Pohnpei

Pohnpei was settled by seafaring Austronesian peoples more than two thousand years ago, and oral tradition describes the building of an island on the reef as the beginning of its history. From about 1200 until about 1628 the Saudeleur dynasty ruled the whole island from Nan Madol, a complex of about ninety artificial islets of stacked basalt columns laid out with canals off the eastern shore — one of the largest stone monuments in the Pacific and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Tradition holds that a warrior named Isokelekel overthrew the last Saudeleur and divided the island among chiefdoms, the origin of the nahnmwarki system that still exists.

Whaling ships and traders called from the early 19th century, bringing epidemics that cut the population sharply, and American Protestant and later Catholic missionaries followed. Spain asserted control in the 1880s and built a fort at Kolonia, whose wall still stands; Spanish rule was resisted and short-lived, and the Carolines were sold to Germany in 1899. German administration ordered forced labour on roads, which provoked the Sokehs Rebellion of 1910–11; it was put down in early 1911, fifteen rebels were executed and several hundred Sokehs people were deported to Palau.

Japan took the islands in 1914 and ruled them under a League of Nations mandate, settling thousands of Japanese colonists around Kolonia; the island was bypassed by the American island-hopping campaign of 1943–45 rather than invaded. From 1947 Pohnpei was administered by the United States within the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. When the Federated States of Micronesia came into being in the 1980s, Pohnpei became the federal capital, with the new government seat built at Palikir rather than in Kolonia.

Pohnpei is a deeply title-conscious society. Each of its chiefdoms is headed by a nahnmwarki and a nahnken, with long ladders of titles below them, and much of public life turns on them. Status is raised by giving: at a feast, or kamadipw, families present giant yams grown for the purpose, pigs, kava and breadfruit to the chiefs, and honorific titles are conferred in return. Formal speech, a separate respectful vocabulary and the practice of lowering the body when passing a titled person all belong to the same system.

Sakau, a kava pounded from pepper-plant roots on a flat basalt stone and strained through hibiscus bark, is drunk in the evening from a coconut shell, in meeting houses at ceremonies and at roadside bars on ordinary nights. Clan and lineage are traced through the mother, and land and reef rights follow them, which is why visitors are expected to ask permission before crossing ground or swimming off a shore.

Christianity is deeply established and sits over these customs rather than replacing them: Protestant congregations descended from the 19th-century mission and a large Catholic community both fill churches on Sundays, and hymn singing is a strong local tradition. Kolonia is also home to Pohnpeians from the Polynesian atolls to the south, whose languages and dances differ from the main island's, and to long-settled families of Japanese, Filipino and American descent.

About 37,000 people live on Pohnpei, most of them along the coastal belt, with some 6,000 in Kolonia. Government is the largest employer — the state administration in Kolonia and the national government at Palikir — alongside the College of Micronesia, the fishing industry, a handful of hotels and dive lodges and the shops and freight businesses that handle imports. Fishing-licence fees paid by foreign tuna fleets and money sent home by relatives working in Guam, Hawaii and the US mainland matter more to household income than anything produced on the island.

Beyond the town, life runs on subsistence farming and fishing. Households keep plots of taro, yam, banana, breadfruit, cassava and kava under the trees, raise pigs for feasts and fish the lagoon and the deep water outside the reef. Family obligations are heavy, and much of a harvest may go to a feast rather than to market.

The rhythm of the day is early: work and school begin soon after dawn, the heat and the afternoon rain slow things down, and evenings are for church groups, family and sakau. Rain shapes everything, and heavy downpours regularly flood low ground and wash out interior tracks. Current concerns are familiar across Micronesia — imported rice, noodles and tinned meat have displaced much of the traditional diet and brought high rates of diabetes; young people leave for the United States under the Compact of Free Association; and reliance on imported fuel, food and aid leaves the island exposed to disruption elsewhere.

Root crops and breadfruit are the base of Pohnpeian cooking. Several kinds of taro, yams grown to prodigious size for feasts, cassava, banana and breadfruit are boiled, baked or pounded, and coconut appears at every stage, from drinking nuts to grated flesh and thick cream. Reef fish, tuna, octopus, mangrove crab and land crab come from the water, and pigs and chickens are cooked in an earth oven, or uhmw, for feasts, along with mounds of taro and whole fish.

Sashimi is an everyday pleasure rather than a luxury here, cut from tuna landed a few hours earlier and eaten with soy sauce and wasabi — one of several habits left by the Japanese decades, along with a taste for rice, ramen and fried chicken. Kolonia's small restaurants serve grilled and fried fish, rice plates, Japanese and Filipino dishes and American standards, while shops are stacked with imported rice, tinned fish and corned beef, which now make up much of the town diet.

Two local products stand out. Pohnpei black pepper, grown on the wet hillsides, is one of the country's few export crops, sent mainly to Japan, and turns up in shops and market stalls. And sakau, though a drink rather than a food, is the thing most associated with the island: earthy, mildly sedating, poured from a hibiscus-fibre strainer into a coconut shell and drunk in quick succession in the evening. Bananas, pawpaw, mangoes, limes and the fragrant pandanus fruit fill out the market tables.