Although Suwarrow was inhabited by
Polynesians during prehistory it was uninhabited when discovered by the
Russian-American Company ship
Suvorov, which reportedly followed clouds of birds to the atoll on 17 September 1814. (The ship was named after Russian
general Alexander Suvorov, who appears as "Suwarrow" in
Lord Byron's epic poem
Don Juan and also in
Alaric Alexander Watts'
alliterative poem "The Siege of Belgrade".) It has been only intermittently inhabited since. The atolls name has also been spelled variously as
Souvorow,
Souwaroff, and
Souworoff. "Suwarrow" is the official spelling adopted by
New Zealand. In the mid-19th century (records dispute whether it was in 1848 or 1855), a ship from
Tahiti was carrying out salvage work when a box containing
NZ$15,000 worth of coins was dug up. Some years later, New Zealander Henry Mair found
pieces of eight in a turtle nest. Mair became involved in a dispute, the find was covered up, and it has never been rediscovered. John Lavington Evans was the first lessee of Suwarrow, who passes his lease to the Pacific Islands Trading Company Limited. Evans remained as the superintendent of the company's operations in the Pacific. In 1867, Captain Handley B. Sterndale was engaged by the company and sailed with Evans from Melbourne, Australia to the
Cook Islands (then known as the Harvey Group). While one ship was lost off the reef of
Rarotonga, British sovereignty was proclaimed 22 April 1889. In 1903 the atoll was leased to
Lever Brothers, "for the purpose of removing guano or other fertilising substances therefrom, and of planting the land with coconuts, and for collecting pearl-shells, and for other purposes of a like nature." They maintained about thirty persons on the island until a cyclone in 1914 so severely damaged operations that the island was abandoned. In April 1890
Robert Louis Stevenson, his wife
Fanny Vandegrift Stevenson, and her son
Lloyd Osbourne were passengers on the trading steamer
Janet Nicoll, which called at Suwarrow during a trading cruise around the central Pacific. Fanny, describing the atoll in her journal, called Suwarrow "the most romantic island in the world." The journal of
Fanny Vandegrift Stevenson was published under the title
The Cruise of the Janet Nichol.
Jack Buckland was also a passenger on
Janet Nicoll; he later returned to Suwarrow to be the island trader. During
World War II,
Robert Dean Frisbie and several
Coastwatchers lived on the largest islet, Anchorage. Frisbie wrote about his experiences in
The Island of Desire. In 1942, a cyclone washed away 16 of the 22 islets in the atoll. The coastwatchers left a hut with water tanks behind, and left wild pigs and chickens on the islet. Later, cats were allowed to run wild on Anchorage Island, to control
Polynesian rats which were documented to occur there since the island was discovered by Europeans (Jones 2001) but conceivably were introduced by Polynesian seafarers a longer time ago.
New Zealander Tom Neale lived alone on Suwarrow for a total of 16 years in three periods between 1952 and 1977. He described his experience in the first two of those periods in
An Island to Oneself (1966 ). In 1964, while Neale was in Rarotonga, June von Donop, a former accountant from
Honolulu,
Hawaii, lived alone in his house on Suwarrow for a week, while her crewmates on the schooner
Europe stayed on board their vessel. Michael Swift lived alone on Suwarrow in 1965–66, but he was not familiar with survival techniques and had a hard time finding sufficient food. In 1978, the island was declared a
National Park of the
Cook Islands due to the plentiful marine and bird wild life it supports. The island and surrounding water is
Crown land. A proposal to establish an
aquaculture operation to
farm Tahitian pearls was successfully opposed by Cook Islands environmental NGO, the
Taporoporo'anga Ipukarea Society. In October 2011, Russian politician
Anton Bakov claimed to have purchased the atoll and declared it the capital of a
new Russian Empire. The claim was denied by Prime Minister
Henry Puna. == Flora and fauna==