Howland Island 🏳

The Nantucket whaler Oeno under Captain Worth made the first recorded European sighting of Howland Island. The sighting placed the atoll on Western charts and began the sequence of naming disputes that preceded American possession.

MacKenzie of the American whaler Minerva Smith, unaware of Worth's earlier sighting, charted the island and named it on 1 December 1828. The independent charting reinforced American familiarity with the island decades before formal annexation.

On 9 September 1842 the island was named after a lookout who sighted it from the New Bedford whaleship Isabella under Captain Geo. E. Netcher. The name has been used ever since and Netcher went on to publicise the island's guano deposits.

Sent by George and Matthew Howland, later of the United States Guano Company, Stetson visited the island and described it as occupied by birds and a plague of rats. The visit was part of the commercial reconnaissance that preceded American claims.

American companies, notably the American Guano Company and the United States Guano Company, extracted guano from Howland from about 1857 until October 1878, when the deposits were substantially depleted; commercial extraction for fertiliser by US and British companies is recorded as continuing until about 1890. Labourers came from across the Pacific, including Hawaiʻi, whose workers named the island Ulukou.

Howland Island, discovered by Americans early in the 19th century, was uninhabited when the United States formally claimed it in 1857 under the Guano Islands Act passed the previous year, which permitted citizens to occupy unclaimed guano deposits. The claim brought the island permanently into the American insular system.

Netcher, Taylor and George W. Benson founded the company after the American Guano Company declined the Howland deposits and Alfred G. Benson resigned. The new company's claim was recognised under the Guano Islands Act of 1856.

When the United States Guano Company sent a vessel to mine in 1859 it found men from the American Guano Company already in occupation, prompting litigation over whether continual possession had lapsed. The court permitted both companies to mine, settling the terms on which American guano claims were held.

Established in 1861, the company acquired the island as a raw-material source for fertiliser manufacture. The purchase tied the remote atoll into the wider American agricultural supply chain.

The British firm worked Howland with labourers from the Cook Islands and Niue between 1886 and 1891, backed by British claims to the island. The episode created a rival sovereignty claim that shaped later American efforts to assert possession.

Four rotating alumni and students of the Kamehameha School for Boys were settled on the island to establish a permanent U.S. presence in the central Pacific. Their settlement, named after the cutter USCGC Itasca, comprised a handful of wooden structures, took hourly weather observations and cleared a landing strip.

The order of 13 May 1936 formally confirmed American sovereignty over Howland Island. It consolidated the legal position against lingering British claims and underpinned the colonisation and airfield projects.

Three graded unpaved runways were constructed to accommodate Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Model 10 Electra, at a cost of about $12,000. The airstrip was intended to make Howland a stopover on future commercial trans-Pacific routes and to strengthen U.S. territorial claims against Britain.

The refuge was expanded in 2009 to include submerged lands within 12 nautical miles and folded into a new marine national monument. The protected area now covers 648 acres of land and over 410,000 acres of water.

The 1987 survey found no evidence of prehistoric settlement and could not locate the architectural features described by Hague in the 1860s. Investigators noted sub-surface testing was limited and earlier features may have been destroyed by airstrip construction.

Cats introduced in the 1930s had devastated seabird populations and were removed by 1985. Their eradication was central to restoring the island's status as a bird refuge.

The refuge established on 27 June 1974 placed the entire island under federal conservation management. It converted a former mining and colonisation site into a strict nature reserve.

Pellegreno overflew Howland in 1967 and Finch did so in 1997, commemorating Earhart's 1937 world flight. Such visits sustained the island's association with the lost aviator.

The navigational landmark, built by colonists in the mid-1930s and partly destroyed by Japanese attacks, was reconstructed in the early 1960s. By 2000 it was reported to be crumbling and unpainted for decades.

After 1944 no further settlement was attempted on Howland, and the colonisation projects on the four other equatorial islands, disrupted by the war, were likewise abandoned. The island has been uninhabited ever since.

A Marine battalion garrisoned Howland from September 1943 until May 1944. It was the island's only period of formal military establishment, though no aircraft is known to have landed there.

The U.S. Navy destroyer removed the last two colonists on 31 January 1942, ending civilian settlement of Howland. Survivor Thomas Bederman recounted the ordeal in Life magazine that March.

On 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, fourteen Mitsubishi G3M bombers from Kwajalein attacked Howland, killing colonists Richard Whaley and Joseph Keliʻihananui and damaging the three airstrips of Kamakaiwi Field; submarine shelling two days later destroyed the remaining colony buildings. The attacks also partially destroyed Earhart Light, the day beacon near the middle of the west coast named in memory of the aviatrix Amelia Earhart, for whom the island was an intended stop on her 1937 round-the-world flight; it was subsequently rebuilt.

The 1940 census counted four residents on Howland Island as of 1 April 1940. It remains the only formal enumeration of the short-lived colony.

Black rats, present since 1854, were eliminated in 1938 by cats introduced the year before. The cats in turn proved destructive to bird populations.

Flying from Lae, New Guinea, the pair transmitted messages indicating they were near the island on 2 July 1937 but never arrived. The largest search and rescue operation to that date concluded the Electra ran out of fuel and ditched, and the loss has defined the island's place in world memory.