Sisters in the sun: The story of Suwarrow and Palmerston atolls [1 ed.] 0709139713, 9780709139713

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SISTERS IN THE SUN

SISTERS in the SUN The Story of Suwarrow and Palmerston Atolls

A. S. Helm and W.H. H. Percival

LONDON

ROBERT

HALE

& COMPANY

© A. S. Helm and W. H. Percival 1973 First published in Great Britain 1973 ISBN

0 7091

3971

3

Robert Hale & Company 63 Old Brompton Road London, S.W.7

Printed in Great Britain by Clarke, Doble & Brendon Ltd Plymouth

G41i¢4-623 512, 2949

Contents Preface Introduction

PART ONE: SUWARROW Suwarrow’s Early Visitors Treasure Trove Murder in the Lagoon Handley Bathurst Sterndale The Castaways

Sovereignty and Trade Robert Dean Frisbie Hurricanes

Dwight AMA © ON AWD

Long at Suwarrow Tom Neale, the Recluse of Suwarrow

Ox

on Loe

2,

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Michael Swift PART TWO: PALMERSTON Palmerston Island The Island where Nobody Wanted to Live William Marsters Founds a Dynasty Trouble in Paradise Palmerston’s Land Problems South Seas Elopement Shipwreck Island Disaster Takes Its Toll The Schooner Tiare Taporo

105

Lz,

I4I 146

152 147

Contents

21 22 23 24

Boat Day at Palmerston Wealth from the Sea Sovereignty Present-day Life Bibliography Index

162 165 170 173 180 184

Illustrations facing page

Tom Neale, the recluse of Suwarrow, standing outside his hut English hermit, Michael Swift, preparing to launch his canoe at Anchorage Islet, Suwarrow A 1971 aerial view of Palmerston Atoll The ‘mountain’, on which Palmerston Islanders have several times sheltered from hurricanes William Marsters, Senior, with some of his family and descendants Ned Marsters, present head of the Marsters family and clerk-in-charge of Palmerston Island 7&8 Island buildings: the church and water tank; the original house, built by the first William Marsters and the only building to retain its position during the 1926 hurricane A Palmerston woman husking coconuts Young turtles bred in captivity at Palmerston Turtles’ eggs Unloading supplies from Akatere, the island trading vessel Commander Clark’s ketch, Solace, being launched at Palmerston Island after being repaired there

PICTURE CREDITS Graham Watson: 1; Johnson’s Studio, Rarotonga: 2; Dr Koekoe Mokotupu: 3; Maori and Island Affairs Department: 4.

32

32

33 33 48

49

128

129 144 t44

145

145

Illustrations

MAPS

Cook Islands Suwarrow

Island

Palmerston Island

Preface It might well be wondered why a book should be written on two such insignificant and tiny dots of land as Suwarrow and Palmerston, but it is hoped that the answer to this question emerges in the pages which follow. Both authors have had a long interest in these two islands, being attracted to Suwarrow by the stories in James Cowan’s book of South Sea tales, Suwarrow Gold, and to Palmerston by the story of the Marsters family. Thanks are due to the editor of Better Business who has sanctioned the use of articles by W. H. Percival which appeared in the March 1958, September 1959 and November 1961 issues of the magazine, and to the proprietors of the now defunct Wide World magazine, who allowed the use of his article, “The Big Blow’, which appeared in the November 1956 issue. We acknowledge our grateful appreciation to Mrs Carmen Temata, the librarian of the Cook Islands Library and Museum, Rarotonga; Mr A. G. Bagnall, chief librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, and the staff for assistance in research facilities; the Rev. William Marsters who read through the manuscript chapters dealing with Palmerston Island and who offered helpful suggestions, and to Professor R. G. Crocombe of the University of the South Pacific, Fiji, for permission to use information contained in his unpublished manuscript, Land Tenure in a Test Tube: the Case of Palmerston Atoll, and also for his kindness in checking our work for accuracy. We are indebted to the kindness of Mr Ronald Powell for supplying the interesting details of the hurricane on Suwarrow Island. The photographs were taken by W. H. Percival, Dr Koekoe Mokotupu, Johnson’s Photographic Studio, Rarotonga, Graham Watson, and Craig Helm, the son of one of the authors. The maps were drawn by the Survey Department, Rarotonga, and supplied through the courtesy of Mr George Cowan, the chief surveyor. )

Suwarrow

Aitutakiij A

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ISLANDS PROJECTION

1 Mitiaro

Introduction Set in the mid-Pacific Ocean, the tiny atolls of Suwarrow and Palmerston seem lost in an immensity of sea and sunlight and appear so fragile that visitors wonder how they survive and sustain life. Loneliness is their lot, for they lie far off even the secondary routes which thread the tropical South Seas, and they have little to offer in the way of cargo and passengers. Every few months one of the three trading motor vessels from Rarotonga, the Akatere, Bodmer, or Tagua, calls at Palmerston for a brief while to unload and load, but visits to Suwarrow are even more infrequent. This is not surprising, for while Palmerston has about one hundred residents, Suwarrow can boast only one. Lying midway among the fifteen islands which make up the Northern and Southern Groups of the Cook Islands, these sisters in the sun enjoy a tropical climate cooled by the trade winds. d Life there is busy but uncomplicated. Skills needed are basic to the environment, for there is no industry or commerce; subsistence living is still the order of the day, and show no signs of change. Warm tropical air permeates everything—and slows down the tempo of life. Snow, frost, or cold weather are so alien as to be incomprehensible. Neither island has a proud tradition of Polynesian history, of legend and mythology, of ancient temples renowned throughout the area, of love chants or poems of warfare or of mighty voyagers or gods such as occur in Raiatea and Rarotonga. They had little to tempt a large number of company-loving Polynesians to settle there; other islands had more to offer, and thus they were by-passed. Although their Polynesian history is scanty, the two islands have a fascinating story stretching back over the last century. Nobody on Palmerston or Suwarrow has ever become a millionII

