Henderson Island is an uninhabited island in the south Pacific Ocean. It is part of the Pitcairn Island Group, together with Pitcairn, Oeno, and Ducie Islands. Measuring 9.6 by 5.1 kilometres (6.0 mi × 3.2 mi), it has an area of 37.3 km2 (14.4 sq mi) and is located 193 km (104 nmi; 120 mi) northeast of Pitcairn Island, which is the only inhabited island of the group. It has poor soil and little fresh water, and is unsuitable for agriculture. There are three beaches on the northern end and the remaining coast comprises steep (mostly undercut) cliffs up to 15 m (50 ft) in height. In 1902, it was annexed to the Pitcairn Islands colony, which is now a British Overseas Territory. Henderson is one of the last two raised coral atolls in the world whose ecosystems remain relatively unaffected by human contact, along with Aldabra in the Indian Ocean. In 1988, it was designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. Ten of its 51 flowering plants, all four of its land birds and about a third of the identified insects and gastropods are endemic – a remarkable diversity given the island's size.
History The island was settled by Polynesians – possibly as early as 800 AD – but by the 1600s it had been abandoned. There is good evidence that the island was continuously occupied for a 600-year period sometime between those dates. The reasons for the inhabitants' disappearance remain uncertain, but they may relate to an exhaustion of resources and to the disappearance around the same time of the Polynesians on Pitcairn Island, on whom those on Henderson will have relied for many of the basics of life, especially for the stone needed to make tools. The Pitcairn Polynesians may in turn have disappeared because of the decline of nearby Mangareva; thus, Henderson was at the end of a chain of small, dependent colonies of Mangareva. The Polynesians that disappeared may have later migrated further to a bigger island to the east in Easter Island, for it has been noted that the jumping-off points for the early Polynesian colonization of Easter Island originally from Mangareva are more likely to have been from Pitcairn and Henderson, which lie about halfway between Mangareva and Easter. Great similarity between the Rapa Nui language and Early Mangarevan, similarities between a statue found in Pitcairn and some found in Easter Island, resemblance of tool styles in Easter Island to those in Mangareva and Pitcairn, and correspondences of skulls found in Easter Island to two found in Henderson all suggest that Henderson and Pitcairn were early Mangareva stepping-stones to Easter Island, which, in 1999, a voyage with reconstructed traditional Polynesian boats was able to reach from Mangareva after merely a seventeen-and-a-half-day voyage. On 29 January 1606, Portuguese captain Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, leading a Spanish expedition in search of the fabled great south land (Terra Australis), was the first European to see the island, and named it San Juan Bautista. More than 200 years later, on 17 January 1819, Captain Henderson of the British East India Company ship Hercules rediscovered the island. Six weeks later, on 2 March 1819, Captain Henry King, of the Elizabeth, landed on the island to find the King's colours already flying. His crew scratched the name of their ship into a tree, and for a while the island was known as both Elizabeth and Henderson Island. Thomas Raine, master of the ship Surry of London, named it Henderson's Island because it appeared to him, from a conversation he had with James Henderson at Valparaíso, to have been Henderson's discovery. On 20 November 1820, a sperm whale rammed and sank the Nantucket whaleship Essex (a report of which inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick), and the ship's 20 crewmen arrived at Henderson on 20 December in three small whaleboats. They found the island's only known drinkable water source – a brackish spring on the north shore, exposed at half tide – and ate fish, birds, eggs, crabs and peppergrass, but within a week they had largely exhausted the readily available food. Therefore, on 27 December, the three boats set sail for South America, leaving behind Thomas Chappel, Seth Weeks and William Wright, who chose to stay and survived until their rescue several months later, on 9 April 1821. In 1902, Henderson Island, along with Oeno and Ducie islands, was formally annexed to the British Empire by Captain G. F. Jones, who visited the islands in a cutter with a crew of Pitcairn Islanders. In August 1937, HMS Leander, on a journey from Europe to New Zealand, carried out an aerial survey of Henderson, Oeno and Ducie, and, on each island, a British flag was planted and an inscription was nailed up proclaiming: "This island belongs to H.B.M. King George VI".
In 1957, a 27-year-old American, Robert Tomarchin, lived the life of a castaway on the island for approximately two months, accompanied by a pet chimpanzee, apparently as a publicity stunt, until people from Pitcairn rescued him in two longboats. In the early 1980s, the American businessman Arthur "Smiley" Ratliff expressed interest in establishing a mansion for himself on the island, with an airstrip. The Pitcairn Island Council approved his plans but, after environmentalists lobbied to protect the natural ecology and environment of the island, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office overrode the decision and vetoed the proposed development. Henderson Island was listed as a World Heritage Site in 1988. In 2019, a group of scientists, journalists, film makers, and artists took part in an expedition to Henderson Island to investigate plastic pollution and marine litter on the island. Five members of the expedition became stranded on the island when their inflatable craft capsized. In 2021, Pitcairn Islanders participated in a scientific expedition to assess the effects of climate change. In March 2022 a Royal Navy survey by HMS Spey, as part of an effort to update maritime charts regarding British Overseas Territories, found the island to be 1 nautical mile (1.9 km; 1.2 mi) south of its indicated position. The existing data dates to an aerial survey in 1937, indicating a calculation error when the chart was produced.
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