Necker Island

Name

The names Native Hawaiians in Ancient Hawaii used for the various Northwestern Hawaiian Islands have been lost. When the French explorer Jean-François de La Pérouse became the first European to sight the island in 1786, he named it "Necker Island" after Jacques Necker, a Genevan banker and statesman who served as finance minister for Louis XVI of France.

The Hawaiian Lexicon Committee was formed in Hawaii in 1987 to create new Hawaiian words for concepts and material culture unknown in Ancient Hawaii. Among its efforts have been the creation of Hawaiian names for geographical features bearing non-Hawaiian names (i.e., exonyms). Although the original Hawaiian name of Necker Island is unknown, ancient Hawaiian chants refer to a "branching island" or "pinnacled island" (mokumanamana). Among the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Necker Island best fits the physical description of a "branched or pinnacled island," and the committee therefore assigned it the Hawaiian name Mokumanamana on the assumption that the ancient chants referred to it.

Administration

Politically, Necker Island is part of the City and County of Honolulu in the state of Hawaii. However, as part of the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, it is administered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. It has no resident human population.

Geography

The remnant of a volcanic cone, Necker Island is located about 120 kilometers (65 nmi; 75 mi) southeast of the French Frigate Shoals on the northwestern end of a large, shallow ocean bank. It is a hook-shaped rocky ridge about 1.3 kilometers (0.8 mi) long and between 60 and 200 meters (197 and 656 ft) wide. Composed of basalt, the island is steep-sided and barren, with very little soil, and its rocks are heavily scoured and eroded. It is the second-smallest of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, with a total area of 45.193 acres (18.289 hectares) according to the United States Census Bureau. In separate documents, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service has claimed its area is 39.5 acres (16.0 hectares) and 41 acres (16.6 hectares).

The westernmost point on Necker Island is Moʻo Point (or Moʻo Head). The island's "hook" is Northwest Cape, a narrow spur that reaches a maximum height of 48 meters (156 ft) and juts northeastward from the west end of the island for 183 meters (600 ft). Northwest Cape is connected to the rest of the island by a narrow gap that is barely above sea level. Northwest Cape's tip is the northernmost point of the island.

The main ridge of the island and Northwest Cape combine to partially enclose Shark Bay (Hanakeaumoe) along the northern shore of the island; the bay opens to the northeast and usually is subject to rough seas. Along the island's western shore, West Cove lies between Moʻo Point and the southern end of Northwest Cape. A small islet, 300 feet (91 m) long and rising 10 feet (3 m) above sea level, lies just off Necker Island's eastern tip.

The main ridge of Necker Island has five peaks. East to west, they are:

Siever's Peak, 61 meters (200 ft) high

Bowl Hill (or Bryan Peak), 79 meters (259 ft) high

Summit Hill (or Vaughn Peak), 84 meters (277 ft) high, the island's highest point

Flagpole Hill, 56.4 meters (185 ft) high

Annexation Peak (also Annexation Hill or Captain Brown Peak), 75 meters (247 ft) high

Flora and fauna

Vegetation on Necker Island is limited to low shrubs and grasses, none more than 2 feet (0.6 m) tall. Five species of plants are known to occur:

Goosefoot shrub (Chenopodium oahuense), found on the island's terraced slopes

Bunch grass (Panicum torridum) (i.e., kakonakona), which grows on the north slope of the ridge

Purslane (Portulaca lutea) (i.e., ihi weed), found on flat tops of the ridge

Pickle weed (Sesuvium portulacastrum), a patch of which grows on the lower northeastern slope of Annexation Hill, where ocean spray from waves breaking in Shark Bay can reach it

Ohai shrub (Sesbania tomentosa), which grows on the crest of the ridge

The forester of the Territory of Hawaii attempted to introduce six other species of plants to Necker Island in June 1923, but all had died out by the latter half of the 1930s, if not earlier.

The island is also noted for large numbers of birds. About 16 species of seabird nest on Necker Island; during nesting season, an estimated 60,000 birds nest on the island, and their eggs cover virtually every piece of level ground. A seabird first observed at Necker Island and at the French Frigate Shoals and Nīhoa in 1902 originally was thought to be new to science and was given the scientific name Procelsterna saxatalis and the popular name "Necker Island tern," but it later was identified as a subspecies of the blue-grey noddy, already known from farther south in the Pacific. No land birds live on the island. Land animals found on the island include land snails and 15 species of insect found nowhere else, as well as wolf spiders and bird ticks.

Although it is the second-smallest of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Necker Island has the second-largest surrounding marine habitat among the islands, totaling 385,000 acres (156,000 ha), with Shark Bay, West Cove, Northwest Cape, and miles of shallow reef to the southeast of the island providing large offshore habitats. Runoff from the heavily eroded rock surfaces of the island and the constant wave action that scours its underwater basalt structure interfere with the growth of corals; little coral life exists in the shallow areas surrounding the island, and it lacks a fringing reef. However, 16 species of stony coral live in the area, and Necker is the easternmost island in the Hawaiian archipelago where table corals of the genus Acropora are found. Gray reef sharks and manta rays are common off the island, and Hawaiian monk seals populate its shores, some giving birth to pups there. Green sea turtles bask on the shore in the narrow gap between the main island and Northwest Cape, but they do not breed on Necker Island because the island lacks sandy beaches in which they could lay their eggs. A great abundance and diversity of sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and lobsters live in Shark Bay. Extensive deeper "shelves" extend many miles from the island's shallow reef, especially to the southeast, and commercial fishing takes place over these shelves, which produce much of Hawaii's catch of green jobfish, known locally as gray snapper or uku. Deep sea fish types that live hundreds of meters (yards) below the surface along the underwater slopes of Necker Island include fishes of the orders Stomiiformes, Gadiformes, Myctophiformes, and Aulopiformes.

