The Calcutta Government Gazette wrote in 1828, "It is a curious fact that the discovery of the wreck of LaPerouse's ships arose out of a massacre at the Fejee Islands,  in 1813".

[2] Survivors from this massacre were put ashore at the nearest landfall, which turned out to be Tikopia, and thus began a chain of events which resulted in this tiny island becoming a recognised name around the world.

[5][6][7] The pattern of settlement that is believed to have occurred is that the Polynesians spread out from Tonga and other islands in the central and south eastern Pacific.

The Hunter had sailed to Fiji to collect sandalwood, and enlisted the help of some Europeans already living there -- shipwrecked or discharged sailors -- as well as local islanders.

The Hunter set sail with various survivors aboard, Captain Robson promising to put three of them (a Prussian named Martin Bushart, his Fijian wife, and a lascar known sometimes as Joe, sometimes as Achowlia) ashore at the nearest landfall.

They came on deck without reserve, seized upon bars of iron from the forge, and jumped overboard with that metal, as also a frying-pan, the cook's axe, knife, saucepans, &c. The firing of a musket in the air had not the least effect upon them [...]The boat being got out, I embarked in her with Martin Bushart, the lascar, and chief.

On reaching the shore the chief landed, and conducted Martin to the king, who was sitting under the shade of some cocoa-nut trees chewing the betel-nut.

He made his majesty a few presents, and by signs, words, and gestures, informed him that himself, the Lascar, his wife, and others, were coming to reside on the island.

According to the Prussian cast-away, only two ships had visited the island in the intervening years, both whalers: one in 1824 for a full month's whaling, and one in 1825 in passage.

The St Patrick proceeded to Calcutta, where Dillon persuaded the authorities to commission a ship for him, the Research, to return to Vanikoro (via New Zealand) in the hopes of finally solving the mystery of the La Perouse expedition.

Several Englishmen had taken up residence on the island, claiming to be shipwrecked sailors, although Dillon suspected mutiny or desertion or absconding from penal servitude in Australia.

Evidently Tikopian encounters with visiting ships In the intervening 16 months had been less than happy, as islanders kept cautiously to the shore instead of greeting an arrival with a flotilla of welcoming canoes.

[2] Most of these visitors would have been whaling ships, which at some point introduced to the island a cat and the mammy apple, which became an important ritual food.

Dillon wrote of the islanders:The Tucopians are an extremely mild and inoffensive race, hospitable and generous, as their reception of Bushart and the lascar sufficiently proves.

Intricate economic and ritual links between paito houses and deference to the chiefs within the clan organization were key dimensions of island life.

Based on fieldwork in 1964–65, Eric H. Larsen wrote Nukufero: A Tikopian Colony in the Russell Islands, documenting labour migration to Levers Pacific Plantations.The first female anthropologist was Judith Macdonald in 1980, whose researc resulted in Women of Tikopia (1991) .

[11] Jared Diamond's 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed describes Tikopia as a success case in matching the challenges of sustainability, contrasting it with Easter Island.

[10] American journalist Vern Smith gave Tikopia a separate mention in presenting Morgan's theory of social evolution to the readers of The Industrial Pioneer in 1925.

[16] In a coincidence of timing with the investigations of Peter Dillon, an official scientific expedition, with a secondary commission to hunt for news of La Perouse.

[20] A remarkable international effort by "friends of" the island, including many yacht crews who had had contact with Tikopia over the decades, culminated in the construction in 2006 of a gabion dam to seal the breach.

These British-based catamaran designers closely followed the hull shape of the traditional Tikopia craft,[21] as represented by Rakeitonga, a 9 m outrigger canoe acquired by the Auckland Museum in 1916.

[23] The 'Lapita Tikopia' and its sistership 'Lapita Anuta' took five months to sail to the islands, following the ancient migration route of the Lapita people into the Pacific.

The resulting show focuses on the experiences of their young daughter, Ivi, with the children of th island, attending school, visiting chief Tafua and his family, and so on.

[25] In October 2018, one of the chiefs of the island, Ti Namo, made his first visit to the western world to share his worries about climate change.

He travelled with a delegation to Grenoble in France, where he presented his documentary Nous Tikopia before a national release on 7 November, and declared to the press, "Before, we suffered a cyclone every ten years.