KING’S NEW LAND.

Waikato Times, Volume 120, Issue 19991, 15 September 1936, Page 9

KING’S NEW LAND.

TINY ISLAND IN PACIFIC. MAY BECOME SEAPLANE BASE. SIXTY Y'ARDS IN DIAMETER. The first new territory to be added to the British Empire under King Edward VIII. has been formally annexed by four Sydney yachtsmen, states a London paper. _ This is a tiny island in the Southern Pacific, near Elizabeth Reef, and 500 miles north-east of Sydney. The island, formed on a coral reef, is now ten feet above sea level, and it had never been charted before. It was. while they were collecting museum specimens and recharting the surrounding seas in a 25-ton schooner, the Wanderer, that the yachtsmen, Messrs Norman K. Wallis, Henry Newton-Scott, John W. Forsyth, and Gilbert Whitley, found the island. After a speech, in which Mr Forsyth predicted that it would become a seaplane base on a Sydney-Fiji-American route, the island was formally annexed and named after him as Forsythland. Still Growing. When Elizabeth Reef was visited last, after a wreck in 1909, “Forsythland” was only a coral reef completely submerged at high tide. As such it is described on the Admiralty chart. Now the island is more than 60 yards in diameter, and still growing. The ceremony of annexation is described in the Wanderer’s log as follows by Mr Forsyth:— “I hoisted the colours and announced that possession had been taken on behalf of His Gracious Majesty King Edward VIII. Three cheers were given for the King, and a portion of the blue coral was broken off and taken as a symbol of possession. “I expressed in a short speech the hope that the new possession might prove a useful, though minor, addition to the Empire.” Mr Wallis, the skipper the Wanderer, said: “It was a great day. I suppose that we were the first to add new territory, humble as it may be, to the Empire of King Edward VIII.”