Faced with land shortage in the southern Gilbert Islands, the British colonial administration launched a settlement scheme in 1938 that moved about a thousand Gilbertese to the uninhabited Phoenix atolls of Nikumaroro, Manra and Orona, where they were to establish coconut plantations. Drought and thin soils made the settlements unviable, and in 1963 the administration evacuated the remaining settlers to Wagina and Gizo in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. A parallel resettlement of Gilbertese directly to the Solomons continued from 1954 until the Governing Council effectively stopped it in 1971 over concerns about ethnic tension of the kind seen in Fiji; the 1976 Solomons census counted 2,753 Gilbertese. Participation was organised and encouraged by the administration rather than compelled at law, but the choices available to settlers were shaped by colonial land policy and by the phosphate economy that had already taken Banaba, whose people the atlas records separately. The Gilbertese communities in the Solomons were displaced again during the tensions of 1998-2003 and questions of land and citizenship have persisted.
The British colonial administration of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands moved Gilbertese settlers to the Phoenix atolls and later to the Solomon Islands
British colonial censuses of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands recorded roughly 28,000-30,000 people in the Gilberts in the 1930s. The scheme moved about 700 settlers to the Phoenix Islands from 1938 and later relocated roughly 2,000-3,000 in total, most of them onward to the Solomon Islands in 1963-64 after drought made the Phoenix atolls unviable.
There was no significant death toll. Settlers suffered drought, water shortage and hardship on the Phoenix atolls, which was why the scheme was abandoned, but no mass mortality was recorded.
Solomon Is.