The Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme was begun in 1938 in the western

Pacific The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is bounded by the cont ...

Ocean and was the last attempt at human colonisation within the

British Empire The British Empire comprised the dominions, Crown colony, colonies, protectorates, League of Nations mandate, mandates, and other Dependent territory, territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It bega ...

History

Conceived by Henry E. "Harry" Maude, lands commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, and approved by

His Excellency Excellency is an honorific style (manner of address), style given to certain high-level officers of a sovereign state, officials of an international organization, or members of an aristocracy. Once entitled to the title "Excellency", the holder ...

Sir Harry Luke, Governor of Fiji and High Commissioner of the Western Pacific, the goal of the project was to reduce

overpopulation Overpopulation or overabundance is a state in which the population of a species is larger than the carrying capacity of its environment. This may be caused by increased birth rates, lowered mortality rates, reduced predation or large scale migr ...

in the southern

Gilbert Islands The Gilbert Islands (;Reilly Ridgell. ''Pacific Nations and Territories: The Islands of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.'' 3rd. Ed. Honolulu: Bess Press, 1995. p. 95. formerly Kingsmill or King's-Mill IslandsVery often, this name applied o ...

by developing three mostly uninhabited

atoll An atoll () is a ring-shaped island, including a coral rim that encircles a lagoon. There may be coral islands or cays on the rim. Atolls are located in warm tropical or subtropical parts of the oceans and seas where corals can develop. Most ...

s in the

Phoenix Islands The Phoenix Islands, or Rawaki, are a group of eight atolls and two submerged coral reefs that lie east of the Gilbert Islands and west of the Line Islands in the central Pacific Ocean, north of Samoa. They are part of the Kiribati, Republic ...

archipelago An archipelago ( ), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster, or collection of islands. An archipelago may be in an ocean, a sea, or a smaller body of water. Example archipelagos include the Aegean Islands (the o ...

: # Nikumaroro (Gardner) # Manra (Sydney) # Orona (Hull) A secondary goal was to enhance the British presence in the western Pacific in response to growing American influence through the Guano Islands Act, especially on Canton (later Kanton), where a commercial

seaplane A seaplane is a powered fixed-wing aircraft capable of takeoff, taking off and water landing, landing (alighting) on water.Gunston, "The Cambridge Aerospace Dictionary", 2009. Seaplanes are usually divided into two categories based on their tech ...

base was being established. The three atolls, Sydney, Hull, and Gardner, were renamed in Gilbertese as

Manra Island Manra (previously: ''Sydney Island''), is one of the Phoenix Islands in the Republic of Kiribati. It lies at . longitude, and has an area of . and an elevation of approximately six metres. Together with the seven other Phoenix Islands, it for ...

, Orona Atoll, and Nikumaroro respectively. Colonisation efforts by Gilbertese settlers were almost immediately hampered by the onset of the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, the islands' isolation and the 1941 death on Nikumaroro of the project's officer in charge, 29-year-old

civil servant The civil service is a collective term for a sector of government composed mainly of career civil service personnel hired rather than elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leadership. A civil service offic ...

Gerald Gallagher.

Abandonment

After 1945 the three settlements continued to struggle with supply problems, limited markets for

copra Copra (from ; ; ; ) is the dried, white flesh of the coconut from which coconut oil is extracted. Traditionally, the coconuts are sun-dried, especially for export, before the oil, also known as copra oil, is pressed out. The oil extracted ...

, the settlements' only major product, and

drought A drought is a period of drier-than-normal conditions.Douville, H., K. Raghavan, J. Renwick, R.P. Allan, P.A. Arias, M. Barlow, R. Cerezo-Mota, A. Cherchi, T.Y. Gan, J. Gergis, D. Jiang, A. Khan, W. Pokam Mba, D. Rosenfeld, J. Tierney, ...

, until the British government determined the colony could not be self-sustaining and evacuated the settlers in 1963, ending the project. The

are part of

Kiribati Kiribati, officially the Republic of Kiribati, is an island country in the Micronesia subregion of Oceania in the central Pacific Ocean. Its permanent population is over 119,000 as of the 2020 census, and more than half live on Tarawa. The st ...

and in 2005 were officially uninhabited except for a few families on

Kanton Island Canton Island (also known as Kanton or Abariringa), previously known as Mary Island, Mary Balcout's Island or Swallow Island, is the largest, northernmost, and , the sole inhabited island of the Phoenix Islands, in the Republic of Kiribati. It i ...

(

census A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...

population 61 in 2000 and 41 in 2005).

References

External links

* * {{cite journal , url= http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bulletins/25_GallagherNiku/25_GallagherNiku.html , title= Gallagher of Nikumaroro: The Last Expansion of the British Empire , first= Thomas F. , last= King , publisher= TIGHAR , journal= Earhart Project Research Bulletin , date= Aug 1, 2000 British colonisation of Oceania 1938 in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Guano Islands Act Phoenix Islands (Kiribati)

History

Abandonment

See also

References

External links