Malden Island
Malden Island, sometimes called Independence Island in the 19th century, is a low, arid, uninhabited atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, about in area. It is one of the Line Islands belonging to the Republic of Kiribati. The lagoon is entirely enclosed by land, though it is connected to the sea by underground channels, and is quite salty.
The island is chiefly notable for its ancient stone architecture, its once-extensive deposits of phosphatic guano, its former use as the site of the first British H-bomb tests, and its current importance as a protected area for breeding seabirds.
The island is designated as the Malden Island Wildlife Sanctuary. In 2014 the Kiribati government established a fishing exclusion zone around each of the southern Line Islands.
Geography
Malden Island is located south of the equator, south of Honolulu, Hawaii, and more than west of the coast of South America. The nearest land is uninhabited Starbuck Island, to the southwest. The closest inhabited place is Tongareva, to the southwest. The nearest airport is on Kiritimati, to the northwest. Other nearby islands include Jarvis Island, to the northwest, Vostok Island, to the south-southeast, and Caroline Island, to the southeast.The island has roughly the shape of an equilateral triangle, with on a side, aligned with the southwest side running northwest to southeast. The west and south corners are slightly truncated, shortening the north, east and southwest coasts to about, and adding shorter west and south coasts about 1 to 2 km in length. A large, mostly shallow, irregularly shaped lagoon, containing a number of small islets, fills the east central part of the island. The lagoon is entirely enclosed by land, but only by relatively narrow strips along its north and east sides. It is connected to the sea by underground channels, and is quite salty. Most of the land area of the island lies to the south and west of the lagoon. The total area of the island is about.
The island is very low, no more than above sea level at its highest point. The highest elevations are found along a rim that closely follows the coastline. The interior forms a depression that is only a few metres above sea level in the western part and is below sea level in the east central part. Because of this topography, the ocean cannot be seen from much of Malden's interior.
There is no standing fresh water on Malden Island, though a fresh water lens may exist.
A continuous heavy surf falls all along the coast, forming a narrow white to gray sandy beach. Except on the west coast, where the white sandy beach is more extensive than elsewhere, a strip of dark gray coral rubble, forming a series of low ridges parallel to the coast, lies within the narrow beach, extending inward to the island rim.
Flora and fauna
Because of Malden's isolation and aridity, its vegetation is extremely limited. Sixteen species of vascular plants have been recorded, of which nine are indigenous.The island is largely covered in stunted Sida fallax scrub, low herbs and grasses. Few, if any, of the clumps of stunted Pisonia grandis once found on the island still survive. Coconut palms planted by the guano diggers did not thrive, although a few dilapidated trees may still be seen. Introduced weeds, including the low-growing woody vine Tribulus cistoides, now dominate extensive open areas, providing increased cover for young sooty terns.Malden is an important breeding island for about a dozen species including masked boobies, red-footed booby, tropicbirds, great frigatebird, lesser frigatebird, grey-backed tern, red-tailed tropicbird and sooty terns. It is also an important winter-stop for the bristle-thighed curlew, a migrant from Alaska, and other migratory seabirds.
Two kinds of lizards, the mourning gecko and snake-eyed skink, are present on Malden, together with brown libellulid dragonfly.
Cats, pigs, goats and house mice were introduced to Malden during the guano-digging period. While the goats and pigs have all died off, feral cats and house mice are still present. Small numbers of green turtles nest on the beaches, and hermit crabs abound.
History
Discovery
The earliest documented sighting of Malden Island by Europeans was on 25 March 1825, by Captain Samuel Bunker of the whaler Alexander of Nantucket. Bunker's journal for that day mentioned that "it proved to be an island seen by the Sarah Ann of London and the Independence of Nantucket, Capt. Whippey". They were also whaling vessels. That logbook extract may explain several things: why Malden Island was once known as "Independence Island", Sarah Ann Island, and that Bunker was not the first European to see the island. He could not land, and sailed on the next day.On 30 July 1825, the island was seen again by Captain The 7th Lord Byron. Byron, commanding the British warship HMS Blonde, was returning to London from a special mission to Honolulu to repatriate the remains of the young king and queen of Hawaii, who had died of measles during a visit to Britain. The island was named after Lieutenant Charles Robert Malden, navigator of the Blonde, who sighted the island and briefly explored it. Andrew Bloxam, naturalist of the Blonde, and James Macrae, a botanist travelling for the Royal Horticultural Society, joined in exploring the island and recorded their observations. Malden may have been the island sighted in 1823 by another captain, William Clark of the whaling vessel Winslow.
