Nikumaroro
Encyclopedia
Nikumaroro, or Gardner Island, is part of the Phoenix Islands
, Kiribati
, in the western Pacific Ocean
. It is a remote, elongated, triangular coral
atoll
with profuse vegetation and a large central marine lagoon
. Nikumaroro is approximately 6 km long by less than 2 km wide. There are two narrow entrances through the rim, both of which are blocked by a wide reef
which is dry at low tide. The ocean beyond the reef is very deep and the only anchorage is at the island's west end, across the reef from the ruins of a mid-twentieth century British colonial village, but this is safe only with the southeast trade wind
s. Landing has always been difficult and is most often done south of the anchorage. Although occupied at various times during the past, the island is uninhabited today.
Nikumaroro is sporadically visited by biologist
s attracted to its extensive marine
and avian
ecosystem
s. Visitors often mention the island's oppressive equatorial heat, razor-sharp coral, dense foliage and aggressive coconut crab
s. Coconut palms, thick scrub and Pisonia
forest cover the land surface. Migratory birds and rats abound. Several species of shark
and tursiops dolphin
s have been observed in the surrounding waters. Some of the fish
species are toxic
to humans during certain seasons.
The island is part of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area
, and as such, has been named an Important Bird Area
.
The scarcity of fresh water on Nikumaroro has proven problematic for residents in the past, and contributed directly to the failure of a British project to colonize the island
from 1938-63.
of the U.S. Exploring Expedition confirmed its position and recorded the atoll's name as Gardner Island, originally given in 1825 by Joshua Coffin of the Nantucket whaler Ganges
. Some sources say the island was named after U.S. Congressman Gideon Gardner
, who owned the Ganges.
In 1856 Nikumaroro was claimed as "Kemins Island" by CA Williams & Co. of New London, Connecticut
under the American Guano Islands Act
. There is no record of guano
deposits ever being exploited, however. On 28 May 1892, the island was claimed by the United Kingdom
during a call by HMS Curacoa
. Almost immediately a license was granted to Pacific entrepreneur John T. Arundel
for planting coconut
s. Twenty-nine islanders were settled there and some structures with corrugated iron
roofs constructed, but a severe drought
resulted in the prompt failure of this project within a year. In 1916 it was leased to a Captain Allen, but remained uninhabited until 1938.
, a large unladen British freighter with a crew of 35 men, ran aground on the reef at the island's northwest corner. A fire broke out in the engine room and all hands abandoned ship in darkness through storm waves across the dangerous coral reef. There were 11 fatalities. The survivors camped near collapsed structures from the abortive Arundel project
and were rescued after several days on the island. The devastated wreck of the Norwich City was a prominent landmark on the reef for 70 years although by 2007 only the ship's keel, engine and two large tanks remained.
On 1 December 1938, members of the British Pacific Islands Survey Expedition arrived to evaluate the island as a possible location for either seaplane
landings or an airfield. On 20 December, more British officials arrived with 20 Gilbertese settlers in the last colonial expansion of the British Empire
. Efforts to clear land and plant coconuts were hindered by a profound lack of drinking water
. By June 1939, a few wells had been successfully established and there were 58 I-Kiribati on Gardner, including 16 women and 26 children. The island's early supervisor and magistrate was Teng Koata whose wife, according to local legend, had an encounter with the goddess Manganibuka on a remote part of the island.
The British colonial officer, Gerald Gallagher
, established a headquarters of the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme
in the village located on the island's western end, on the south side of the largest entrance to the lagoon. Wide coral-gravel streets and a parade ground were laid out and important structures included a thatched administration house, wood-frame cooperative store and a radio shack. Gallagher died and was buried on the island in 1941. From 1944 through 1945 the United States Coast Guard
operated a navigational LORAN
station with 25 crewmen on the southeastern tip of Gardner, installing an antenna system, quonset hut
s and some smaller structures. Only scattered debris remains on the site.
The island's population reached a high of approximately 100 by the mid-1950s. However, by the early 1960s, periodic drought and an unstable freshwater lens
had thwarted the struggling colony
. Its residents were evacuated to the Solomon Islands
by the British in 1963 and by 1965 Gardner was officially uninhabited.
, which achieved complete independence in 1979 as Kiribati
. That same year the United States
, after having recently surveyed the island for possible weapons testing, relinquished any claims to Gardner through the Treaty of Tarawa
. The island was officially renamed Nikumaroro, a name inspired by Gilbertese legends and used by the settlers during the 1940s and 1950s.
