page_title: History of Guam
section_title: Magellan's first encounter with Guam
hierarchical_section_title: History of Guam / Spanish era / Magellan's first encounter with Guam
caption_attribution_description: English: The island of Guajan (Guam), detail from Carta Hydrographica y Chorographica de las Islas Filipinas (1734). Caption in Spanish. Corren las Islas Marianas, o de los ladrones de 13 a 21 grados Norte Sur. En Agaña esta el Gouernador, y la Milicia. Salo en Guajan y Rota ay gente, y seran como tres mil Almas. "The Mariana Islands, or the "Island of Thieves" 13 to 21 degrees North South. The Governor and Militia are in Agaña. Three thousand souls live in Guam and Rota."
context_page_description: The history of Guam involves phases including the early arrival of Austronesian people known today as the Chamorros around 2000 BC, the development of "pre-contact" society, Spanish colonization in the 17th century and the present American rule of the island since the 1898 Spanish–American War. Guam's history of colonialism is the longest among the Pacific islands.
context_section_description: The first known contact between Guam and Western Europe occurred when a Spanish expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer sailing for the Holy Roman Emperor King Charles I of Spain, arrived with his 3-ship fleet in Guam on March 6, 1521 after a long voyage across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, from Spain. History credits the village of Umatac as his landing place, but drawings from the navigator's diary suggest that Magellan may have landed in Tumon in northern Guam. The expedition had started out in Spain with five ships. By the time they reached the Marianas they were down to three ships and nearly half the crew, due to storms, diseases and the mutiny in one ship which destroyed the expedition. Tired and hungry from their long discovery voyage, the crew prepared to go ashore and restore provisions in Guam. However, the excited native Chamorros who had a different concept of ownership, based on subsistence living, canoed out to the ships and began helping themselves to everything that was not nailed down to the deck of the galleons. "The aboriginals were willing to engage in barter... Their love of gain overcame every other consideration." As the Chamorros took everything they found on the ship without asking, Magellan and his crew remembered the island as the "Isla de Ladrones" (Island of Thieves). After a few shots were fired from the Trinidad's big guns, the natives were frightened off from the ship and retreated into the surrounding jungle. Magellan was eventually able to obtain rations and offered iron, a highly prized material, in exchange for fresh fruits, vegetables, and water. Details of this visit, the first in history between Westerners and a Pacific island people, come from the journal of Antonio Pigafetta, the expedition's scribe and one of only 18 crew members to eventually survive the circumnavigation of the globe, completed by Juan Sebastian Elcano.
caption: The island of Guajan (Guam), detail from Carta Hydrographica y Chorographica de las Islas Filipinas (1734)
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