thumb|250px|NASA orbital photo of Malden Island (north at top)

thumb|250px|Boat landing on Malden Island with ruins of old settlement

Malden Island, sometimes called Independence Island in the 19th century, is a low, arid, uninhabited atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, about in area. It is one of the Line Islands belonging to the Republic of Kiribati. The lagoon is entirely enclosed by land, though it is connected to the sea by underground channels, and is quite salty.

The island is chiefly notable for its ancient stone architecture, its once-extensive deposits of phosphatic guano (exploited by Australian interests from 1860–1927), its former use as the site of the first British H-bomb tests (Operation Grapple, 1957), and its current importance as a protected area for breeding seabirds.

The island is designated as the Malden Island Wildlife Sanctuary. In 2014 the Kiribati government established a fishing exclusion zone around each of the southern Line Islands (Caroline (commonly called Millennium), Flint, Vostok, Malden, and Starbuck).

Geography

Malden Island is located south of the equator, south of Honolulu, Hawaii, and more than west of the coast of South America. The nearest land is uninhabited Starbuck Island, to the southwest. The closest inhabited place is Tongareva (Penrhyn Island), to the southwest. The nearest airport is on Kiritimati (Christmas Island), to the northwest. Other nearby islands (all uninhabited) include Jarvis Island, to the northwest, Vostok Island, to the south-southeast, and Caroline (Millennium) Island, to the southeast.

The island has roughly the shape of an equilateral triangle, with on a side, aligned with the southwest side running northwest to southeast. The west and south corners are slightly truncated, shortening the north, east and southwest coasts to about , and adding shorter west and south coasts about 1 to 2 km (½–1 mi) in length. A large, mostly shallow, irregularly shaped lagoon, containing a number of small islets, fills the east central part of the island. The lagoon is entirely enclosed by land, but only by relatively narrow strips along its north and east sides. It is connected to the sea by underground channels, and is quite salty. Most of the land area of the island lies to the south and west of the lagoon. The total area of the island is about .

The island is very low, no more than above sea level at its highest point. The highest elevations are found along a rim that closely follows the coastline. The interior forms a depression that is only a few metres above sea level in the western part and is below sea level (filled by the lagoon) in the east central part. Because of this topography, the ocean cannot be seen from much of Malden's interior.

There is no standing fresh water on Malden Island, though a fresh water lens may exist.

A continuous heavy surf falls all along the coast, forming a narrow white to gray sandy beach. Except on the west coast, where the white sandy beach is more extensive than elsewhere, a strip of dark gray coral rubble, forming a series of low ridges parallel to the coast, lies within the narrow beach, extending inward to the island rim. grey-backed tern (Onychoprion lunata), red-tailed tropicbird (Phaethon rubricauda) and sooty terns (sterna fuscata). It is also an important winter-stop for the bristle-thighed curlew (Numenius tahitiensis), a migrant from Alaska,

On 30 July 1825, the island was seen again by Captain The 7th Lord Byron (a cousin of the famous poet). Byron, commanding the British warship HMS Blonde, was returning to London from a special mission to Honolulu to repatriate the remains of the young king and queen of Hawaii, who had died of measles during a visit to Britain. The island was named after Lieutenant Charles Robert Malden, navigator of the Blonde, who sighted the island and briefly explored it. Andrew Bloxam, naturalist of the Blonde, and James Macrae, a botanist travelling for the Royal Horticultural Society, joined in exploring the island and recorded their observations. Malden may have been the island sighted in 1823 by another captain, William Clark of the whaling vessel Winslow.

Early history

thumb|Early Polynesian ruins on Malden Island

At the time of its discovery by Europeans, Malden had no population. However, extensive archaeological sites on the island point to occupation by Polynesian people in the past. Sites on the island are consistent with pre-contact Polynesian architecture of the wider region and are noted to be especially similar in form to architectural forms in Tonga.

