Henderson Island
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How it came to be
Henderson is a raised coral atoll in the South Pacific. Polynesians once lived there, but by the 1600s the island had been abandoned, for reasons that remain unknown. At least four endemic bird species are believed to have died out after people arrived, and the Pacific rats the Polynesians brought are still on the island.
The first Europeans to see it belonged to a Spanish expedition in 1606. On 17 January 1819 Captain Henderson of the British East India Company ship Hercules came upon it again, and the island later took his name. In 1902 it was formally annexed to the British Empire together with Oeno and Ducie, and it is now part of the Pitcairn Islands.
In the early 1980s the American businessman Arthur Ratliff proposed building a mansion and an airstrip on the island. The Pitcairn Island Council approved, but after lobbying by environmentalists the British Foreign Office vetoed the plan, and Henderson was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1988. An attempt to eradicate the Pacific rat in 2011 left survivors from which the population recovered, and a study published in 2017 estimated that 37.7 million items of debris, weighing 17.6 tonnes, had washed up on its beaches.
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