Prehistory The atolls (ring-shaped coral reefs) of the Pacific Ocean are the most marginal environment in the world for human habitation. They have generally not been occupied for more than 1,500 years, but started to be settled by humans once permanent
islets formed around
lagoons. In comparison with other atolls, Caroline Island has been relatively undisturbed. There are indications that early
Polynesians reached the island before Europeans, as several
marae (communal or sacred places) and graves have been discovered, but no evidence has been found of long-term settlement. Evidence of the largest of the
marae, located on the west side of Nake Islet, was documented in 1883.
Early sightings and accounts Ferdinand Magellan may have sighted Caroline Island on 4 February 1521. The first recorded sighting of Caroline Island by Europeans was on 21 February 1606, by the Portuguese explorer
Pedro Fernández de Quirós, who named the island San Bernardo, and who wrote an account of his voyage. The island was next seen by Europeans on 16 December 1795, when the
British naval officer
William Robert Broughton of named it Carolina, after the daughter of
Philip Stephens, the
First Secretary of the Admiralty. The island was sighted in 1821 by the English
whaler Supply, and was then named "Thornton Island" for the ship's captain. It was also recorded in the 19th century as Hirst Island and Clark Island. Other early visits which left behind accounts of the island include that of the
USS Dolphin in 1825, written by the
United States Navy officer
Hiram Paulding. According to this account, the crew of the
Dolphin supplied themselves with fish from the island, although when wading back to their ship they were attacked by sharks. The English whaling ship
Tuscan reached Caroline island in 1835, and the geography and wildlife of the island were recorded by the
ship's surgeon, the biologist
Frederick Debell Bennett, in his
Narrative of a Whaling Voyage Round the Globe From the Year 18331836. Bennett knew that the island was seldom visited, "although it is usually 'sighted' by South-Seamen, when on their way from the Society Islands to the North Pacific". He noted that about seven years before the arrival of the
Tuscan, a Captain Stavers had landed on the island and left behind some pigs, of which no trace remained.
1883 solar eclipse In 1883 two expeditions arrived on Caroline Island in time to observe and record the
solar eclipse of 6 May. On 22 March, American and English astronomers left the Peruvian port of
Callao aboard the , arriving at the island on 20 April. Among those in the American expedition were the astronomers
Edward S. Holden of the
Washburn Observatory, the expedition's leader, and
Winslow Upton, professor of astronomy at
Brown University. An expedition from France arrived two days later in the ''L'Eclaireur''. As small boats could not come close to the shore, the equipment was carried to the island by men standing in about of water, and then about further to the observation site. On the morning of 6 May, the sky cleared shortly before the time of
first contact, and remained clear for the rest of the day. During the eclipse, the astronomers searched for
Vulcan, a hypothetical intra-Mercurial planet, but discovered nothing. The duration of
totality (the time the entire disc of the Sun is obscured) was 5 minutes 25 seconds, a little less than the maximum duration of 5 minutes 58 seconds. The Austrian astronomer
Johann Palisa, a member of the French expedition, discovered an
asteroid later that year, which he named
Carolina after the island.
Commercial enterprises and British claim In 1846, the Tahitian firm of Collie and Lucett attempted to establish a small stock-raising and
copra-harvesting community on the island; the operation met with limited financial success. In 1868, Caroline was claimed for Britain by the captain of
HMS Reindeer, which noted 27 residents in a settlement on South Islet. The island was leased by the British government to
Houlder Brothers and Co. in 1872, with
John T. Arundel as the manager; two of the islets are named for him. Houlder Brothers and Co. conducted minimal
guano mining on the island from 1874. John T. Arundel and Co. took over the lease and the industry in 1881; the company supplied a total of about 10,000 tons of
phosphate until supplies became exhausted in 1895. In 1885 Arundel established a coconut plantation, but the coconut palms suffered from disease and the plantation failed. The settlement on the island lasted until 1904, when the six remaining Polynesians were relocated to
Niue. The island was leased to S.R. Maxwell and Company and 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. It was abandoned in the late 1930s. During World War II, Caroline Island remained unoccupied, and no military action took place there. Under British jurisdiction, it was formally repossessed by the
British Western Pacific High Commission in 1943 and then governed as part of the
Central and Southern Line Islands. A Tahitian family was found to be living on the atoll when the American sailor John Caldwell visited it in September 1946. In January 1972, the Central and Southern Line Islands were joined with the British colony of the
Gilbert and Ellice Islands, which had become autonomous in 1971.
Kiribati When the Gilbert Islands became the independent nation of Kiribati in 1979, Caroline Island became Kiribati's easternmost point. The island is owned by the government of the Republic of Kiribati and overseen by the
Ministry of Line and Phoenix Islands Development, which is headquartered on
Kiritimati. Claims to sovereignty over the island by the United States were relinquished in the 1979
Treaty of Tarawa, ratified by the
U.S. Senate in 1983. The island was inhabited from 1987 to 1991 by Anne and Ron Falconer and their children, who developed a largely self-sufficient settlement. Following a transfer of ownership, the Falconers left the island. In the 1990s, the island was occasionally visited by Polynesian copra gatherers under agreements with the Kiribati government in
Tarawa. On 23 December 1994, the Republic of Kiribati announced a change of
time zone for the Line Islands would take effect on 31 December 1994. This adjustment placed all of Kiribati on the Asian or western side of the International Date Line. Although Caroline Island's longitudinal position of 150 degrees west corresponded to a
UTC offset of −10 hours, the island's new time zone became
UTC+14. This move made Caroline Island both the easternmost land in the earliest time zone (by some definitions, the
easternmost point on Earth), and the first point of land which would see sunrise on 1 January 2000—at 5:43 a.m. local time. Other Pacific nations, including Tonga, New Zealand and Fiji, protested the move, objecting that it infringed on their claims to be the first land to see dawn in the year 2000. According to the
United States Naval Observatory, the first point of land to see sunrise on 1 January 2000 (local time) was between the
Dibble Glacier and
Victor Bay in
East Antarctica, at 66 degrees south, where the sun rose at 12:08 a.m. In August 1997, to promote events to mark the
arrival of the year 2000, Caroline Island was renamed Millennium Island by the Kiribati government. In December 1999, over 70 Kiribati singers and dancers travelled to Caroline from South Tarawa, accompanied by approximately 25 journalists, as part of the celebrations to mark the arrival of the new millennium. In 2017 a Russian businessman proposed a deal to invest $350 million to build a resort in Kiribati in exchange for sovereign rights over three islands. The deal was rejected by the Kiribati government based on a report from the Kiribati Foreign Investment Commission. ==Geography and climate==