20 Dollars - Elizabeth II HMS Royalist

HMS Royalist was a Royal Navy corvette that served as the vessel from which the Gilbert and Ellice Islands were formally proclaimed a British protectorate in 1892. Captain Davis of the Royalist conducted the annexation negotiations across the atolls that would eventually, nearly a century later, become the independent nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu. By the time Tuvalu issued this coin, the ship had been out of service for the better part of a hundred years, but her administrative role in the archipelago's colonial history gave the Tuvaluan government a direct institutional reason to commemorate her.