Region: Oceania
Climate: Warm, Tropical
Leader(s): Enele Sopoaga, since 2013 (at time of writing)
Population: 10,640
Capital: Fongafele
Largest City: Fongafele
Currency: Tuvaluan Dollar, Australian Dollar
Languages: Tuvaluan, English
Independence: 1978, from the U.K.
Territories or Colonies: None
THE FACTS
Tuvalu is a tiny island nation in the South Pacific midway between Hawaii and Australia. It is one of the smallest nations geographically and population wise, as the fourth smallest by area and the second least populous. It has fewer people than San Francisco's Chinatown district a neighborhood four by eight blocks large.
The country itself is comprised of nine island groups in an archipelago. Tuvalu is one of the countries most affected by climate change because of how low lying and small it is.
Another idea of how small it is: there is only one High-School that every one in the nation goes to and only two supermarkets.
PRE-CONTACT (????-1568)
Not very much is known about the islands before arrival by Europeans who wrote stuff down. The culture of Oceania didn't have written languages and therefore history was passed down orally. The Tuvaluan people were believed to have come from Samoa on outrigger canoes. This website has information on how the polynesian people groups navigated the vast Pacific ocean and has details about expeditions a recreated outrigger canoe made around the world recently.
The Samoans quickly populated eight of the islands, giving Tuvalu it's name: Eight Standing Together in early Austronesian dialects.
SPANISH CONTACT (1568-1861)
The Spanish were messing around in that area during the late 1500s. They had successfully found their way to India (with no help from Columbus, that dumbass) and they had just started to expand their voyages into the South Pacific, discovering Australia (which they, at the time, believed was a part of Antarctica) and discovering this massive ocean they hadn't had much contact with.
This guy Alvaro de Mendana y Neyra was a Spanish explorer who was dicking around in this area when he happened across Nui, a small atoll that today contains little more than a few speckles of houses and a bunch of palm trees. He thought the island was so great he called in Jesus.
Some Nui islanders were concerned that this massive wooden ship that was bigger than any boat they'd ever seen before, populated with a bunch of white guys in tights and sailed out to try and figure out what was going on in the boat. Alvaro didn't make contact with the islanders instead writing in his journal that the islanders were "naked" and "brown" and that their was a large dock on the island.
Mendana showed up a couple more times, but never made contact.
Europe left it alone, similar to Vanuatu, because they didn't think these places had any resources that they needed and they were so hard to get to that even if they did have resources, it probably wouldn't be worth it to spend gajillions of dollars shipping them 6000 miles through choppy sea.
In 1819, the next big step forward for Tuvalu came when this british guy Arent de Peyster almost crashed into Funafuti. He renamed the islands Ellice's Group, because Britain wasn't so hot on Spain at the time and the way he could get back at Spain and get some props from the British government would be to give this far-off, pretty isolated and not totally important to the geo-political climate of Europe, group of islands a British name. This name stuck until 1976, when Tuvalu gained independence and chose a native name.
The islands were again left alone. They were visited by some more British guys, then some American guys, one of whom was named Obed Starbuck of Nantucket, MA. He wasn't super important, I just wanted to write the name Obed Starbuck, because it's really cool.
EUROPE STARTS TO SHOW UP AND LIVE ON THE ISLANDS (1861-1940s)
In the 1860s, Europe showed up and this means two things. Illegal Slavery and Jesus! The Illegal Slavery thing wasn't too successful as the Tuvaluans ended up just killing the slavers (a.k.a. Blackbirders), but 400 Tuvaluans were captured and sold to plantations in Fiji, Samoa and even Hawai'i (slavery had been Abolished in the U.S., but at this time Hawai'i was a sovereign kingdom run by Kamehameha V, who was fine with it).
The missionaries actually arrived by accident. They were doing missionary stuff in the Cook Islands, and their boat accidentally drifted off course. I don't know how you slip 1,600 miles off course, but hey I'm not a sailor.
Missionaries and traders began arriving at the islands in the 1880s and 1890s. The islanders weren't super thrilled to have all of these Europeans taking their coconuts and trying to convert them to Christianity, but it eventually worked out for the missionaries. Now most people in the country are Christian.
The white population on the islands was never super high though (at one point Funafuti only had two white residents, a soldier of fortune named Al and a trader named George Westbrook) which sounds like the setup for a sitcom, but it isn't.
The islands were handed to the british in 1877, all the while the native Tuvaluans were pissed. They were having their natural resources taken from them and they didn't even get to keep any of the cool colonial architecture associated with being a colonized island nation.
WW2 & INDEPENDENCE (1940s-PRESENT)
The Tuvaluans were double pissed when war-crazy Japan showed up and started claiming all of these Pacific Islands. The British lost control briefly, during a Japanese occupation. America showed up to kick out the Japanese and blow stuff up, and the Tuvaluan people are happy that the crazy Japanese are out of their hair, but the U.S. just start building military bases and airfields on the islands. "Come on!!!" -Tuvaluans during WW2
Now, it's post-war, and you're Great Britain. You're thinking to yourself "I have all of these territorial possessions left over from the colonial era and this newfangled UN isn't super into colonizers like myself", so in 1974 the Brits say to the Tuvaluans "hey, you guys need to set up your own government, we're giving you up." This wasn't one of those U.S.A. or South America style independences that involve big wars, garish songs and national heroes that are later idolized for saying and doing things they probably didn't say or do. This was the quiet, diplomatic kind that involved lots of paperwork and guys at desks looking at charts with numbers on them. The boring kind, but the kind with less maiming and killing, so I guess the better kind.
After independence most things were good. Tuvalu's standard of living is pretty high for the region and how much political turmoil can possible come from a country smaller than Disneyland with the population of a poorly attended Joan Jett concert.
The biggest problem now for Tuvaluans is climate change. Rising sea levels are threatening the land itself and many Tuvaluans might soon have to move to other countries like Fiji, Solomon Islands and Australia or the U.S.
FUN FACTS
Tuvalu is smaller than San Francisco's Chinatown.
You could fit the entire population of Tuvalu into AT&T Park in San Francisco and it would only be a quarter full.
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