Introduction

aire, but they greatly enjoy life, and make the most of the little they have. Even though Suwarrow and Palmerston had Cook Islanders living on them at the turn of the century, neither of them suffered the terrible police supervision which was such a blight on early missionary endeavour, when islands such as Mangaia had 155 police spying on and interrogating a population of less than 2,000. Some of the things done in the name of morality in Mangaia as late as the 1890s and reported by the first British Resident in the Cook Islands, Mr F. J. Moss, are so appalling as to be almost incredible. During the nineteenth century hundreds of whaling vessels, mainly from the United States, cruised the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of the Cook Islands, and many of them called at the various islands from time to time for rest and recreation. There is little record of them calling at Suwarrow, for it was deserted at various periods, but Palmerston was host to rough whaling men on numerous occasions. Life on Palmerston today is calm and mostly untroubled, and those who have lived there all their lives have never seen a railway train, a traffic tangle or an aeroplane on the ground, but are none the worse for that. The story of the Marsters Family of Palmerston will be told and retold as long as there are stories about the Pacific Islands. Islanders learn their skills carefully and the present-day Marsters, like their forebears, are justly famous as seamen and boatbuilders. In the days of the sailing schooners it was often remarked that no boat in the central Pacific put to sea without a Marsters among its crew. Of all the islands of mystery in the Pacific, none has a more

interesting history than the lonely atoll of Suwarrow. It has been the retreat of shipwrecked mariners, castaways, pearl poachers and other outlawed men. Buried treasure, murders, seduction, starvation, hurricanes and hermits have all added their quota to the tale of Suwarrow. In Auckland, in the decades of sail, James Cowan, New Zealand’s best writer, and at that time a top journalist, covered the waterfront for stories for his newspapers. Over a tankard of beer or a tot of rum the old shellbacks told him tales of happenings in the far corners of the Pacific, particularly of I2

Introduction

Polynesia, for Auckland, then as now, was the chief centre of the Polynesian people. Sailing up the spacious reaches of Auckland Harbour with them on arrival, or later listening quietly in the ship chandler’s store in Lower Queen Street where all the deep-sea skippers gathered, he learned the gossip of the islands and of strange stories which often seemed incredible but probably were true. Here he first became interested in Suwarrow Atoll, and heard wondrous yarns about it from Captain Tom Fernandez and others. But though Cowan knew some famous and some eccentric skippers and a few most unseaworthy craft, it is doubtful if this master story-teller met the equal of Captain Cambridge and his vessel, the Taipi, which features now in the accounts of both Suwarrow and Palmerston. Captain Andy Thomson of the Tiare Taporo, and Tom Neale, the New Zealand hermit of Suwarrow, are characters who also would have appealed greatly to Cowan.

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PART

ONE

Suwarrow

1

Suwarrow’s Early Visitors Sixteen hundred and more miles north-east of Auckland lie a group of fifteen small islands scattered over 750,000 square miles of blue Pacific. These Cook Islands, many of them just coral atolls, are rich in colourful history, and in this respect Suwarrow is king of them all. Suwarrow is one of the loneliest and remotest islands, and lies 450 miles eastward of Pago Pago, and 513 miles northnorth-west of Rarotonga. Its nearest neighbour is Nassau, 170 miles away to the north-west, while Palmerston is 288 miles south of Suwarrow. The area of the islets around Suwarrow’s reef has been variously stated as being 100, 600 and 1,000 acres according to the authority consulted. This is not surprising, as it has varied from time to time as hurricanes have devastated it, or the slow accretion of peaceful years has brought more land above sea level. Likewise its length of reef is sometimes stated as being fifty miles, but twenty-six is a more realistic estimate. The number of islets, or motu, also differs. One authority lists it as high as twenty-five, but other figures are much lower. Seventeen of these emerald islets are named in the latest map book of the Cook Islands, which also shows some unnamed sandbanks. Only five of the islets are of any size. The motu are strung together on an almost circular reef which encloses a fine lagoon some eleven miles east and west and ten miles north and south. Most of the reef is very little above high water, and it is dangerous of approach from the south and south-east unless visibility is good. Alfred Lord

Tennyson’s line, “The league-long roller thundering on the reef’’, seems particularly appropriate to Suwarrow, although it

B

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Sisters in the Sun

is extremely doubtful if the English Poet Laureate ever heard of this remote spot. Just east of Anchorage Island is a reef passage wide and deep enough to allow the entry of a cruiser. The lagoon varies in depth from five to thirty fathoms. Very few islands in the central Pacific were unknown to the industrious and skilled seamen of Polynesia, so it would be most surprising indeed if some of them, at some time, did not discover this tiny dot on the ocean and make a landfall. But there was little to detain them, and even if they did discover it, Suwarrow did not become permanently settled by Polynesians. Alaska and the fur seal trade seem vastly remote from the tropical South Seas, but there is a connecting link between the forty-ninth State of the United States and Suwarrow. The link is the Russian American Company which was formed under charter by the Russian Czarist Government in 1799 by the merger of several companies. This new company was a corporation set up to administer the Russian dominion in North America, of which Alaska formed the largest and principal part. Fur seals and sea otters were ruthlessly exploited as far south as San Francisco Bay, and the company was also interested in exploration. Finding that it was easier and more profitable to despatch their furs to Canton, in South China, by sea, than to the long overland route from Okhotsk, the Russians sent vessels to open

up this trade from 1803 onwards. The leaders chosen for these expeditions were all of a high calibre, and several of them became famous for their exploration of the Pacific and Antarctic regions. Their base was Kronstadt, the Russian naval fortress some thirty-two miles west of Petrograd (now Leningrad) at the head of the Gulf of Finland, half the world away from the Cook Islands. It was from Krondstadt that, in 1813, Lieutenant Mikhail Lazareff (or Lazarev) sailed in command of the Russian American Company’s armed ship, Suvorov (or Suvarov). On his way round the world he passed the stormy Cape Horn

and came

eventually to the Polynesian islands of the Pacific. Although it is almost certain that he was not the first to 18

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Sisters in the Sun

sight the lonely atoll, credit for the discoverey of Suwarrow is usually given to Lieutenant Lazareff. Beckoned there by huge flocks of seabirds circling around, he landed on Suwarrow on September 27th 1814, to find that the only inhabitants were seabirds, crabs and rats. He named the island after his vessel and sailed onwards. Today, it is one of the only two islands in the South Pacific to bear a Russian name. Vostok, in the Line Group north of Tahiti, is the other. There have been many different ways of spelling the atoll’s name: ‘Suvoroy’, ‘Souworoft’ and ‘Suwarrow’ are but three of the most common. The latter is the one used by the New Zealand authorities and by the Cook Islands Government. The vessel derived its name from Russia’s most successful General —Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov (or Suwarrow) who rose from the ranks to become a field marshal and a commander-inchief. Born of Swedish parents on November 24th 1724, either in Moscow or Finland, he first served in one of the Russian guards regiments, but soon rose to high rank, distinguishing himself by bravery and military skill in the Seven Years War against Prussia, two wars against Poland, two against Turkey and then against the French in Italy and Switzerland. In all his long service he was never defeated, even by Napoleon. But he ended his days in undeserved disgrace in St Petersburg, on May 17th 1800. So this small atoll in the South Pacific perpetuates the name of one of the best Russian generals of all time, and one who is still held in high repute in the Soviet Union. One of the mysteries of Suwarrow is the question of the first European visitors to its shores. Suwarrow’s history is comparatively well known since the Russians called there in 1814, but before that there had been at least one settlement