Severe storms in 2002 destroyed most of the remaining structures on Nikumaroro, although Gallagher's empty grave (his remains were moved to Tarawa for reburial in 1963) can still be seen in the overgrown village site.
that in July 1937 aviators Amelia Earhart
and Fred Noonan
landed on Gardner after failing to find Howland Island
during the final stage of their ill-fated world flight. It was surmised that Earhart might have survived on Nikumaroro for several months before the British survey parties began arriving in 1938, by which time she and Noonan may have succumbed to injury, starvation or disease. In June 2010, TIGHAR made a 10th expedition to the island.
In an area on the atoll's northwest side called the "Seven Site" the team has found and cataloged artifacts such as flakes of rouge and a shattered mirror from a woman's cosmetic compact, parts of a folding pocket knife, traces of campfires bearing bird and fish bones, clams opened in the same way as oysters in New England, "empty shells laid out as if to collect rain water" and American bottles dating from before World War II, their heat warped bottoms showing they "had once stood in a fire as if to boil drinking water." A phalanx bone found at the site and examined by forensic anthropologist Karen Ramey Burns
has been examined by Dr. Cecil Lewis at the Molecular Anthropology Laboratories at the University of Oklahoma
in Norman, Oklahoma
, USA. DNA tests on the bone fragment proved inconclusive for testing as to whether it is turtle or human.
Phoenix Islands
The Phoenix Islands are a group of eight atolls and two submerged coral reefs, lying in the central Pacific Ocean east of the Gilbert Islands and west of the Line Islands. They are a part of the Republic of Kiribati. During the late 1930s they became the site of the last attempted colonial...
, Kiribati
Kiribati
Kiribati , officially the Republic of Kiribati, is an island nation located in the central tropical Pacific Ocean. The permanent population exceeds just over 100,000 , and is composed of 32 atolls and one raised coral island, dispersed over 3.5 million square kilometres, straddling the...
, in the western Pacific Ocean
Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...
. It is a remote, elongated, triangular coral
Coral
Corals are marine animals in class Anthozoa of phylum Cnidaria typically living in compact colonies of many identical individual "polyps". The group includes the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton.A coral "head" is a colony of...
atoll
Atoll
An atoll is a coral island that encircles a lagoon partially or completely.- Usage :The word atoll comes from the Dhivehi word atholhu OED...
with profuse vegetation and a large central marine lagoon
Lagoon
A lagoon is a body of shallow sea water or brackish water separated from the sea by some form of barrier. The EU's habitat directive defines lagoons as "expanses of shallow coastal salt water, of varying salinity or water volume, wholly or partially separated from the sea by sand banks or shingle,...
. Nikumaroro is approximately 6 km long by less than 2 km wide. There are two narrow entrances through the rim, both of which are blocked by a wide reef
Reef
In nautical terminology, a reef is a rock, sandbar, or other feature lying beneath the surface of the water ....
which is dry at low tide. The ocean beyond the reef is very deep and the only anchorage is at the island's west end, across the reef from the ruins of a mid-twentieth century British colonial village, but this is safe only with the southeast trade wind
Trade wind
The trade winds are the prevailing pattern of easterly surface winds found in the tropics, within the lower portion of the Earth's atmosphere, in the lower section of the troposphere near the Earth's equator...
s. Landing has always been difficult and is most often done south of the anchorage. Although occupied at various times during the past, the island is uninhabited today.
Flora and fauna
Biologist
A biologist is a scientist devoted to and producing results in biology through the study of life. Typically biologists study organisms and their relationship to their environment. Biologists involved in basic research attempt to discover underlying mechanisms that govern how organisms work...
s attracted to its extensive marine
Marine ecosystem
Marine ecosystems are among the largest of Earth's aquatic ecosystems. They include oceans, salt marsh and intertidal ecology, estuaries and lagoons, mangroves and coral reefs, the deep sea and the sea floor. They can be contrasted with freshwater ecosystems, which have a lower salt content. Marine...
and avian
Bird
Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...
ecosystem
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving , physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight....
s. Visitors often mention the island's oppressive equatorial heat, razor-sharp coral, dense foliage and aggressive coconut crab
Coconut crab
The coconut crab, Birgus latro, is a species of terrestrial hermit crab, also known as the robber crab or palm thief. It is the largest land-living arthropod in the world, and is probably at the upper size limit of terrestrial animals with exoskeletons in today's atmosphere at a weight of up to...
