History
The two main islands were discovered by the French explorer Nicolas Baudin in 1801. Hermite Island is named after the French Admiral Jean-Marthe-Adrien L'Hermite. Trimouille Island is named after a French noble family. There are problems with the naming of the islands in the accounts of the early explorers, and it has been suggested that the French. and later the British, explorers mixed up the names of Lowendal and Hermite Islands.
An early reference to the islands is in 1622, when the Tryall was wrecked just west of them. For years afterwards their approximate position was recorded on charts as the Tryal Rocks. The islands were economically significant for pearl fishing from the end of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Second World War.
Read more about this topic: Montebello Islands
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)