which involved considerable building activity. Handley Bathurst Sterndale, whose story is told later, on one of his visits to Suwarrow had discovered, when digging foundations, traces of funnel-shaped pits which turned out to be an old lime kiln which still contained about three feet of burnt coral. Near this, also buried a foot or two beneath the surface,

he found the tops of sunken walls. They were made of cement 20

Suwarrow’s Early Visitors

blocks and formed the outer limits of huge stone and concrete platforms upon which houses had once been built. Three human skeletons were found in a pit three feet deep, and one of them still grasped an iron bolt about nine inches long and an inch in diameter in his hand, an indication that there had been violence associated with his death. A rudely constructed tomahawk, laboriously fashioned from a shacklelink of a large chain was also buried in the pit. Breaking up the concrete walls into large slabs, Sterndale used them, together with timber and earth, in the construction of his fort. This destruction of the buildings was a great pity, for had they been left as found archaeologists might later have been able to reconstruct the history of this early settlement on the island. Towards the centre of Anchorage Island, under a heap of stones shaped like a cairn at the foot of a large tamanu tree, he also found an extremely old flintlock musket which had almost rusted away. The only part anything like intact was a portion of the breech which showed a much-worn flint. Greatly excited by these discoveries, Sterndale gave thought as to who could have been there during the remote time when flintlocks were used. In an entertaining account published in a Wellington, New Zealand, journal for 1890, he gave his story of the island, including an account of these ruins. His view was that they were constructed by early Spaniards, those explorers who were the first in the central Pacific. Perhaps they were built by castaways from a vessel on the route from Spain to the Indies by way of the Straits of Magellan. Or was it one of the richest vessels in the history of commerce and one of the most romantic, a lumbering Manila galleon, which first discovered this tiny lost world? Perhaps, but today no one knows. Certainly the atoll is south of the normal run of these vessels which plied between the port of Acapulco in Mexico and Manila in the Philippines. Both these countries were Spanish colonies, and for two and a half centuries Manila acted as a trade station between the riches of China on the one hand and the equally rich Spanish possessions in America on the other. The trade carried by the Manila galleons was sufficient to 21

Sisters in the Sun

enrich almost every Spaniard living in the Philippines, all of whom were allocated a share in the space in the vessel. The majority of the crew were Filipinos with a proportion of Spaniards, and each crewman was allocated a chest which could be filled with whatever commodity they could afford, and this could be sold at the journey’s end. To Manila came the Chinese junks from Canton and Amoy, carrying cargoes mainly of silk, but also of gold, jewels, pearls, chinaware, carpets, camphor chests and jade, which were unloaded in Manila Bay and sold to the Spanish merchants. From other parts of the Far East came the spices which were so eagerly sought after, cloves and cinnamon from Java and the Moluccas. Not all of these goods were destined to be sold in Mexico and remain in North America, for some were carried onwards across the continent and the Atlantic to Spain. The westward-bound vessels were always crammed full of goods, but on the eastward journey they were more lightly laden, carrying mostly silver from Mexico—either in mint or in bars—to pay for the goods in Manila; but some Spanish goods were carried, plus some passengers. From Manila to Acapulco the journey took six months, with only half that time required for the return journey. A glance at the globe will show that the journey was a long and dangerous one, beset by the risks of storms of unusual violence, the hazards of scurvy, and the possibility of attack by pirates. It was in 1565 that the first exploratory vessel left the Philippines for Acapulco and pioneered a route which was to be used until the Manila galleon trade ended in 1815. Because of the rough conditions it was found that very strong vessels were needed; and many of the galleons, three-decker vessels, slower but easier to handle than the even more cumbersome carrack which they superseded, were built at Manila specifically for the trade. Many of them were of 1,000 tons, built of teak, and so slow that they would have been an easy prey for swift piratical English marauders, but there is only record of four of them being captured by Englishmen, in 1587, 1709, 174% and 1762. Others may have been attacked but were able to beat off the attackers. Several hundred of the galleons sailed in all, taking a curving route which differed when travelling eastward or westward. 22

Suwarrow’s Early Visitors

Leaving Manila they headed north to thirty degrees where they encountered the prevailing strong westerlies and currents which sped them on their way. Coming from Acapulco they sailed south-west to about ten degrees north, then ran down the latitudes, passing close to Guam and from there to the San Bernardino Straits. They kept south of the Hawaiian Islands, which they never discovered, and used the prevailing northeast trade winds to help them. Seldom did they vary from this route, and in all the years they sailed less than thirty vessels were lost from any cause. Considering the long voyage, the difficult conditions and the unwieldiness of the galleons, this is a remarkably good record. Normally they left Acapulco before March 25th, but sometimes more than one galleon—possibly as many as four in some years—made the journey. If any of them travelled in the hurricane season they could have struck serious trouble. Perhaps a hurricane swept one of the Acapulco-Manila bound silver argosies as it made its way westward, driving it far south of its normal course. Possibly it was dismasted and driven a helpless hulk to end its career on some dark stormy night on the cruel fringing reef at Suwarrow, where the stout treasure-laden vessel would be pounded to pieces in the surf. Some of the crew may have struggled ashore on flotsam and jetsam, and been the men who built the concrete structures which indicate a lengthy period ashore. They may have quarrelled among themselves and fraticidal warfare decimated their numbers, or an outside attack may have found resistance from men armed with iron bolts and rough tomahawks. Locked away in the Spanish Archives of Madrid might be a key as to why these skeletons, buildings and the flintlock were found at Suwarrow without any indication as to who had lived there so long ago. It seems certain, however, that Lazareff could not have been the first to land there.

23

2

Treasure Trove In 1855 an American whale-ship named the Gem, laden with oil after a long and profitable cruise among the islands, ran ashore on Suwarrow’s reef and became a total wreck. No lives were lost, and the captain and crew after establishing themselves ashore, ultimately reached Apia, Samoa, in open boats. From there they made their way by a trading vessel to Tahiti, where the captain sold the wreck, with its cargo of whale oil to a Tahitian mercantile firm. The fact that the Gem was copperfastened throughout added to its salvage value. She had been driven far up on the flat reef, and the water alongside her was only knee deep, which made the task of salvage easy. Three casks of oil which floated out of her were later found on Savai’i Island, Samoa, 500 miles due west. The firm which bought the wreck and its contents was Messrs Hort Brothers, who despatched one of their vessels, the Caroline Hort, to salvage the cargo. John Lavington Evans, who appears in both the Palmerston and Suwarrow stories, was the supercargo of the vessel. Evans, who superintended the breaking up of the wreck and the salvaging of the oil, is also credited with the discovery of the profitable pearl fishery. Sterndale made his first visit to Suwarrow on the Caroline Hort on this voyage. Once the supercargo had completed his task and the Caroline Hort rode low in the water with her holds full and her decks laden, he approached the captain and divulged that he knew the whereabouts of a buried treasure on Anchorage Island. That John Lavington Evans knew what he was about was

evident from the first day he went ashore after the captain had agreed. Once a camp had been established he sought out a giant banyan (doa) tree with huge branches. At that time most

