HOM.17
Last Discoveries, 1795-1807, is the seventeenth volume of the History of Micronesia: A Collection of Source Documents (HOM), compiled and edited by Rodrique Levesque.
Download
The History of Micronesia: A Collection of Source Documents was complied, edited and published by Rod Levesque from 1992 to 2002. Copyrights were obtained by the Habele Outer Island Education Fund, a US nonprofit, in 2022, which digitized the content to facilitate noncommercial access to, and use of, the twenty-volume series. The PDF file for HOM.17 is roughly 65MB.
Levesque's Summary
Volume 17 contains 97 chapters, with 229 documents and 56 illustrations. Shown above is part of the first map of the Island of Kosrae that was discovered by an unnamed French ship in 1804, a month before a Yankee ship came by.
At least nine more islands were discovered by Europeans during this period; they were to be the last such discoveries. They were: Eauripig, Woleai, Nauru, Ebon, Puluwat, Banaba, Losap-Nama, Murilo and Nukuoro.
Important new documents are those about the voyage of the Diamante to Palau by Lieutenant Snook of the East India Company, four new forts that were built in Guam by the Spanish, the first shipwreck of a U.S. ship at Tinian, the capture of the English frigate Paloma, and the French warship Canonnfere, Captain Bourayne, that acted as a Spanish galleon.
It is hard to understand how some mythical islands in Micronesia, specially high islands like Kosrae, escaped discovery by Europeans until the 19th century, but this is a reality. In fact, ten new islands, atolls, or island groups, were discovered during the period covered by this volume: Eauripig in 1796, Woleai in 1797, Nauru in 1798, Ebon and Puluwat in 1799, Banaba in 1801, Losap-Nama and Murilo in 1802, Kosrae in 1804, and Nukuoro in 1806. The discovery of Kosrae by a French ship is a paper discovery of mine, never before published. It occurred less than one month before a Yankee ship passed by, and was later credited with this discovery.
There were yearly fleets of English convict ships going from NSW to China that sailed through Micronesia, often led by a Royal Navy ship for protection. They were sighted from Saipan twice, and this led to fears of war in Guam, where four new forts were quickly built. The technical details of their construction are here published for the first time. We now have Part 12 of the on-going series of documents about the history of Palau, that of Lieutenant Snook who took three Palauan women back home, aboard the sloop named Diamante which he had purchased in Macao. I have found the relevant docu¬ments about his 1798 voyage in the records of the India Office in London.
In this volume we have the full details of the shipwreck of the first U.S. ship in Micronesia, which occurred at Tinian in 1797 —from Spanish archives. The body of the Captain of this packet, named Experiment, was even buried ashore (along with the barrel of wine in which it had been pickled) by his widow. She, in turn, became the first white woman to be stranded in Micronesia. She may have been an English woman, and a former convict from Sydney, a port twice visited by Captain McClellan.
The papers of two successive governors of Guam, Governor Muro (1798-1801) and Governor Blanco (1802-1806) are to be found in the Library of Congress in Washington. I have looked through all of them, and summarized or transcribed their more important letters or proclamations.
A mystery ship passed by Guam in November 1801; only one man could speak Spanish. One other mystery that has been fully solved is that of the frigate Paloma (wrongly recorded in the annals of Australia as the Plunder). She was a Peruvian ship that had been made a prize by three English whalers and brought to NSW, sold and taken to New Zealand for a cargo of timber. Captain Reid was taking her to Macao when he had to divert to Guam, where she almost sank upon arrival. Anyhow, it was no secret that she was a prize; she was retaken and the Englishmen made prisoners. One of the part-owners of this ship was a Reverend Palmer, who insisted on corresponding with the Governor of Guam in Latin
Publication Details
Lévesque Rodrigue. History of Micronesia : A Collection of Source Documents. Vol. 17 Last Discoveries: 1795-1807. Gatineau Québec: Lévesque Publications; 2001.
ISBN-10: 0920201172
ISBN-13: 978-0920201176
LCC: DU500 .H58 2000