s. Coconut palms, thick scrub and Pisonia
Pisonia
Pisonia is a genus of flowering plants in the four o'clock flower family, Nyctaginaceae. It was named for Dutch physician and naturalist Willem Piso . Certain species in this genus are known as Catchbirdtrees because their sticky seeds reportedly trap small birds...
forest cover the land surface. Migratory birds and rats abound. Several species of shark
Shark
Sharks are a type of fish with a full cartilaginous skeleton and a highly streamlined body. The earliest known sharks date from more than 420 million years ago....
and tursiops dolphin
Dolphin
Dolphins are marine mammals that are closely related to whales and porpoises. There are almost forty species of dolphin in 17 genera. They vary in size from and , up to and . They are found worldwide, mostly in the shallower seas of the continental shelves, and are carnivores, mostly eating...
s have been observed in the surrounding waters. Some of the fish
Fish
Fish are a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic vertebrate animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as various extinct related groups...
species are toxic
Toxicity
Toxicity is the degree to which a substance can damage a living or non-living organisms. Toxicity can refer to the effect on a whole organism, such as an animal, bacterium, or plant, as well as the effect on a substructure of the organism, such as a cell or an organ , such as the liver...
to humans during certain seasons.
The island is part of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area
Phoenix Islands Protected Area
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area is located in the Republic of Kiribati, an ocean nation in the central Pacific approximately midway between Australia and Hawaii. PIPA constitutes 11.34% of Kiribati’s Exclusive Economic Zone and with a size of it is the largest marine protected area in the...
, and as such, has been named an Important Bird Area
Important Bird Area
An Important Bird Area is an area recognized as being globally important habitat for the conservation of bird populations. Currently there are about 10,000 IBAs worldwide. The program was developed and sites are identified by BirdLife International...
.
The scarcity of fresh water on Nikumaroro has proven problematic for residents in the past, and contributed directly to the failure of a British project to colonize the island
Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme
The Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme was begun in 1938 in the western Pacific ocean and was the last attempt at human colonisation within the British Empire.Conceived by Henry E...
from 1938-63.
19th century sightings and claims
Nikumaroro was known by sundry names during the early 19th century: Kemins' Island, Kemis Island, Motu Oonga, Motu Oona and Mary Letitia's Island. The first record of a European sighting was made by Capt. C. Kemiss (or Kemin, Kemish) from the British whaling ship Eliza Ann in 1824. On 19 August 1840, the USS VincennesUSS Vincennes (1826)
USS Vincennes was a 703-ton Boston-class sloop of war in the United States Navy from 1826 to 1865. During her service, Vincennes patrolled the Pacific, explored the Antarctic, and blockaded the Confederate Gulf coast in the Civil War. Named for the Revolutionary War Battle of Vincennes, she was...
of the U.S. Exploring Expedition confirmed its position and recorded the atoll's name as Gardner Island, originally given in 1825 by Joshua Coffin of the Nantucket whaler Ganges
Ganges (whaler)
The Ganges was a whaleship from Nantucket, Massachusetts operating in the Pacific Ocean during the mid-nineteenth century. It was probably the vessel reported to have found Gardner Island in the Phoenix group...
. Some sources say the island was named after U.S. Congressman Gideon Gardner
Gideon Gardner
Gideon Gardner was a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts.Born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, Gardner received a limited schooling.Gardner was a successful ship master, and later became a shipowner....
, who owned the Ganges.
In 1856 Nikumaroro was claimed as "Kemins Island" by CA Williams & Co. of New London, Connecticut
New London, Connecticut
New London is a seaport city and a port of entry on the northeast coast of the United States.It is located at the mouth of the Thames River in New London County, southeastern Connecticut....
under the American Guano Islands Act
Guano Islands Act
The Guano Islands Act is federal legislation passed by the U.S. Congress, on August 18, 1856. It enables citizens of the U.S. to take possession of islands containing guano deposits. The islands can be located anywhere, so long as they are not occupied and not within the jurisdiction of other...
. There is no record of guano
Guano
Guano is the excrement of seabirds, cave dwelling bats, and seals. Guano manure is an effective fertilizer due to its high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen and also its lack of odor. It was an important source of nitrates for gunpowder...
deposits ever being exploited, however. On 28 May 1892, the island was claimed by the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
during a call by HMS Curacoa
HMS Curacoa (1878)
HMS Curacoa was an of the Royal Navy, built by John Elder & Co., Govan and launched on 18 April 1878.Commenced service on the Cape of Good Hope and West Africa Station before being transferred to the Australia Station arriving on 5 August 1890. She left the Australia Station in December...
