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Updated: May 24, 2025
On the tenth they passed and named the islands Placeres and San Pablo. Other islands were passed on the twelfth and fifteenth. On the twenty-second they sighted a mountainous island to the south, whose inhabitants saluted them as "chamurre, chamurre," or that is, "friends, friends!" This was the island of Guam. They found it to have a good bay and good rivers of fresh water.
They ran on for nearly five thousand miles without seeing a flying-fish or fowl of any sort, but then they fell in with a number of boobies, which they supposed came from some rocks not far off. As they approached Guam some rain fell, a sign that they were in the neighbourhood of land.
We now agreed to proceed in a W.S.W. course till we reached the latitude of 13° N. and to keep in that parallel till we should make the island of Guam, being informed by our Spanish pilot that the parallel of 14° was dangerous, by reason of certain islands and shoals, on which a Spanish ship had been lost some time ago.
The total population of the United States, including our territorial possessions and dependencies, was found to be about 101,000,000, thus for the first time passing the hundred million mark. The population of the United States proper was 91,972,266; of Alaska, 64,356; Porto Rico, 1,118,012; Hawaii. 191,909; Guam and Samoa, 15,100; the Philippine Islands about 7,700,000.
Polillo made impregnable, with Guam defenseless, supported by an undefended line of communications several thousand miles long to the main country, would in case of war with an active Asiatic power be reduced to the zero of effectiveness in whatever was the length of time in which its accumulated stores would be exhausted.
Even if New Jersey or the Island of Guam goes on with its lax corporation laws, permitting its creatures to do business all over the land without proper regulation, this power could thus be instantly taken away from it by such an act of Congress, even if the States themselves remained unready or unwilling to act.
The Island of Guam, in lat. 13°30'N. long 145°30'E. from Greenwich, is nearly ten leagues long from N. to S. and five leagues from E. to W. It has several villages, the most remarkable being Amatta, Atry, Agana, Anigua, Asa, Hugatee, and Rigues.
The Pacific Ocean is so vast, and the interests of the United States there will some day be so great, that the question of establishing naval bases, in addition to bases at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Guam, will soon demand attention. The localities that are the most obvious are the Panama Canal Zone and the Samoan Islands in the south, and the Aleutian Islands in the north.
But notwithstanding his anting-anting, and the more potent factor of several hundred natives in his ranks, he was easily defeated by a mere handful of soldiers from the little fort, and when last heard of by our ship was lying in the American hospital at Dumaguete awaiting transportation to Guam.
He even went so far as to write a letter of apology for the scantiness of the provisions, the result of the drought which had desolated Guam for the previous six months, and which had prevented him from doing things as he could have wished. The final farewell took place off Agagna.
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