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Erromango is the fourth largest island in the Vanuatu archipelago. With a land area of it is the largest island in
Tafea Province Tafea is the southernmost of the six provinces of Vanuatu. The name is an acronym for the five main islands that make up the province: Tanna, Aneityum, Futuna, Erromango and Aniwa. History Unlike the other provinces of Vanuatu, the territo ...
, the southernmost of Vanuatu's six administrative regions.


Name

The
endonym An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...
for Erromango in
Erromangan Erromangan, or Sie (Sye), is the primary language spoken on the island Erromango in the Tafea region of the Vanuatu islands. The other Erromanga languages are either moribund or extinct. Although the island is quite large (887 km²), th ...
is ''Nelocompne''. There are several accounts of how 'Erromango' came into common usage: firstly, an oral history from the Potnarvin area tells of how Captain
James Cook James Cook (7 November 1728 Old Style date: 27 October – 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean an ...
was given a yam during his visit in August 1774, and was told in the (now-extinct) Sorung language ''armai n'go, armai n'go'' ('this food is good'), and mistakenly assumed this to be the name of the island. A second account is related by the naturalist Georg Forster, who accompanied Cook. He writes that he learned the name 'Irromanga' from a man named Fannòko, while visiting the neighbouring island of Tanna five days later. Cook himself does not name the island in his account of his visit, but writes later that he got the name, which he spells as 'Erromango', from Forster.


History


Prehistory

Erromango was first settled by humans around 3,000 years ago, as part of the
Lapita The Lapita culture is the name given to a Neolithic Austronesian people and their material culture, who settled Island Melanesia via a seaborne migration at around 1600 to 500 BCE. They are believed to have originated from the northern Philipp ...
migration out of south-east Asia into island Melanesia. The Lapita people brought with them domestic animals such as pigs and chickens and food plants such as yam and breadfruit. Two sites on Erromango, Ifo and Ponamla, have yielded significant archaeological evidence of habitation by Lapita and post-Lapita peoples, including pottery sherds, adzes, marine shell artifacts and cooking stones. Erromango contains numerous caves that provided refuge from tribal warfare and
cyclones In meteorology, a cyclone () is a large air mass that rotates around a strong center of low atmospheric pressure, counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere as viewed from above (opposite to an anti ...
. Human use of these caves has been dated to 2,800-2,400 years before the present. Some of the caves contain
rock art In archaeology, rock art is human-made markings placed on natural surfaces, typically vertical stone surfaces. A high proportion of surviving historic and prehistoric rock art is found in caves or partly enclosed rock shelters; this type also ...
and petroglyphs that have been identified with clan motifs and traditional stories. Caves were also used as burial sites.


European contact

James Cook James Cook (7 November 1728 Old Style date: 27 October – 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean an ...
was the first European to land on Erromango, landing near present-day Potnarvin in the north-east on 4 August 1774. Cook and his landing party were set upon by a group of local men, and in the scuffle that followed, several of Cook's men were injured and a number of Erromangans killed. Following this incident, Cook gave the name 'Traitor's head' to the peninsula adjacent to Potnarvin. Whaling vessels were among the early regular visitors to the island on the nineteenth century. The first such vessel known to have visited was the ''Rose'' in 1804 and the last on record was the American vessel ''John & Winthrop'' in 1887.