Archaeology

Necker Island is known for its numerous religious sites and cultural objects. There are few, if any, signs of long-term habitation, giving rise to the theory that people visited the island for short periods from other islands instead of settling permanently. Many anthropologists believe that the island was a ceremonial and religious site. Necker has 55 currently known sites including 33 ritual sites called heiau, while the remaining sites represent agricultural terraces, miscellaneous platforms, and shelter caves — of which Bowl Cave is the largest. Cultural sites on Necker Island are contemporaneous with those on Nīhoa and appear to have been abandoned at roughly the same time several centuries prior to European contact with the Hawaiian Islands.

The heiau on Necker Island and Nīhoa are unique in the Hawaiian chain, constructed as a raised pavement of basalt stones with upright stones placed across this pavement, often near the edges; this differs from the form common on other islands in the chain, where heiau were built as a high stacked stone wall enclosing a central space. This difference in form represents an earlier iteration of Hawaiian monumental architecture that offers a unique perspective on cultural norms prior to the abandonment of Necker. Thanks to this difference in form, scholars often use the Māori and Tahitian term marae as opposed to the Hawaiian term heiau in reference to these structures, and some scholars argue that the shift in form represents a shift in ritual practice in Hawaii.

Artifacts excavated on Necker Island show a remarkable number of items rendered in stone that elsewhere in Hawaii normally were made of wood. This is especially true of a series of remarkable carved stone bowls and a bird snare that would have required far more time and effort to create from stone. Additionally, archaeologists have recovered a series of human figures (kiʻi) from Necker Island carved from local stone in the vicinity of the ceremonial complexes. These statues are up to 1.5 feet (0.5 m) in length and differ in style and medium from similar sculptures usually rendered in wood recovered elsewhere in Hawaii. It is unknown what religious ceremonies these stone idols were associated with. They are now located in various museums around the world:

five complete figures, 21 to 40 cm high, as well as two heads and a leg in the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu

History

Geological research in the early 21st century indicates that Necker Island is about 10 million years old. While it rises only about 84 meters (277 ft) above sea level now, it reached 1,000 meters (3,281 ft) in height earlier in its history and at one time was comparable in size to modern Oahu.

Hawaiians appear to have started visiting Necker Island a few hundred years after they settled the main Hawaiian Islands. Archaeologists believe that the island's poor soil for farming and its small size and relative lack of rainfall made it uninhabitable, and that the Hawaiians visited from Nīhoa and other nearby islands to worship at religious sites without establishing any permanent settlements. Their visits appear to have ended a few hundred years before European contact, and by the time Europeans first visited Hawaii in the late eighteenth century, Necker Island apparently was unknown to the Hawaiians.

In 1785, the French explorer Jean-François de La Pérouse left France to circumnavigate the world on a mission of exploration for the French Academy of Sciences aboard the ships Astrolabe (under command of Fleuriot de Langle) and Boussole. The expedition had just discovered the French Frigate Shoals (Basse des Frégates Françaises) and La Pérouse's namesake rock, La Perouse Pinnacle, when on November 4, 1786, La Pérouse and his crews became the first Europeans to visit Necker Island. La Pérouse did not attempt to land on the island due to its nearly vertical sides and the violent seas breaking on its shore, but he sailed within a third of a league of it and named it after Jacques Necker, a Genevan banker and statesman who served as finance minister for Louis XVI of France. Although the expedition was lost at sea in 1788, it was able to send its logs home before its loss, bringing the island's existence to the attention of Europeans.

The first people to set foot on Necker Island in modern times appear to have been the British seaman John Turnbull of the ship Margaret, who visited the Hawaiian Islands between December 17, 1802, and January 21, 1803, and two Hawaiian pearl divers in his employ. The three men landed on the island during an expedition to find pearls on a reef in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

Captain John or William Paty (sources disagree on Paty's first name) claimed Necker Island for the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1857, although he did not land on the island. The claim was disputed over the following decades. In January 1859, United States Navy Lieutenant J. M. Brook aboard the survey schooner USS Fenimore Cooper visited Necker Island and determined its position. During the summer of 1859, Captain N. C. Brook of the Hawaiian barque Gambia passed the island during a sealing and exploration voyage, but did not report landing on it.

Access

Access to Necker Island is by boat, and is quite difficult because of the island's nearly vertical coastline. Heavy surf usually precludes landings along the coast in Shark Bay, but a small lee exists west of Northwest Cape, and landing on rocky shelves there is possible in moderately calm weather but can be dangerous in high surf.

Visits to Necker Island are permitted only for scientific, educational, and cultural purposes and require the approval of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which gives preference to scientific and cultural visits.