Tuvalu

Interesting Facts About Tuvalu

• Tuvalu was first sighted by Europeans on 16 January 1568, when Spanish explorer Álvaro de Mendaña sailed past Nui and charted it as Isla de Jesús because the previous day was the feast of the Holy Name.
• Captain John Byron charted Tuvalu's atolls as the Lagoon Islands during his circumnavigation of the globe in 1765 as captain of the Dolphin.
• The name 'Ellice Island' was given to Funafuti in 1819 by Captain Arent Schuyler de Peyster, named after English politician Edward Ellice, and was later applied to all nine islands.
• Christianity arrived in Tuvalu in 1861 when Elekana, a deacon from a Congregational church in the Cook Islands, drifted for eight weeks in a canoe during a storm before landing at Nukulaelae on 10 May 1861.
• Elekana, who brought Christianity to Tuvalu, was trained at Malua Theological College, a London Missionary Society school in Samoa, before establishing the Church of Tuvalu.
• American whalers visited Tuvalu's waters, with Captain George Barrett of the Nantucket whaler Independence II identified as the first to hunt there in November 1821, bartering coconuts with the people of Nukulaelae.

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