Swains Island
Swains Island, also known as Jennings Island, is a remote coral atoll in the Tokelau volcanic island group in the South Pacific Ocean. Administered as part of American Samoa since 1925, the island is subject to an ongoing territorial dispute between Tokelau and the United States.
Privately owned by the family of Eli Hutchinson Jennings since 1856, Swains Island was used as a copra plantation until 1967. It has not been permanently inhabited since 2008, but continues to be visited by members of the Jennings family, scientific researchers, and amateur radio operators.
The island is located south of Fakaofo and north of Savai‘i. The land area is, and the total area including the lagoon is.
Etymology
Swains Island has been known by several names: Gente Hermosa, Quiros Island, Olosega, Olohenga, and Jennings Island.Swains Island was long believed to have been first charted on 2 March 1606 by Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, a Portuguese navigator who sailed for Spain. On that date, he reckoned an island at 10°36′S 171°W, and his ship's historian named it Isla de la Gente Hermosa, after its inhabitants. The closest island to that reckoned location is Swains Island at 11°03′S 171°05'W, leading later authors to label it with the Spanish name or the Spanish version of Queirós's surname, Quirós. However, the island described by Queirós was significantly larger and, considering likely errors in the calculation of longitude, later scholars concluded that the island found by Queirós was actually Rakahanga, lying to the east.
Captain William L. Hudson of the sighted Swains Island on 1 February 1841, during the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–42. He claimed to have learned about the island's location from a Captain Swain of Nantucket, and after concluding that it did not match the description by Queirós, resolved to call it Swain's Island :
This Captain Swain has not been conclusively identified. Authors have suggested it might be Jonathan Swain of whaler Independence in 1820, or William C. Swain of whaler George Champlain in the 1830s. Other evidence suggests Obed Swain of whaler Jefferson of Nantucket, who was at Tahiti when the United States Exploring Expedition was there with the USS Peacock.
It is also called Jennings Island, after Eli Hutchinson Jennings, who settled there in 1856 and whose family still owns and manages the island.
In Tokelauan, the main language formerly spoken on Swains Island, the island is called Olohega. The name is composed of the prefix olo-, indicating a collective noun, and the word hega, meaning a tuft of feathers tied to the end of a skipjack lure, possibly referring to the island's location at the end of the Tokelau chain. A variant of this name is Olosega in both Tokelauan and Samoan. It should not be confused with the homonymous island in the pair Ofu-Olosega of the Manu‘a group in American Samoa.
Geography
Swains Island has a total area of about, of which is land. The central lagoon, called Lake Namo, accounts for.The atoll is somewhat unusual, featuring an unbroken circle of land enclosing a lagoon separated from the sea. The channel connecting the lagoon to the sea likely closed around. The lagoon has a maximum depth of and contains significant amounts of algae and two species of freshwater fish. Its water has a salinity of about 0.4%, described as brackish, useful for bathing and washing but not for drinking. Drinking water in the island is derived entirely from rainfall collected in tanks. A 1998 investigation of the lagoon noted possible evidence that the lagoon is fed by volcanic springs; fresh water plumes were also noted in the island's fringing reef. Nearly all of the land is filled with coconut palms.
The village of Taulaga in the west of the island consists of a malae surrounded by houses, a church, a communications center, and a school, but as of 2013 the only structure still standing was a church built around 1886.
The village of Etena in the south contains the former residence of the Jennings family, also built in the 1880s but abandoned after a cyclone severely damaged it in 2005. A four-bedroom, colonial-style residence is now in a state of disrepair and largely overgrown. A road named Belt Road once circled the entire island, but as of 2013 only the portion connecting the two villages was usable, the rest being covered in vegetation. The island also contains several cemeteries.
Swains Island is part of the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa. The Swains Island sanctuary area encompasses a and includes territorial waters within a circle around the island, excluding the interior lagoon and two channels between the lagoon and the sea. Like other areas of its coastline, the United States claims a exclusive economic zone around Swains Island, making up about a third of the U.S. EEZ in the South Pacific.
