The Marsters Family
pp. 37-38 · Read in the full issue
Strange Story of Palmerston Island
WHERE, in the whole of the Pacific, is there another island so remarkably peopled as Palmerston? Where is Palmer ston and what is this particularly interest ing feature about its inhabitants?
Here is part of the story.
Palmerston lies some 270 miles north west from Rarotonga (Cook Group). It is a reef about 25 miles in circumference with a collection of pan-cake motus (small islands) scattered along a great ring of coral. There are six motus —a family of tiny infant islands held up by the reef, only just without the reach of old Nep tune’s clutches.
The largest islet of this little group is named Palmerston, and on it is a small mound which seems to have been made artificially. It is only a few feet high, but its presence at these low-lying islets has earned for it a singularly apt title. The islanders call it the “Mountain.” It has well earned the name for it has proved itself a place of refuge in time of peril.
This “Mountain” is the final stronghold which the people have against the “big bad wolf” in these regions—the hurricane.
There is a large fattish sea slug found in tropical lagoons—the Beche-de-Mer— which is very plentiful at Palmerston.
Seventy or eighty years ago the islanders in these parts gathered the sea slugs and sent them to Tahiti, whence probably they were shipped to China.
Up till 1862, no one seems to have re sided permanently at Palmerston; but in that year Mr. William Marsters, a white man, landed on the largest motu. He brought with him two native women—one his wife and the other a sister of his wife.
These women were from the Island of Penrhyn. Later, a third woman from Penrhyn came and joined the small group.
Except for the occasional visit of a schooner, the island was completely isolated from the world. With his women folk to help him, William Marsters began to establish a home and to try to get a quantity of Beche-de-Mer together to trade to a passing schooner. Fate was not un kind to him, for from time to time flotsam and jetsam from the ocean came drifting along to these motus and the remains of wrecks were located. Marsters built a house, and passing ships brought him odds and ends of all sorts, including coconuts, which he planted. In a year or two he was settled down —established in an island kingdom—a dominion of his very own.
As between the womenfolk, Marsters did not share his dominion selfishly. With only one man for three women, the ideal of
monogamy was untenable and Marsters departed from it and followed his own line.
Each of the three women bore children, and thus three families came into being at the same time, each with the same father.
The children grew up and, as there was no alternative, romantically, for them, they simply intermarried between them selves. In this way, the family went on increasing until it reached somewhere about 100 members. This intermarrying at Palmerston has been investigated, and it
is found that the absence of new blood ap parently has had no detrimental effect upon the later generations.
More recently, marriages have taken place with outsiders, principally with native people from Penrhyn, Manahiki and Aitutaki. But for the most part the Mar sters family has grown directly, in a straight line of descent, from the one man and three women.
In 1923 a terrible thing happened to dis turb the close continuity of marriage with in the Marsters family. In that year a hurricane struck the island. The seas drove across the reef, blotted out the motus and washed away completely some 27 of the 30 domiciles forming the tiny com munity.
The terrified people grabbed what they could, ran on to the “Mountain” and there remained in helpless despair from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m., during which time they saw their homes; their plantations and all their simple island possessions washed into the lagoon and lost. When the hurricane sub sided, it left the Marsters folk like starving castaways, homeless and demoralised.
A schooner called shortly afterwards.
The family had decided that some of them should now go to other islands, for a time, until the plantations and village could be restored. So forth they went, many to Rarotonga, some away farther north, to their own homeland at Penrhyn. These
emigrants did so well that they have re mained at Rarotonga and elsewhere, and to-day there are branches of the Marsters family springing up throughout the Cook group.
There is still another extraordinary thing to be told. Marsters insisted that all the children at Palmerston should be taught to speak English. He forbade the use of the native tongue altogether. Marsters is dead, but his dictum is respected and survives to this day.
Passing ships have given garbled re ports to newspapers regarding the weird English spoken by the Palmerston Islanders. Yet that island speech, with its individualistic euphony, ought rather to have been looked upon as something de lightfully complimentary to the Mother tongue. That the English language taught by Marsters to his children should have survived down the years in the face of
stark isolation, and of that natural strong bias towards the native tongue itself, which the child from its mother, must surely claim our admiration.
The Marsters people have wholly re stored their plantations and rebuilt upon the wreck wrought of the 1923 hurricane.
Palmerston is almost self-supporting. The lagoon abounds with fish, and some of the motus with sea-birds, the eggs of which are relished by the people there.
The whole story of Palmerston is not told here. Palmerston is a place quite off the beaten track. It is a lonely island— possibly the most lonely in the Cook Group. Yet, oddly enough, whenever a schooner announces that it is going to call there, a longing to go back to the family atoll creeps over the soul of a Marsters in Rarotonga or elsewhere, and away he goes, back to the old isolation—back to the king dom of William Marsters.