Why New Zealand is on a map of the USA – Signore Galilei
Skip to content
Subscribe
Why New Zealand is on a map of the USA
Backstory time: there’s a whole subreddit dedicated to maps without New Zealand. It’s an unfortunately large category. Most maps are like this one from the 404 page of New Zealand’s government:
Years ago, someone made a joke post that was just a map of the United States of America, which is therefore a map without New Zealand…or is it?
Let’s take a look at those little islands in the corner of the map, off to the left of Alaska and Hawaii. These are the USA’s inhabited Pacific island territories, specifically Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. Specifically, we’re going to focus on American Samoa, where there’s an extremely miniscule dot in the top left sub-box:
This dot is Swains Island, or Olohega. It has less than 1 square mile of land, has been uninhabited since 2008, and is kinda sorta maybe part of New Zealand.
Here’s a better picture of the island in question:
Olohega is your classic coral atoll with a central lagoon, known as Lake Namo. Located in the South Pacific about halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand, the island is legally part of American Samoa, but is geographically part of the Tokelau island group. This will be important later.
Polynesian voyagers came across the island and settled it around the 1300s CE. Portuguese explorer Pedro Ferdinand de Quiros, sailing for Spain, charted an island in the same rough area in 1606, but current scholars think Quiros’s island was actually Rakahanga Atoll much further East. In that case, the first westerners to reach Swain’s island would have been early 19th century whalers, using the brackish Lake Namo to top up their water supplies.
The name “Swains Island” comes from the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, in which William L. Hudson located the island using the reports of one Captain Swain from Nantucket (and unfortunately neglected to tell us Swain’s first name). Polynesian settlers from Fakaofo (another island in the Tokelau chain) had just re-established a presence on the Olohega around time Hudson landed, according to their oral history, having previously abandoned it during a famine.
Post-contact, westerners used the island as a copra plantation – first a group of Frenchmen in the 1840s and then American whaler Eli Hutchinson Jennings. Jennings intervened in a Samoan dynastic conflict and married a Samoan woman, before settling on the island in 1856. The Jennings family still owns the island today.
The westerners often treated the Polynesians poorly: a group of 22 islanders left for Samoa after a Frenchman killed their chief, and Eli Jennings assisted in the notorious “blackbirding” trade, which saw indigenous Pacific Islanders being tricked or coerced into overseas forced labor.
Toward the end of the 19th century, world powers started taking an interest in the South Pacific, primarily for mining guano for fertilizer, but also as strategic hubs for navy ships and telegraph lines. In 1909, a British official from the Gilbert and Ellice Islands protectorate demanded a tax payment from Eli Jennings Jr., who paid up but complained to the US State department. Jennings was refunded, the British relinquished their claim to Olohega, and the island was annexed to the territory of American Samoa in 1925.
But the dispute would pop up again nearly a century later. The Tokelau archipelago was transferred from the UK to New Zealand in 1926, eventually becoming its own dependent territory within New Zealand. New Zealand affirmed US sovereignty over Olohega/Swains Island in the 1981 Treaty of Tokohega, establishing the borders of Tokelau’s Exclusive Economic Zone. Though the Tokelau government hasn’t officially, formally contradicted New Zealand’s position, it’s clear that many in Tokelau still see Olohega as part of Tokelau because of its geographic and cultural links.
In 2006, Tokelau held a referendum on independence from New Zealand. The draft constitution of Tokelau included Olohega on the list of islands of Tokelau, though the members of the government clarified in commentary that this wasn’t a legal claim but only “part of the historical and cultural story of Tokelau”. The measure failed to achieve the two-thirds majority needed to pass, and Tokelau remains a dependent territory of New Zealand with some autonomy.
So as far as the governments of New Zealand and the USA are concerned, Olohega is firmly US territory, as part of American Samoa. Even the Tokelau government officially agrees they have no legal claim, but many individual politicians in Tokelau have talked about wanting the island back. As with many geopolitical issues, it’s complicated. So arguably there is indeed a tiny piece of New Zealand on the map of the United States, but that dot on the map hides a world of historical and political nuance.
Coming soon: The 3,000 year old mystery animal that...