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Capital: Avarua
Population: 14,000+
Language: English, Cook Islands Maori, Pukapukan
1 – Palmerston Atoll
Palmerston Atoll, a ring of small islets around a lagoon nearly 500 km north-west of Rarotonga, is by most accounts the only island in the group where Captain Cook himself went ashore, in 1777, finding it uninhabited, while the name Cook Islands was given in his honour in the 1820s by the Russian navigator Adam Johann von Krusenstern.
Palmerston Atoll has no airstrip or deep-water harbour, so it is reached only by sea, and visitors who make the long voyage are welcomed and hosted by island families.
Almost everyone on Palmerston Atoll descends from William Marsters, an Englishman believed to be from Gloucestershire, who arrived in 1863 with two Polynesian wives from Penrhyn, soon took a third, divided the atoll into three family shares and left thousands of descendants, whose English is said to echo his West Country accent.
2 – Rarotonga
Rarotonga, the mountainous main island, home to most Cook Islanders as well as the capital, Avarua, was settled by East Polynesian voyagers, and tradition holds that canoes, among them Tākitimu, set out from its harbour at Avana for Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Rarotonga’s coast road, the Ara Tapu, is shadowed inland by the Ara Metua, said to have been built by the chief Toi around the 11th century, with ancient marae such as Arai-te-Tonga beside it, while the Cross-Island Track climbs past the spire of Te Rua Manga, the Needle, to Wigmore’s Falls.
By long-standing custom, no building on Rarotonga is said to rise above a coconut palm, which helps explain why the island has no high-rises, no traffic lights and a bus service famous for running just two ways round the island, clockwise and anticlockwise.
3 – Aitutaki
Aitutaki, about 45 minutes’ flight north of Rarotonga, is a low volcanic island inside a vast triangular lagoon ringed by small motu, sighted by Bligh in the Bounty in April 1789, less than three weeks before the mutiny, and Christianity arrived with the missionary Papeiha in 1821.
Boat trips across Aitutaki’s lagoon stop to wade the sandbanks and snorkel the reef channels, while from 1951 to 1960 TEAL’s Coral Route flying boats landed on the lagoon at Akaiami to refuel, and in 1942 an airfield was built on the island for American forces in the Second World War.
Aitutaki’s best-known motu is Tapuaetai, One Foot Island, named for a legend in which a father hid his son and walked so that only one set of footprints showed in the sand.
4 – Atiu
Atiu, the third-largest of the Cook Islands, is a volcanic island millions of years old, ringed by raised fossil coral known as makatea that is riddled with caves, and its traditional name, Enuamanu, means “land of birds”.
Guided walks on Atiu lead into Anatakitaki cave, with its stalactites and a freshwater pool for swimming, one of only two caves where the kopeka, the Atiu swiftlet, nests, finding its way through the darkness by clicks of echolocation.
Bush beer reached Atiu with 19th-century whalers, and when missionaries banned alcohol, drinkers took it into the bush in the tumunu, a ritual drinking circle with a barman serving from a coconut-shell cup, which was officially recognised in the 1980s.