The sandalwood trade

In 1825, trader and adventurer
Peter Dillon Peter Dillon (15 June 1788 – 9 February 1847) was a ship's captain engaged in the merchant trade, explorer and writer. Dillon discovered in 1826–27 the fate of the La Pérouse expedition. Early career Peter Dillon was born in Martinique, the ...
discovered the island's large reserves of sandalwood (''Santalum austrocaledonicum''), valued in China for its aromatic oil and as a carving wood. Dillon found that his trade goods were not sufficient to entice Erromangans to cut the timber for him, so he left without gathering any sandalwood. News of his discovery brought other outsiders to Erromango to exploit the resource, and this caused conflict between the Erromangans and the traders. In 1830, King Kamehameha III of Hawaii sent two ships with 479 Hawaiians on board to seize control of Erromango and its sandalwood, under the command of Boki, ruler-designate of Erromango. Their arrival in Cook's Bay coincided with the arrival of two other groups of traders intent on exploiting the sandalwood; two ships, the ''Dhaule'' and the ''Sophia'', both crewed by 330 Rotuman labourers and another ship, the ''Snapper'', with a crew of 113 Tongan labourers on board, had all arrived just before the Hawaiian vessels. The Erromangans resisted the Hawaiians' takeover attempt, and the Hawaiians' hostile intent turned the Erromangans against the other interlopers and their Polynesian crews. Fever killed most of the Tongan and Hawaiian labourers, and just 20 Hawaiians returned to Hawaii to tell the story of their failed occupation. A crash in the price of sandalwood shortly after deterred most traders until the mid-1840s, but even when prices rose again, the combined risks of attack on shore, uncharted reefs, storms and hurricanes meant that sandalwood trading was a highly speculative venture. Some traders such as Robert Towns and James Paddon established stations on Erromango or nearby islands such as
Aneityum Aneityum (also known as Anatom or Keamu) is the southernmost island of Vanuatu, in the province of Tafea. Geography Aneityum is the southernmost island of Vanuatu (not counting the Matthew and Hunter Islands, which are disputed with New Caledoni ...
and Île des Pins in
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to reduce their costs. By 1865 though, Erromango's sandalwood resource was exhausted.


Introduced diseases and depopulation

Erromango's population prior to European contact is estimated at approximately 5,000, though some estimates are as high as 20,000. European visitors brought diseases such as influenza, smallpox and measles to which the local population had no immunity. Sixty percent of Erromangans died during a smallpox outbreak in 1853 and a measles epidemic in 1861. Contemporary accounts by missionaries blamed the sandalwood traders for the outbreaks. Erromangans sought reprisal by killing European and Polynesian missionaries (e.g.
George N. Gordon George Nicol Gordon (April 21, 1822 – May 20, 1861) was a Protestant Canadian missionary to the Pacific Islands. Due to the murder of Gordon and his wife, Ellen (1833 - May 20, 1861), they are considered by many to be martyrs of modern times ...
), their converts and other visitors.


The labour trade and blackbirding

Between 1863 and 1906, around 40,000 people from what was then the New Hebrides were blackbirded onto ships to work as indentured labour on cotton and sugarcane plantations in Queensland, Australia. Another 10,000 went to work in nickel mines in New Caledonia and on plantations in
Fiji Fiji ( , ,; fj, Viti, ; Fiji Hindi: फ़िजी, ''Fijī''), officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. It lies about north-northeast of New Zealand. Fiji consists ...
, Samoa and Hawaii. Many of the islanders recruited were duped into taking part; some were coerced, and some volunteered. While some Erromangan names are listed in official records of Melanesian labourers in Queensland, no exact figures exist for the number of Erromangans who were blackbirded. However, 25 years after the White Australia Policy ended the Melanesian labour trade in 1906, Erromango's population had dwindled to just 381.


