If you’ve never heard of the Wallis and Futuna Islands, no worries, neither has about 99% of the population, including French people despite this being a very isolated and very obscure constituent territory of Overseas France.
You will find Wallis and Futuna Islands in the South Pacific between Tuvalu to the northwest, Fiji to the southwest, Tonga to the southeast, Samoa to the east, and Tokelau to the northeast.
If that doesn’t help, find New Zealand and go roughly north-north-east, but look closely because you might miss them. And, while it confuses me for some reason, Futuna is the island further to the west with Wallis, the bigger island, being to the east.
Though both French and Polynesian, Wallis and Futuna is distinct from the entity known as French Polynesia.
To be sure, this isn’t a big place. The total land area of Wallis and Futuna combined is all of 55 sq miles with a population of about 11,899. The capital and biggest city is Mata-Utu
located on Wallis Island.
There are three main volcanic islands in the territory, Wallis and Futuna, obviously, but also Futuna’s little sister, Alofi, which is mostly uninhabited due to a lack of fresh water resources.
Wallis and Futuna are about 160 miles apart from one another.
Polynesians settled the islands around the year 1000 CE, when the Tongan Empire expanded into the area.
Futuna was “discovered” by Europeans first when Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire came upon it during their famous circumnavigation of the globe in 1616.
As they were from the Dutch town of Hoorn they named the island Hoorn Island and some sources still refer to it this way today.
Despite being discovered by two Dutchmen, it was the French who first colonized the island with the arrival of missionaries in 1837. Pierre Chanel, canonized as a saint in 1954, is a major patron of the island of Futuna and the region.
The Wallis Islands are named after the British explorer, Samuel Wallis.
The missionaries ran into trouble in 1842 when the local population, perhaps understandably, rebelled. The missionaries asked for the protection of France to face down this rebellion. By 1887 the Queen of the island of Wallis signed a treaty with the French that formally made the island a French protectorate. By 1888 the respective kings of the islands of Futuna and Alofi also signed a treaty establishing a French protectorate. The island were governed indirectly from New Caledonia, and to this day New Caledonia functions as the islands’ link to the outside world.
Wallis and Futuna is located about two-thirds of the way from Hawaii to New Zealand.