. Almost immediately a license was granted to Pacific entrepreneur John T. Arundel
John T. Arundel
John T. Arundel was an entrepreneur who was instrumental in the development of the mining of phosphate rock on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Banaba ....
for planting coconut
Coconut
The coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, is a member of the family Arecaceae . It is the only accepted species in the genus Cocos. The term coconut can refer to the entire coconut palm, the seed, or the fruit, which is not a botanical nut. The spelling cocoanut is an old-fashioned form of the word...
s. Twenty-nine islanders were settled there and some structures with corrugated iron
Iron
Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...
roofs constructed, but a severe drought
Drought
A drought is an extended period of months or years when a region notes a deficiency in its water supply. Generally, this occurs when a region receives consistently below average precipitation. It can have a substantial impact on the ecosystem and agriculture of the affected region...
resulted in the prompt failure of this project within a year. In 1916 it was leased to a Captain Allen, but remained uninhabited until 1938.
SS Norwich City wreck
During a storm on 29 November 1929, the SS Norwich CitySS Norwich City
The SS Norwich City was a British, oil-fired steam freighter powered by a triple expansion steam engine and manufactured in 1911 by Central Marine Engine Works in Britain.In 1928, the ship ran into the Second Narrows Bridge in Vancouver, B.C.....
, a large unladen British freighter with a crew of 35 men, ran aground on the reef at the island's northwest corner. A fire broke out in the engine room and all hands abandoned ship in darkness through storm waves across the dangerous coral reef. There were 11 fatalities. The survivors camped near collapsed structures from the abortive Arundel project
John T. Arundel
John T. Arundel was an entrepreneur who was instrumental in the development of the mining of phosphate rock on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Banaba ....
and were rescued after several days on the island. The devastated wreck of the Norwich City was a prominent landmark on the reef for 70 years although by 2007 only the ship's keel, engine and two large tanks remained.
British settlement scheme
Seaplane
A seaplane is a fixed-wing aircraft capable of taking off and landing on water. Seaplanes that can also take off and land on airfields are a subclass called amphibian aircraft...
landings or an airfield. On 20 December, more British officials arrived with 20 Gilbertese settlers in the last colonial expansion of the British Empire
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
. Efforts to clear land and plant coconuts were hindered by a profound lack of drinking water
Drinking water
Drinking water or potable water is water pure enough to be consumed or used with low risk of immediate or long term harm. In most developed countries, the water supplied to households, commerce and industry is all of drinking water standard, even though only a very small proportion is actually...
. By June 1939, a few wells had been successfully established and there were 58 I-Kiribati on Gardner, including 16 women and 26 children. The island's early supervisor and magistrate was Teng Koata whose wife, according to local legend, had an encounter with the goddess Manganibuka on a remote part of the island.
The British colonial officer, Gerald Gallagher
Gerald Gallagher
Gerald Bernard Gallagher is noted as the first officer-in-charge of the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme, the last colonial expansion of the British Empire.He was the son of Gerald and Edith Gallagher....
, established a headquarters of the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme
Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme
The Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme was begun in 1938 in the western Pacific ocean and was the last attempt at human colonisation within the British Empire.Conceived by Henry E...
in the village located on the island's western end, on the south side of the largest entrance to the lagoon. Wide coral-gravel streets and a parade ground were laid out and important structures included a thatched administration house, wood-frame cooperative store and a radio shack. Gallagher died and was buried on the island in 1941. From 1944 through 1945 the United States Coast Guard
United States Coast Guard
The United States Coast Guard is a branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven U.S. uniformed services. The Coast Guard is a maritime, military, multi-mission service unique among the military branches for having a maritime law enforcement mission and a federal regulatory agency...
operated a navigational LORAN
LORAN
LORAN is a terrestrial radio navigation system using low frequency radio transmitters in multiple deployment to determine the location and speed of the receiver....
station with 25 crewmen on the southeastern tip of Gardner, installing an antenna system, quonset hut
Quonset hut
A Quonset hut is a lightweight prefabricated structure of corrugated galvanized steel having a semicircular cross section. The design was based on the Nissen hut developed by the British during World War I...
s and some smaller structures. Only scattered debris remains on the site.
The island's population reached a high of approximately 100 by the mid-1950s. However, by the early 1960s, periodic drought and an unstable freshwater lens
Lens (hydrology)
In hydrology a lens is a convex layer of fresh groundwater that floats on top of denser saltwater. It arises when rainwater seeps down through a soil surface and then gathers over a layer of seawater at or down to about five feet below sealevel...
had thwarted the struggling colony
Colony
In politics and history, a colony is a territory under the immediate political control of a state. For colonies in antiquity, city-states would often found their own colonies. Some colonies were historically countries, while others were territories without definite statehood from their inception....
