Starbuck Island is an uninhabited coral island in the central Pacific, and is part of the Central Line Islands of Kiribati. Former names include "Barren Island", "Coral Queen Island", "Hero Island", "Low Island", and "Starve Island".
Located at, and measuring east-to-west and north-to-south, Starbuck Island has a land area of. It is a low, dry, corallimestone island with a steep beach backed by a bank composed of large coral fragments. Several hypersaline lagoons form on the island's eastern side. These occasionally dry up, and are said to be dangerous to approach: one worker during the island's guano-mining days sank up to his neck in salty mud before being rescued. There is no freshwater on the island, which is one of the drier atolls in the Line Island group. Annual yearly rainfall averages approximately. Little vegetation exists on Starbuck; stunted Sida fallax scrub and low herbs and grasses predominate, with a few Cordia subcordata bushes and bunch grass rounding out the flora. Recent photos showed a few palm trees growing near the center of the island. The island boasts a large colony of sooty terns, estimated at 1.5 million pairs, together with Polynesian rats, feral cats, green turtles, and around fifteen other species of seabirds. Other accounts estimate the sooty tern population to be as high as three to six million birds.
History
Starbuck Island was sighted by Valentine Starbuck, the American-born master of the British whaling ship on which the young king and queen of Hawaii, travelled to England in 1823–1824. This, according to the log of L'aigle, took place on the day of December 12, 1823, but by then it had already been seen by at least two other Western captains. Valentine Starbuck, however, remains the first known person to have set foot on the island. In 1819, the merchant captain James Henderson of the East India Company ship Hercules, sailing from South America to Calcutta, India, had sighted it. Soon after his arrival a local newspaper would publish Henderson's report of three islands recently discovered by him in his last voyage, but the periodical had failed to state the exact date for his discovery of modern Starbuck Island. Henry Evans Maude's educated guess was that this may have been in early February, 1819. The next captain known to have seen it was Valentine Starbuck's first cousin, Obed Starbuck, captain of the whaler Hero of Nantucket. This was on September 5, 1823, thus three months and one week before Valentine would see it. Obed Starbuck had made one attempt to land on Starbuck Island but failed. It was charted in 1825 by CaptainThe 7th Lord Byron. Lord Byron, commanding the British warship, was returning to London from a special mission to Honolulu to repatriate the remains of the Hawaiian royal couple, King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu who had died of measles while trying to visit King George IV. Lord Byron discovered and charted Malden Island, which he named after his surveying officer, Mauke, and Starbuck Island. It was claimed by the United States under the 1856 Guano Act, but controlled by Britain after 1866, when possession was taken by Commodore Swinburn of. Starbuck Island was mined for phosphate between 1870 and 1893. Because of its low profile and the dangerous surrounding reefs, a number of ships were wrecked at Starbuck Island in the late 19th century, including the French transport Euryale on March 10, 1870. The captain of this ship, the future contre-admiral Albert Des Portes, who stayed 35 days with his crew on the atoll before being rescued and coming back to France with all the members, finally found the right geographical location of the island. On August 7, 1896 the Norwegian ship "Seladon" was wrecked against the barrier. The crew went into the lifeboats and drifted for 30 days until they landed on the island of Niulakita, Tuvalu. For 10 months they lived together with a few natives until they were picked up by a ship and rescued. The island formed a part of the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony prior to the independence of Kiribati in 1979. American claims to the atoll were formally vacated in the Treaty of Tarawa, signed that same year. Starbuck Island has been designated as the Starbuck Island Wildlife Sanctuary. In 2014 the Kiribati government established a 12-nautical-mile fishing exclusion zone around each of the southern Line Islands: Caroline, Flint, Vostok, Malden, and Starbuck.