Missions and Cannibals

John Williams John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932)Nylund, Rob (15 November 2022)Classic Connection review ''WBOI'' ("For the second time this year, the Fort Wayne Philharmonic honored American composer, conductor, and arranger John Williams, who wa ...
of the London Missionary Society and fellow missionary James Harris were killed and eaten by cannibals at Dillons Bay in November 1839. In November 2009, after a lengthy collaboration between the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Presbyterian church of Vanuatu and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, Williams' descendants travelled to Erromango to reconcile with the descendants of those who killed their ancestor, the Uswo-Natgo clan, 170 years earlier. To mark the occasion, Dillons Bay was renamed Williams Bay. The Rev. George Nicol Gordon, of Prince Edward Island, Canada and his wife, Ellen Catherine Powell, missionaries from the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia to the New Hebrides, were killed at Dillons Bay on May 20, 1861. A memoir of the couple appeared in book form, at Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1863. In total, six missionaries were killed on Erromango. An oral history from Unpogkor (Dillons Bay) says Rev. Williams was killed because he disrespected an important kastom ceremony that was taking place when he landed. As Williams was the first Christian martyr in the south Pacific, Erromango became a particular focus for missionisation. Canadian Presbyterian missionary H.A. Robertson, resident on Erromango from 1872–1913, succeeded in missionising the island's population. This changed the traditional society of the island. His attempts at missionisation were effective because he carefully studied the beliefs and material culture in order to target the most powerful symbols of traditional society. He collected many objects and sent them to overseas museums or used them as curios in his overseas fundraising tours to demonstrate the 'backwardness' of Erromangans. In 1902, Robertson published
Erromanga: the Martyr Isle
', his description of his life as a missionary on the island. It was the first popular account of Erromango and its people. It promoted to a global audience the idea that Erromango was the 'Martyr's Island'. Robertson's predecessor, Rev. James D. Gordon, had spread the belief amongst Erromangans that the Christian God had sent the 1861 measles epidemic to punish them for the killing of Rev. Williams and the other missionaries. Gordon saw this as a means of gaining converts, though some of his contemporaries disapproved of this tactic. This tactic backfired on Gordon, as he and his wife were killed in reprisal for the epidemic, which continued unabated despite their deaths. Over time, Gordon's myth grew into a collective belief amongst Erromangans that the island had been cursed by the Presbyterian Church. This caused the abandonment of forms of cultural expression not sanctioned by the church. Belief in this 'curse' endured until the 2009 reconciliation ceremony, which initiated a re-examination of Erromango's history and culture from an Erromangan point of view. According to a participant, "the reconciliation has freed us up to embrace our customs and traditions, which we couldn't do before because of the guilt attached to Erromango's history and the tendency to view traditional culture as the antithesis of Christianity".


Later history

Erromango and nearby Tanna were devastated by cyclone Pam in mid-March 2015, with reports from Tanna of an unknown number of deaths, complete destruction of the island's infrastructure and permanent shelters, no drinking water.


Geography

The total area of Erromango is 891.9 km². It measures approximately 48 km from the north-west tip to the south-east, and is between 20 and 30 kilometres wide. Its highest point is Mount Santop, at 886m. The island is situated between latitude 18°37'S and 18°59'S and 168°59'E and 168°20'E. Vete Manung Island is located 15 km off the north-east coast of Erromango. In the middle of the east coast is a promontory formed by the volcanic cone of Mount Rantop. 6 km off the east coast is an uninhabited islet named Vetemanu (English name Goat Island) of approximately 12ha in area. The island is part of the Vanuatu rainforests ecoregion, within the
East Melanesian Islands The East Melanesian Islands, also known as the Solomons-Vanuatu-Bismarck moist forests, is a biogeographic region in the Melanesia subregion of Oceania. Biogeographically, the East Melanesian Islands are part of the Australasian realm. It is notabl ...
biogeographic region. Dense evergreen forest covers nearly three-quarters of the island on the windward (eastern) side, while a combination of grassland and woodland occupies the north-west.
Cloud forest A cloud forest, also called a water forest, primas forest, or tropical montane cloud forest (TMCF), is a generally tropical or subtropical, evergreen, montane, moist forest characterized by a persistent, frequent or seasonal low-level cloud c ...
s exist at higher elevations. Much of the vegetation on the island is secondary growth. Formerly it was known as a source of sandalwood in the 19th century, and much of it was depleted. It is also home to the kauri and
tamanu ''Calophyllum inophyllum'' is a large evergreen plant, commonly called tamanu, oil-nut, mastwood, beach calophyllum or beautyleaf. It is native to tropical Asia and Wallacea. Due to its importance as a source of timber for the traditional shipbu ...
trees. There has been extensive logging, but most of the area is recovering, and efforts are underway to try to make the industry sustainable. With European Union support, there is a protected
Happy Lands Kauri Reserve Happiness, in the context of mental or emotional states, is positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. Other forms include life satisfaction, well-being, subjective well-being, flourishing and eudaimonia. Sin ...
.


Geology

Erromango, like most other islands of the Vanuatu archipelago, is volcanic in origin. It is composed of basalt and andesite from the late Miocene-Recent periods and is situated along a Pliocene-Recent volcanic chain that is moving to the north-northwest. Most of the island is fringed with a platform of uplifted coral reef limestone dating from the Late Pleistocene and Holocene.


