vanuatu

This photo was taken by Sir David Attenborough and it appeared in his book 'Quest in Paradise' which was first published in 1960. The picture is shows a land diver from Pentecost Island jumping from a platform 'over eighty feet high'.

The first settlers to arrive in Vanuatu are believed to have arrived by canoe approximately 3,500 years ago from New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. In 1606, the Portuguese explorer, Pedro Fernández de Quirós, discovered the island of Espiritu Santo, which he thought was a great southern continent. Europeans did not return until 1768, when Louis Antoine de Bougainville rediscovered the islands. In 1774, Captain Cook named the islands the New Hebrides, a name that lasted until independence. During the 1860s, planters in Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, and Samoa, in need of labourers, began a slave trade called “blackbirding”. At the height of the blackbirding, more than one-half of the adult male population were kidnapped and sent to work overseas. During the time of blackbirding, foreign settlers and missionaries started arriving. Initially, most of the settlers were British subjects from Australia, but by the turn of the century, the French outnumbered the British two to one. Attempts to halt the decimation of the native population met success in 1887 when the islands were placed under an Anglo-French naval commission, governed in the current capital Port Vila, which at the time was known as Franceville. In 1906, France and the United Kingdom agreed to administer the islands jointly. Source: thehavannah.com/history-of-vanuatu#:~:text=The%20first%20....