stock-raising and copra-harvesting community on the island; the operation met with limited financial success. In 1868, Caroline was claimed for Britain by the captain of HMS Reindeer, which noted 27 residents in a settlement on South Islet. The island was leased by the British government to Houlder Brothers and Co. in 1872, with John T. Arundel as the manager; two of the islets are named for him. Houlder Brothers and Co. conducted minimal guano mining on the island from 1874. John T. Arundel and Co. took over the lease and the industry in 1881; the company supplied a total of about 10,000 tons of phosphate until supplies became exhausted in 1895. In 1885 Arundel established a coconut plantation, but the coconut palms suffered from disease and the plantation failed. The settlement on the island lasted until 1904, when the six remaining Polynesians were relocated to Niue. The island was leased to S.R. Maxwell and Company and a new settlement was established in 1916, this time built entirely upon copra export. Much of the South islet was deforested to make way for coconut palms, a non-indigenous plant. The business venture, however, went into debt, and the island's settlement slowly decreased in population. By 1926, it was down to only ten residents, and by 1936, the settlement consisted of only two Tahitian families. It was abandoned in the late 1930s. During World War II, Caroline Island remained unoccupied, and no military action took place there. Under British jurisdiction, it was formally repossessed by the British Western Pacific High Commission in 1943 and then governed as part of the Central and Southern Line Islands. A Tahitian family was found to be living on the atoll when the American sailor John Caldwell visited it in September 1946. In January 1972, the Central and Southern Line Islands were joined with the British colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, which had become autonomous in 1971. Kiribati When the Gilbert Islands became the independent nation of Kiribati in 1979, Caroline Island became Kiribati's easternmost point. The island is owned by the government of the Republic of Kiribati and overseen by the Ministry of Line and Phoenix Islands Development, which is headquartered on Kiritimati. Claims to sovereignty over the island by the United States were relinquished in the 1979 Treaty of Tarawa, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1983. The island was inhabited from 1987 to 1991