Fauna
The island has been recognised as an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International because it supports a breeding population of white terns. Seven reptile species have been recorded from the island, including three geckos and three skinks, as well as the green sea turtles which formerly nested on the island, but now occur only as visitors to inshore waters. A 2012 survey noted the island's seabird community was dominated by black noddies, white terns, and brown noddies, while the reef flat was dominated by Pacific golden plovers and wandering tattlers. Inland surveys found roosting or breeding communities of noddys, terns, and red-footed boobies. The island is also home to coconut crabs, as well as several non-native invasive species, including Pacific rats and feral cats. Feral pigs were eradicated from the island in the early 2010s. In 2022, the American Samoa Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources received a grant to help eradicate non-native predators from Swains Island.In the lagoon, two freshwater fish were reported as common in 2013: a goby and a molly; however, the specific species were unidentified. A goby collected at Swains Island in 1939 was identified as a new subspecies, Bathygobius fuscus swainsensis. Studies of the waters surrounding Swains Island have noted deep-sea coral, sponges, sea stars, crinoids, and crustaceans, including giant glass sponges. Predator species, such as barracudas, jacks, and snappers, are also found near Swains Island, and sharks and humphead wrasse are frequently seen in its nearshore waters. Dogtooth tuna is more common near Swains than other waters of American Samoa.
Demographics
Swains Island first appeared in the U.S. census in 1930, following its annexation to American Samoa in 1925.The 2010 census counted 17 people in six households on Swains Island. There were eight males and nine females. There were 11 U.S. nationals and six foreign nationals. They reported their ethnic origins as 15 Samoans, one Tokelauan, and one Filipino. Of the 16 people over age five, 15 spoke mainly Samoan, and one spoke another Oceanic language, but all also spoke English.
However, the people counted in the 2010 census likely did not permanently reside on Swains Island. Multiple visitors have reported the island as uninhabited since 2008. The 2020 census recorded no residents there.
History
Archaeological field research on Swains Island has been largely limited to only a few surveys, in part due to the private ownership of the island since it was first claimed by the Jennings family. However, based upon oral traditions and limited field work, anthropologists estimate that the island was settled by Polynesian voyagers in the mid-1300s CE, although it may have served as a waypoint for travel between islands prior to that. Evidence of pre-contact settlement include mounds and a tupua. Oral histories indicate the island was later dominated by the Tokelauan atoll Fakaofo, but there are also memories of the island being depopulated by famine prior to western contact. Connections between the island and Samoa were also known.Whalers from New England began visiting the island as early as 1820 to load fresh water from the atoll's lagoon. Settlers from Tokelau also reestablished a presence on the island by the 1800s, and the colony was well established by the time a group of Frenchmen arrived in the 1840s with the aim of establishing a copra production operation. Many Tokelauans abandoned the island at that point due to violence from the Westerners.
Captain William L. Hudson of the sighted the island on 1 February 1841, during the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–42. He named it Swain's Island after "a certain Captain Swain", from whom he had learned about the island's location.
The Jennings family
Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Swains Island was visited by whalers seeking fresh water. By the mid-1850s, a group of Fakaofoans had returned to the island, and the French copra workers had left.In 1856, an American, Eli Hutchinson Jennings, arrived on Swains with his Samoan wife, Malia, who was from Upolu. Originally from Long Island in New York, Jennings came to the Pacific as a whaler, eventually settling in Samoa, where he became involved in local struggles over lineage after the death of Tamafaiga. While in Samoa, Jennings purchased the title for Swains Island from a British Captain Turnbull, who claimed ownership of the island by right of discovery. According to one account, the sale price for Swains was 15 shillings per acre — and a bottle of gin.
Jennings arrived on Swains on 13 October 1856 and began work to establish a copra plantation. One of the Frenchmen later returned, but did not care to share the island with Jennings and left. Swains was considered a semi-independent proprietary settlement of the Jennings family, a status it would retain for approximately 70 years. It was also claimed for the U.S. by the United States Guano Company in 1860, under the Guano Islands Act. However, there is no evidence that guano or guano mining was present on the island.
Jennings also played an instrumental role in helping Peruvian "blackbird" slave ships depopulate the other three Tokelau atolls.
After Jennings died in 1878, his wife Malia took over management of the island's coconut plantation until her death in 1891. At that point, their son Eli Jennings Jr inherited the island and its copra industry. Jennings had been born on Swains Island, but he was educated in San Francisco, and was referred to as "King Jennings". Jennings's descendants maintain ownership of the island to the current era.