An Island Called Christmas: A Narrative History - Paperback

by Lester Gaynor (Author)

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."

Author Biography

Lester Gaynor enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1939, and in 1941 he was transferred to Christmas Island with assistant Francis Wallis. He and Wallis established the first weather station on Christmas Island and transmitted radiosonde and hourly surface data to Hickam Field, Hawaii, located about 1400 miles to the north. He developed an interest in meteorology during WWII when he was in the Air Weather Service and supported combat air and ground operations in the central Pacific Ocean. After the war, Gaynor kept in touch with many of his wartime comrades, and organized 7th Weather Squadron reunions in San Francisco and Detroit. He studied the history of Christmas Island on travels around the world with his wife, Mildred.