Howland, Baker & Jarvis

Perhaps because President Roosevelt did not endow Hawaii this year with the publicity of a visit, the Pan-Pacific Press Bureau, whose business it is to call that part of the world to public attention, uncorked a story which made news so hot that it caused the U. S. Departments of State and of Commerce to burn with embarrassment last week.

Story began with a tantalizing little dispatch from Honolulu fortnight ago to the effect that J. Walter Doyle, Collector of Customs of that port, had returned from a trip to Howland, Baker and Jarvis Islands in mid-Pacific, had refused to allow his subordinates to inspect his luggage on the ground that he had not been outside the U. S. This gesture was supposed to clinch U. S. title to three tiny specks of land spang on the equator and almost midway between the Hawaiian Islands, Australia and New Zealand.

Washington newshawks flipped open their atlases, found that Howland, Baker and Jarvis were frequently credited to Great Britain. When inquiries both at the State Department and the British Embassy drew blanks, newshawks began to do their own research. They discovered that the three bits of land had been claimed for the U. S. in 1860 under the terms of the Guano Islands Act. Jarvis, a treeless, scrubless coral patch less than two sq. mi. in area, was originally discovered by the U. S. sailing ship Eliza Thomas in 1821. In the days when the nitrates from bird-droppings were worth big money, Jarvis was an important place for guano hunters.

Howland and Baker, 25 mi. apart, are some 1,100 mi. due west of Jarvis. Howland was first sighted by Captain George E. Netcher out of New Bedford in 1842. Fifteen years later the U. S. S. St. Mary's formally took the islands for the U. S. What, then, was all the official secrecy about in reclaiming this land? The answer seemed to lie in a brand new factor in Pacific diplomacy: transoceanic airlines.

After Pan American Airways began practical preparations for its line between San Francisco and Canton, William T. Miller of the Department of Commerce's Air Commerce Bureau quietly sailed out to Hawaii to survey the possibility of establishing depots for U. S. airlines to the Antipodes. With similar lack of fanfare, twelve youngsters from Honolulu's Kamehameha School were thereafter packed aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca, taken out to Jarvis, Howland and Baker Islands, established in crews of four as weather observers. Along with their instruments for noting wind velocity, rainfall and cloud formations, the boys had to be supplied with everything else to support life. None of the islands is more than 20 ft. above sealevel; none is forested; none has fresh water. Accordingly, camping equipment was landed as well as food supplies and drums of drinking water sufficient to last the colonists until the Itasca returned. And on the theory that the islands' designation as British on some world maps might be construed as a precedent for British possession, a U. S. flag was raised on each island, and mounted on a cairn of stones were legends like this graven in lead plates:

HOWLAND ISLAND

LATITUDE 0DEG 49' NORTH

LONGITUDE 176DEG 43' WEST

THIS ISLAND IS COLONIZED

THIS 30TH DAY OF MARCH

1935 BY AMERICAN CITIZENS

IN THE NAME OF THE UNITED

STATES OF AMERICA

NO TRESPASSING ALLOWED.

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