An Island Called Christmas

A romantic desert island... Who first saw and went ashore on Christmas Island will never be known. Where these people came from and when is conjecture though we are almost certain they were Polynesians. Seafarers, either castaways, hopeful colonizers, passers-by, or perhaps all of these, were the first to land there probably as early as the eighth or ninth century A.D. Random voyagers travelling north or south between Hawaii and the Marquesas may have used Christmas as a reference island and thus would in all likelihood have steered to the east. Others may have island hopped through Palmyra, Washington and Fanning Islands on a deliberate voyage. Archaeological remains are few and scattered but definite enough to show that people lived here at one time, perhaps at different periods, however briefly. If any attempt at colonization was actually made it was fore-ordained to failure by the scarcity of coconut palms, the atoll staff of life. The aligned stones at a number of sites could also have been placed by castaways caught in the treacherous currents of the east coast and the Bay of Wrecks and doomed to live out their lives there unable to leave the island. But all this is conjecture and when Europeans first saw the island in late 1777 it was literally a "desert island."