18671776 Club
Lackawanna's captain plants the flag on an empty Pacific atoll
No one lived there to object; Reynolds and his boat crews had the beach to themselves.
By the summer of 1867, the U.S. Navy was scouting the Pacific for coaling stations to refuel steamships far from home. On August 28, Captain William Reynolds brought USS Lackawanna to a remote, uninhabited atoll, landed with his officers, and raised the flag under a 21-gun salute to formally claim it for the United States. The atoll, already known to sailors as Brooks' Island or Midway, had no residents to greet him and no garrison to leave behind. It became the first Pacific island the United States annexed outright…
