Ponape

Ponape
Location	Pacific Ocean
Also known as	Pohnpei
Type	Island
Notable Features	Ruined city of Nan Madol
First appearance	HPL: The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Created by	H. P. Lovecraft (fictional version)

Ponape, correctly spelled Pohnpei, is a real-world island in the Pacific Ocean, part of the Caroline Islands group and politically part of the Federated States of Micronesia. Due to the ruined megalithic city of Nan Madol located on the island, Ponape has been incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos, particularly in the works of August Derleth and Lin Carter.

Nan Madol

Nan Madol is a extraordinary complex, constructed from large black lava columns placed on 92 artificial islands built atop coral reefs. It's the only ancient city built on a coral reef, and aside from the giant sculptures of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), its use of massive rock in construction is virtually unique in Oceania.

A complex of palaces, temples, and tombs built from 1200-1500 A.D., Nan Madol was the ceremonial center of the Saudeleur dynasty, which ruled Pohnpei from around 1100 A.D. to c. 1628. It is still unknown how the islanders managed to erect such huge pieces of stone on isolated islets; contemporary legends on the island attribute the feat to twin sorcerers who enlisted a flying dragon. The ruins became a UNESCO world heritage site in 2016.

In Lovecraft's Fiction

Ponape is mentioned in H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931), but the island is not directly linked to that story's fictional aquatic humanoids. The story's main informant, Zadok Allen, citing Innsmouth dissenter Matt Eliot, tells the narrator

abaout an island east of Otaheité whar they was a lot o’ stone ruins older’n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o’ like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carvin’s of faces that looked like the big statues on Easter Island. They was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff’rent carvin’s—ruins all wore away like they’d ben under the sea onct, an’ with picters of awful monsters all over ’em.

So in Lovecraft, the island of the Deep Ones was "east of Otaheité"--that is, Tahiti--whereas Pohnpei is almost 4,000 miles to the west of Tahiti. Ponape is only similar to Lovecraft's fictional island in having "a lot o' stone ruins." Ponape is mentioned again in Lovecraft's revision tale for Hazel Heald, "Out of the Aeons" (1935):

Theories of a bygone Pacific civilisation, of which the Easter Island images and the megalithic masonry of Ponape and Nan-Matol are conceivable vestiges, were freely circulated among students, and learned journals carried varied and often conflicting speculations on a possible former continent whose peaks survive as the myriad islands of Melanesia and Polynesia.

Here Lovecraft is using the pseudo-science of James Churchward--who is cited by name elsewhere in the story--to lend verisimilitude to his fantastic tale of an ancient confrontation with an eldritch god. Churchward did maintain that Pohnpei was a remnant of the supposed lost continent of Mu; he mistakenly believed that Nan Madol was many millennia rather than several centuries old.

Other Mythos Writers

August Derleth made Ponape much more central to the Deep One mythology, which had the unfortunate effect of implicating the real-world residents of the island (with a population of nearly 37,000 in 2020) in a cult of Cthulhu-worshipping hybrid sea monsters.

Thus in "The Survivor" (1954), the notes of Jean-Francois Charriere refer to "[c]onsiderable traffic between Innsmouth and Ponape," adding, "Some dark religious worship." In "The Shadow out of Space" (1957), after the Innsmouth raid of 1928, there were "the most vaguely terrifying hints of a connection to certain batrachian people of Ponape." (In the story, Ponape is one of the places Amos Piper travels to when he is possessed by a Yithian.)

Zebulon Whateley in "The Shuttered Room" (1959) speaks of "Obed Marsh's "wife that he faound in the trade—at Ponape, if ye know whar that is.” Later, a letter from Ariah Whateley discusses the Innsmouth look, noting, "Once I did see a native who had a similar appearance, but he was evidently not typical, for he was shunned by all the workers around the ships in the harbor where I saw him. I’ve forgotten now where it was, but I think Ponape."

The story "Innsmouth Clay" (1971) features a Zadok Allen-style blabbermouth, Seth Atkins, who remarks, "“Cap’n Obed larnt a lot o’ things in Ponape an’ from the Kanakys—all abaout people they called the ‘Deep Ones’ that lives under the water."