These sites are clustered along the northwest and south beach ridges. A total of 21 archaeological sites have been catalogued on the island. The sites include temple platforms, called marae, house sites, and graves. Due to the nature of early archaeological classification of sites at the time of classification, these sites are composed of irregular groups of above ground architecture and should not be taken as representative given a lack of more intensive subterranean investigation. Comparisons with stone structures on Tuamotu atolls show that a population of between 100 and 200 people could have produced all of the Malden structures. Marae of a similar type are found on Raivavae, one of the Austral Islands. declaring that "...shade, coolness, refreshing fruit, pleasant sights and sounds: there are none. For those who live on the island, it is the scene of an exile which has to be endured somehow or other". She described Malden as containing "a little settlement fronted by a big wooden pier, and a desolate plain of low greyish-green herbage, relieved here and there by small bushes bearing insignificant yellow flowers". Water for settlers was produced by large distillation plants, since no fresh-water wells could be successfully dug on the island.

The five or six European supervisors on the island were given "a row of little tin-roofed, one-storeyed houses above the beach", while the native labourers from Niue Island and Aitutaki were housed in "big, barn-like shelters". Grimshaw described these edifices as being "large, bare, shady buildings fitted with wide shelves, on which the men spread their mats and pillows to sleep". Their food consisted of "rice, biscuits, yams, tinned beef, and tea, with a few cocoanuts for those who may fall sick". Food for the white supervisors consisted of "tinned food of various kinds, also bread, rice, fowls, pork, goat, and goat's milk", but vegetables were hard to come by.

Indentured labourers on Malden were contracted for one year, paid ten shillings per week plus room and board, and repatriated to their home islands when their contracts expired. Salaries for the supervisors were described as "quite high". Some labourers were prisoners, sentenced by New Zealand resident agents. Work hours were 5 am to 5 pm, with one hour and 45 minutes given off for meals.

The guano diggers constructed a unique railroad on Malden Island, with cars powered by large sails. Laborers pushed empty carts from the loading area up the tramway to the digging pits, where they were loaded with guano. At the end of the day, the sails were unfurled, and the train cars whisked back to the settlement by the prevailing southeastern winds. While cars were known to jump the tracks more than once during these excursions, the system seems to have worked fairly well. No further human use seems to have been made of Malden until 1956.

British nuclear testing

thumb|A [[mushroom cloud rising over Malden Island after the first British hydrogen bomb test in May 1957]]

thumb|Memorial tablet in [[Paisley (Scotland)|Paisley remembering the people concerned in the tests]]

In 1956, the United Kingdom selected Malden as the "instrumentation site" for Operation Grapple its first series of thermonuclear (H-bomb) weapons tests, based at Kiritimati (Christmas Island). In 1957, between May 15 and June 19, three thermonuclear devices with yields ranging between 200–720 kt were detonated at high altitude a short distance offshore. British officials insisted that Malden should not be called a "target island". The airstrip constructed on the island by the Royal Engineers in 1956–57 remained usable in July 1979.

Malden Island today

Malden was incorporated in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony in 1972, and included in the portion of the colony which became the Republic of Kiribati in 1979. The U.S. continued to dispute British sovereignty, based on its nineteenth century Guano Act claims, until after Kiribati became independent. On 20 September 1979, representatives of the United States and Kiribati met on Tarawa Atoll in the Gilberts group of Kiribati, and signed a treaty of friendship between their two nations (commonly referred to as the Treaty of Tarawa of 1979) by which the United States recognized Kiribati's sovereignty over Malden and thirteen other islands in the Line and Phoenix Islands groups. This treaty entered into force on 23 September 1983.

The main value of the island to Kiribati lies in the resources of the exclusive economic zone which surrounds it, particularly the rich tuna fisheries. Gypsum deposits on the island itself are extensive, but do not appear to be economically viable under foreseeable market conditions, mainly due to cost of transportation. The principal purpose of this reservation was to protect the large breeding populations of seabirds. This sanctuary is administered by the Wildlife Conservation Unit of the Ministry of Line and Phoenix Islands Development, headquartered on Kiritimati.

See also

  • Protected areas of Kiribati
  • Desert island
  • Lists of islands

References

Sources

  • Dunmore, John (1992); Who's Who in Pacific Navigation, Australia:Melbourne University Press,
  • Quanchi, Max & Robson, John, (2005); Historical Dictionary of the Discovery and Exploration of the Pacific Islands, USA: Scarecrow Press,
  • Bloxam, Andrew (1925), Diary of Andrew Bloxam: naturalist of the "Blonde" on her trip from England to the Hawaiian islands, 1824–25 Volume 10 of Bernice P. Bishop Museum special publication
  • National Geographic – Southern Line Islands Expedition, 2014
  • Malden Atoll viewed from space