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Not much is known about Tonga before European contact because of the lack of a writing system during prehistoric times other than the oral history told to the early European explorers. The first time the Tongan people encountered Europeans was in April 1616 when Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten made a short visit to the islands to trade with ...
The word tonga is cognate to the Hawaiian word kona meaning 'leeward', which is the origin of the name for the Kona District in Hawaiʻi. [15] Tonga became known in the West as the "Friendly Islands" because of the congenial reception accorded to Captain James Cook on his first visit in 1773.
Queen Salote of Tonga: The Story of an Era 1900-1965 (ISBN 1-86940-205-7) Latukefu, S. (1974), Church and State in Tonga, ANU Press, Canberra; Campbell, Ian C; Island Kingdom: Tonga Ancient and Modern, 2001, ISBN 0-908812-96-5 "Brief history of the Kingdom of Tonga", on the website of the Tongan Parliament
Around 2850 BP, the Lapita people reached Tonga, and carbon dating places their landfall first in Tongatapu and then in Haʻapai soon after. [3] The newcomers were already well adapted to the resource-scarce island life and settled in small communities of a few households [3] on beaches just above high tide line that faced open lagoons or reefs.
Tonga is a sovereign island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean. [1] Tonga comprises the Tonga Archipelago of 169 islands, 36 of them inhabited, stretching over a distance of about 800 kilometres (500 mi) in a north–south line. The islands lie south of Samoa and are about one-third of the way from New Zealand to Hawaii.
Captain Cook also wrote that he travelled by canoes to visit Mooa where Paulaho and other great men lived. The house that Paulaho provided was on the beach 500 metres ( 1 ⁄ 3 mi) from the ship. Reference to his map shows that he must have landed and stayed in the Siesia area, the eastern part of modern Nukuʻalofa.
Because of its remote location from the main islands of Tonga, ʻAta was largely self-governed; the Official Report on Central Polynesia by Charles St Julian stated its population was 150 in 1857. [9] It is one of the three islands in Tonga to have been affected by the Peruvian slave trade of 1862 to 1864; of the three, it suffered the most.
In Tongan mythology, or oral history, ʻAhoʻeitu is a son of the god ʻEitumātupuʻa and a mortal woman, ʻIlaheva Vaʻepopua.He became the first king of the Tuʻi Tonga (Tonga king) dynasty in the early 10th century, dethroning the previous one with the same name but originating from the uanga (maggots) instead of divine; see Kohai, Koau, mo Momo.