ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to correct some of the more egregious and longstanding misperceptions of the first European colonial incursion into Oceania. The progression in Spanish policy throughout the period was from conversion to conquest—but conquest only in the belief that the was necessary to achieve the Christianization of the people, for the Spanish government's sole raison d'ere throughout was to support the missionary enterprise. However high-minded Spanish aims may have been in the Marianas, the period of early conquest and colonization clearly saw an enormous reduction in the Chamorro population, nearly to the point of extinction. Historians differ in the role that they assign the Jesuit missionaries in these events, but they agree that Spanish soldiery, which supposedly a century before had massacred large numbers of natives in Mexico and Peru, was again guilty of near genocide in the Marianas.
