About half of the territories in Oceania (or Australia or Australasia) are still dependencies / overseas departments / external territories / special territory to countries that are not in Oceania (except for few that are either associated with Australia or New Zealand). New Caledonia, French Polynesia, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Cook Islands, Wallis and Futuna, Norfolk Island, Niue, Tokelau and Pitcairn Islands are the above mentioned territories that had been long dominated by a dominant country that are mostly in Europe. This doesn't mean that these islands were completely barren when Europeans founded them for the first time. But surely they did name it differently at the time they sailed on them initially.
When Ferdinand Magellan sailed from Spain on what today is Northern Mariana Islands in 1521, he named these islands as Las Isles de las Velas Latinas, while to Guam he named it as Las Islas de Los Ladrones. Between 16th to 18th centuries when Cook Islands were sighted by Spanish and British explorers, various names were designated to various islands of this group - San Bernardo (1595), Peregrina (1606), Danger Island (1765) etc. Its interesting to note that over the time almost all the islands changed their name to their local ethnic names (Fiji, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu etc.) while some retain the colonial names (Australia, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands etc.).
The map here shows a list of some of the names given by the earliest European explorers to these islands. The old names are marked in red while the current names are in blue.
@mapsbysagar
@mapsbysagar
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