Rakahanga

Rakahanga is an atoll of the Îles Cook located at more than 1000 kilometers at the north of Rarotonga and forty Manihiki, considered as its island sister. The tradition wants indeed that it served as “pantry” with the latter. The atoll consists of 9 coral small islands (motu) of which two only are inhabited.

Rakahanga is regarded as being the first island of Cook to have known the passage of a European ship. It is about the Portuguese Pedro Fernández de Quirós in 1606. He baptized the island Isla de Gente Hermosa the “island of beautiful people”). She then did not know other visits before 1820 and the passage of the Russian Thaddeus Bellingshausen who renamed the atoll, the island of the large Duke Alexandre. Other names were allotted to him thereafter, Francis island, island of the Marianne Princess… none of these names did not survive. The island was christianized as from 1857 and the passage of the missionary of London Missionary Society, Aaron Buzacott.

The saving in Rakahanga rests partly on the harvest of the Coprah, the taro, the clothes industry of hats in sheets of Cocotier braided then exported and sold on Rarotonga. Its lagoon did not make it possible until little to establish pearl-bearing farms there, because of a sufficient lack of depth. It seems that this constraint is solved today and that farms will be able to settle very soon making it possible the island to develop

Bond

Chart of Rakahanga published by the Land Information of New Zealand

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