Department of Foreign Aff / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Palikir
Population: 75,000+
Language: English, Chuukese, Pohnpeian, Kosraean, Yapes
1 – Yap
Yap, the westernmost state of the Federated States of Micronesia, is famous for rai, limestone discs up to about 3.6 m across, used as money but quarried not on Yap at all but in Palau, about 400 km away, and carried home by canoe and raft.
Rai stand in stone money banks along Yap’s village paths, and in the main harbour lies O’Keefe’s Island, named after David Dean O’Keefe, an Irish-born sea captain who arrived in the early 1870s, grew rich carrying Yapese to Palau to quarry rai in exchange for copra, and was played by Burt Lancaster in the 1954 film His Majesty O’Keefe.
A Yapese stone’s worth lay in its size, craftsmanship and history rather than where it sat, so when one huge rai sank in a storm on the voyage home, everyone agreed it lay intact on the seabed, and it went on being owned and traded by people who had never seen it.
2 – Chuuk
Chuuk Lagoon, a ring of high volcanic islands inside a vast barrier reef, was seized by Japan from Germany during the First World War and built up into the Imperial Navy’s main forward base in the central Pacific, often called the Gibraltar of the Pacific.
On 17 and 18 February 1944, American carrier aircraft struck Chuuk in Operation Hailstone, sinking around 40 ships and destroying some 250 aircraft, and the wrecks on the lagoon floor, many with their cargo aboard, are widely regarded as one of the world’s great wreck-diving sites.
Kimiuo Aisek watched the Hailstone raid on Chuuk at the age of 17, and in 1973 he opened the Blue Lagoon Dive Shop, helping to find the wrecks and urging divers to respect them as war graves, while the wrecks were listed on the US National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
3 – Nan Madol, Pohnpei
Nan Madol, off Pohnpei’s south-east coast beside Temwen Island, is a city of nearly 100 artificial islets divided by tidal canals, built of stacked basalt columns and coral fill from about 1180, the seat of the Saudeleur dynasty, who ruled Pohnpei until about 1628.
Boats reach Nan Madol’s royal mortuary, Nandauwas, whose basalt walls rise to about 7.5 m, and in 2016, the site was inscribed as a World Heritage site and placed at once on the danger list, with its canals silting and mangroves spreading through the stonework.
One of the earliest written accounts of Nan Madol came from James O’Connell, a sailor who said he was born in Dublin, shipwrecked on Pohnpei in the late 1820s, and its builders moved an estimated 750,000 tonnes of stone, which Pohnpeian legend credits to two sorcerer brothers, Olisihpa and Olosohpa.
4 – Lelu, Kosrae
Lelu, a small island just off Kosrae, was home to the island’s high chiefs from about 1250 until the mid-1800s, a walled town of compounds and canals behind a seawall over a kilometre long, and Pohnpeian tradition says the warrior Isokelekel, who overthrew the Saudeleur, came from Kosrae.
The ruins of Lelu stand behind the modern village, where high basalt walls laid header-and-stretcher, like a log cabin, enclose the compounds of the ruler and high chiefs, alongside sacred compounds and the royal tombs.
Lelu’s royal tombs, where bodies lay for months before the bones were reburied on the reef, were built of coral cut from the reef, and uranium dating of that coral in 2015 put them as early as the 1300s, about 300 years older than once thought, making Lelu a rival centre to Nan Madol.