. Its residents were evacuated to the Solomon Islands
Solomon Islands
Solomon Islands is a sovereign state in Oceania, east of Papua New Guinea, consisting of nearly one thousand islands. It covers a land mass of . The capital, Honiara, is located on the island of Guadalcanal...
by the British in 1963 and by 1965 Gardner was officially uninhabited.
Kiribati
In 1971, the UK granted self-rule to the Gilbert IslandsGilbert Islands
The Gilbert Islands are a chain of sixteen atolls and coral islands in the Pacific Ocean. They are the main part of Republic of Kiribati and include Tarawa, the site of the country's capital and residence of almost half of the population.-Geography:The atolls and islands of the Gilbert Islands...
, which achieved complete independence in 1979 as Kiribati
Kiribati
Kiribati , officially the Republic of Kiribati, is an island nation located in the central tropical Pacific Ocean. The permanent population exceeds just over 100,000 , and is composed of 32 atolls and one raised coral island, dispersed over 3.5 million square kilometres, straddling the...
. That same year the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, after having recently surveyed the island for possible weapons testing, relinquished any claims to Gardner through the Treaty of Tarawa
Treaty of Tarawa
On September 20, 1979, representatives of the newly independent Republic of Kiribati and of the United States met in Tarawa to sign a treaty of friendship between the two nations, known as the Treaty of Tarawa. In this treaty, the U.S. acknowledged Kiribati sovereignty over fourteen islands...
. The island was officially renamed Nikumaroro, a name inspired by Gilbertese legends and used by the settlers during the 1940s and 1950s.
Severe storms in 2002 destroyed most of the remaining structures on Nikumaroro, although Gallagher's empty grave (his remains were moved to Tarawa for reburial in 1963) can still be seen in the overgrown village site.
Amelia Earhart
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) made several expeditions to Nikumaroro during the 1990s and 2000s. They investigated documentary, archaeological and anecdotal evidence supporting a hypothesisHypothesis
A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, ὑποτιθέναι – hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose". For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it...
that in July 1937 aviators Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart
Amelia Mary Earhart was a noted American aviation pioneer and author. Earhart was the first woman to receive the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross, awarded for becoming the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean...
and Fred Noonan
Fred Noonan
Frederick Joseph "Fred" Noonan was an American flight navigator, sea captain and aviation pioneer who first charted many commercial airline routes across the Pacific Ocean during the 1930s...
landed on Gardner after failing to find Howland Island
Howland Island
Howland Island is an uninhabited coral island located just north of the equator in the central Pacific Ocean, about southwest of Honolulu. The island lies almost halfway between Hawaii and Australia and is an unincorporated, unorganized territory of the United States. Geographically, it is part...
during the final stage of their ill-fated world flight. It was surmised that Earhart might have survived on Nikumaroro for several months before the British survey parties began arriving in 1938, by which time she and Noonan may have succumbed to injury, starvation or disease. In June 2010, TIGHAR made a 10th expedition to the island.
In an area on the atoll's northwest side called the "Seven Site" the team has found and cataloged artifacts such as flakes of rouge and a shattered mirror from a woman's cosmetic compact, parts of a folding pocket knife, traces of campfires bearing bird and fish bones, clams opened in the same way as oysters in New England, "empty shells laid out as if to collect rain water" and American bottles dating from before World War II, their heat warped bottoms showing they "had once stood in a fire as if to boil drinking water." A phalanx bone found at the site and examined by forensic anthropologist Karen Ramey Burns
Karen Ramey Burns
Karen Ramey Burns is an American forensic anthropologist known for work in international human rights. Her specialty is the recovery and identification of human remains in criminal, historical, archaeological, and disaster-related circumstances...
has been examined by Dr. Cecil Lewis at the Molecular Anthropology Laboratories at the University of Oklahoma
University of Oklahoma
The University of Oklahoma is a coeducational public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. Founded in 1890, it existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two became the state of Oklahoma. the university had 29,931 students enrolled, most located at its...
in Norman, Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma
Norman is a city in Cleveland County, Oklahoma, United States, and is located south of downtown Oklahoma City. It is part of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. As of the 2010 census, Norman was to have 110,925 full-time residents, making it the third-largest city in Oklahoma and the...
, USA. DNA tests on the bone fragment proved inconclusive for testing as to whether it is turtle or human.