Everything about Transportation On Howland Island totally explained
Howland Island is an uninhabited
coral island located just north of the
equator in the central
Pacific Ocean, about 3,100 km (1,670
nm) southwest of
Honolulu. The island is almost half way between
Hawaii and
Australia and is an
unincorporated,
unorganized territory of the
United States, and is often included as one of the
Phoenix Islands. For statistical purposes, Howland is grouped as one of the
United States Minor Outlying Islands.
The island was named after a lookout who sighted it from the whaling ship
Isabella of
New Bedford on
9 September 1842. One recorded European sighting had already been made 20 years earlier from the
Nantucket whaler
Oeno in 1822, and it was briefly named
Worth Island after that ship's captain, George B. Worth.
Howland Island National Wildlife Refuge consists of the 455 acre (1.84 km²) island and the surrounding 32,074 acres (130 km²) of submerged land. The island is now a
National Wildlife Refuge managed by the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as an
insular area under the
U.S. Department of the Interior.
The atoll has no economic activity and is perhaps best known as the island
Amelia Earhart never reached. Airstrips built in the late 1930s to accommodate her planned stopover were never used, subsequently damaged, not maintained and gradually disappeared. There are no harbors or docks. The reefs may pose a hazard. There is one boat landing area along the middle of the sandy beach on the west coast along with a crumbling day beacon. Defense is the responsibility of the
United States and the island is visited every two years by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Geography
Located in the North Pacific Ocean at, the island is tiny at just 1.84 km² (455 acres) and 6.4 km of coastline. The island has an elongated shape on a north-south axis. The climate is equatorial, with little rainfall and a burning sun. Temperatures are moderated somewhat by a constant wind from the east. The terrain is low-lying and sandy: a coral island surrounded by a narrow fringing
reef with a slightly raised central area. The highest point is about six meters above
sea level.
There are no natural
fresh water resources. The landscape features scattered grasses along with prostrate vines and low-growing shrubs. A 1942 eyewitness description mentioned "a low grove of dead and decaying
kou trees" on a very shallow hill at the island's center, but 58 years later (2000) a visitor accompanying a scientific expedition reported seeing "a flat bulldozed plain of coral sand, without a single tree" and some traces of building ruins. Howland is primarily a nesting, roosting and foraging habitat for seabirds, shorebirds and marine wildlife. The U.S. claims an
exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles (370 km) and a
territorial sea of 12 nautical miles (22 km).
Since the island is uninhabited, no time zone is specified but it lies within a
nautical time zone which is 12 hours behind UTC.
History
Prehistoric Settlement
There is evidence to suggest that Howland Island was the site of prehistoric settlement, which possibly extended down to
Rawaki,
Kanton,
Manra and
Orona of the
Phoenix Islands 500 to 700 km southeast, probably in the form of a single community utilising several adjacent islands, but the hard life on isolated islands led to extinction of or dereliction by the settled peoples, in much the way other islands in the area (such as
Kiritimati and
Pitcairn) were abandoned. Such settlements probably began around 1000 BC, when eastern
Melanesians travelled north.
Sparse remnants of trails and other artifacts indicate a sporadic early
Polynesian presence
Discovery
Captain George B. Worth of the Nantucket whaler
Oeno sighted Howland around 1822 and called it "Worth Island". Daniel MacKenzie of the American whaler
Minerva Smith was unaware of Worth's sighting when he charted the island in 1828 and named it after his ship's owners on
1 December 1828.
U.S. Possession and Guano Mining
Howland Island was uninhabited when the United States took possession of it in 1857 through claims under the
Guano Islands Act of 1856. The island was known as a navigation hazard for many decades and several ships were wrecked there. Its
guano deposits were mined by American companies until October, 1878.
John T. Arundel and company, with laborers from the
Cook Islands and
Niue, occupied the island from 1886 to 1891.