24

Treasure

Trove

of the island was covered with tall forest, chiefly this sort of banyan tree overgrown with gigantic creepers and surrounded by dense and matted undergrowth. The great coconut plantations still lay in the future. Setting his crew members to clear and dig around the foot of the tree, Evans watched their activity with intense interest. Although they dug deeply they found nothing, so he moved to another big tree and commenced a fresh search. For six weeks they worked without success, and then, at the foot of an ancient banyan in the middle of the island, on the lagoon side of the tree and ten yards from its trunk, the diggers found a large iron chest at a depth of six feet. Evans did not trust the crew members sufficiently to open it on the spot, so it was laboriously carried to the lagoon and ferried out to the vessel. Safely closetted with the captain behind a locked door Evans broke open the rusty lock and prised the lid open. The sight which met their eyes was one most treasure-seekers meet only in imagination. Gold and silver coins, mostly in American gold money, almost filled the chest, and the value totalled approximately $US15,000. Sterndale’s account states that the dates on the coins coincided with the era of Commodore Anson. George Anson, later an admiral,

in 1740 was

placed in charge of a small

English fleet which had been organized to operate against the Spanish ships in the Pacific Ocean. After creating havoc against Spanish commerce he was forced, because of heavy losses by death and sickness, to destroy some vessels and return to England with only one of the six ships he had set out from England with, but with enormous treasure on board. Evans never disclosed the source from which he obtained his information about buried treasure, but it was not just a lucky find. He gave Sterndale a minute account of other similar but more valuable deposits, but fate did not permit Evans a further opportunity of profiting from his knowledge, for he died upon the island of Manihiki where he went to visit his wife. Almost twenty years later, in 1874, an Apia merchant named

Donaldson became friendly with a drunken old English beach25

Sisters in the Sun

comber in a grog shop in Papeete, Tahiti. For the sum of $20 the old man told him of the location of buried gold at Anchorage Island and at Motu Tou, one of the other large islets at Suwarrow, and of a further cache at Manihiki Island in the Northern Cook Group. Regarding the latter, he must have been referring to the gold buried there by Tom Charlton. Donaldson had a vessel of his own, and he called at Suwarrow and located a huge ironwood tree leaning to the east on Anchorage Island. After only twenty minutes digging at the foot of the tree his men uncovered a rotting wooden chest. It contained Mexican dollars in canvas bags to the value of $US2,400. Thoroughly excited, Donaldson crossed to Motu Tou and dug under several ironwood trees leaning to the east, but this time he was unlucky and found nothing. Another of the many mysteries associated with Suwarrow is where the beachcomber obtained his information about this buried treasure. Obviously there,are many chapters of Suwarrow’s history still untold, and which will probably remain unknown for ever. Possibly even grimmer episodes than have been told remain hidden.

26

3

Murder in the Lagoon Five years after the loss of the Gem eight forlorn wanderers were cast up on Suwarrow. They were Tom Charlton, an Englishman, a woman of Paumotu, and two women and four men from Rakahanga. One of the Rakahanga women was Charlton’s wife. While sailing the short but difficult passage of twenty-four miles between Manihiki and Rakahanga, the canoe in which they were travelling was blown off course, and they ended up at Suwarrow. During the previous year a vessel trading between Sydney and Tahiti had been wrecked upon the island of Scilly, the most westerly of the Society Islands and not far east of the Cook Islands. One item of her cargo consisted of two small iron chests containing gold and certain other valuables, the proceeds of the sale of landed properties in New South Wales. These were consigned to Mr Gibson, a merchant of Tahiti, as agent for clients residing in California. The shipwrecked crew made no attempt to save anything from the wreck, but made their way in their boat to the island of Huahine, where they fell in with a small schooner belonging to Hort Brothers, called the Cheerful and captained by an Englishman, Captain Ruxton, with Tom Charlton as his mate. The Cheerful, with a Polynesian crew, was bound for Manihiki to purchase pearl shell and coconut oil. For this purpose the vessel carried a small consignment of trade goods. The captain and his mate began drinking with the shipwrecked men and, hearing of the iron chests, set sail without delay for Scilly. According to James Cowan in Suwarrow Gold, Fenua-ura was known as Scilly Island.

The island was a large low coral reef enclosing a lagoon, without any entrance, a most dangerous place on which to 27

Sisters in the Sun

land, even in favourable weather. Here they found the wreck partly wedged in a fissure in the coral, its stern almost overhanging the outer edge of the reef which descended at a steep angle. The counter had been stove in by the seas, the cargo was damaged or destroyed, and there were no iron boxes in the ship. Ruxton did not believe that the chests existed, and wished to sail away. Charlton wanted to stop and search further, so they tossed a coin, and Charlton won. Tom Charlton reasoned that the boxes of specie would have been stowed either in the captain’s cabin or the run (which in a larger vessel would have been called the lazarette). These were situated aft, and on the counter being stove in by the waves, the heavy chests would have fallen through the bottom and rolled down the reef. Acting on this assumption, he set some of the Polynesian seamen to diving off the outer edge of the reef. They soon came up with the first iron box, which, on being blasted open with gunpowder was found to contain $30,000 in English gold. Although they searched avidly until stormy weather compelled them to abandon their efforts, they found no trace of the second box. It had probably rolled further down the reef into extremely deep water. In order to keep their discovery of the gold a secret from its rightful owners, they decided to wreck the Cheerful at Manihiki, as though by accident. This would ensure that the Polynesian crew would remain at Manihiki and would not

carry the story to European ears. Charlton and Ruxton decided to divide the booty equally, and to take the first opportunity to reach civilization. This plan was soon carried into effect, and the spot where the schooner was put on the reef was known as ‘Cheerful Bay’. The crew was paid off in trade goods, and the two white men divided the gold. Charlton buried his share in the sandy soil, where it is said to lie undisturbed to this day. He married a local woman and became domesticated among the islanders. Ruxton, on the other hand, took the first opportunity to get away. He indulged in a chronic drinking bout, and babbled his secret that he had more money than he knew what to do with. 28

