Otto von Kotzebue was the first Westerner to discover the Bikini Islands in the mid-1820s. The Islands had always been called Bikini by the native Marshall Islanders, from the Marshallese “Pik” meaning surface and “ni” meaning coconut. The name was popularized in the United States not only by nuclear bomb tests, but because the bikini swimsuit, which was introduced within days of the first nuclear test on the Islands.