Tuvalu

Tuvalu is an independent island country in Polynesia, roughly halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Funafuti is its capital, and the name Tuvalu means eight standing together in Tuvaluan, after the eight of its nine islands that were inhabited.

Polynesians reached the atolls from Samoa and Tonga during the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific, which started some 3,000 years ago, and island stories name founding ancestors from both. The Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña sighted Nui on 16 January 1568, the first European to sail through the group. In 1819 the privateer Arent de Peyster named Funafuti Ellice's Island, and the Ellice Islands later became the name of the whole chain. Christianity arrived in 1861 when Elekana, a church deacon from the Cook Islands, drifted ashore on Nukulaelae, and in 1863 Peruvian labor recruiters carried off hundreds of people from Funafuti and Nukulaelae.

Britain declared a protectorate over the Ellice and Gilbert Islands in 1892 and joined them in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony in 1916. Royal Society scientists drilled deep into the coral of Funafuti to test how atolls form, at a spot still called Darwin's Drill. United States Marines landed on Funafuti on 2 October 1942 and built airfields used before the Battle of Tarawa in 1943. After a 1974 referendum the Ellice Islands became the separate colony of Tuvalu in 1976, and independence followed on 1 October 1978, with the British monarch as head of state. Tuvalu joined the United Nations in 2000.

With little soil, Tuvalu relies on imported food and fishing. Its income comes from fishing licenses, the Tuvalu Trust Fund set up in 1987 by Britain, Australia and New Zealand, money sent home by Tuvaluan sailors on cargo ships, and the lease of the .tv internet domain. As a low-lying country it is highly exposed to sea level rise and speaks for small island states in climate talks, and in 2023 it signed the Falepili Union treaty with Australia, which opens a migration route for its citizens. Fatele dances and the ball game te ano are part of village life.