The Vitu Islands are a volcanic group with an area of 37 sq mi (96 km²) located in the Bismarck Sea off New Britain, in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. They are not technically part of the Bismarck Archipelago. Administratively they are part of Papua New Guinea. Formerly called the French Islands, the group is sometimes known as the Witu Islands. Geography The islands are volcanic ocean peaks, much as they are reef-ringed, not atolls, and are thereby highly fertile. Garove (Vitu, or Big Witu) and Unea (Bali) are the largest islands. The group was the chief copra centre of Papua New Guinea, although cocoa is now the main crop harvested due to the depressed prices available for copra. The islands are situated west of north of the Willaumez Peninsula, on the north coast of New Britain, with Unea some east of south of the main group, and the remaining other islands Mundua (Ningau), situated eleven kilometres (7 mi.) northwest of Garove, and Naragé some twenty-four kilometres (15 mi.) northwest of Mundua, the final extension of the subaqueous peaks chain being the Ottilian Reef (Attilian Reef) a further twenty-two kilometres northwest of Naragé, this last all but totally submerged at all tide states, and dangerous to shipping. Sometimes the submerged Whirlwind Reef a further fifty-eight kilometres to the southwest of the Ottilian Reef is included in the island arc. History Naragé is a post-explosive-eruption volcanic remnant of some of what was an island of prior to an eruption that occurred in approximately 1892. The resulting tsunami reached 100 metres on impact on Ningau, wiping out all but two persons of the lowest-lying of three villages - Goru - (they were absent on Garove) and caused major disruption and reduction of population over a wide area of the north coastal areas of New Britain and quite possibly New Guinea and the Western Islands group, plus other islands. A wave of such magnitude would have made the 1997 Itape wave little more than a reef or shore break. In German times prior to World War I this was - outside of Kokopo, at Rabaul - the stomping ground and major enterprise of the American-Samoan, Queen Emma, whose island group H/Q was Langu plantation, Vitu, and whose manager, a Dane named Peter Hansen, became quite famous for his retinue of concubines, some 26 in number, this the more surprising as the male:female birth ratio