The Nadroga chief Ratu Kini sold the uninhabited island in 1872 to John Thomson for cotton planting. Thomson died in 1876 and the island was sold to the American Louis Armstrong; he died bankrupt and the island fell to the Mortgage Agency of Australasia. In November 1891, they sold it James Borron who owned several plantations throughout Fiji and who leased Malolo Lailai to the Chinese family Wong Ket for 70 years to plant coconut palms and harvest copra. In the early 1960s, the island was sold to Richard "Dick" Smith, Regge Raffe and Sir Ian Mac Farlane. They parted their ways in the early 1970s to develop their own part of the island. At about this time, the airstrip was built. In 1969, Raffe opened Plantation Village Resort, now Plantation Island Resort, with six rooms. In the late 2000s, he added the Lomani resort.
Smith started to build Musket Cove and it opened on 3 October 1975 with twelve bures. The resort's restaurant is called Dick's Place in honor of Smith who died, aged 81, in July 2012 on the island. In 2000, Mac Farlane sold his parcel of the island to the other two partners and those 400 acres are now used for organic farming and the continuation of the coconut plantation for the supply of the resorts
