With a land area of 891.9 square kilometres (344.4 sq mi), it is the largest island in Tafea Province, the southernmost of Vanuatu's six administrative regions.

There are several accounts of how 'Erromango' came into common usage: firstly, an oral history from the Potnarvin area tells of how Captain James Cook was given a yam during his visit in August 1774, and was told in the (now-extinct) Sorung language armai n'go, armai n'go ('this food is good'), and mistakenly assumed this to be the name of the island.

[3] Erromango was first settled by humans around 3,000 years ago, as part of the Lapita migration out of south-east Asia into island Melanesia.

The Lapita people brought with them domestic animals such as pigs and chickens[4] and food plants such as yam[5] and breadfruit.

[6] Two sites on Erromango, Ifo and Ponamla, have yielded significant archaeological evidence of habitation by Lapita and post-Lapita peoples, including pottery sherds, adzes, marine shell artifacts and cooking stones.

[11] In 1825, trader and adventurer Peter Dillon discovered the island's large reserves of sandalwood (Santalum austrocaledonicum), valued in China for its aromatic oil and as a carving wood.

Dillon found that his trade goods were not sufficient to entice Erromangans to cut the timber for him, so he left without gathering any sandalwood.

News of his discovery brought other outsiders to Erromango to exploit the resource, and this caused conflict between the Erromangans and the traders.

Some traders such as Robert Towns and James Paddon established stations on Erromango or nearby islands such as Aneityum and Île des Pins in New Caledonia to reduce their costs.

[17][18][19] Between 1863 and 1906, around 40,000 people from what was then the New Hebrides were blackbirded onto ships to work as indentured labour on cotton and sugarcane plantations in Queensland, Australia.

However, 25 years after the White Australia Policy ended the Melanesian labour trade in 1906, Erromango's population had dwindled to just 381.

George Nicol Gordon, of Prince Edward Island, Canada and his wife, Ellen Catherine Powell, missionaries from the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia to the New Hebrides, were killed at Dillons Bay on May 20, 1861.

Williams and a Mr. Harris (identified as a man traveling to England to become a missionary) were killed because they arrived on the island shortly after an "outrage" was committed by the crew of another vessel.

The pair, realizing their danger, died during a failed attempt to escape the island, being killed by natives on shore a few yards from their boat.

A Royal Navy captain visiting in 1869 described the conditions there as difficult, with scarce supplies of flour, clouds of mosquitoes, murderous threats from natives, and a "sweltering poisonous atmosphere, accompanied by fever and ague.

His attempts at missionisation were effective because he carefully studied the beliefs and material culture in order to target the most powerful symbols of traditional society.

James D. Gordon, had spread the belief amongst Erromangans that the Christian God had sent the 1861 measles epidemic to punish them for the killing of Rev.

Over time, Gordon's myth grew into a collective belief amongst Erromangans that the island had been cursed by the Presbyterian Church.

[36] Belief in this 'curse' endured until the 2009 reconciliation ceremony, which initiated a re-examination of Erromango's history and culture from an Erromangan point of view.

Dense evergreen forest covers nearly three-quarters of the island on the windward (eastern) side, while a combination of grassland and woodland occupies the north-west.

[44] It is composed of basalt and andesite from the late Miocene-Recent periods and is situated along a Pliocene-Recent volcanic chain that is moving to the north-northwest.

[45] Most of the island is fringed with a platform of uplifted coral reef limestone dating from the Late Pleistocene and Holocene.

[48] The eastern peninsula that forms Traitor's Head, north of Cook's Bay on the east coast, is the youngest volcanic formation on the island and consists of four stratovolcanoes (Urap, Ulenu, Rantop and Wahous).