Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Northern Mariana Islands: A Deep and Vast History with Sharon McMahon

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

In today’s episode, Sharon continues her tour of the U.S territories by talking about the history of the Northern Mariana Islands. This island territory is not well-known to mainland Americans–we don’t talk about them very often–so consider this your crash course! The Northern Mariana Islands are a submerged mountain chain in the Pacific Ocean near Guam. Learn the name the explorer Ferdinand Magellan gave to the island chain, and who it was ultimately named after, along with other facts, like the cultures that have influenced the islands, the incredible depths of the Mariana Trench, and which famous Hollywood director made history in the Marianas. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello friends, welcome. As always, I'm so happy you're joining me and I've got some great stuff to share with you today. We've been talking quite a bit about the various territories of the United States. How do they get to be a territory? And today I want to talk to you about the Northern Mariana Islands. But there's more to this story than just how did the United States acquire it? So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon.

And welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Sharon McMahon. And welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Okay, first of all, a lot of people, when I say Northern Mariana Islands, do you know any of those? Can you name any of them? Most people are like, no. And that's okay. We don't talk about them very often. But after today's episode, you're going to know more. So Guam, which we've talked about previously, is actually part of the archipelago of islands that make up the Northern Marianas, but Guam is distinct. It is politically separate than the rest of the Northern Mariana Island chain, And that is largely related to some of the history we're about to talk about. So the Northern Mariana Islands are actually a submerged mountain range. And that submerged mountain range extends about 1500 miles from Guam to near Japan in the Pacific Ocean. And geographically, the

Marianas are part of a larger region called Micronesia. And they have a total land area of about 389 square miles. There are three main islands that are inhabited and a large number of smaller islands that are largely uninhabited. So the three main islands we're going to be discussing today are Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. And again, Guam, also part of the chain, but politically separate from Saipan, Tinian, and Rota and the other uninhabited islands. So these islands are very well known for their beautiful beaches. They're heavily, heavily forested. In the case of Saipan, about 80% of the island is covered in forest. The scuba diving is amazing. And the history is old. Archaeological studies of human activity on these islands has revealed things like pottery that go back to about

1500 BC. The first known inhabitants of the Northern Marianas came from the Philippines and Indonesia more than 4,000 years ago. And these became known as the Chamorro or the Chamorro people. And they had very cool homes that were built on giant pillars of stones. And of course, as one can imagine, once European explorers like Ferdinand Magellan began making contact with these islands in the 1500s, these islands inhabitants began to experience incredible amounts of disease that they had no immunity to. In fact, throughout about 100 years, the island's population went from about 50,000 people to about 1,800 indigenous people. people to about 1,800 indigenous people. Some of them were lost because of fighting and war accidents, certainly, but most of them were lost because of disease. So the islands became Spanish territory in about the 1500s, and Magellan's first contact with the Marianas, he would encounter farmers, hunters, fishermen, and most of them were not particularly friendly to him and they pillaged his ship.

And so Magellan named the islands the Island of Thieves. And of course, those islands were renamed in the 1600s after the Spanish king's widow, Maria Anna. And so now they're called the Marianas. Zooming ahead a little bit to the 1800s, these islands became German territories. So the end of the 1800s, they became German territories. Large influx of people from the Caroline Islands in the 1800s who began to intermarry with the remaining indigenous Shimoro people. And then the islands came under Japanese control during World War I. Japan seized all of Germany's colonial possessions in East Asia and Micronesia, including the Northern Marianas, and held them throughout the war. And so that was one thing that really has made the Northern Marianas distinct from Guam, is that they were held and occupied by Japan from about the time of roughly 1917 until World War II. So for 30 years,

Japan occupied the Northern Marianas, and they sought actively to assimilate many of the people that were living there into Japanese culture. They taught them Japanese. They built businesses. So this was a distinction from what was happening on Guam, where Japan invaded Guam, wiped out a lot of people on Guam, and it was not a quote-unquote friendly occupying force the way the Northern Marianas experienced. Now, when I say friendly, I mean, obviously, would you rather not be occupied? Yes. But nevertheless, Japan was attempting to establish communities on the Northern Marianas that did not happen on Guam. This island chain became incredibly important during World War II. Incredibly important. So after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the United States obviously became involved

in World War II. And in 1944, the U.S. captured the Mariana Islands from Japan. And the U.S. wanted the Marianas so that they could use them as a bombing base to reach the Japanese mainland. There was a very, very well-known battle of Europe, World War II, the Battle of Saipan. Saipan is in the northern Marianas, as I mentioned. So Saipan and Tinian used extensively by the U.S. military. And it was from Tinian, one of these Northern Mariana Islands, that the Enola Gay was launched. These are the bomber planes that dropped atomic weapons on Japan. And the United States conducted a lot of very intense strategic bombing campaigns against Japanese cities, against the Japanese

military, things that were of industrial importance in Tokyo and Osaka, etc. We can now see why the United States wanted them because of how close they were to Japan. It allowed our planes to reach the Japanese mainland from an area that we controlled. Mariana Island historians estimate that roughly 10% of the population of these islands was wiped out by violence during World War II. They were wiped out by Japanese army and navy, wiped out by fighting amongst multiple occupying forces. If you can imagine you're on a small island and both the United States and Japan are fighting each other on your island, you are absolutely going to have civilian casualties, things that you were not planning on. So when the U.S. invaded

