History
Polynesian people settled the Kermadec Islands in around the 14th century (and perhaps previously in the 10th century), but the first Europeans to reach the area—the Lady Penrhyn in May 1788—found no inhabitants. The islands were named for the French captain Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec, who visited the islands as part of the d'Entrecasteaux expedition in the 1790s. European settlers, initially the Bell family, lived on the islands from the early nineteenth century until 1937, as did whalers. One of the Bell daughters, Elsie K. Morton, recounted the family's experience there in her memoir, Crusoes of Sunday Island.
Read more about this topic: Kermadec Islands
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)