CANTON ISLAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 282, 27 November 1940, Page 6

CANTON ISLAND.

AIRWAYS TO RULE.

ANNOUNCEMENT IN U.S.A.

(0.C.) SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 15,

That tiny dot in the Pacific Ocean, Canton Island, located in the Phoenix Group, which recently inaugurated a part of the South Pacific air service from San Francisco to Auckland, has just undergone another chapter in its colourful annals.

It will be recalled that Pan-American Airways System recently brought civilisation to the mid-Pacific island 25 years after Captain Allen entered the picture for his company, the Samoa Shipping and Trading Co., Ltd., for whom he erected a beacon and planted hundreds of coconut trees. When he returned in 1919 all but five or six of the trees had died, so that experiment was abandoned. His lease was granted by the British Government. Great Britain further laid claim to the island by sponsoring a visit in 1930 by the sloop Leith, when Captain L. C. P. Tudway planted the British flag and proclaimed British sovereignty. But it was claimed that vessels of the United States had discovered the island. The L<iith, according to history compiled by the San Francisco headquarters of the Pan-American Airways, "called at Canton again in 1938, and diplomats of the United States and Britain met to discuss the question of sovereignty. It was settled for present practical purposes by an agreement in early 1939 under which either nation would be entitled to use the island as an ocean air base, with the question af actual sovereignty postponed until later."

The Eclipse expedition of 1937 made Canton Island its base and the members of that expedition gathered information about Canton itself which was useful later to the expedition which set forth from San Francisco to set up an airways base there for Pan-American. Now comes a dispatch from Washington couched in the following terms: "The Interior Department to-day transferred administration of Canton Island in the South Pacific to Pan-American Airways.

"Heretofore, responsibility for maintaining American sovereignty on the small coral atoll had been entrusted to youthful Hawaiian colonists."