Nan Madol

In the lagoon at Ponape there are ruins of an ancient city. The city consists of more than 90 separate man made islands in the shallow tidal flats of the lagoon.

The Ponapeans have legends about the fabled, megalithic city of Nan Madol. I was told that it was built over 1,000 years ago by an ancient race of giants called the Saudeleurs, and that a Japanese expedition several decades ago had found some larger than normal human bones buried here. It is also believed by some to have been built by the ancestors of today's Ponapeans. But the truth is that no one really knows who built the city of Nan Madol or what happened to them.

Nan Madol is considered by the Ponapeans to be a "forbidden city", a place not to be visited after dark.

At the dock in Kolonia we chartered a small aluminum boat for the trip out to the ruins. It took at least a couple of hours to get there.

Nan Madol is built in a shallow part of the lagoon. I guess you'd call the area a "mangrove swamp" or "mangrove plain". As we approached the ancient city the water got shallower and shallower. Eventually the water was too shallow for the outboard motor and one of the Ponapeans began to pole the boat like a Venitian boatman. After a few minutes more we were walking, sloshing through the shallows with the boat in tow.

Soon we were walking through the thick jungle in a shallow, walled canal. The water was only a few inches deep, and the seawalls were 3 or 4 feet high. Other canals intersected it from the right and the left, and I soon realized that we had entered a network of canals, and that these canals were the "streets" of the city of Nan Madol.

The entire city was made of huge hexagonal columns of volcanic basalt, some of them 2 or 3 feet in diameter and as much as 30 or 40 feet long! Each column weighed at least several tons. The columns were laid out and stacked atop each other, sort of like the way tree trunks are stacked to build a log cabin.

The islands themselves had been constructed by enclosing large, roughly square areas with sea walls and then filling them in with rocks and coral. The canals between the islands were only navigable by motor boat at high tide, although canoes could travel them at any time except the lowest of tides.

We hadn't gone far when we came to the largest and most intact structure at Nan Madol, the great fortress known as Nan Dowas. It was on what looked to be the largest of the islands, maybe 3 or 4 acres. The fortress, like the seawalls, had been constructed of stacked basalt columns, but unlike the rest of the city the jungle had been cleared away from it. It enclosed a square area of about an acre. Standing atop this fortress wall I could see other similar, but partially toppled walls in the surrounding jungle.

The outer wall of the fortress looked to be about 30 ft. high at it's tallest points, the corners, and maybe 8 ft. thick at the base.

The basalt columns used at Nan Madol had been quarried many miles away, probably at Sokeh's Rock and/or Pwisehn Malek (Chicken Shit mountain!). Then they were carried or floated to Nan Madol and lifted into place

There was only one opening, maybe 12 ft. wide, through the outer wall of the fortress. It was in the middle of the wall facing the canal. A walkway of sun bleached crushed coral led from the stone steps at the canal through this "gate", and then through a similar gap in the shorter, inner wall and finally to a strange, bunker-like structure at the center of the fortress.

The short, square bunker had one small opening into the basalt lined inner room, and the floor was several feet lower than the surrounding ground, providing almost enough room to stand up inside. I suppose the small bunker would have provided a final, desparate line of defense for a neolithic Saudeleur king faced with an army of spear wielding Ponapeans that had breached the high walls. But it seemed to me more likely that it had some sort of religious function, maybe like the kivas used by the American natives of the southwest United States.