Palmerston Atoll; a Tale of Survival Over 117 Years by One Family
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Palmerston Atoll; A tale of survival over 117 years by one family Pamela Takiora Ingrain Pryor I. VOYAGE AND ARRIVAL Even school children in the Cook Islands are aware that everyone they meet named Marsters must be from Palmerston Atoll or at least must be a descendant of the original Englishman who set up life there with three wives in the middle of the last century. Since then the community has remained largely isolated, living for the most part on surrounding natural resources. Life there remained technologically simple until the 1970's, somehow avoiding or being by-passed by the sweep of cultural changes, the materialism and the worldliness that have affected even more remote and much older communities throughout the Pacific. Palmerston is 270 miles northwest of Rarotonga. The sea voyage takes three days in calm weather. Passengers aboard the government fishing vessel sleep on top of diesel drums and building supplies surrounded by bananas and oranges or, on the way back, on bags of copra surrounded again by more copra (which has a highly unpleasant stench), bosun birds, bags of clams and occasionally live turtles. The misery of the voyage ends marvelously, however. The arrival in Palmerston was a truly rewarding experience. At first it was difficult to make out even the atoll's tree line against the horizon, let alone the slim slice of land just slightly elevated above the enormous lagoon, but soon the vessel was motoring along the western shore seeking the "passage", often led by flying fish which leapt in schools before the bow. The engineer and crew will watch their trolling Pamela Takiora Ingram Pryor, a Cook Islander, has completed the requirements for a Master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Hawaii and is currently Program Coordinator for the Pacific Islands Development Program at the East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii. 142 lines for the tell-tale snap of a hooked fish, for Palmerston is renowned for its abundance of marine life. Passengers are struck by the sight of the sparkling blue lagoon rimmed with coconut covered islets or motus. While the passage through the reef was narrow, the welcoming beach on Home Islet was wide and spotted with people eager to take a guest home and to show off the place that they loved. Approaching the beach, the water was very clear; one could see the sandy bottom 30 feet below. Reef fish scuttled away, multicolored corals and even giant Tridacna clams were visible with no effort at all. Within this tranquility there was a sense of excitement as the vessel cast anchor and boats left the beach to come alongside. The welcoming Palmerston islanders didn't just climb aboard; they clamored aboard. They brought baskets of food and coconuts and in turn were given oranges and tangerines. They were just as pleased to savor these treats as the visitors were to drink from fresh green coconuts. Only the men came out in the boats for this greeting: the acting Clerk in-Charge, Tuakana Marsters, the head of the second lineage, John James Marsters, and the head of the third lineage, Bob Marsters, and other male members of their respective families. On the beach, the women were waiting to greet the visitors with shell leis and kisses. After the supplies had been unloaded, visitors were escorted home where a lovely spread of food was laid out: suckling pig, three kinds of fish, and pumpkin pudding in coconut milk sauce, the first of many such meals. Walking from the beach to a home the visitor passes scaevola shrubs, young heliotrope trees at the high water mark, and then past pockets of mixed woodlands on higher ground. These characteristic mixtures of plant varieties are the result of water-carried seeds being randomly assembled on the beach and then pushed over the berm by higher tides or storms. Inland there are the coconuts which occupy most of the acreage on the larger motus, most of them resulting from copra plantation activity. In addition to those obvious species, there are many imported plants on Home Islet. The settlement area itself is shaded and protected by the coconut trees on the lagoon side, with little or no ground cover. The "main street" is cleared with a church, water tanks, the original old Marsters' house and another old house lining both sides. Further inland, around the other houses, there are breadfruit trees, some obviously old. There are also ornamented plants such as plumeria, the Tahitian gardenia ("tiare maori") and hibiscus in this area. Some papaya trees grow to considerable heights but the fruit is small. The home of the visitor's host was quite modern and similar to