Early history
At the time of its discovery by Europeans, Malden had no population. However, extensive archaeological sites on the island point to occupation by Polynesian people in the past. Sites on the island are consistent with pre-contact Polynesian architecture of the wider region and are noted to be especially similar in form to architectural forms in Tonga.These sites are clustered along the northwest and south beach ridges. A total of 21 archaeological sites have been catalogued on the island. The sites include temple platforms, called marae, house sites, and graves. Due to the nature of early archaeological classification of sites at the time of classification, these sites are composed of irregular groups of above ground architecture and should not be taken as representative given a lack of more intensive subterranean investigation. Comparisons with stone structures on Tuamotu atolls show that a population of between 100 and 200 people could have produced all of the Malden structures. Marae of a similar type are found on Raivavae, one of the Austral Islands. However, no studies have been conducted on the agricultural potential of the island to corroborate this.
Whalers and guano diggers
In the first half of the 19th century, during the heyday of American whaling in the central Pacific, Malden was visited on a number of occasions by American whalers.In 1918, schooner Annie Larsen, infamous for her role in the Hindu–German Conspiracy, was stranded at Malden Island.
Malden was claimed by the U.S. Guano Company under the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which authorized citizens to take possession of uninhabited islands under the authority of the United States for the purpose of removing guano, a valuable agricultural fertilizer. Before the American company could begin their operations, the island was occupied by an Australian company under British licence. This company and its successors exploited the island continuously from the 1860s through 1927.
Writer Beatrice Grimshaw, a visitor to Malden in the guano-digging era, decried the "glaring barrenness of the bit island", declaring that "...shade, coolness, refreshing fruit, pleasant sights and sounds: there are none. For those who live on the island, it is the scene of an exile which has to be endured somehow or other". She described Malden as containing "a little settlement fronted by a big wooden pier, and a desolate plain of low greyish-green herbage, relieved here and there by small bushes bearing insignificant yellow flowers". Water for settlers was produced by large distillation plants, since no fresh-water wells could be successfully dug on the island.
The five or six European supervisors on the island were given "a row of little tin-roofed, one-storeyed houses above the beach", while the native labourers from Niue Island and Aitutaki were housed in "big, barn-like shelters". Grimshaw described these edifices as being "large, bare, shady buildings fitted with wide shelves, on which the men spread their mats and pillows to sleep". Their food consisted of "rice, biscuits, yams, tinned beef, and tea, with a few cocoanuts for those who may fall sick". Food for the white supervisors consisted of "tinned food of various kinds, also bread, rice, fowls, pork, goat, and goat's milk", but vegetables were hard to come by.
Indentured labourers on Malden were contracted for one year, paid ten shillings per week plus room and board, and repatriated to their home islands when their contracts expired. Salaries for the supervisors were described as "quite high". Some labourers were prisoners, sentenced by New Zealand resident agents. Work hours were 5 am to 5 pm, with one hour and 45 minutes given off for meals.
The guano diggers constructed a unique railroad on Malden Island, with cars powered by large sails. Laborers pushed empty carts from the loading area up the tramway to the digging pits, where they were loaded with guano. At the end of the day, the sails were unfurled, and the train cars whisked back to the settlement by the prevailing southeastern winds. While cars were known to jump the tracks more than once during these excursions, the system seems to have worked fairly well. Railroad handcars were also used. This tramway remained in use on Malden as late as 1924, and its roadbed still exists on the island today.
Although guano digging continued on Malden through the early 1920s, all human activity on the island had ceased by the early 1930s. No further human use seems to have been made of Malden until 1956.