Murder in the Lagoon

He disappeared, mysteriously, off the deck of a vessel bound for Sydney from the Society Islands. In order to visit his wife’s relatives on Rakahanga, Tom Charlton set out on the short voyage which ended on Suwarrow, 208 miles from his starting point. Here they lived for three months, in what Charlton considered great misery, although they had plenty of coconuts, fish, turtles and seabirds’ eggs. At the end of that time a schooner arrived, the Dart, skippered by a man with the satisfying name of Samuel S. Sustenance, who had visited Suwarrow before at: the wrecking of the Gem. He brought some thirty Penrhyn Islanders to dive for pearl oysters, under the command of Joseph Bird, a native of Bristol, England, but now an American citizen who was a piratical and evilly-disposed ruffian. Joe Bird had been one of the crew of the Chatham owned by Mr E. H. Lamont, later a resident of Melbourne, which was wrecked at Penrhyn. At that time, according to H. B. Sterndale’s account, there were four native London Missionary Society teachers at Penrhyn. They were said to have sold their congregations to the Spaniards (Blackbirders from Callao, Peru) at $5 a head, and three out of the four themselves took pasage to Callao, with their wives, having engaged themselves as interpreters and overseers at $100 per month besides their keep. It was from this circumstance that Penrhyn Island became known among the slavers as the ‘Island of the Four Evangelists’. The Chatham’s crew all got away from Penryhn with the exception of Lamont, whom his shipmates treacherously left behind, and Joe Bird and Frank Payne. The last two remained of their own free will, having a natural liking for savagery and lawless liberty. They took several wives apiece, and each became a chief. But they lived in deadly enmity with one another and with Lamont, whom they tried to assassinate. Each of them carried pistols as well as muskets cut short, of which they made free use. Bird, in particular, shot several islanders during his residence in Penrhyn, including one of his wives. He also killed an unfortunate islander of Paumotu in a brutal manner. This unlucky man, having being concerned in a quarrel about fish29

Sisters in the Sun

ing for pearls, ran away along a flat reef from certain savages armed with spears who were chasing him. The fugitive ran well, but on looking back at his pursuers stepped into a hole in the coral and dislocated his ankle. The islanders afterwards declared that under the circumstances they would not have taken his life, but not so Bird, who seizing the miserable man by the hair, threw his head back over his own bended knee, and with a large knife cut his throat down to the vertebrae. After Lamont succeeded in leaving Penrhyn, word soon spread about its pearl-shell beds, and vessels began to call in to trade. Bird and Payne then made large sums of money, as they conducted the entire traffic of the island, and kept hundreds of the local people diving for mother-of-pear]-shell oysters. For their efforts the islanders received a paltry number of knives, nails, beads and looking-glasses. When Bird and his thirty Penrhyn Islanders were landed at Suwarrow by Sustenance, the latter proposed to return within six months, by which time it was expected that the party would have collected a large amount of pearl shell. Soon after the Dart left, Suwarrow was visited by another ship, this time the infamous armed schooner Tickler, commanded by Captain Thomas F. Martin. The schooner belonged to San Francisco, and Martin had an unsavoury record of being a pearl-shell oyster thief. A short time before he had been at Penrhyn Island and there he had appropriated, without the formality of payment, a cargo of pearl-shell belonging to another skipper there present. The offended captain ventured an angry remonstrance, to which Martin replied with several cannon shots which seriously damaged the other vessel and caused the argument to cease. At sea Martin had the guns run out ready for action, while in port they were stowed away as innocent old iron among his ballast.

On one occasion Martin took on a load of passengers from San Francisco and bound for Australia, but decided to dump

them, without any recompence, at Samoa. The United States Consul at Samoa, Mr Van Kamp, tried to reason with Martin, who backed his own opinions by discharging a pistol in the astonished official’s face. Z0

Murder in the Lagoon

When a difference of opinion arose between Martin and the islanders at Manihiki, in the Northern Cooks, Martin lured the resident missionary, an elderly man and immensely corpulent, on board. There he had a long rope with a running noose rove aloft through a single block. He had the pastor’s head placed in the noose and gave orders to haul away. This had the effect of influencing the pastor to back Martin’s point of view against the islanders. Martin did not land at Suwarrow, but sent Jules Tirel ashore to spy upon the activities of the pearl-shell divers, and to inform him on his return in a fortnight’s time as to how successful they had been. Martin sailed for Niue for a cargo of yams, but did not return to Suwarrow, because he failed to find it. Jules Tirel was a Frenchman, said to be of good family, and a political exile. Although still young, he had been involved in a good deal of wild life in the Pacific. After shooting two Polynesians in the Tokelaus he was fortunate to escape the vengeance of their relatives by taking passage on Martin’s vessel. Tirel had a Samoan wife and two young sons at Upolu, Samoa. He told Bird and Charlton that Martin had marooned him, and thereby won their sympathy. They allowed Tirel to live among the Rakahangans who had established a settlement half a mile away from the pearl divers’ camp. Both camps were on Anchorage Island. Ten days after Tirel’s arrival trouble broke out between Joe Bird and his Penrhyn Islanders, one of whom he suspected of seducing his wife. Before he went out fishing one night, Bird told his wife to bake three coconuts for him. When he returned he found his wife’s suspected lover eating one of his baked nuts. In a fury he threw the man down, intending to tie him to a tree and flog him. The islander’s friends came to his assistance, and Bird attacked them with his cutlass. The Penrhyn Islanders were armed with broken oars, butt ends of spears and harpoon staves. Bird was close to his hut, and called for Charlton, who was inside looking for a sword, to throw him his pistol. Bird did not catch the pistol, which fell into the sand and failed to fire when Bird tried to use it a moment later. A blow on the back of the head put Bird down. 31

Sisters in the Sun

Tom Charlton defended himself valiantly for a while but was also overcome by superior numbers, and the two men were trussed up and left helpless. The Penrhyn Islanders debated what to do with them. The fracas had occurred at an early hour in the morning, and it was past noon before any definite decision was reached. Some of the more moderate proposed to maroon the white men on an islet some miles distant, giving them a cask of water and the means to catch fish until they could be taken away on some vessel. They were overruled by the majority who voted for death, some of them for the reason that they coveted the large sum of money which Bird was known to have, and especially one, Vaimou, a Christian teacher (Sterndale, who told the story, evidently did not like Christian teachers) who had been having an affair with Charlton’s wife and wished him out of the way. Meanwhile, tied hand and foot, the two men lay in the hot sand with no shade to protect them from the scorching beams of the sun, an awful punishment in itself when prolonged for hours. Sometime later Tirel arrived and found Bird and Charlton tied up. Tirel stood smoking a short pipe, with his hands behind his hips, as was his habit, while he questioned Bird and Charlton as to how the trouble had originated. He asked for some coconut fronds to cover the two men from the sun, and these were provided by some of the bystanders. Then Tirel himself was seized and tied up. He pleaded for his life, for he could not see why he should

lose it in the quarrel of men in whose interests he had no concern. He besought his captors to consider that he was not answerable for the other two men’s misdeeds and that he had known nothing of the conflict that had arisen. But the islanders were adamant, and argued simply upon the logic of facts. ‘There are three of you white men,” they said. “If only two be killed, the one left alive will tell what has become of his comrades. There is no more to say.” Jules Tirel made no answer, but those who killed him told Sterndale

later that there were

tears in his eyes. Maybe

he

was thinking of his Samoan wife and his two young half-caste sons in Samoa. His thoughts may have switched from them to 32