the Marianas, they destroyed the Japanese-created economy on the islands. And after the war, because the United States destroyed it, the United States began the task of rebuilding. Some people don't realize this, that after World War II, the United States then helped all of the countries that it fought rebuild their economies. The United States helped Germany rebuild its economy, helped Japan rebuild its economy. It helped them militarily. It helped them economically. It helped other countries that were affected by the war. And it did the same in the Northern Marianas. And so in 1947, President Truman signed an agreement with the UN to administer the Northern Marianas as a district for what was referred to as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands in Micronesia. And the United States assumed responsibility for the administration. It actually gave that duty to the United States Navy. And in the 1950s, Japan renounced all of their claims to the Northern Marianas.

And the trusteeship of the Northern Marianas was then transferred to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. And the United States pledged as part of the document, this is a quote, to promote development towards self-government or independence as may be appropriate. So throughout the 20th century, the Northern Marianas gained additional ability to govern themselves, elect their own governors, write their own constitutions, and they were granted U.S. citizenship. And you have heard me talk about this with our other episodes related to U.S. territories. Maybe you can recite it from memory now. These are U.S. citizens who can vote in local elections, but they cannot vote for president. Why? Because they do not live in a state. And the Electoral College requires that only states participate in the election of the president.

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wherever you get your podcasts. In 1986, the United States declared its trusteeship over the Marianas ended and then entered into a covenant agreement with them that the United States and the Northern Mariana Islands would exist in a political union. And the U.S. Department of the Interior would administer federal funds that were being allocated to the Northern Marianas. And it wasn't until 2008 that the Northern Marianas sent a delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time. And again, if you've listened to my other episodes, I bet you'll remember that that delegate can act in an advisory capacity, but they cannot vote on the passage of bills. A couple of other very interesting things that you might not know about this island chain. The first one is that beginning in the late 20th century, the Northern Marianas became a production center for the garment industry. Big, big garment manufacturers, names you 100% know. If I

listed them off, you'd be like, oh yes, I know that. I know that. I know that. Use the Northern Marianas as a place to produce their garments. They could import large numbers of workers from places like Bangladesh, China, the Philippines, other Asian countries, because the Northern Marianas were not subjected to labor laws that are present in mainland United States. And so they could produce garments much more cheaply, but still claim that they were made in the United States. And it wasn't until investigations happened years later that demonstrated the incredibly poor working conditions. In some cases, it seemed as though people were enslaved. They would go into these garment manufacturing facilities and find people locked in rooms,

unable to leave, or at least without the financial resources to be able to leave. They'd signed contracts. They didn't have a way to get home. And there was a lot of worker exploitation. It wasn't until 2007 that the United States government enacted minimum wage legislation that included the Northern Marianas for the first time. And of course, we all know that just because a law passes, it doesn't mean that, wow, everything's fixed. Well, it's been fixed. I mean, if that's how it worked, great. We'd have no crime whatsoever, right? So it took a while for the garment industry to change and for the exploitation of workers to begin to be diminished. Okay, we have to get to the part that I am like, that is so interesting, which is a geographic feature on planet Earth that is named for the Mariana Islands. And that

is the Mariana Trench. Have you heard of it before? It is the deepest place in the ocean. It is so deep that if you put Mount Everest inside of it, Mount Everest would still be more than a mile underwater. That is how deep the Mariana Trench is. And it is nearby this island chain. I find this so, so, so interesting. It is over almost 36,000 feet deep. The water that is inside the Mariana Trench hovers between 35 and 39 degrees Fahrenheit. So just slightly above freezing. It's so deep that there's no

sunlight whatsoever that reaches this part of the ocean. So it's pitch black, freezing cold, deep water. And the pressure that is experienced inside the Mariana Trench is about 80 times more than you would be experiencing from the atmosphere at sea level. So can a human survive under those conditions? Of course not. Even if you could hold your breath to get that deep in the water, you couldn't survive the incredible amount of pressure. deep in the water. You couldn't survive the incredible amount of pressure. So how did humans discover that the Mariana Trench was so deep? Well, there was an expedition called the Challenger Expedition. And this was an expedition from Great Britain. And it was a ship called the Challenger. There was later one called the Challenger II that used sounding equipment, which are like weighted anchors that help people determine the depth of the ocean. And these are expeditions that were designed to map the world's

oceans. So in the 1800s, this Challenger expedition was like, hold up, hold up. This is real deep. And of course, it took some time to get really, really accurate measurements of exactly how deep this place is that we're talking about. So this trench was caused from the two tectonic plates colliding. And at the collision point, one of the plates sort of dives underneath the other plate, actually into the mantle of the Earth. That's how deep we're talking here. The Challenger expedition estimated that the depth of the Mariana Trench was about five miles deep. And so of course it actually is quite a bit deeper than that, but that was how deep they were able to measure using

the equipment they had on board. And it wasn't until the 1950s that the Challenger II returned to this spot with echo sounders and more advanced equipment, and they were able to measure a depth of nearly seven miles. undertake a dive to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, which is one of the deepest parts of the Mariana Trench. And that was Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and oceanographer Jacques Picard. And they went in a U.S. Navy submersible, and it took them five hours to get to the bottom. And once they were down there, they realized like, oh, snap, we kicked up so much sediment on the bottom that they were unable to take any pictures because you couldn't see anything. But until 1960, until this historic dive from Picard and Walsh, Until this historic dive from Picard and Walsh, scientists had debated whether or not life could even exist under such extreme pressure. But once they got down there, they turned on their floodlight and their light illuminated a creature. Picard wrote later, here in an instant was the answer that biologists had asked for decades.

