They could have been called the Bligh Islands and probably should have been. But with the name Captain William Bligh forever associated with being cast adrift in a longboat by sailors chafing under condign leadership, it was unlikely to be a popular choice. Captain James Cook, the bold adventurer done in by nasty natives after sighting much of the known world (and curing scurvy to boot), was a much safer bet.
Cook first laid eyes on the atoll of Manuae in 1777 and named what he came upon further south the Hervey Islands. He didn't find the main, southern island of Rarotonga, it always being beyond the horizon. Bligh, who visited on the Bounty in 1789, landed on Aitutaki, visited its astonishing lagoon and introduced the papaya before heading to Rarotonga, on the way to Tonga.
He might have spent more time among the 'necklace of islands' but, given it was only 17 days before Fletcher Christian led his famed mutiny, the mood aboard was probably a tad tense.
Of course, the Spaniards had beaten both of them - Alvaro de Mendana in 1595 and Pedro Quiros in 1606, neither of whom achieved naming rights. In fact, it was not the British Admiralty who formally honoured its pin-up boy (Cook's Endeavour did come within sight of Rarotonga in 1813, but it was the crew of HMS Cumberland who first set foot on its shores, the following year). The name Cook Islands was assigned by the Russians in honour of the great English navigator when the archipelago appeared for the first time on one of the country's naval charts, in the early 1800s.
We know this thanks to European record keeping. Considerably less is known of the real discoverers or settlers of this South Pacific crucible. More than a thousand years before the Europeans arrived in their masted ships to plant flags and collect sandalwood, canoes from the north and the east landed and roads were cut. Had I known it was the old warrior Toi who, 1,200 years ago, built the 32km Ara Metua road, which rings Rarotonga, I may have paid it more attention as I whipped along in a rental car searching for the Royale Takitumu Villas. As it was, the light was fading and I was more interested in a warm and welcoming resort than the contours of a famed thoroughfare.
'Resort' is a subjective word in the Cook Islands. Although its 15 islands are spread over more than two million square kilometres of the southwest Pacific - an area the size of western Europe - the total land area is only 240 sqkm, with Rarotonga accounting for about a quarter of that. Sprawling or towering sun 'n' sand holiday complexes are noticeably absent. The principal and prestige properties, which help draw 80,000 visitors a year (not including cruise-ship day-trippers), are subtly tucked away along the coast.