From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle p. 242:
The first Spaniards reaching the remote Marianas islands noted how tall and fit they were, and recent examination of remains suggests they had a life expectancy of 44 years, much higher than in Europe at the time. The islands had been settled some 3,000 earlier, from either Luzon or Sulawesi, and had typical Austronesian characteristics such as a matrilineal system, weaving skills and megaliths known as latte stones, and a language, Chamorro, roughly comprehensible to Ferdinand Magellan’s Malay interpreter. Magellan (in Portuguese ‘Fernão Magalhães’, in Spanish ‘Fernando Magallanes’) was so impressed with their sailing skills that he called them the ‘Islas de Velas Latinas’ (‘Isles of the Lateen Sails’) after their small but remarkably agile sailing craft. The late sixteenth century Spanish document known as the Boxer Codex noted that their lateen sails were made of waxen palm leaves of many colours and designs. The boats could sail very fast whatever the wind strength and direction. The people were described as ‘thickset with large and stout limbs […] larger than we are’. They had a ‘pleasant appearance’ apart from filed teeth and widespread yaws – a disfiguring but not fatal skin disease common in the tropics. However, less appreciative Spaniards called them the ‘Islas Ladrones’ (‘Robber Islands’) on account of their sense of communal possession, a name which lingered long after they were renamed Marianas in 1668 after Mariana, widow of Spain’s King Philip IV. They are now divided as Guam, the largest, which is an unincorporated US territory, and the Northern Marianas, a US-dependent Commonwealth.
Far Outliers 