Bikini Atoll

Bikini Atoll occupies a remote coral platform at the northern end of the Ralik Chain. Twenty-three islets enclose a lagoon of 229.4 square miles, while the largest, Bikini Island, reaches only about seven feet above low tide. Rainwater, shallow wells and salt-tolerant plants made this low ground habitable. The Marshallese name Pikinni means “surface of coconuts,” a description of land made from sand, limestone and groves rather than dense soil.

Before European contact, Bikini’s families grew coconut, pandanus, breadfruit, taro, arrowroot and bananas, and raised pigs and chickens. They fished with shell hooks and coconut-fibre lines, using more than twenty-five techniques, and sailed two-hulled proas between the islets and neighbouring atolls. Clans held land through maternal descent; chiefs regulated tenure and resource use, while clan heads supervised daily work.

The lagoon provided sheltered water and an unusually broad horizon within a narrow ring of land. Knowledge of winds, reefs and currents made those passages possible and tied Bikini to the wider Marshallese world. In 1529 the Spanish captain Álvaro de Saavedra may have landed here, and the Russian expedition of Otto von Kotzebue sighted the atoll in 1816–17 and named it Eschscholtz Atoll after the ship’s naturalist.