Caroline Island
Caroline 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 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 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 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
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 Winslow 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 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.
On 23 December 1994, the Republic of Kiribati announced a change of time zone for the Line Islands would take effect on 31 December 1994. This adjustment placed all of Kiribati on the Asian or western side of the International Date Line. Although Caroline Island's longitudinal position of 150 degrees west corresponded to a UTC offset of −10 hours, the island's new time zone became UTC+14. This move made Caroline Island both the easternmost land in the earliest time zone, and the first point of land which would see sunrise on 1 January 2000—at 5:43 a.m. local time. Other Pacific nations, including Tonga, New Zealand and Fiji, protested the move, objecting that it infringed on their claims to be the first land to see dawn in the year 2000. According to the United States Naval Observatory, the first point of land to see sunrise on 1 January 2000 was between the Dibble Glacier and Victor Bay in East Antarctica, at 66 degrees south, where the sun rose at 12:08 a.m.
In August 1997, to promote events to mark the arrival of the year 2000, Caroline Island was renamed Millennium Island by the Kiribati government. In December 1999, over 70 Kiribati singers and dancers travelled to Caroline from South Tarawa, accompanied by approximately 25 journalists, as part of the celebrations to mark the arrival of the new millennium.
In 2017 a Russian businessman proposed a deal to invest $350 million to build a resort in Kiribati in exchange for sovereign rights over three islands. The deal was rejected by the Kiribati government based on a report from the Kiribati Foreign Investment Commission.
Geography and climate
Caroline Island lies near the southeastern end of the Line Islands, a string of atolls and islands extending across the equator, south of the Hawaiian Islands in the central Pacific Ocean. The slightly crescent-shaped atoll has a land area of. It consists of approximately 39 separate islets, surrounding a narrow lagoon; the smallest islet, Motu Atibu, may have disappeared. The islets—which rise to a height of above sea level—share a common geologic origin, and consist of sand deposits and limestone rock set atop a coral reef. According to the path of the International Date Line, the atoll is the easternmost point of land on Earth.Three islets make up the bulk of Caroline's land area: Nake Islet at the north, Long Islet at the northeast of the lagoon, and South Islet at the southern end. The other islets, most of which were named during a 1988 ecological survey conducted by the naturalists Cameron and Angela Kepler, fall into four groups: the South Nake Islets, the Central Leeward Islets, the Southern Leeward Islets, and the Windward Islets. The island is vulnerable to erosion by spring tides, storms, and strong winds; storms have caused smaller islets to sometimes appear or disappear, and the shapes of larger ones to become altered.
The lagoon, roughly in size, is shallow—it is at most in depth—and is crossed repeatedly by narrow coral heads and patch reefs. Reef flats generally extend over from the shore—although some sources report them to extend more than from land—and make boat landings perilous except at high tide. There are no natural landings, anchorages, or deep water openings into the lagoon; water that spills into it over shallow channels at high tide is contained within the surrounding reef and remains stable despite ocean tides. Most landings are made at a small break in the reef at the northeast corner of South Islet.
There is no standing fresh water on Caroline Island, but Nake Islet and South Islet have underground freshwater aquifers and freshwater lenses. The underground water supply on Nake attracted Polynesian settlers, but the first European explorers to reach the atoll searched in vain for drinking water; wells were built to tap drinking water for later temporary settlements. Little is known about the island's existing freshwater lenses. Soils are of poor quality, dominated by coral gravel and sand, with organic content present only within stable, forested island centers. Guano deposits make island soil, where it does exist, nitrogen-rich.
Like the rest of Kiribati, Caroline Island enjoys a tropical maritime climate which is consistently hot and humid, with air temperatures that relate closely to sea temperature. Across Kiribati average temperatures vary no more than 1 °C from season to season.
There is no weather station located at Caroline. During 2014, monthly mean temperatures at South Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, ranged between, with maximum monthly temperatures ranging from and minimum temperatures ranging from. Caroline Island lies within a region of highly variable precipitation; between 1950 and 2010 the region received an average of of rain annually. Tides are on the order of, and trade winds, generally from the northeast, mean that corner of the island experiences the roughest seas.
Caroline Island is among the most remote islands on Earth. It is from the closest land at Flint Island, and from the nearest continental land in North America.