The story of Teonimenu, a lost island of the Pacific

Teonimenu disappeared hundreds of years ago, but stories about it and its people have been kept alive across Solomon Islands. (ABC News: Cordelia Brown)

If you type 9°59’36″S 161°59’10″E into Google Earth, you’ll see a dark blue patch of water in the Pacific Ocean.

It’s about the same size as the dots of land that make up the nearby Solomon Islands.

The sea is relatively shallow here, ranging between just 1 and 14 metres deep.

Now known as Lark Shoal, it was once an island and part of the archipelago.

Scientist Patrick Nunn, author of Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific, said it had been inhabited by hundreds of people.

“It’s the place where perhaps two or three islands disappeared very rapidly, several hundred years ago,” he said.

“Those islands were named Teonimenu.”

They disappeared sometime between when Spanish explorer Álvaro de Mendaña (1568) and English explorer James Cook (1768-71) were in the region, according to the oral traditions of people in the central Solomon Islands, which Professor Nunn researched extensively for his book.

Tony Heorake, director of the Solomon Islands National Museum, said the story of Teonimenu had been passed down through his family.

“I am one of the direct descendants of Teonimenu on my mother’s side,” he said.

“After the island sank, some of my ancestors survived and they floated on banana tree trunks and other debris.”

Mr Heorake said his ancestors settled on the southern tip of Ulawa, an island just to the north of where Teonimenu was.

They still live there today.

“Every evening after dinner, we normally hear the elders in the family talking about those stories,” he told the ABC.

“Not only about Teonimenu but about different animals, different plants, different ways of fishing, hunting [on the island].”

Professor Nunn and Mr Heorake have documented oral histories from four places where survivors of Teonimenu are believed to have settled.

They discovered memories of the island were ubiquitous.

People in the surrounding islands of Ulawa, Malaita, San Cristobal and as far as Santa Anna, all had something to say about Teonimenu.

“Most of the relatives that I’ve talked to seem to tell the same story,” Mr Heorake said.

“There is not much variation because they refer back to the ancestors or relatives who used to live on Teonimenu.”

Jealous lovers and cursed waves

Many stories said Teonimenu’s tragic fate began when a woman from the island named Sauwete’au married Roraimenu, a man from nearby Ali’te Island.

One day Sauwete’au eloped with another man, Kaliita’alu, and returned to Teonimenu.

Roraimenu became infuriated and vowed to take revenge on Sauwete’au and particularly Kaliita’alu for bringing him such shame.

He hatched a plan to purchase a wave curse with shell money to destroy Teonimenu.

Roraimenu obtained a curse with eight destructive waves.

When he arrived at Ali’ite, he went to the interior of the island and climbed onto a high rock and watched with grim satisfaction as Teonimenu was gradually swamped and crushed by the waves.

The eighth wave completely submerged the island and an unknown number of people perished.

Those who survived this terrifying ordeal were driven in various directions by the ocean currents and were washed ashore in different places in Solomon Islands.

Fact or fiction?

While the exact details might have been embellished for the sake of a good story, Professor Nunn thinks there’s a pretty obvious link between the evidence of a sunken island at Lark Shoal and the oral traditions of central Solomon Islands.

“I think there is a tendency of Western science-trained observers to dismiss all of these things as kind of fantasy as myth or legend,” Professor Nunn said.

“We’re almost certain that Teonimenu really did exist … Why would people in a western Pacific Island group invent a story about a sinking island unless it actually happened?

“The tendency now — particularly over the last 10 years or so — is for scientists to take these kinds of stories far more seriously than they once did, as memories of catastrophic events that have become encoded in people’s oral traditions and world views.”

So tales of disappearing islands might not be as far-fetched as previously thought, but how on earth does an island suddenly disappear?

The scientific explanation

Many Pacific Islands are located along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a region prone to frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity.

Lark Shoal, where descendants say Teonimenu existed, is located along the top of an undersea ridge, which drops steeply for up to 5 kilometres into the Cape Johnson Trench.

Through an analysis of seismic data, Professor Nunn identified a build-up of debris from landslides inside the trench, which suggests the ridge is “inherently unstable”.

“This is a place where one section of the Earth’s crust is moving down underneath another section and whenever there’s a slip, there’s a huge earthquake that shakes everything on the sea floor, including the islands,” Professor Nunn said.

“Sometimes, these earthquakes cause landslides that are so gigantic they cause entire islands to slip suddenly beneath the ocean surface.”

Across the Pacific, there are oral histories about submerged islands or volcanic lands that have blown themselves to pieces.

When the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano erupted in 2022, it became the latest example, giving scientists an unprecedented view of the life cycle of an island.

“There are thousands of islands in the Pacific basin and many of those formed in places where there’s a lot of tectonic activity and in all of those places, it causes islands both to form and to disappear,” Professor Nunn said.

“My feeling is that scientists should be paying a lot more attention to bodies of surviving oral tradition … because there’s information there that can inform our pasts, but also help us manage the future.”

Keeping the lessons of Teonimenu alive

Mr Heorake has called on scientists to take the oral histories of Pacific Islanders more seriously and to investigate their reliability as historical records.

“We come from a society that passes on information orally. Those stories have been recorded in the collective memories of people then been passed on down for generations,” he said.

“Teonimenu is a good example where science can corroborate oral histories.”

Mr Heorake and fellow descendants want to gain formal recognition from the Solomon Islands government as a group of people with a lineage to Teonimenu.

“In other parts of the Solomons there is very little knowledge about [Teonimenu] … there is no such recognition as yet,” Mr Heorake said.

The group believes that keeping the memory and lessons of Teonimenu alive will help educate future generations about the threat of geological hazards.

“We need to have the skills or the different mindsets to enable us to mitigate the impacts of those catastrophic events,” Mr Heorake said.

“[It’s] also about maintaining and keeping the traditional cultures and stories, legends and myths that people have about Teonimenu.”