Jarvis Island 🏳

The island was first recorded by the British vessel Eliza Francis, owned by Edward, Thomas and William Jarvis and commanded by Captain Brown, giving the island its name. Whaling vessels continued to visit until the 1870s.

The United States Exploring Expedition charted Jarvis Island, adding it to American hydrographic knowledge of the equatorial Pacific. The survey preceded the American claim of the following decades.

The island was claimed in March 1857 under the Guano Islands Act and formally annexed by the United States on 27 February 1858, bringing Jarvis under American sovereignty and opening it to commercial guano extraction. The island was abandoned in 1879 after tons of guano deposits had been removed for use in producing fertiliser.

Incorporated in 1857, the company established claims to Baker and Jarvis Islands and from 1858 erected support structures, a two-storey superintendent's house and tram tracks to carry guano to the western shore. Labourers were drawn from across the Pacific, including Hawaiʻi, and mining continued for twenty-one years supplying fertiliser to the United States.

After twenty-one years the commercial guano works were suddenly ended, leaving about a dozen buildings and 8,000 metric tons of mined guano behind. The island's first economic era closed, and later New Zealand attempts to resume extraction failed.

Left for months as sole caretaker during sporadic New Zealand attempts to revive guano extraction, Flockton took his own life. His carved wooden grave marker stood for decades in the island's four-grave cemetery.

The firm restarted extraction for thirteen years, briefly reviving the island's commercial use. Arundel later returned in 1909, when his crew built a wooden pyramidal day beacon on the western shore that survived into the 1940s.

In June 1889 Britain formally annexed Jarvis Island, creating a competing claim alongside the earlier American annexation and reflecting wider Anglo-American rivalry over Pacific guano islands; however, Britain never carried out its plans for further exploitation of the island.

Carrying coal from Newcastle, New South Wales, to San Francisco, the ship was lost on Jarvis; its crew escaped in two lifeboats reaching Pago Pago and Apia. The wreck's timber was later scavenged and used to build the Millersville settlement's shacks.

From 26 March 1935 the island was reclaimed and settled, beginning as tents beside the old day beacon and growing into the Millersville settlement with stone and wood dwellings, refrigeration, radio and a weather station. The colony asserted effective American occupation of the equatorial Pacific in the run-up to war.

The designation raised Jarvis Island's protected status and extended safeguards over surrounding waters. It embedded the island in one of the largest marine protected areas under American jurisdiction.

Cats descended from animals likely brought by colonists in 1937 had badly damaged the island's wildlife and vegetation. Removal efforts begun in the mid-1960s achieved total eradication by 1990, permitting seabird recovery.

Eight breeding species were recorded in 1982, rising to thirteen in 1996 and fourteen in 2004. The Polynesian storm petrel returned after over forty years' absence, brown noddies grew to nearly 10,000, and spectacled terns rose from twelve birds to over 200 nests.

The refuge was established on 27 June 1974 and expanded in 2009 to include submerged lands within 12 nautical miles. It now covers 1,273 acres of land and 428,580 acres of water.

Witnessed by IGY scientists, a storm lasting several days erased without trace the remains of the nineteenth-century guano diggings and the 1935–1942 colonisation. It removed nearly all physical evidence of the island's occupation history.

A research party worked on the island from July 1957 until November 1958, the last sustained human presence. When the project ended the island was abandoned again, leaving only a few sheds, the scientists' house and a day beacon.

On 7 February 1942 the cutter removed the settlers, then shelled and burned the dwellings to deny them to the enemy, ending the Millersville colony. The cleared landing area on the northeast end was later shelled by Japanese forces.

At the outset of the Second World War a Japanese submarine surfaced off the west coast and opened fire with its deck gun on the four young colonists who had run to the beach; none were hurt. The attack demonstrated the island's exposure in the Pacific theatre.

The 1940 federal census enumerated three residents on Jarvis Island. It marked the demographic peak of formal American habitation there.

Roosevelt placed Jarvis under Interior Department administration, formalising the civil governance of the colonisation project. This established the administrative arrangement that persisted through later refuge designations.