the new houses of Western design found on Rarotonga, large with four bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, dining room, bathroom and a verandah. It had a concrete foundation, pinex walls, a corrugated iron roof and many louvered glass windows. It was well furnished with beds, couches (made on the island) and even a flush toilet. While there was no running water in the bathroom or kitchen (one simply rilled a bucket of water and used a cup for bathing), there was running water into the toilet cistern. It was a very comfortable home and quite unlike anything one expected. The Palmerston people are very friendly and hospitable, making one feel at ease and very fortunate to be with them. They are cheerful, quick to crack a joke, and enjoy the company of their visitors. II. EARLY HISTORY Palmerston's early history is not well documented, but on June 16, 1774, on his second voyage around the world, Captain James Cook discovered the atoll. About half an hour after sunrise this morning, land was seen from the topmast-head. We altered our course, and steering for it, found it to be another reef island, composed of five or six woody islets connected together by sand-banks and breakers, enclosing a lake into which we could see no entrance. We found no anchorage, nor saw we any signs of inhabitants. There were plenty of various kinds of birds, and the coast seemed to abound with fish. I looked upon it as a new discovery and named it Palmerston Island in honour of Lord Palmerston, one of the Lords of the Admiralty.1 Cook then left without landing, but returned on his third voyage on April 13, 1777. It was not until the next day that four boats went ashore. They landed on a motu on the southeast of the atoll and returned with young coconut palms as food for the cattle aboard and "scurvy grass" (purslane) which Cook thought prevented scurvy. Captain Edward Edwards of the Pandora and his crew were the next visitors to Palmerston, arriving there on May 21, 1791. Captain Edwards and his party were searching for the mutineers of the Bounty and his Lieutenant Corner actually found a yard marked "Bounty's Driver Yard" and spars with Bounty markings but these must have drifted to Palmerston from the Austral group. While a thorough search for the mutineers was being made, a strong wind forced the Pandora out to sea. The schooner which accompanied the Pandora along with a jolly boat containing five men became separated. The jolly boat and the five men were never seen again, but the schooner with its crew was found by Edwards in Samarang, Java, later.2 On April 1, 1797, the London Missionary Society's ship Duff called at Palmerston, a Tahitian aboard swam ashore and claimed the atoll for 144 King Pomare II of Tahiti. On July 15, 1811, Captain Michael Fodger landed a group of men on uninhabited Palmerston to collect beche-de-mer and shark fins to be shipped to the China market. Fodger never landed at Palmerston again, and the men presumably perished.3 In 1850 the Merchant of Venice called at the atoll and found four white men headed by Jeffrey Strickland. They had been employed to collect the same commercial valuables and were in a starving state. They made arrangements with the captain to give them passage to Rarotonga in return for their rights and titles to the island. The captain passed on these rights to John Brander, a Scottish planter and trader who had settled in Tahiti.4 It was Brander who hired William Richard Marsters to be his agent on Palmerston: this was the beginning of the modern history and the continuous habitation of Palmerston. William Marsters was born in Birmingham, England in 1821. At eighteen he went to sea, serving for some time on whaling ships, going ashore in California to join the gold rush. By 1850 he was on a vessel in the South Pacific and jumped ship at Penrhyn Island (Tongareva) in the northern Cooks where he married the chief's daughter. He visited other Cook Islands and Samoa then returned to Penrhyn where he took another wife, a cousin of his first wife. He was taken to Palmerston by the ship Aorai which belonged to Brander along with his two wives and his old friend named Jean Baptiste Fernandez and his wife Matavia (who was also the wives' cousin), on July 8, 1863. From this time until 1870, Brander sent ships regularly to Palmerston at six-month intervals. Fernandez is thought to have signed on some of these vessels and spent much time away from Palmerston. He and his wife had one son named Mahuta; but while her husband traveled, Matavia had three more children who must have been fathered by Marsters. Fernandez finally confronted Marsters with his suspicions and then abandoned his wife and went to Atiu and Rarotonga where in 1895 he drowned while drunk.