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This included Wake, but even the industrious German administrators ignored the place, as it was devoid of any marketable resources, not to mention fresh water and locals to do the work. Spain had claimed most of Micronesia for three hundred years, but ceded sovereignty to Germany in the 1880s when the guano and copra trades began to flourish, and Spain was losing its long colonial grip. The Marshall Islands, Wake included, went through some nominal cartographic changes in the latter decades of the 19th century. Renowned illustrator, Titian Peale, was the expedition’s official naturalist/artist - hence the name of two of the atoll’s islands, Wilkes and Peale. The likely first encounter by Americans came with wide-ranging New England whaling fleets in the early 1800’s, but the place was officially recognized, if not claimed, by the United States Exploration Expedition under US Navy Commander Charles Wilkes in the 1840s. No wonder, as it is isolated from the rest of the Marshall Islands by hundreds of miles of open ocean, and has no natural fresh water. Marshallese seafarers had been there already, but had not settled the atoll. The official European discovery of Wake is credited to eponymous British sea captain William Wake in 1796. The result is a lagoon of calm water surrounded by strips of sandy ground – a watery garden of sorts sitting in the midst of the vast Pacific. The corals find this environment a happy place to make their home, and over millennia built up the bits of land that remain above the waves. As the extinct volcano eroded above the waves, it was also sinking due to subsidence of the seafloor on which it rests. Like its neighboring atolls to the south, Wake exists thanks to the ceaseless work of the corals that have grown up on top of a submerged volcanic mountain.
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NASA Satellite Image of Wake Island location in the Pacific. It’s geographically related to the Marshall Islands, most of which lie well to the south of Wake. Actually an atoll, the three bits of land comprising Wake – Wake, Peale, and Wilkes Islands – altogether add up to less than 3 square miles of ground. If you are flying west across the International Dateline, the first piece of American soil you could encounter is Wake Island. The Pan American compound is at the foot of the pier.” ( U.S. Navy Consolidated PBY patrol planes are anchored in the lagoon, and a Pan American Airways Boeing "Clipper" is docked at the pier. Photo: Wake Atoll with Pan Am Boeing 314 NC18609, May 25, 1941. Chronicling Wake Island - A Brief History