Round about 1100 A.D., one of Pohnpei’s chiefs decided to erect himself a compound, a series of buildings that would act as the proverbial county seat and leave a legacy of his power and status after he was gone. Not an uncommon urge among ruler types with a god complex and a handy supply of slave labor. Think Egypt. Think terra cotta warriors of the Q’uin dynasty. Think lots of heavy rocks and a bunch of tired guys encouraged in not so subtle ways to carry them around. Think wonders of the ancient world that to this day boggle the minds of modern man in their complexity, innovation, and the sheer amount of work required to turn a megalomaniacal dream into reality. The place I visited on Pohnpei deserves recognition alongside Stonehenge, the pyramids of Egypt, the heads on Easter Island, and other of man’s mammoth undertakings the mystery of which’s origins, purpose, and construction methods last as long as the edifices themselves. If you ever go to Micronesia, put the ruins of Nan Madol on your list.
Pohnpei is, along with Chuuk, one of the four island states in Micronesia. It is the country’s capitol, with friendly people, a clean and beautiful environment, and solid infrastructure as far as Pacific Islands go. A welcome departure from Chuuk. Though settled around 200 A.D., not much is known of Pohnpei’s history before the 1100’s, at which time a tyrannical dynasty called the Saudeleurs took control of the population. Determining the need for a power base from which to rule, one of the Saudeleur kings selected a building site on the island’s eastern side, hired some architects, and gently suggested that his subjects limber up for some exercise in the form of several consecutive lifetimes of heavy lifting.
Nan Madol is located at the edge of a small island, Temwen, just off Pohnpei. Temwen is in a shallow tidal zone shielded from the open ocean by a fringing reef, beyond which perfect barrels tirelessly hammer the protecting coral, Inside, however, the water is shallow and calm right up to the mangrove growth on the edge of the island. When I say that Nan Madol is on the edge of Temwen, what I really mean is that it is off the edge of Temwen. Imagine the faces of the royal dynastic engineering corps when the boss explained to them that the plan was to construct a city in the shallow waters of the tidal flat next to the island. It must have been like telling your contractor today that you want your four bedroom family home to levitate a few inches off the ground.
So. Build a city. In the water. Step one is to figure out how to get the buildings above the water. Going to need to make some islands. Sounds so easy from a modern day perspective once you see pictures of Dubai, but we’re talking 1100 A.D. here. Luckily, Pohnpei is volcanic. It is made of basalt, a hard, dense, black stone formed by the partial melting of the earth’s mantle. Through the forces of geothermal heat, pressure, and subsequent cooling, basalt naturally forms large crystals with a hexagonal cross-section. Large is such a nebulous word. I say crystals and maybe you are thinking rock candy, or eighth-grade science projects with a string dangling in a supersaturated salt solution mixed with some food coloring, or a head shop in the Haight with some really pretty geodes. Readjust your thinking to include a six sided log of ferrous rock as big as a telephone pole weighing up to 50 tons. Technically it’s a crystal. Nothing you want to lay on your chest to tune up your chakras, but still a crystal.
Unfortunately these crystals, good island building material that they are, had to be quarried and transported from Pohnpei island proper. Unfortunate for the guys who had to do the dragging and the grunt work, but fortunate for the designers and engineers as, though they will never be individually recognized or exalted or studied the way Khufu (forgive the spelling) might, their ingenuity and methods are still a stumper. How do you move a 50 ton log over land and, better yet, water? Get enough guys with ropes and something you can use for wheels and you can move heavy rocks. Ask the Egyptians. But how do you float them, circa 1100? Nobody’s figured it out, and that includes some folks on one of those cable channels who recently did a special on the place and put modern engineers and eggheads with fancy computer modeling software on the case, and still left scratching their heads. Check it out on your net TV viewing station of choice by searching Nan Madol and you too will scratch.
Okay, gloss over the genius and the labor required to move these logs of stone. Levitate them from the quarry to the shore into the water and to the site. Stack them horizontally in square and rectangular matrices to create retaining walls that stick up out of the water along the tidal flats and the reef area. Fill the walls with coral rubble and rock, and you have an artificial islet. Repeat. 92 times. In a grid every bit as thought out as a city zoning plan, better than most, in fact. Over a 220 acre area stretching half a mile by a mile. Leaving a navigable series of waterways and canals between the islets. Can you tell how desperately I am trying to convey the enormity of this achievement?
It gets better, of course, because now you have all these islets sticking out of the water. Level them properly and build a city on them. Temples, burial complexes, ritual sites, meeting areas, housing, bathing pools, holding pens for food fish and turtles, food preparation sites, ceremony sites, all separate islets. They built an islet for coconut processing. Unreal.
What did they use for building material? Was it coconut logs and thatch? Some of the structures surely were, but remember those big chunks of basalt? Many of the edifices were constructed with them, are still standing, and are wildly impressive. The least ruinlike island of the ruins is Nan Douwas. The outer walls of the compound are twenty-five feet tall, made of basalt crystals stacked like lincoln logs. They tower above the crushed coral walkway that surrounds the outer edge of the island, dripping history and lichens. Pass between the soaring walls, down the main walk, and into the inner compound, another series of walls and sanctums that served as burial chambers and crypts for members of the Saudeleur dynasty. Big buildings of stacked stone with stairs and crawlways leading inside, cool dark interiors with slits of bright equatorial sun winking in from between the rocks and somewhere underfoot the millennium old remnants of the family who built and ruled this place. When I say crypt, and ancient ruin, are you getting an Indiana Jones vibe? It was definitely there. I kept recalling one of the scenes in the latest of those films, one of the scenes I didn’t sleep through, where they are looking for whatever the macguffin is in the ruins where the midget savages jump them. If midget savages were ever going to jump me outside a Hollywood set, this would be the spot.
I make light, but the whole experience was awe-inspiring. After exploring Nan Douwas, we got into kayaks and paddled all over the compound, through the thoroughly thought out and planned canals between the islets, outside to the lagoon between the fringing wall that protected the city and the reef, past the ocean entrance to the city, navigating a grid as neat and orderly as a planned community. Everything was bursting with life, from mangrove swamps and lush vegetation to water birds hunting in the shallows to marbled rays spooking underneath the boats as we paddled above them. The jungle and the ocean were slowly reclaiming this place, creating a harmony between the man-made and the natural usually only experienced in ancient places. Somehow it became impossible to tell if the ruins were slowly fading away or if they were somehow maturing and revealing themselves after centuries of incubation.
In traveling along the canals we were moving in the spaces between the islets, just as while exploring the walkways, crypts, meditation chambers, and walled compounds, we were moving in the spaces between the structures. I don’t want to get too spiritual or insinuate that I profoundly understand anything about this ancient culture, but I was certainly moved by the experience, more so after finding out that the name of the place, Nan Madol, is loosely translated as ‘the spaces in between.’
Technologically staggering edifices of near incomprehensible magnificence don’t just pop up, or every culture would have created them. When you think of all the people who have gone before us, there is scant little evidence to mark their passing, and precious few monuments of them survive. In a modern world where indoor ski slopes, impossibly tall skyscrapers, massive bridges, and channel stretching tunnels seem commonplace, it is a treat to get to witness an ancient and still inexplicable marvel built in a time when everything was done with hand tools, elbow grease, and lots and lots of vine ropes. I’m just glad we didn’t live in Pohnpei around 1100 A.D. to see it happen, because they probably would have insisted that we pitch in and help.
