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Portuguese sailor Pedro Fernandes de Queirós came upon Ducie and Henderson Islands while sailing for the Spanish Crown, arriving on 26 January 1606.

Eventually, important natural resources were exhausted, inter-island trade broke down and a period of civil war began on Mangareva, causing the small human populations on Henderson and Pitcairn to be cut off and eventually to become extinct.Īlthough archaeologists believe that Polynesians were living on Pitcairn as late as the 15th century, the islands were uninhabited when they were rediscovered by Europeans. They traded goods and formed social ties among the three islands despite the long canoe voyages between them, which helped the small populations on each island survive despite their limited resources. The earliest known settlers of the Pitcairn Islands were Polynesians who appear to have lived on Pitcairn and Henderson, and on Mangareva Island 540 kilometres (340 mi) to the northwest, for several centuries from at least the 11th century. History Īdamstown, the only settlement on the Islands Polynesian settlement and extinction As of January 2020, the territory had only 47 permanent inhabitants. The mutiny and its aftermath have been the subject of many books and films. The Pitcairn Islanders are a biracial ethnic group descended mostly from nine Bounty mutineers and a handful of Tahitian consorts-as is still apparent from the surnames of many of the islanders. The islands nearest to the Pitcairn Islands are Mangareva (of French Polynesia) at 688 km to the west and Easter Island at 1,929 km to the east. Henderson Island accounts for 86% of the land area, but only Pitcairn Island is inhabited. The four islands- Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno-are scattered across several hundred miles of ocean and have a combined land area of about 18 square miles (47 km 2). The Pitcairn Islands ( / ˈ p ɪ t k ɛər n/ Pitkern: Pitkern Ailen), officially the Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno Islands, is a group of four volcanic islands in the southern Pacific Ocean that form the sole British Overseas Territory in the Pacific Ocean. ^ The Pitcairn Islands dollar is also official legal tender, although it does not circulate as widely.