paragraph_text: In 1568, Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña was the first European to sail through the archipelago, sighting the island of Nui during his expedition in search of Terra Australis. In 1819 the island of Funafuti was named Ellice's Island; the name Ellice was applied to all nine islands after the work of English hydrographer Alexander George Findlay. The islands came under Britain's sphere of influence in the late 19th century, when each of the Ellice Islands was declared a British Protectorate by Captain Gibson of HMS Curacoa between 9 and 16 October 1892. The Ellice Islands were administered as British protectorate by a Resident Commissioner from 1892 to 1916 as part of the British Western Pacific Territories (BWPT), and then as part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony from 1916 to 1974.

paragraph_text: Albert Ghiorso (July 15, 1915 -- December 26, 2010) was an American nuclear scientist and co-discoverer of a record 12 chemical elements on the periodic table. His research career spanned five decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1990s.

paragraph_text: Brucite was first described in 1824 and named for the discoverer, American mineralogist, Archibald Bruce (1777–1818). A fibrous variety of brucite is called nemalite. It occurs in fibers or laths, usually elongated along [1010], but sometimes [1120] crystalline directions.

paragraph_text: The launch of Discoverer 37 occurred at 21:41 UTC on 13 January 1962. A Thor DM-21 Agena-B rocket was used, flying from Launch Complex 75-3-4 at the Vandenberg Air Force Base; however, it failed to achieve orbit.

paragraph_text: In mathematics applied to computer science, Monge arrays, or Monge matrices, are mathematical objects named for their discoverer, the French mathematician Gaspard Monge.

paragraph_text: Austria (minor planet designation: 136 Austria) is a main-belt asteroid that was found by the prolific asteroid discoverer Johann Palisa on 18 March 1874, from the Austrian Naval Observatory in Pola, Istria. It was his first asteroid discovery and was given the Latin name of his homeland.

paragraph_text: Stigler's law of eponymy, proposed by University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in his 1980 publication "Stigler’s law of eponymy", states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Examples include Hubble's law which was derived by Georges Lemaître two years before Edwin Hubble, the Pythagorean theorem although it was known to Babylonian mathematicians before the Pythagoreans, and Halley's comet which was observed by astronomers since at least 240 BC. Stigler himself named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law" to show that it follows its own decree, though the phenomenon had previously been noted by others.

paragraph_text: Ratzinger was considered to be one of the most authoritative voices in the Vatican and became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. The name was proposed by the asteroid's first discoverer, Lutz Schmadel. The approved naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 23 May 2000 ().

paragraph_text: Alfred François Donné (13 September 1801 – 7 March 1878) was a French bacteriologist and doctor. He was born in Noyon, France, and died in Paris. Donné was the discoverer of Trichomonas vaginalis and leukemia. He was also the inventor of the photomicrography.

paragraph_text: Evelyn (minor planet designation: 503 Evelyn) is a main belt asteroid discovered by Raymond Smith Dugan on 19 January 1903. The asteroid was named after Evelyn Smith Dugan, mother of the discoverer.

paragraph_text: Alexander Mikhaylovich Butlerov (Алекса́ндр Миха́йлович Бу́тлеров; 15 September 1828 – 17 August 1886) was a Russian chemist, one of the principal creators of the theory of chemical structure (1857–1861), the first to incorporate double bonds into structural formulas, the discoverer of hexamine (1859), the discoverer of formaldehyde (1859) and the discoverer of the formose reaction (1861).

paragraph_text: Henri Debehogne (30 December 1928 – 9 December 2007) was a Belgian astronomer and a prolific discoverer of minor planets.

paragraph_text: Audouin Charles Dollfus (November 12, 1924 – October 1, 2010) was a French astronomer and aeronaut, specialist in studies of the Solar System and discoverer of Janus, a moon of Saturn.

paragraph_text: Father Jean-Vincent Scheil (born 10 June 1858, Kœnigsmacker – died 21 September 1940, Paris) was a French Dominican scholar and Assyriologist. He is credited as the discoverer of the Code of Hammurabi in Persia. In 1911 he came into possession of the Scheil dynastic tablet and first translated it.

paragraph_text: Funamanu is a small narrow island that is part of Funafuti atoll in Tuvalu. It is a motu (islet) or very small island and is located 2.6 miles southwestward of the southwest tip of Funafuti. The islet is known to be covered in coconut trees which grow 70 feet high. Te Ava Pua Pua is the passage through the reef, with a least depth of 12.7 metres, between the islets of Funamanu to the north and Fale Fatu to the south, in the southeast of Funafuti atoll.

paragraph_text: Jaan Einasto (born 23 February 1929, in Tartu) is an Estonian astrophysicist and one of the discoverers of the large-scale structure of the Universe.

paragraph_text: 792 Metcalfia is a minor planet orbiting the Sun. It was discovered in 1907 by Joel Hastings Metcalf and was named after its discoverer.

paragraph_text: The Laplace plane or Laplacian plane of a planetary satellite, named after its discoverer Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), is a mean or reference plane about whose axis the instantaneous orbital plane of a satellite precesses.

paragraph_text: Henry E. Holt (born 1929) is an American astronomer and prolific discoverer of minor planets and comets, who has worked as a planetary geologist at the United States Geological Survey and Northern Arizona University.

paragraph_text: The Wiegand effect is a nonlinear magnetic effect, named after its discoverer John R. Wiegand, produced in specially annealed and hardened wire called Wiegand wire.

Question: Who discovered the country where Funamanu was located?
Answer: Álvaro de Mendaña