A Jesuit mission established on Guam in 1668 under Spanish protection provoked three decades of intermittent war with the CHamoru, whose canoes and villages were destroyed by Spanish soldiers and Filipino auxiliaries in repeated campaigns. Between 1698 and 1700 the surviving inhabitants of Rota, Tinian, Saipan and the northern islands were removed to Guam and settled in mission villages under the policy of reduccion, so that they could be catechised, taxed and controlled; the northern islands were left largely uninhabited for a century. The CHamoru population collapsed to a small fraction of its pre-contact level. Guampedia and CHamoru scholars set out the debate over causation: introduced smallpox, influenza and other epidemics account for most of the deaths in nearly all accounts, but the wars, the destruction of the seafaring economy and forced concentration compounded them, and some CHamoru writers apply the term genocide while others emphasise disease and reject it. Spanish records are the principal source and were produced by the colonising power.
Spanish forces with Filipino auxiliaries fought the CHamoru of the Marianas and removed the surviving northern islanders to Guam
Estimates rest on early Spanish mission counts, village and canoe tallies and later archaeological survey; Rogers and others put the pre-contact CHamoru population at roughly 40,000, with published figures from about 30,000 to over 100,000. By the 1700 reduccion, when the northern islanders had been removed to Guam, Spanish counts recorded fewer than 5,000 survivors.
No count exists. The CHamoru population fell by something on the order of 90 per cent between 1668 and 1700; the great majority of deaths in almost all scholarly accounts are attributed to introduced epidemic disease, with killings in the wars a smaller though significant component. The proportions cannot be recovered from the Spanish sources.
Spanish and Jesuit accounts record the burning of villages, destruction of canoes and forced concentration into mission settlements.
Guam, N. Mariana Is.