Volcanism

Erromango was formed during a prolonged period of volcanic activity took place between 6-1 Ma. The island is an ancient underwater volcano that has been raised 100-300m above sea level by tectonic uplift, forming a plateau on which stand three sets of eroded volcanic cones in the centre, north and east of the island. The centre is divided into two volcanoes; Mount Melkum (758m) to the west, and Nompun Umpan (802m) to the east. In the north of the island, Mount William (682m) is a strombolian cone with a caldera 6 km wide and around 600m deep. The eastern peninsula that forms Traitor's Head, north of Cook's Bay on the east coast, is the youngest volcanic formation on the island and consists of four
stratovolcano A stratovolcano, also known as a composite volcano, is a conical volcano built up by many layers (strata) of hardened lava and tephra. Unlike shield volcanoes, stratovolcanoes are characterized by a steep profile with a summit crater and per ...
es (Urap, Ulenu, Rantop and Wahous). A
submarine volcano Submarine volcanoes are underwater vents or fissures in the Earth's surface from which magma can erupt. Many submarine volcanoes are located near areas of tectonic plate formation, known as mid-ocean ridges. The volcanoes at mid-ocean ridges ...
between the peninsula and nearby Vetemanu last erupted in 1881.


Population

Erromango's population at the last census in 2009 was 1,959. The annual population growth rate is 2.2%, and there are a total of 325 private households on the island. The largest villages are
Dillons Bay Dillons is a grocery supermarket chain based in Hutchinson, Kansas, and is a division of Kroger. Other banners under Dillon Stores Division include Gerbes in Missouri and Baker's in Omaha, Nebraska. Dillons operates grocery stores throughout ...
(Upogkor), Potnarvin and Ipota.


Languages

Erromango was linguistically diverse prior to European contact. Since contact, however, Erromango has lost between 67% and 83% of its original languages. The island "has the dubious honour of having suffered the greatest amount of linguistic devastation in the region of Oceania outside of Australia", according to Pacific linguist Terry Crowley. While the original distribution of languages is not well documented, there were originally at least four distinct Erromangan languages: Enyau/Yocu, Ura (also known as Aryau), Utaha (also known as Etiyo or Ifo) and Sorug/Sye (also spelt Sie or Siye). Sorug and Utaha are now extinct and only a few elderly Ura speakers remain. These four languages constitute the Erromanga branch of South Vanuatu languages. Due to a lack of documentation, it is unclear whether Sorug and Sye were two distinct languages or whether they were dialects of a single language. There is also evidence of two additional speech forms, Novulamleg and Uravat, though it is not known whether these were dialectical variants, distinct languages, place or area names, names of descent groups or simply descriptive names. The depopulation that followed the series of epidemics of the mid-19th century resulted in a linguistic realignment. Villages that were no longer viable because of population loss either relocated or amalgamated with others, and the island's population dispersed. Yocu/Enyau was the dominant language during the late 19th century, as it was the language of the Dillons Bay area where the missionaries were based, and the language used in the first missionary bibles. Enyau/Yocu and Sorug/Sye merged between the 1870s and 1920s to become modern Erromangan. Some linguists call this language Sye, however on Erromango ''nam Eromaga'' ('Erromangan language') is more common. Erromangan is spoken as the first language in 90.4% of Erromango's households. Of Erromangans over the age of five, 63.6% are literate in Bislama, Vanuatu's ''lingua franca''. 62.3% are literate in English and 19.0%Vanuatu National Statistics Office 2009a, p. 99. are literate in French, Vanuatu's two official languages.


Transportation

The island is served by two airstrips: Dillon's Bay Airport in the west and Ipota Airport in the east.


References


External links


Conserving and managing biodiversity in the South Pacific, Kauri Forest Reserve, Erromango Island, Vanuatu 2015, Rudolf Hahn CTA FAO (youtube video)

Erromango Cultural Association Languages of Erromango
* SIL Ethnologuebr>– Sie (Sye) languageAustralian Museum – Singing Arrows of ErromangoRadio Australia – Revived Erromango bark cloth painting heads to exhibition in Germany

Erromango – TAFEA Tourism Council
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20150616080306/http://www.vanuatu-diving.com/cruising/pages/erromango.html Cruising and diving Erromangobr>Highlights of tourism in Erromango island (youtube video)Radio New Zealand – Sandalwood on ErromangoAvibase – checklist of birds of Erromango

{{authority control Islands of Vanuatu Tafea Province Volcanoes of Vanuatu Cannibalism in Oceania