to make good with our life, sweat, and blood the chance that we have at hand, against all at-tacks from Hell. Soon after our arrival, when a throat, head and chest ache had fallen upon almost all the poor inhabitants, the Enemy of the soul took the opportunity to make us hated among them, as if we had brought this evil and would be the cause of more in the future, but in a few days God most graciously diverted this epidemic and thoroughly removed this suspicion from the simple people. As a result, they again show up for Christian instruction just as often as they did on the first days.

It is to be hoped that they will soon grow to understand the foundation of our Christianity, so that we can lead them further towards a moral life, to the renunciation of many bad customs and loathe the destruction of prevalent vices. Idleness is the first enemy which we will have to combat.

Since they have no paramount chief and show their Thamoles, or chiefs, neither respect nor obedience, there is no one to urge them on to work. In their whole life they have never heard anything about agriculture. Fishing, to which they sometimes apply themselves, occupies them only at night. The leisurely meetings, in which they spend the whole morning amid wild screaming, and the baths which they take every afternoon, make them quite weak, sluggish, and disinclined to everything that brings the least amount of hardship. They waste many hours in sleeping, dancing, jumping, smearing and massaging with oil, and the silly people consider themselves more handsome when they drip with palm oil and when they are painted in a most terrible fashion with red and white paint. The paints are obtained from the Island of Yap, where they go yearly to pay their tribute. They care only for this beauty of their body and do not strive after other things, as they are already used to poverty and misery. Their entire wealth consists of their hut and a blanket woven from palm leaves; beyond these they have and demand nothing.

Just the iron implements which we brought here with us attract them very much as something strange to them, and in Order to express the strength of their desire for it, they made use of the awkward comparison: "As you," they say, "long for Heaven, so we long for iron." It will now be up to us to make use of this popular iron as a key with which we can open for ourselves a way into their hearts and unlock for them the gate of Heaven.

May Your Reverence promote these endeavors of ours by continuously remembering them in the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass, to which I most respectfully commend myself and my comrade, who is preparing for the voyage back to the Mariana Islands to obtain provisions.

Falalep, 10 May 1731

Your Reverence's

Most humble servant in Christ

Victor Walter, S.J. Missionary

Commentary

Fran Hezel, SJ

Fr. Walter was in Ulithi for just three months before he had to return to Guam to bring back provisions for the missionary party. He was a tyro, a newcomer to island life, who was likely to exaggerate and distort the differences between his own culture and that of the world he had just entered. Authority? Because it wasn’t exercised as it might have been in Spain, it went largely unrecognized by the Jesuit priests. Work practices? They wouldn’t have seen too much of these either, and what they did see the priests would have judged by their European practices. Near starvation? Short of a major typhoon, there’s not a big chance of that happening.

Their cultural observations were about what you might expect from short-timers on the islands, even today. But we can count on the fact that their work would have been sweetened by the deep appreciation of the people they came to serve–just as all we foreigners have experienced. If only the mission had survived.

What went wrong? Why were Fr Cantova and his military escort wiped out by the good-natured people of Ulithi? We don’t have the answer to that question, but I’ve always suspected that the military escort might have been the heart of the problem. After all, they didn’t take vows of chastity and there were lots of attractive women at hand–along with offended husbands and demanding fathers.

In the end, however, the island reclaimed Fr. Walter as its own. But two centuries elapsed before that happened, and the priest spoke a different language.

Learn more about Fran Hezel, SJ.

Larry Raigetal

The author may be writing to justify funds allocated for this mission and perhaps to secure more funds. Some of observations seem superficial; based on what he sees as they appear which would be accurate. I think it would be the usual that kids, being curious, would surround him. Men would be around but women are likely away.

Subsistence living, which includes getting from nature what you need, might be equated with idleness to some degrees but that is not necessarily "lazy."" Specifically, the months of January to March or April bring bad weather around our reefs and thus canoes are pulled out of water. This could account for less fishing and harvesting than he may have anticipated seeing. That is time of the year that we lose weight. The author missed the extent to which the paramount chief holds his power. As a commodity of value, it would not surprise me that the people would do whatever it takes to have metal, including obedience of some sort to the mission, but then turn away from it once they have obtained it.

Learn more about Larry Raigetal.

References to the Source Document

Carrell, Toni. Submerged Cultural Resources Assessment of Micronesia. United States, U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Southwest Region, Southwest Cultural Resources Center, Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, 1991. See page 98.

Gajdusek, Daniel Carleton. Journal of an Expedition to the Western Caroline Islands : September 4 to October 1, 1961. Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness, National Institutes of Health 1968. See page 55.

Lessa William Armand. Ulithi : A Micronesian Design for Living. Holt Rinehart and Winston 1966. See pages 6-7.

Descantes, Christophe. The Martyrdom Of Father Juan Cantova On Ulithi Atoll: The hegemonic struggle between Spanish colonialism and a Micronesian island polity. Missionalia, Volume 32, Number 3, November 2004. Pages 394 to 418. See pages 9 and 14-15.

Viana, Augusto de. 2013. “Fr. Juan Antonio Cantova and the First Christian Mission in the Caroline Islands.” Philippiniana Sacra 48(144). doi:10.55997/ps2004xlix144a3.

See Also

1731A1G This source document in the original German

Bibliographic Information

Sources

Stócklein's Welt-Bott, tome 29(?), n°608; copied in Spillmann's Uber die Südsee (Freiburg, 1902), pp. 232-233; also in Die Katholischen Missionen of 1886; translated by the Micronesian Seminar.

Citing the Source Document

Victor Walter, “Letter from Fr. Victor Walter to Fr. Bernard Schmiz, Falalop, Ulithi, 10 May 1731,” in Failure at Ulithi Atoll, 1727-1746, ed. and trans. Rodrigue Levesque, First, vol. 13, 20 vols., History of Micronesia: A Collection of Source Documents 1 (Gatineau, Canada: Levesque Publications, 1999), 186–92

Rodrigue Levesque's Notes

Learn more about Rodrigue Levesque.