Gilbert and Ellice Islands

The Gilbert and Ellice Islands (GEIC as a colony) in the Pacific Ocean were part of the British Empire from 1892 to 1976. They were a protectorate from 1892 to 12 January 1916, and then a colony until 1 January 1976. The history of the colony was mainly characterized by phosphate mining on Ocean Island. In October 1975, these islands were divided by force of law into two separate colonies, and they became independent nations shortly thereafter: the Ellice Islands became Tuvalu in 1978, and the Gilbert Islands became part of Kiribati in 1979.

Location

The Gilbert IslandsReilly Ridgell. ''Pacific Nations and Territories: The Islands of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.'' 3rd. Ed. Honolulu: Bess Press, 1995. p. 95. (sometimes also known as ''Kingsmill Islands''Very often, this name applied only to the southern islands of the archipelago. ''Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary''. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam Webster, 1997. p. 594.) are a chain of sixteen atolls and coral islands in the western Pacific Ocean. They are part of Remote Oceania, and traditionally part of the Micronesia subregion of Oceania. The Gilbert Islands are the main part of what is now the Republic of Kiribati ("Kiribati" is the Gilbertese rendition of "Gilberts") The atolls of the Gilbert Islands are arranged in an approximate north-to-south line.

Geographically, the Equator is the dividing line between the northern Gilbert Islands and the southern Gilbert Islands. South of the Gilbert Islands lie the Ellice Islands (now called Tuvalu), which were previously politically connected with them. The Ellice Islands comprise three reef islands and six true atolls, spread out between the latitude of 5° to 10° south and longitude of 176° to 180°, west of the International Date Line. The Ellice Islands are midway between Hawaii and Australia, and they, too, lie in the Polynesia subregion of Oceania.

European Discovery and naming

In 1568, when Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira was commissioned to explore the South Pacific, he sailed relatively close to the Gilbert Islands. He sailed between the Line Islands and the Phoenix Islands, but without sighting land. However, he ultimately discovered what he called "Isla de Jesús", (probably Nui, amongst the Ellice island group).

In 1606, Pedro Fernandes de Queirós sighted two of the islands in the Gilbert island group: Butaritari and Makin, which he named the Buen Viaje Islands (‘good trip’ islands in Spanish).

In 1788, Thomas Gilbert, a British captain, encountered the archipelago while commanding one of two ships of the First Fleet that were looking for an outer passage route from Port Jackson to Canton. In 1820, a Russian admiral, Johann von Krusenstern, named the group “îles Gilbert” (French for Gilbert Islands) in honor of Captain Gilbert’s earlier discovery. Around that time, the French captain Louis Duperrey became the first to map the whole Gilbert Islands archipelago. He commanded ''La Coquille'', circumnavigating the globe between 1822 and 1825.

The first recorded sighting by Europeans of an Ellice Island was on 16 January 1568, during the voyage of Álvaro de Mendaña from Spain, who sailed past Nui and charted it as ''Isla de Jesús'' (Spanish for "Island of Jesus") because the previous day was the feast of the Holy Name. Mendaña made contact with the islanders but was unable to land. During Mendaña's second voyage across the Pacific, he passed Niulakita on 29 August 1595, which he named ''La Solitaria''. Captain John Byron passed through the Ellice islands in 1764, during his circumnavigation of the globe as captain of the . He charted the atolls as ''Lagoon Islands''. Nanumea was explored by Spanish naval officer Francisco Mourelle de la Rúa who sailed past it on 5 May 1781 with frigate ''La Princesa'', when attempting a southern crossing of the Pacific from the Philippines to New Spain. He charted Nanumea as ''San Augustin''.Keith S. Chambers & Doug Munro, ''The Mystery of Gran Cocal: European Discovery and Mis-Discovery in Tuvalu'', 89(2) (1980) ''The Journal of the Polynesian Society'', 167-198

In 1809, Captain Patterson in the brig ''Elizabeth'' sighted Nanumea while passing through the northern Tuvalu waters on a trading voyage from Port Jackson, Sydney, Australia to China. Captain Arent de Peyster sighted the rest of the Ellice island group in 1819, while sailing the ship ''Rebecca''. He named Funafuti atoll “Ellice's Island,” after Edward Ellice, a British politician and merchant who owned the ship’s cargo. After the work of English hydrographer Alexander George Findlay was published, the name Ellice was applied to all nine islands in the Ellice Island group, which is now called Tuvalu.

Until 1977, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (GEIC) was designated ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 (country code "GE").

In the 1930s, British officials tried to choose a less cumbersome name for the GEIC. Critics jocularly called the arbitrary collection of atolls scattered across the central Pacific the “Gilbert and Sullivans” (a reference to the famous light opera composers). One official suggested renaming the islands “Quateria” (after the word “quarters”), because the main inhabited archipelago extends over four notable quarters of the globe: It lies partly north and partly south of the equator, and also partly east and partly west of the international dateline. There were indigenous names, such as Tungaru and Tuvalu, but they were used to refer to only some of the islands in the group; they did not include the mostly uninhabited Phoenix and Line island groups, or Banaba (also called Ocean Island), whose phosphate rocks provided half of the GEIC’s tax revenue. Further complicating the naming problem, the Tokelau atolls were made part of the colony for a decade (1916–1926), and at one point a governor of Fiji, Sir J.B. Thurston, suggested adding Rotuma to the colony to enable a more organized administration of islands that were scattered over such a vast expanse of water. In 1969, after political issues arose that had led to the creation, four years earlier, of the Gilbertese National Party, the hybrid term “Tungavalu” was suggested (combining the indigenous names for the islands of Tungaru and Tuvalu); the idea was rejected because of political tensions between those islands.

Administration of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands

Protectorate administered as part of the British Western Pacific Territories

In 1857, the British established a protectorate over this general area (but not specifically over these islands), under the Pacific Islanders Protection Act In 1877, they established one over the British Western Pacific Territories.
In 1886, an Anglo-German agreement partitioned the “unclaimed” central Pacific, leaving Nauru in the German sphere of influence, while placing Ocean Island and the future GEIC in the British sphere of influence.

German New Guinea was established in 1884, and British protectorates were established on the Marshall Islands and Nauru, in 1885 and 1888, respectively. Then, between 27 May and 17 June 1892, partly in response to the presence of the United States in Butaritari, Captain E.H.M. Davis R.N., of made the sixteen islands of the Gilbert Islands a British protectorate. Between 9 and 16 October of the same year, Captain Gibson R.N., of declared the Ellice Islands to be a British protectorate. The British government found it administratively convenient to govern the Ellice and Gilberts islands together. It gave the British governor in Fiji the authority to establish an administration in the Gilberts. He eventually visited the islands and appointed a single resident commissioner and local tax collectors. At first, the British Western Pacific Territories (BWPT) were administered by a high commissioner who resided in Fiji (and later in the British Solomon Islands). Then, Sir John Bates Thurston appointed Charles Richard Swayne as the first resident commissioner of the Ellice Islands in 1892 and as the first resident commissioner of the Gilbert Islands in 1893. He was succeeded in 1895 by William Telfer Campbell, who established himself on Tarawa