Could life exist in the greatest depths of the ocean? And with one little flick of a light, they discovered that it could. By the way, scientists had often believed that calcium could only exist in solution at that depth because of the incredible pressure, that bones were impossible. Bones, of course, made of calcium. And without bones, you don't have a fish. And so there has long been this debate about whether or not fish can live in the Mariana Trench because of the incredible pressure. So in 2012, another man descended to the depths of the Mariana Trench, director James Cameron, the director of the Titanic, the director of Avatar, obviously has an incredible love of exploring and underwent months of training to be able to make this journey. Tons of submarine simulators because he was going to go down alone. And the submersible that he was going to descend in, the almost seven mile deep valley,

the almost seven mile deep valley. Nobody had visited since 1960. And he was going to go down in this very small, very claustrophobic looking little capsule type situation. Even National Geographic described the vehicle that he was going to descend in, the submersible, even National Geographic described it as a coffin. And I was like, oh no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. It was so small that he was really even unable to move or straighten his arms and legs. And it took him a couple of hours to get to the bottom. And once he was down there, he used the equipment that he had been training to use, a robot claw, a slurp gun for sucking up tiny little sea creatures, instruments to measure temperature and pressure gauges and how much salt was in the water. And then he was going to take all of that and return it to scientists so that they could use that information for scientific discoveries. So Jacques Picard has died.

Don Walsh was still alive in 2012. And Don Walsh was like, there's only three of us and only two of us are alive. Only two people on planet Earth have ever been where we've been. And Walsh said that was a grand moment to welcome him to the club. So James Cameron's little vehicle had 3D video cameras, and he was planning to release all this on National Geographic. You can see a ton of the footage now. They took all kinds of videos. They had lots of lights. And he had been training by doing tests where they would go down five miles under the water, which is incredibly deep, but not quite as deep as the seven miles under that he needed to go.

And testing, can James Cameron, who at the time was 57, is he going to be physically okay if he does this dive? And they finally determined, yes, he is. He's going to be fine. He's in good shape. He's been is. He's going to be fine. He's in good shape. He's been training. He's going to be great. So one of the things they were concerned about was because he was going alone and you're going under these extraordinarily harsh conditions, was that he was going to get fatigued. And once you start getting fatigued, you start making

mistakes. And this is not a quick journey, right? You don't just like go down there like, hey, what's up? And then head back up. Takes you a long time to get down and a long time to get back up. Ultimately, he made the journey successfully. And one person who was part of the team that put together this entire journey for him said, I consider Cameron to be doing for the trenches what Jacques Cousteau did for the ocean many decades ago. Another one of James Cameron's friends said he is down there

on behalf of everybody else on this planet. There are 7 billion people who can't go and he can, billion people who can't go and he can and he's aware of that so i'm curious would you descend to the depths of the mariana trench given the opportunity if somebody's like it's free here you go make some scientific discoveries would you do it i would absolutely not do it? I would absolutely not do it. I love you science, but I would not do it. There is nothing down there that I want to see. Only creepy things live where the sun don't shine. But you know what? I appreciate other people that do it because learning about these things is so endlessly fascinating. I love to learn about it, even though I would not personally want to do it myself. Okay, let's recap some of the things we've learned. These islands are distinct from Guam politically.

They were inhabited by Japan for more than 30 years. The islands were inhabited by indigenous people who traveled from places like the Philippines and Indonesia for many, many thousands of years. Many of them were wiped out by germs from European explorers. Japan seized control of the islands from Germany in the late 1800s. And it wasn't until after World War II that they became part of the United, a Commonwealth of the United States. And these are islands with incredible beaches and forests, very remote. It's still like a many, many, many hour flight, like five to seven hours, depending on weather from Honolulu to even get

there. Incredibly remote, about 50,000 people live on these islands total. But it is nearby the deepest part of the ocean on planet Earth. So I hope you learned something new. Thank you so much for being here. It's just a delight to make these podcasts for you. Thanks for listening. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched

by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time. Hey, Torontonians. Recycling is more than a routine. It's a vital responsibility. By recycling properly, you help conserve resources, reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, and protect the environment. Toronto's Blue Bin Recycling Program ensures the majority of the right items are recovered and transformed into new products.

Recycling right is important and impactful. Let's work together and make a difference. Because small actions lead to big products. Recycling right is important and impactful. Let's work together and make a difference because small actions lead to big change. For more tips on recycling, visit toronto.ca slash recycle right.