The Prince Edward Islands are two small uninhabited subantarctic volcanic islands in the southern Indian Ocean that are administered by South Africa. They are named Marion Island (named after Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, 1724–1772) and Prince Edward Island (named after Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, 1767–1820). The islands in the group have been declared Special Nature Reserves under the South African Environmental Management: Protected Areas Act, No. 57 of 2003, and activities on the islands are therefore restricted to research and conservation management. Further protection was granted when the area was declared a marine protected area in 2013. The only human inhabitants of the islands are the staff of a meteorological and biological research station run by the South African National Antarctic Programme on Marion Island.
History
Barent Barentszoon Lam of the Dutch East India Company reached the islands on 4 March 1663 on the ship Maerseveen. They were named Dina (Prince Edward) and Maerseveen (Marion), but the islands were erroneously recorded to be at 41° South, and neither were found again by subsequent Dutch sailors. In January 1772, the French frigate Le Mascarin, captained by Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, visited the islands and spent five days trying to land, thinking they had found Antarctica (then not yet proven to exist). Marion named the islands Terre de l'Espérance (Marion) and Ile de la Caverne (Prince Edward). After failing to land, Le Mascarin continued eastward, discovering the Crozet Islands and landing at New Zealand, where Marion du Fresne and some of his crew were killed by local Māori. Julien Crozet, navigator and second in command of Le Mascarin, survived the disaster, and happened to meet James Cook at Cape Town in 1776, at the onset of Cook's third voyage. Crozet shared the charts of his ill-fated expedition, and as Cook sailed from Cape Town, he passed the islands on 13 December, but was unable to attempt a landing due to bad weather. Cook named the islands after Prince Edward, the fourth son of King George III; and though he is also often credited with naming the larger island Marion, after Captain Marion, this name was adopted by sealers and whalers who later hunted the area, to distinguish the two islands. The first recorded landing on the islands was in 1799 by a group of French seal hunters of the Sally. Another landing in late 1803 by a group of seal hunters led by American captain Henry Fanning of the Catharine found signs of earlier human occupation. The islands were frequented by sealers until about 1810, when the local fur seal populations had been nearly eradicated. The first scientific expedition to the islands was led by James Clark Ross, who visited in 1840 during his exploration of the Antarctic, but was unable to land. Ross sailed along the islands on 21 April 1840. He made observations on vast numbers of penguins ("groups of many thousands each"), and other kinds of sea-birds. He also saw fur seals, which he supposed to be of the species Arctocephalus falklandicus. The islands were finally surveyed during the Challenger Expedition, led by Captain George Nares, in 1873. The sealing era lasted from 1799 to 1913. During that period, visits by 103 vessels are recorded, seven of which ended in shipwreck. Sealing relics include iron trypots, the ruins of huts and inscriptions. The occasional modern sealing vessel visited from Cape Town, South Africa, in the 1920s. The islands have been the location of other shipwrecks. In June 1849, the brig Richard Dart, with a troop of Royal Engineers under Lt. James Liddell, was wrecked on Prince Edward Island; only 10 of the 63 on board survived to be rescued by elephant seal hunters from Cape Town. In 1908, the Norwegian vessel Solglimt was shipwrecked on Marion Island, and survivors established a short-lived village at the north coast, before being rescued. The wreck of the Solglimt is the best-known in the islands, and is accessible to divers. The British government never officially claimed ownership of the islands; however it did manage economic activities on the islands in the early 20th century. In 1908, the British government granted a guano lease on Marion Island. Following the Second World War, technological advancements made the islands more strategically important, and as no further economic activity was taking place, the UK was concerned other countries might claim the islands. In late 1947 and early 1948, South Africa, with Britain's agreement, annexed the islands and installed the meteorological station on Transvaal Cove on the north-east coast of Marion Island. On 22 September 1979, a United States surveillance satellite known as Vela 6911 noted an unidentified double flash of light, known as the Vela incident, in the waters off the islands. There was and continues to be considerable controversy over whether this event was perhaps an undeclared nuclear test carried out by South Africa and Israel or some other event. The cause of the flash remains officially unknown, and some information about the event remains classified. Today, most independent researchers believe that the 1979 flash was caused by a nuclear explosion. In 2003, the South African government declared the Prince Edward Islands a Special Nature Reserve, and in 2013 it declared 180,000 km2 (69,000 sq mi) of ocean waters around the islands a Marine Protection Area, thus creating one of the world's largest environmental protection areas.
Marion Research Station
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