Ten thousand Polynesians hold nine scattered Pacific platforms
Tuvalu, midway between Hawaii and Australia, joins three reef islands and six atolls between 5°–10° S and 176°–180°, west of the Date Line. The 2022 census counted 10,643 people—the world’s 194th-most populous country. Polynesians arrived in migrations beginning about three thousand years ago via Samoa and Tonga stepping-stones.
Tuvalu's land adds up to just 25.14 square kilometres, making it the fourth-smallest country on Earth, and only Niue and Vatican City have fewer people within the UN system. The name means eight standing together, since eight of the nine islands were inhabited before Europeans came. Local tradition says the islands were made by the Eel and the Flounder: the flat atolls take after the flounder, the coconut palms after the eel. Founding ancestors are said to come from Samoa on Niutao, Funafuti and Vaitupu, but from Tonga on Nanumea.
Álvaro de Mendaña sighted Nui on 16 January 1568 and called it Isla de Jesús, though he could not land. In 1819 the privateer captain Arent de Peyster named Funafuti Ellice's Island after the owner of his cargo, and the label later spread to the whole group. The first whaler to work these waters, George Barrett of Nantucket, traded for coconuts on Nukulaelae in 1821.
Christianity arrived by accident in 1861 when Elekana, a church deacon from the Cook Islands, drifted eight weeks in a storm-tossed canoe before landing on Nukulaelae. Peruvian blackbirders raided in 1862 and 1863, taking about 170 people from Funafuti and some 250 from Nukulaelae, whose 1861 population of 300 dropped below 100. Robert Louis Stevenson visited in 1890 aboard the trading steamer Janet Nicoll.
Britain declared a protectorate in 1892 alongside the Gilbert Islands, and after a 1974 referendum the two groups separated; Tuvalu became independent on 1 October 1978 and joined the UN in 2000 as its 189th member. With little soil, the country relies on imports, fishing licences and money sent home by seafarers, and its low atolls face grave danger from rising seas.
Source: Tuvalu