(right) Tom Neale, the recluse of Suwarrow, standing outside his hut. (below) English hermit, Michael Swift, preparing to launch his canoe at Anchorage Islet, Suwarrow

The ‘mountain’,

on which Palmerston Islanders have several times sheltered from hurricanes

Murder in the Lagoon

his happy boyhood days among the apple orchards of Normandy. He may have seen again the milkmaids in their tall white caps and short skirts, and clumsy wooden shoes. Probably he thought of his parents who would never know what had become of him, and the scene of the green churchyard where his forefathers were buried, and where he would have been buried except for his wanderlust and hunger for adventure, may have flashed across his mind. The islanders, having made their decision, carried the trussed-up captives to their boat which lay on the lagoon beach. They launched the boat and threw the doomed men on to the bottom boards. Then they placed heavy stones in the boat and pushed off. Several of the islanders were armed with swords. As the islanders pulled for a deep part of the lagoon Joe Bird asked them what their intentions were. On being told, he asked for time to pray. One of the Rakahangans remarked, “These white men act very strangely. During their whole lives they seem to have no gods—yet when they are going to die they pray to God.” When they reached a deep part of the lagoon the islanders rested on their oars. The heavy stones in the boat were tied round the necks of the three condemned men who were then thrown into the lagoon, one by one. Jules Tirel was the last, and in sinking, managed to get loose from his stone and rise to the surface. Some of the boat’s crew heard him speak. “Hark!” they said. “He calls upon God. Let us have no more to do with him.” However, one islander named Powhatu swung his cutlass and cleft Tirel’s skull. A red patch spread for a moment on the sea then disappeared—and with it all trace of the ill-starred young adventurers. Several months after the tragedy the Penrhyn folk were repatriated. They told Captain Sustenance that the three

Europeans had tired of atoll life, and had taken a boat and left for Samoa 500 miles due west of Suwarrow. To make their

story more plausible, they burnt the boat in question, and for a while they were believed. Cc

33

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Over a year later one of the Rakahangans who had been implicated in the murders died at Tukao, Manihiki. Some expressions let fall by the dying man convinced a native teacher that some great crime had been committed, but the dying man did not confess. These suspicions were confirmed by the fact that a quantity of gold coin was in the possession of the islanders who had returned from Suwarrow. Then Charlton’s wife bought a Bible from the teacher and paid for it with some of the dead man’s gold. The teacher worked on her superstitious fears and finally she confessed the whole story. Soon the others were anxious to tell their own tales, exonerating themselves and each blaming others. Some of them were taken back to Suwarrow by Sterndale as béche-de-mer fishers, and so were able to give him the Yull particulars on the spot where the deed was done. There they found the undischarged pistol of Joe Bird, where it had been trodden into the sand, and the sword of Tom Charlton which had been driven into a tree stump. These relics Sterndale preserved carefully until they were lost in the wreck of the brigantine Samoa. The Penrhyn Islanders principally involved in the affray were taken by the captain of a trading schooner to Samoa and there delivered for trial to the British Consul in Apia. The prisoners, having pleaded guilty to the indictment found that their case was dismissed by the consul on the grounds that they had had a certain amount of provocation! The prisoners each received a supply of clothing, a copy of the Holy Scriptures in the Rarotongan language, and a free passage to their home island. Joe Bird was said to have amassed some $6,000 from pearls which he kept buried in a box under his hut. A great part of his fortune was found in this chest by his wives, who divided it up after his murder. Charlton also had some gold, part of the treasure from the wreck at Fenua-ura Island. Whether the islanders found all the money, or whether some of it is still left on Suwarrow, is not known.

34

tt

4

Handley Bathurst Sterndale One of the most interesting characters in the Pacific in the latter half of the nineteenth century was Handley Bathurst Sterndale who was to have various associations, mostly troubled, with Suwarrow over many years. Sterndale, an individualist if there ever was one, was author, dreamer, trader, pearl-shell hunter, a beachcomber and a fighter. He arrived on Suwarrow on October 16th 1867 on the Traveller, a schooner owned by the Pacific Islands Trading Company, together with a party of twenty-three Cook Islanders, among whom were two women and three children. Already on the island were three castaways, a Lascar, a Cook Islander from Manihiki, and the half-caste son of Captain Strickland. According to an article written by James Cowan in the New Zealand Free Lance magazine of August 14th 1923: “there was another, a more solitary Robinson Crusoe, one Captain Jeff Strickland. His story reached Auckland by way of Samoa. He had lived on Suwarrow for the greater part of two years, quite alone.” The Traveller, skippered by Captain John Tyack, and another vessel had left Melbourne with full cargoes of trade goods and building materials. While recruiting labour at Rarotonga the smalier vessel had been wrecked on the reef, but the ship’s boats and much other gear had been salvaged. Sterndale and his party had been recruited for the purpose of collecting pearl shell and béche-de-mer by John Lavington Evans, who again enters the Suwarrow scene. Leaving them with only four months’ supply of food, Evans promised to return on the Traveller to uplift their cargo and bring them fresh supplies.

35

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Evans left them an apparatus for condensing fresh water from the sea, but refused to leave them extra food, supplies, seaworthy boats, charts or navigation instruments, of which he had a surplus stock salvaged from his smaller vessel wrecked at Rarotonga. Sterndale had specially requested these goods of Evans. The months went by and there was no sign of a ship, and Sterndale stretched his stores to the limit. Both he and his party were weak with scurvy and starvation. On March Ist 1868 with trembling fingers he scrawled a barely legible entry in his diary: “‘Company’s food stocks all consumed. Have rationed out my private supplies among the natives.” The chances of survival seemed slim. There were only fifty bearing coconut palms on Suwarrow, far too few to keep so many people supplied with the nuts that meant both food and drink. Polynesian atoll dwellers are used to a diet of coconuts and fish, and the lagoon waters, then as now, teemed with fish. But without coconuts even islanders could not exist for long. First they would suffer from stomach disorders, then would come total exhaustion and death. The nearest land that Sterndale knew of was Manihiki, 400 miles to windward. The only boats he had were old, leaky, and without sails or gear. He had no canvas, twine, pitch, tar or copper nails with which to repair them. Neither had he charts or navigation instruments. All these things had been taken by Evans to Samoa where he expected to sell them at a high price, together with the surplus food. Sterndale cursed as he remembered Evans’s parting words: ‘Set your mind.at rest. You will be relieved without fail, long before your stocks are exhausted.”’ So he had trusted him. He had been on good terms with Evans and the other shareholders in the venture, and he thought that he had won their confidence and respect. In five months he had built a settlement and surveyed Suwarrow, as well as collecting five tons of shell and seven

tons of béche-de-mer, a feat he had not believed possible in the time. In his account of the island Sterndale stated that there were twelve islets ranging in size from about twenty acres to 200 36

