A Polynesian kingdom kept sovereignty under British protection
Tonga, a Polynesian kingdom of 171 islands (45 inhabited), spreads about 750 square kilometres of land across 700,000 square kilometres of South Pacific ocean. Lapita-related settlers arrived roughly 2,500 years ago. From 1900 to 1970 Britain handled foreign affairs under a Treaty of Friendship, yet Tonga never ceded sovereignty.
The word tonga means southwards, since the islands are the southernmost of western Polynesia, and it is related to Hawaiian kona, meaning leeward. About 103,000 people live here, seven in ten on Tongatapu, whose 257 square kilometres hold the capital Nukuʻalofa. The chain runs some 800 kilometres north to south in three groups, Vava'u, Ha'apai and Tongatapu, built mostly of uplifted coral limestone, some of it capping volcanic rock.
Thorium dating shows settlers had reached Nukuleka, the oldest known town, by 888 BC, give or take eight years. Starting with the first king, ʻAhoʻeitu, the Tuʻi Tonga became a seafaring power whose reach touched Fiji, Samoa, Niue and New Caledonia. Captain Cook's warm welcome in 1773 earned the name Friendly Islands, though William Mariner later wrote that chiefs had planned to kill him and simply could not agree on how.
In 1845 the warrior Tāufaʻāhau, baptised George by Methodists, united the islands, and in 1875 he proclaimed a constitutional monarchy, freed the serfs and guaranteed a free press. Britain's protection from 1900 left the kingdom self-governing, the only Pacific state to keep its own monarchy, and that arrangement ended in 1970 under plans laid by Queen Salote before her death. Influenza arrived aboard a New Zealand vessel in 1918 and claimed some 1,800 lives, roughly one Tongan in twelve.
Fruit bats are sacred royal property and cannot be hunted, so they flourish, and two birds, the Tongan whistler and the Tongan megapode, live nowhere else. The kingdom ranked third for disaster risk worldwide in 2021, and early in 2022 the nearby Hunga volcano, rivalling Krakatoa in scale, sent a tsunami into the capital and cut the undersea internet cable for five weeks.
Source: Tonga