Itascatown (1935-1942)
In 1935 a brief attempt at colonization was attempted, part of a larger project administered by the
Department of Commerce to establish a permanent U.S. presence on the equatorial
Line Islands. It began with a rotating population of four alumni and students from
Kamehameha School for Boys, a military school in
Honolulu, Hawaii. Although the recruits had signed on as part of a scientific expedition and expected to spend a three month assignment collecting botanical and biological samples, once at sea they were told, "Your names will go down in history" and that the islands would be developed into "famous air bases in a route that will connect Australia with California." The settlement
Itascatown, near the beach on the island's western side, was a line of no more than half a dozen small wood-frame structures and tents named after the
Itasca, which brought them to the island and made regular cruises between the islands during that era. The fledgling colonists were given large stocks of canned food, water, and other supplies including a gasoline powered refrigerator, radio equipment, complete medical kits and (characteristic for that time) vast quantities of cigarettes. They varied their diet by fishing. Most of their work involved making hourly weather observations and gradually developing a rudimentary infrastructure on the island, including the clearing of a landing area for airplanes. During this period the island was on Hawaii time which was then 10.5 hours behind
UTC. Similar colonization projects were started on nearby
Baker Island,
Jarvis Island, and two other islands.
Kamakaiwi Field
Ground for a rudimentary aircraft landing area was cleared during the mid-1930s in anticipation that the island might eventually be used as a stop-over for a commercial trans-Pacific air route and to further U.S. territorial claims in the region. In keeping with its potential aviation role Howland Island was a scheduled refueling stop for American pilot
Amelia Earhart and navigator
Fred Noonan on their
round-the-world flight in 1937.
WPA funds were used by the Bureau of Air Commerce to construct three graded, unpaved runways meant to accommodate Earhart's modern twin-engined
Lockheed L-10E Electra. The facility was named
Kamakaiwi Field after James Kamakaiwi, a young Hawaiian who arrived with the first group of four colonists, was subsequently picked as leader and spent a total of over three years on Howland, far longer than the average recruit. It has also been referred to as
WPA Howland Airport (the
WPA contributed about 20% of the $12,000 cost). Earhart and Noonan took off from
Lae,
New Guinea and radio transmissions from Earhart were picked up on the island when their aircraft reached its vicinity but they were never seen again.
Japanese attacks
A
Japanese air attack on
8 December 1941 by fourteen twin-engined bombers killed two of the Kamehameha School colonists (Richard "Dicky" Kanani Whaley and Joseph Kealoha Keliʻhananui) at the beginning of U.S. involvement in
World War II. The three airstrips of Kamakaiwi Field were targeted and damaged in the raid. Two days later, a Japanese submarine shelled what was left of the government colony's few buildings into ruins. A single bomber returned twice during the following weeks and dropped more bombs on the rubble of tiny Itascatown. The two survivors were evacuated by a U.S. Navy destroyer on
31 January 1942. The island was occupied by a
battalion of
United States Marines in September 1943 and known as Howland Naval Air Station until May 1944. Following this brief period, all attempts at habitation were abandoned (the colonization projects on the other four islands were also disrupted by the war and ended at the same time).
Kamakaiwi Field suffered more damage during World War II and later all but disappeared. Ironically, while the atoll was colonized in 1935 as a future aviation facility and is referenced in popular culture almost exclusively because of its association with the last flight of Earhart and Noonan, no airplane is known to have ever landed on Howland Island.
Wildlife refuge
By the 1970s Howland Island was overrun by a population of
feral cats, descendants of individuals brought by earlier human colonists. The cats were gradually removed during the 1980s and the area was designated a bird and wildlife refuge. However, abandoned World War II military debris continued to be a concern.
Amateur radio enthusiasts made several authorized visits to the island during the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2006, trespassing by commercial fishing boats and their helicopters was cited as a serious problem.
Public entry to the island is by special-use permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service only and is generally restricted to scientists and educators. Representatives from the agency visit the island on average once every two years, often coordinating transportation with amateur radio operators or the
U.S. Coast Guard to defray the high expense of logistical support required to visit this remote atoll.
Earhart Light
Earhart Light is a
day beacon or navigational landmark shaped somewhat like a short
lighthouse (with no illumination), painted with wide stripes and meant to be seen from several miles out to sea during daylight hours. It is located near the boat landing at the middle of the west coast by the former site of Itascatown. It was partially destroyed during early World War II by the Japanese attacks, but was rebuilt in the early 1960s by the US Coast Guard. By 2000, the Earhart beacon was said to be crumbling and hadn't been painted in decades.
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