Handley Bathurst Sterndale

acres, some of which were covered with tall forest, others with good grass, while the rest were just barren rocks covered with ironwood scrub. He said that at low tide a man could traverse the whole of the enclosing coral reef, with the exception of one channel. At that time the soil on the largest islets was extremely fertile and of great depth. The entrance channel was wide and deep, opening straight down from north to south, without an angle or bend of any kind, the most suitable direction with regard to the prevailing wind, which blows steadily from the eastward during the greater part of the year. Mariners acquainted with Suwarrow, of whom there were not a great many, did not hesitate to go in or out on a clear night. They did so without apprehension as there were no hidden dangers or rocks below the surface. The bottom was level and the channel carried five fathoms of water at the lowest tides. Within the harbour were all depths from thirty fathoms, shoaling to the beach, with a fine sandy bottom, white as snow. Beyond the outer reefs there were no outlying dangers, either in the shape of promontories or detached rocks; neither was there any land within 160 miles in any direction. The shallow portions of the vast lagoon produced great quantities of pearl oysters, likewise béche-de-mer of the largest and most valuable species. One of the earliest trades in the South Pacific was béchede-mer or trepang fishing, which supplied the China market with a profitable item. The Chinese considered the béche-demer had special properties which made it most desirable. Included in these properties was that of an aphrodisiac, and therefore the Chinese, who had a keen taste for women, considered it well worth eating. The béche-de-mer, or trepang, is an ugly sea slug about a foot to eighteen inches long. They live in the shallow lagoons of the South Pacific and are usually black in colour, although some are red or brown. They are sluggish by nature as well as by appearance and are absolutely harmless. Being slow-moving and contrasting sharply with the white sand of the shallows, they are easily seen from a distance and cannot evade capture. The first of the beachcombers and castaways made their living by collecting and drying these repulsive-looking creatures which they sold to ships’ captains 37

Sisters in the Sun

bound for China, where trepang commanded a ready sale. Béche-de-mer eat decayed coral, mud or gravel and live on the organic matter contained in them. The curing of béche-de-mer was a harder task than collecting them. A heap of them were gathered together and boiled in an iron pot for about twenty minutes, then they were allowed to cool for half an hour before being split open lengthways with a sharp knife and gutted. Drying was done by pegging them out in the sun to keep them open and allow the sun and air to penetrate them. The next stage was to smoke them thoroughly. This was done in a smokehouse with a space for the wood fire beneath and trays to hold the béche-de-mer in the upper portion. It took about twenty-four hours for the sea slugs to be cured, and at the end of that time they were hard and shrivelled. Finally, they were again placed in the sun until bone dry. If they were not quite dry they would not keep, but when done properly they would last indefinitely. Meanwhile, long before this, Evans had reached Samoa from Suwarrow. There he paid off his crew and sold his ship and extra gear. In a written statement to the British Consul he testified that he had left Sterndale and party with twelve months’ supplies and a boat capable of getting them to Samoa. Evans then left for Sydney, but the Consul became suspicious and, after questioning ex-crew members of the Traveller, learned the true story. The Consul then wrote to Captain William Henry Hayes, then at Savage Island (Niue) and asked him to rescue Sterndale and his party. Hayes sailed at once in his brig, Rona, although he was badly overcrowded with 109 Niue Islanders and the gear he had stripped from the wreck of the missionary ship John Williams II, wrecked at Niue. As the days dragged by Sterndale became too weak to move from his bed, too weak to write legibly in his diary. He knew that death was not far off. Then, on the morning of April 17th 1868, a Cook Islander ran excitedly into his room to advise him that a big ship with all sail set was beating up for the island. It was the Rona and just in time. William Henry ‘Bully’ Hayes, who stepped ashore so 38

Handley Bathurst Sterndale

providentially on Suwarrow that morning, was probably the most colourful rogue ever seen in the South Pacific. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., in 1829, and before he was thirty had established a reputation in many parts of the world as a bold and skilful seaman, a trickster, thief, bigamist, gun-

runner and blackbirder. He was a big handsome man with a silky brown beard that covered his chest. Bald early, he wore his hair long at the sides to conceal the stump of his right ear which was said to have been cut off in a fight. A cheerful extrovert, Hayes sang well at parties, spent his money freely, and could be bland and charming, especially with women. He had almost as many friends as he had enemies. However, a violent temper which grew worse in middle age, was a contributing factor which led to his murder at sea on one of his vessels in March 1877. Even during his lifetime the accounts of Hayes’ exploits were often confused and sometimes contradictory. Ranging widely over the Pacific for twenty-four years he had many strange changes of fortune during which he bought and sold many ships, stole cargoes, defrauded merchants and passengers, seduced many women (some of whom he married), survived several shipwrecks, served several terms of imprisonment— and became a legend. The Rona, the vessel he sailed to Suwarrow, was named after his late wife, Rona Buckingham, who had been drowned with her thirteen-month-old baby, her younger brother and a maidservant at Croisselles Bay, New Zealand, on August 18th 1864. Hayes was the only one to save his life when a yacht in which they were sailing sank in a squall. Originally named the Anglo-Saxon, the Rona was a 140-ton American-built brig which Hayes bought with mortgage money on May 3rd 1866, for trading among the Pacific Islands. Sterndale said this about his rescue: “On April 17, 1868, arrived at Suwarrow, Captain W. H. Hayes, of the brig Rona, having on board 109 natives of Savage Island, and Captain Geoffrey Strickland, the father of the young half-breed whom I had found on Suwarrow Islands [sic] on my arrival in October of the previous year. Captain Hayes was on his way to Manihiki, en route to Tahiti. To the care and kindness of ao

