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CHamoru Cultural Values Workshop

Summary Workshop Report epublication. In May-June 2016, Guam is hosting the Festival of the Pacific Arts (FestPac), a region-wide festival celebrating the various arts and cultures of the Pacific. FestPac 2016 will showcase traditional performances, arts and craft displays and demonstrations, music and story-telling. Hosting the Pacific wide festival represents an important and exciting opportunity to highlight cultural identity and heritage among a diverse group of Pacific islanders, many of whom share a colonial past and have felt its impact on traditional practices and lifestyles.

POP Cultures: Australia

Australia, often touted as the world’s largest island but smallest continent, is home to aboriginal and indigenous oceanic peoples. With a total area of 7.69 million sq km, Australia is divided into six states and two territories. It is the sixth largest nation in the world and the only continent that is governed as a single country. The population is roughly 23 million people.

SMS Cormoran: 90th Anniversary

In 2007, Guam commemorated the 90th anniversary of the scuttling of the SMS Cormoran II. The festivities included wreath-laying ceremonies at Apra Harbor and the US Naval Cemetery in Hagåtña, and a series of lectures and an exhibit. Surviving descendants of the original crew and other German representatives were invited to participate. Hosted by the Guam Visitors Bureau and the Department of Parks and Recreation, the week-long celebration was just one way to remember and celebrate the Cormoran and its crew.

La Nao de China: The Spanish Treasure Fleet System

The Manila Galleons. On 15 August 1568 the Spanish galleon San Pablo, anchored off the southwest coast of Guam, was hit by a sudden violent storm and was blown and battered onto a nearby coast. The 132 men sailing from Spain’s newly established Philippine colony began a three-month stay on Guam which allowed for intensive interaction with the CHamoru people, alternating between periods of trade and cooperation, and confrontation and violence. The Spanish sailors eventually converted the galleon’s boat into a large bark to return to the Philippines.

SMS Cormoran II: Local Stories

From December 1914 to April 1917, Guam was the backdrop for one of the earliest stories of the United States’ participation in World War I. The first violent shots between the US and Germany were fired on Guam. The first German casualties and deaths occurred in the waters of Apra Harbor, Guam. The first POWs were imprisoned on Guam.

SMS Cormoran II: Non-German Crew Members

When the SMS Cormoran II arrived in Guam in December 1914, among the hundreds of crew members were individuals who worked on the vessel but were not German. Twenty-nine men originally from German New Guinea in the South Pacific and four Chinese men from Tsingtao stayed on Guam along with their German counterparts for the duration of the Cormoran’s internment at Apra Harbor.

The SMS Cormoran II Crew – Prisoners of War

After more than two years of internment on the United States territory of Guam, the German cruiser SMS Cormoran II was scuttled by its crew in Apra Harbor on 7 April 1917 to prevent it becoming a spoil of war between the US and Germany.

SMS Cormoran II: Partial Crew List

The partial list presented here that researcher James Oelke-Farley compiled for Guampedia, indicates only 108 crew members. The list was cross-checked with message traffic from the US State Department and prison records. However, Oelke-Farley explains that when the men arrived in the US they often were no longer referred to by the ship upon which they served as crew members (the crew of the SMS Geier which had been interned in Honolulu was combined with the Comoran’s crew on the way to the prisoner of war camp in Fort Douglas, Utah) but rather simply as “POWs” or “German Navy,” which has made an exact identification of every man difficult.

Cormoran-Südseefahrer: SMS Cormoran Crew Annual Meetings

By 1920, after the end of World War I, the men of the SMS Cormoran II who had been taken as prisoners of war by the United States were returned to their home country of Germany. The experience of being interned In Guam and then in US POW camps bonded these men together in a significant and personal way. Even though they went their separate ways back to their families the men of the Cormoran met yearly for over 40 years to remember, share stories, mourn lost comrades and stay in touch.

Captain Adalbert Zuckschwerdt

Adalbert Zuckschwerdt (1874 – 1945) was the captain of the German raider SMS Cormoran and its successor SMS Cormoran II which sailed to Guam from Tsingtao (Qingdao), China in 1914 in the early months of World War I. For more than two years, Zuckschwerdt and his crew remained in Guam until the United States entered the conflict in April 1917, and the SMS Cormoran II was scuttled by the Germans in Apra Harbor.