Rakahanga: History
=== Maori settlement ===
Rakahanga was first inhabited about 1350 AD. According to oral histories, the original population descended from just two people. Toa was a defeated warrior banished from Rarotonga, and his wife Tapairu was either the sister or the daughter of a Rarotongan chief. She may have been the one with the navigational skills to locate the tiny atoll, which some accounts claim was discovered by her brother Huku. The couple settled on the motu of Te Kainga, near the south west entrance to the lagoon.
Genealogy histories show Toa and Tapairu had four daughters. Toa married each of these daughters in an attempt to produce a male child. Finally, a union with a grand-daughter produced a son, and the youngest daughter produced another boy. Parent-child marriages appear to have been banned after that. Rakahanga was isolated from wars and infectious diseases, and the population grew rapidly. By the sixth generation, the community had split into two tribes under separate arikis (chiefs) and a tuha whenua (Land Distributor) was appointed to arbitrate disputes. By the ninth generation there were four tribal groups, still based around two ariki.
Despite dividing into tribes, there are no records of wars. Te Kainga remained the only site of habitation in Rakahanga. Pearl shell was plentiful there, used in tools such as saws, chisels and fishhooks. The rest of the atoll was reserved for food production, primarily based on the coconut palm, pandanus and puraka, a type of taro.
The population eventually outstripped the food supply. This led to the practice of moving between Rakahanga and the larger but less fertile atoll of Manihiki, which was previously uninhabited. Every few years the entire community would make the dangerous inter-atoll crossing, allowing the vacated atoll to restore. When on Manihiki, the tribal groupings lived on separate motus under their ariki in villages called Tauhuna and Tukoa.
It is believed that Ferdinand Magellan encountered Rakahanga in 1521, but this cannot be substantiated by historians who have researched the island's history. One of the last great Spanish voyages of exploration, under the command of Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, came upon the island on 2 March 1606. He noted in a record of the voyage: "The land is divided among many owners, and is planted with certain roots, which must form their bread. All the rest is a large and thick palm grove which is the chief sustenance of the natives. Some 500 inhabitants were seen assembled on the beach". A Franciscan friar, Fray Martin de Munilla, was so struck with admiration that he called it the island of beautiful people (gente hermosa). De Quiros described the inhabitants as "the most beautiful white and elegant people that were met during the voyage".
Russian oceanic explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen visited Rakahanga on 8 August 1820, on ships Vostok and Mirni. He took its coordinates and charted its position with accuracy; he named this atoll "Grand Duke Alexander Island", after Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaievich who would later become tsar Alexander II. According to Bellingshausen: "The inhabitants (of Rakahanga) came out in canoes and challenged us to fight by throwing stones and spears at the ship."
"The density of its cocoanut [sic] groves has excited the astonishment of all mariners who have visited it," according to a report written in 1874. …