History of Tristan da Cunha

It was settled by men from military garrisons and ships, who married native women from Saint Helena and the Cape Colony.

Some sources state that the Portuguese made the first landing on Tristan in 1520, when the Lás Rafael captained by Ruy Vaz Pereira called for water.

[3] Though far west of the Cape of Good Hope, the islands were on the preferred route from Europe to the Indian Ocean in the 17th century; ships first crossed the Atlantic to Brazil on the Northeasterly Trades, followed the Brazil Current south to pass the Doldrums, and then picked up the Westerlies to cross the Atlantic again, where they could encounter Tristan da Cunha.

The Dutch East India Company required their ships to follow this route, and on 17 February 1643 the crew of the Heemstede, captained by Claes Gerritszoon Bierenbroodspot, made the first confirmed landing.

Thereafter, the Dutch East India Company returned to the area four more times to explore whether the islands could function as a supply base for their ships.

The first stop was on 5 September 1646 on a voyage to Batavia, Dutch East Indies,[4] and the second was an expedition by the galliot Nachtglas (Nightglass), which left from Cape Town on 22 November 1655.

[5] The Nachtglas, commanded by Jan Jacobszoon van Amsterdam, examined Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island and made rough charts for the Dutch East India Company.

[4][7] In the 17th century ships were also sent from Saint Helena by the English East India Company to Tristan to report on a proposed settlement there, but that project also came to nothing.

The presence of water at the large waterfall of Big Watron and in a lake on the north coast were noted, and the results of the survey were published by a Royal Navy hydrographer in 1781.

John Patten, the master of an English merchant ship, and part of his crew lived on Tristan from August 1790 to April 1791, during which time they captured 3600 seals.

The first known attempt to climb Queen Mary's Peak was in 1793 by the French naturalist Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars, but this was without success.

The British wanted to ensure that the French, their repeated enemies, would not be able to use the islands as a base for a rescue operation to free Napoleon Bonaparte from his prison on Saint Helena.

At their own request William Glass (d. 1853), a Scottish corporal from Kelso in the Royal Artillery, was left behind with his wife, two children and, two masons.

In 1827 they persuaded five coloured women (these were of mixed race: African, Asian and European) from Saint Helena to migrate to Tristan to become the wives of the five desperate bachelors then on the island.

Cotton was succeeded by Peter William Green (anglicised from Pieter Willemszoon Groen), a native of Katwijk aan Zee, who had settled in the island in 1836.

Captain George Nares recorded that upon the ship's arrival, the men of Tristan came forward offering potatoes, albatross eggs, and other provisions to his crew.

[11] Following a disaster at sea that killed fifteen islanders, a large proportion of the working men, Dodgson returned to Tristan in 1886 and remained until December 1889.

[11] In 1906 the islanders passed through a period of distress owing to great mortality among the cattle and the almost total failure of the potato crop.

The second Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, visited the islands in 1957 as part of a world tour on board the royal yacht Britannia.

The 1961 eruption of Queen Mary's Peak forced the evacuation of the entire population[14] via Cape Town to wooden huts in the disused Pendell Army Camp in Merstham, Surrey, England, before moving to a more permanent site at a former Royal Air Force station in Calshot near Southampton, England, living mainly in a road called Tristan Close.

In 1962, a Royal Society expedition went to the islands to assess the damage, and reported that the settlement Edinburgh of the Seven Seas had been only marginally affected.

[15] In 2005, the islands were given a United Kingdom post code (TDCU 1ZZ) to make it easier for the residents to order goods online.

The St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha Constitution Order 2009 was made by Her Majesty the Queen and the Privy Council on 8 July and came into operation on 1 September 2009.

The concrete topping put in place has subsequently been badly damaged and on-going repairs will be required to keep the harbour from breaking apart in winter storms.

On 16 March 2011, the Maltese-registered freighter MS Oliva ran aground on Nightingale Island, spilling tons of heavy fuel oil into the ocean.

The crew were rescued, but the ship broke up, leaving an oil slick that surrounded the island, threatening its population of rockhopper penguins.

[19] In November 2011 the Volvo Ocean Race boat Puma's Mar Mostro headed to the island after the mast came down to meet a supporting vessel in the first leg between Alicante (Spain) and Cape Town (South Africa).