The unhappy life of Samuel Stratton Foster.
This American merchant and adventurer found himself on Guam in the late 1800s, as did many other Americans and Europeans. Our small island of just 8000 or so inhabitants became home to a good number of immigrants of all nationalities.
Foster was someone always on the move. Born in New Jersey, he moved to California by 1849, in the first years of that state's incorporation into the United States. That was the year of the great California Gold Rush. Using California as his home base, he eventually did business in Tahiti and Samoa.
In time he got connected with the Capelle trading company in the Marshall Islands and went to Guam in 1880 as an agent to get some commercial activity going on in Pagan and Agrigan. But he seems to have brought his daughter Jennie along with him, along with her love interest, who happened to be a fellow agent with the Capelle company. His name was Charles H. Ingalls, an American from Boston.
On January 9, 1880, Ingalls and Jennie, Foster's daughter, were married at the Dulce Nombre de Maria Church in Hagåtña by Father Francisco Resano, the Spanish priest. Ingalls was 40 years old; Jennie a mere 19.
Witnesses to the marriage included the Englishman Henry Millinchamp and his Chamorro wife Emilia Castro Anderson. Other witnesses were Mariano de Castro, a government clerk, and Salvador Luján, patriarch of the Åtdot clan which today runs the Lujan Towing company in Aniguak.
A joyful occasion; except that 1880 would also be the year that the bride's father, Samuel Foster, passed away, again on Guam. He died in Hagåtña on November 20th of that year.
In the Spanish records, Foster's last will is found. Its paragraphs reveal a broken man, who both owed money and was owed money, and a man who had severed relationships with his wife and some of his children. As he writes, he had left country, family and friends.
But he hadn't lost everything. He still had Jennie, his loyal daughter, whom, he says, followed him in his "exile." He also found a friend in the first Chamorro priest, Påle' José Palomo, whom Foster made executor of his will. Foster even suggested in his will that, if necessary, Palomo use the Church as a shield against the Spanish government if the civil authorities attempted to grab the assets of the Capelle Company on Guam.
Foster's friend Påle' José Palomo
a friend to many Americans
The Spanish records show that Palomo spoke excellent English. In fact, it was Palomo who translated Foster's will written in English into Spanish for the Spanish Governor to read.
When the Americans took over Guam in 1898 and collided with the Spanish missionaries, some of the Spanish friars wrote that Palomo quietly supported the end of the Spanish regime and the start of the American one. "He was always friendly with the Americans," they said.
Palomo learned to speak English because he was, first of all, very bright, speaking more than one language, and because there were so many British and American seamen and merchants visiting Guam, some of them staying for life, that it was easy to pick up English from them if one wanted to.
Thank you. Jennie was my great grandmother and Samuel was my great-great grandfather. FYI, Hagåtña was called Agaña at that time and later in the early 1950s when we lived in Guam not knowing then the family history.
ReplyDeleteI do think the article is wrong in how he got to Guam. He did definitely go there looking for work. He had been U.S. Consul to Samoa but lost that when President Grant's term ended. After he got to Guam, He wrote a letter to his oldest daughter begging her and the rest of the family, including his estranged wife Jane, to join him on Guam as it was a place where he could surely make his fortune growing food for the sailors. Samuel Foster was always looking for the next great thing and never finding it.
Charles Ingalls and Jennie were definitely with the Capelle company. They went first to Ponape (now Pohnpei) where most of Jennie's children were born. From there they went to Jaluit in the Marshal Islands where their last child, my grandmother, was born.
Ronald Smith