Food for Iron

CHamorus Trade With Europeans

Though it hardly could be called fair trade – an officer on the Trinidad, one of Magellan’s vessels, wrote that the islanders traded “coconuts and fish in abundance in exchange for a few glass beads from Spain” – members of the matao, the highest-ranking strata of Mariana Islands society in the 16th and 17th centuries, carried on the first sustained commercial exchange between Pacific Islanders and Europeans. From Ferdinand Magellan’s 1521 visit through the establishment of the 1668 Spanish Jesuit mission, these island traders regularly bartered food staples and craft work for iron and other goods with Spanish exploration and trade vessels, Dutch expeditions, and English privateers. Learn more about the trading practices of early CHamorus and European visitors to the Marianas at Guampedia entry “The Matao Iron Trade Part I: Contact and Commerce.”