For many decades, spanning the Spanish, German, and Japanese administrations, scores of Chamorro families left the Marianas to make a life on the island of Yap in the Carolines. The first arrivals were men and women from Guam, drawn in the late nineteenth century as teachers and settlers under Spain's colonial government. Among them was Ascension Martinez Cruz, who met and married a Spanish soldier named Pascual Artero y Saez. Later, during the German and Japanese periods, families from Saipan—names like Untalan, Cruz, and Diaz—joined them, establishing roots in Yap town and across its outlying districts.
Life on Yap was steady for a time. Chamorros worked as copra traders, carpenters, cooks, and radio operators. They sailed their own boats, spoke Chamorro at home, and picked up Yapese and Japanese. They held fast to their language and customs, living comfortably until the war arrived and shattered the island’s trading economy into a hand-to-mouth existence.
The war brought darker tragedies than economic ruin. In September 1944, a Chamorro woman of the Untalan family, her Filipino husband named Hondonero, and their children were taken to Palau alongside a Spanish Jesuit priest, a lay brother, and a weather observer. None of them survived the execution that followed.
When peace returned, the Chamorros faced another departure. As local historian Pale Eric Forbes and scholar Alexander Spoehr noted, the Yapese chiefs sought to rebuild their own government free of a sizable minority population. It was not born of malice or hatred; the Yapese bade farewell to their longtime friends and invited them to return if life in the Marianas proved unsatisfactory.
The movement unfolded in two distinct waves. The Navy's Civil Affairs Division offered land in the Marianas matching what the families held on Yap. In 1946, the former Saipan-based families returned to their island of origin. Two years later, following an inspection by an advance party of eighteen in February 1948, the remaining group prepared to leave.
On April 18, 1948, aboard the navy ship LST 803, the last of the Yap Chamorros boarded for Tinian, closing a long chapter of exile and returning to the home islands.
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