The Marquesas Islands are a group of islands in French Polynesia. In French they are known as the Îles Marquises or Archipel des Marquises or Marquises.
The Marquesas Islands suffered the greatest population decline as a result of diseases brought by European and
American explorers, reducing the estimated sixteenth
century population of over 100,000 inhabitants, to about 20,000 by the middle of the nineteenth
century, and to
just over 2,000 by
the beginning of the 1900s. During the course of the twentieth century, the population increased to about 8,500 by 2002, not including the Marquesan community residing on
Tahiti.
The first recorded settlers of the Marquesas were Polynesians, who, from archæological evidence, are believed to have arrived before 100 AD. Ethnological and linguistic evidence suggests that they likely arrived from the region of Samoa.
The islands were given their name by Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira who reached them in 1595. He named them after his patron, García Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete, who was Viceroy of Peru at the time. Mendaña visited first Fatu Hiva and then Tahuata before continuing on to the Solomon Islands.
The American navigator Capt. Joseph Ingraham first visited the northern Marquesas while commanding the brig Hope in 1791, giving them the name Washington Islands. In 1813, Commodore David Porter claimed Nuku Hiva for the United States, but the United States Congress never ratified that claim, and in 1842, France, following a successful military operation on behalf of a native chief (named Iotete) who claimed to be king of the whole of the island of Tahuata, took possession of the whole group, establishing a settlement (abandoned in 1859) on Nuku Hiva. French control over the group was reestablished in 1870, and later incorporated into the territory of French Polynesia.
; "Marquises")
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