Millennium Island

Caroline Island (also known as Caroline Atoll or Millennium Island) is the easternmost of several uninhabited coral atolls comprising the southern Line Islands in the central Pacific Ocean nation of Kiribati.

The atoll was first sighted by Europeans in 1606 and was claimed by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1868. It has been part of the Republic of Kiribati since the island nation's independence in 1979. Caroline Island has remained relatively untouched and is one of the world's most pristine tropical islands, despite guano mining, copra (coconut meat) harvesting, and human habitation in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is home to one of the world's largest populations of the coconut crab and is an important breeding site for seabirds, most notably the sooty tern.

The atoll is known as the first place on Earth to see sunrise each day during much of the year, and for its role in the millennium celebrations of 2000. A 1995 realignment of the International Date Line made Caroline Island the first point of land on Earth to reach 1 January 2000 on the calendar.

History

Prehistory

The atolls (ring-shaped coral reefs) of the Pacific Ocean are the most marginal environment in the world for human habitation. They have generally not been occupied for more than 1,500 years, but started to be settled by humans once permanent islets formed around lagoons. In comparison with other atolls, Caroline Island has been relatively undisturbed.

There are indications that early Polynesians reached the island before Europeans, as several ''marae'' (communal or sacred places) and graves have been discovered, but no evidence has been found of long-term settlement. Evidence of the largest of the ''marae'', located on the west side of Nake Islet, was documented in 1883.

Early sightings and accounts

Ferdinand Magellan may have sighted Caroline Island on 4 February 1521. The first recorded sighting of Caroline Island by Europeans was on 21 February 1606, by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Fernández de Quirós, who named the island San Bernardo, and who wrote an account of his voyage. The island was next seen by Europeans on 16 December 1795, when the British naval officer William Robert Broughton of named it Carolina, after the daughter of Philip Stephens, the First Secretary of the Admiralty. The island was sighted in 1821 by the English whaler ''Supply'', and was then named "Thornton Island" for the ship's captain. It was also recorded in the 19th century as Hirst Island and Clark Island.

Other early visits which left behind accounts of the island include that of the USS ''Dolphin'' in 1825, written by the United States Navy officer Hiram Paulding. According to this account, the crew of the ''Dolphin'' supplied themselves with fish from the island, although when wading back to their ship they were attacked by sharks.

The English whaling ship ''Tuscan'' reached Caroline island in 1835, and the geography and wildlife of the island were recorded by the ship's surgeon, the biologist Frederick Debell Bennett, in his ''Narrative of a Whaling Voyage Round the Globe From the Year 18331836''. Bennett knew that the island was seldom visited, "although it is usually 'sighted' by South-Seamen, when on their way from the Society Islands to the North Pacific". He noted that about seven years before the arrival of the ''Tuscan'', a Captain Stavers had landed on the island and left behind some pigs, of which no trace remained.

1883 solar eclipse

In 1883 two expeditions arrived on Caroline Island in time to observe and record the solar eclipse of 6 May. On 22 March, American and English astronomers left the Peruvian port of Callao aboard the , arriving at the island on 20 April. Among those in the American expedition were the astronomers Edward S. Holden of the Washburn Observatory, the expedition's leader, and William Upton, professor of astronomy at Brown University. An expedition from France arrived two days later in the ''L'Eclaireur''.

As small boats could not come close to the shore, the equipment was carried to the island by men standing in about of water, and then about further to the observation site. On the morning of 6 May, the sky cleared shortly before the time of first contact, and remained clear for the rest of the day. During the eclipse, the astronomers searched for Vulcan, a hypothetical intra-Mercurial planet, but discovered nothing. The duration of totality (the time the entire disc of the Sun is obscured) was 5 minutes 25 seconds, a little less than the maximum duration of 5 minutes 58 seconds. The Austrian astronomer Johann Palisa, a member of the French expedition, discovered an asteroid later that year, which he named Carolina after the island.

Commercial enterprises and British claim

In 1846, the Tahitian firm of Collie and Lucett attempted to establish a small stock-raising and copra-harvesting community on the island; the operation met with limited financial success. In 1868, Caroline was claimed for Britain by the captain of HMS ''Reindeer'', which noted 27 residents in a settlement on South Islet. The island was leased by the British government to Houlder Brothers and Co. in 1872, with John T. Arundel as the manager; two of the islets are named for him. Houlder Brothers and Co. conducted minimal guano mining on the island from 1874. John T. Arundel and Co. took over the lease and the industry in 1881; the company supplied a total of about 10,000 tons of phosphate until supplies became exhausted in 1895. In 1885 Arundel established a coconut plantation, but the coconut palms suffered from disease and the plantation failed. The settlement on the island lasted until 1904, when the six remaining Polynesians were relocated to Niue.

The island was leased to S.R. Maxwell and Company and a new settlement was established in 1916, this time built entirely upon copra export. Much of the South islet was deforested to make way for coconut palms, a non-indigenous plant. The business venture, however, went into debt, and the island's settlement slowly decreased in population. By 1926, it was down to only ten residents, and by 1936, the settlement consisted of only two Tahitian families. It was abandoned in the late 1930s.

During World War II, Caroline Island remained unoccupied, and no military action took place there. Under British jurisdiction, it was formally repossessed by the British Western Pacific High Commission in 1943 and then governed as part of the Central and Southern Line Islands. A Tahitian family was found to be living on the atoll when the American sailor John Caldwell visited it in September 1946. In January 1972, the Central and Southern Line Islands were joined with the British colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, which had become autonomous in 1971.

Kiribati

When the Gilbert Islands became the independent nation of Kiribati in 1979, Caroline Island became Kiribati's easternmost point. The island is owned by the government of the Republic of Kiribati and overseen by the Ministry of Line and Phoenix Islands Development, which is headquartered on Kiritimati. Claims to sovereignty over the island by the United States were relinquished in the 1979 Treaty of Tarawa, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1983.

The island was inhabited from 1987 to 1991 by Anne and Ron Falconer and their children, who developed a largely self-sufficient settlement. Following a transfer of ownership, the Falconers left the island. In the 1990s, the island was occasionally visited by Polynesian copra gatherers under agreements with the Kiribati government in Tarawa

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