Caroline Island
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large marae exists on the west side of Nake Islet. To date, these artifacts have not been surveyed by archaeologists. The first recorded sighting of Caroline Island by Europeans was on February 21, 1606, by Pedro Fernández de Quirós, a Portuguese explorer sailing on behalf of Spain; his account names the island "San Bernardo." The atoll was "rediscovered" on December 16, 1795 by Captain William Robert Broughton of HMS Providence, who gave the atoll the name Carolina (which later became Caroline) "in compliment to the daughter of Sir P. Stephens of the Admiralty." Caroline was again sighted in 1821 by the English whaling ship Supply and was then named "Thornton Island" for the ship's captain. Other early names for the atoll include Hirst Island, Clark Island, and Independence Island. Among other early visits which left behind accounts of the island are that of the USS Dolphin in 1825 (recorded by Lieutenant Hiram Paulding), and of a whaling ship in 1835 (recorded by Frederick Debell Bennett in his Narrative of a Whaling Voyage Round the Globe From the Year 1833–1836). In 1846, the Tahitian firm of Collie and Lucett attempted to establish a small stock-raising and copra (coconut meat) community on the island, an operation which met with limited financial success. In 1868, Caroline was claimed by the British vessel HMS Reindeer, which noted 27 residents in a settlement on South Islet. This settlement lasted until 1904, when the six remaining Polynesians were relocated to Niue.
17th to 19th century
In 1872, the island was leased by the British government to Houlder Brothers, who conducted minimal guano mining on the island. In 1881, the lease was later taken over by the mining operation's manager, John T. Arundel (for whom one of the islets is named). Guano mining, which began in 1874, supplied a total of about 10,000 tons of phosphate until supplies were exhausted around 1895. In 1883, an expedition of American astronomers traveled from Peru to Caroline Island aboard the USS Hartford to observe a total solar eclipse on May 6. A French expedition also observed the eclipse from Caroline, and the United States Navy mapped the atoll. Johann Palisa, a member of the expedition, discovered an asteroid later that year which he named Carolina "in remembrance of his visit to [the] island." Leased to S.R. Maxwell and Company, a new settlement was established in 1916, this time built entirely upon copra export. Much of the South islet was deforested to make way for coconut palms, a non-indigenous plant. The business venture, however, went into debt, and the island's settlement slowly decreased in population. By 1926, it was down to only ten residents and by 1936, the settlement consisted of only two Tahitian families before abandonment sometime in the late 1930s. Caroline Island remained uninhabited and undisturbed through World War II and afterwards. It remained under British jurisdiction, repossessed by the British Western Pacific High Commission in 1943 and governed as part of the Central
20th century