Jimmy Stephens' Family Tree

Jimmy Stephens, the man behind the Nagriamel movement, has a colourful background. His grandfather was Thomas Garfield Stephens, an English seaman who arrived in the New Hebrides in the 1890’s.

In 1899, grandfather Stephens left the New Hebrides in a German ship and went to Tonga, where he married a relative of the Tongan Royal family, Sela Tupou. After having had three children by her, Stephens got into financial difficulties of some sort and skipped out of Tonga in a 25 ft whaleboat with his wife, three young children, two male companions, and a large supply of water melons—their only food. This was in 1904.

The party narrowly escaped shipwreck in Fiji and finally washed up at Erromanga in the southern New Hebrides. From there, the Stephens family moved over the years to Ambrym, then Malekula and finally back to Espiritu Santo.

By the time he died in 1951, “old man” Stephens had had 10 children. As many of them have also been prolific, there is now a numerous Stephens clan in the New Hebrides.

One of the original Stephens’ part-Tongan sons, Tupou-Luther, married a New Hebridean woman from the Banks Islands called Patuntun, and it was this pair who were the parents of Jimmy Stephens.