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Vanuatu forms an archipelago of some eighty islands approximately 1000 miles to the northeast of Australia. This part of the South Pacific is known as Melanesia–the “black islands”– in contrast to Polynesia (further to the east) and Micronesia (which spans the equator). Although most Melanesians are dark in color, anthropologists believe that their ancestors migrated by dugout canoes from Southeast Asia, not Africa, thousands of years ago.

The 170,000 inhabitants of Vanuatu- -called ni-Vanuatu- – live principally on a dozen islands. Espiritu Santo (or just “Santo”), the largest island, was sighted and named by the Spanish explorer Fernandez de Quiros in 1606. De Quiros thought he had discovered the southern continent, a logical fiction which European scientists thought necessary to “balance” the weight of the land in the northern hemisphere.

One hundred sixty-two years later, a Frenchman, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, returned with de Quiros’ plans and named two more islands: Pentecost and Aurora. The religious name of Pentecost has stuck, but Aurora–so-named for its discovery at dawn–is now called Maewo.

But the honor of naming most of Vanuatu’s islands went to Captain James Cook, the Yorkshireman, who in 1774 was the first European to set foot on Malakula and Erromango. The other major islands were called Efate, Tanna, Ambrym, Aneityum and Ambae (immortalized by James Michener as “Bali Hai”). Though they bear no resemblance whatsoever to Scotland, Captain Cook called the whole cluster of islands the New Hebrides.

The sheer act of naming the whole group imparted a new sense of unity to these islands. Those islands to the extreme north, named by Bligh of the Bounty after the botanist Joesph Banks, have more in common with Santa Cruz than they do with Tanna and Aneityum. But Santa Cruz has been lumped together with the Solomons, and so is part of another nation entirely.