Sisters in the Sun

this gentleman I am indebted for the preservation of my life and that of the people under my charge.” On May 4th Hayes landed Sterndale and Strickland at Reirson’s Island (Rakahanga) in the Northern Group of the Cook Islands. A few days after Hayes’ departure a Moorea schooner under Captain Waterman called in and took Sterndale to Tahiti where he arrived on June rst 1868. After three weeks in the military hospital in Papeete, Sterndale was able to walk again. From letters written by Evans to various people in Tahiti and Rarotonga, Sterndale discovered that Evans and his associates had believed that he could never collect enough pearl-shell and béche-de-mer to offset the expense of another voyage. They had then cold-bloodedly written him and his group off as a ‘dead loss’. Suwarrow had an attraction for Sterndale, as for many others who had visited it, and within a few years he was back there again. He did not stay long on the island, but possibly he noticed traces of the recent visit of a party seeking gold. Soon afterwards Sterndale was in Auckland, New Zealand, where he wrote a glowing report to the New Zealand Government on the trade possibilities in the Pacific. This report attracted the attention of an enterprising firm, Henderson and Macfarlane Ltd. Both Henderson and Macfarlane were Scots emigrants to New Zealand in the early 1840s, brothers-in-law with keen eyes for business. They soon prospered and owned hotels, shops and a successful shipping fleet called the Circular Saw Shipping Line, which traded throughout the Pacific. By the 1870s the firm was looking for expansion in the central South Pacific, and the ideas propounded by the fluent Sterndale seemed to them to have great merit. Sterndale advocated that they should establish their head-

quarters on Suwarrow, annex the island and trade from there. On the map it certainly looked to be a central location from which to operate, and Sterndale’s account of the island was not only first-hand, but most commendatory. Mr Henderson counted himself fortunate in having met a man like Sterndale who knew this part of the world so intimately, and he appointed him as manager of the trading station that was to be set up in Suwarrow. 40

Handley Bathurst Sterndale

The firm envisaged large profits from pearl-shell fishing, from coconut plantations and from trade with other islands in the surrounding region. This was in the period before the Big Powers had staked out all their claims to islands in the Pacific Ocean, and therefore a big company such as Henderson and Macfarlane could take over an island such as Suwarrow and make it their own, provided they had the strength to defend it against the lawless characters who infested the area. The fast eighty-five-ton brigantine, Ryno, owned by the Circular Saw Line and commanded by Captain Millar, was loaded in Auckland in December 1874 with trade stores, timber, arms and material of all kinds necessary to establish the trading post. This vessel, built by the Nova Scotian shipwrights who had settled on the east coast of North Auckland at Waipu, was

well-known in the islands trade. It was a beautiful ship, usually painted white and kept in immaculate condition. Accompanying Sterndale was his wife; a friend, Henry Mair, who was to help him establish the post and then return to New Zealand; a foreman named Peter Petersen—and possibly others. On arrival, the vessel was anchored off Anchorage Island and the task of unloading was commenced. A substantial bungalow was built and a lighthouse was set up and a water tank and a fort. The fort was necessary to protect the company’s interests against lawless visitors and three of the Ryno’s guns were manhandled ashore and placed in position inside the fort. They were mounted on wooden carriages and were sited to cover the lagoon entrance and the area around Anchorage Island. A supply of cutlasses and rifles and ammunition was also placed inside the fort. Horses, goats and pigs were brought ashore, and Sterndale and his men planted fruit trees and a garden. Soon the animals were thriving. Shortly after Captain Millar and Henry Mair had departed the first visitor arrived in the form of a cutter from Samoa. In charge was a Chinese who had with him a crew of Polynesian pearl-shell divers, anxious to exploit the pearl-shell beds of Suwarrow lagoon. Sterndale had other ideas. He trained one of the guns of the fort on the cutter and peremptorily ordered the Chinese to leave. The latter was reluctant to depart, but a

4t

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shot across his bow changed his attitude and Sterndale was left in charge of the situation. The next visitors to arrive received a different kind of welcome. Strangely enough, two of the five wrecks which have occurred at Suwarrow happened in the year 1876. On June 21st at 8.30 p.m. the American barque Onward, owned in San Francisco by Renton Holmes and Co., struck the reef at Suwarrow. On board were Captain J. S. Black and a crew of nine, plus a cargo of 257,000 feet of timber consigned from Puget Sound to Higginson, Morgan and Co. in Noumea, New Caledonia. Soon the vessel began to break up, but the crew was fortunate in being able to remain on board until daylight showed them their perilous condition. A heavy surf was breaking on the reef when they made their way there and floating baulks of timber from the cargo were an additional hazard. To the best of Captain Black’s knowledge, Suwarrow was unoccupied, and he and his men were understandably surprised to see a boat put off from Anchorage Island and come to their rescue. Sterndale and his men made the crew very welcome, and the newcomers were again fortunate in that on the very next day the Ryno arrived from Rakahanga in the Northern Cooks and took them on to Auckland. Sterndale did not let the opportunity of salvaging much of the timber pass, and gained much valuable material for his establishment. Then, on August 2nd, the Peerless, an Auckland schooner commanded by Captain Metcalfe, which had an eventful past behind it and had recently been purchased by Henderson and Macfarlane, was wrecked on Suwarrow. She was on her maiden voyage for her new owners from Auckland via Palmerston and Tongatabu, and had little cargo on board. The wreck was sold to Peter Petersen for £20, but it is not known what use he made of it. It was suggested about this time that these, and possibly other, wrecks could be due to Suwarrow being incorrectly charted. Staff were needed to dive for shell in the lagoon and to plant coconut palms on the various islets at Suwarrow. The Cook Islanders from Manihiki, then as now, were famed throughout 42

Handley Bathurst Sterndale

the Pacific for their diving skills. Late in 1875 the brand-new thirty-six-ton Auckland schooner, Kriemhilda, was chartered by Henderson and Macfarlane to recruit labour at Manihiki for Suwarrow, and seems to have remained in the area, based at Suwarrow, until at least September 1876. About eighteen months after the post was established a difference of opinion arose between Sterndale and his employers as to whether the station at Suwarrow should be kept open, as it was not making the fortune they had expected. But Sterndale was a stubborn man and refused to budge. Since there was no direct control of the island by any goverment it was necessary for the firm to arrange for his removal and the recovery of their assets. One account states that the quarrel was over the division of profits, Henderson and Macfarlane saying Sterndale was their employee while he claimed he was an equal partner. When his point-blank refusal was received in Auckland Captain Tom Fernandez, a tall, thin, soldierly-looking skipper, was despatched in the Kriemhilda to bring him out and take possession of the station. There were few parts of the Pacific Fernandez did not know well, and he was just the man for the job. Sailing up to the anchorage, Captain Fernandez tried parleying with Sterndale and when that proved unsuccessful attempted to remove him and his wife by force. But the Sterndales stood their ground in their bungalow and replied with rifle fire to the schooner’s gunfire, directed at their water tanks. For a fortnight the siege continued, and then the Ryno again appeared at Suwarrow, with Henry Mair as supercargo. Mair came of a family of distinguished brothers. Gilbert and William had made a splendid name for themselves as fighters in the Maori Wars in New Zealand, in which Henry had also been engaged. Henry was now concerned for his friend Sterndale and his wife. The captain of the Ryno, which it will be recalled also belonged to the company, naturally would not agree to place a boat at Henry’s disposal to enable him to go ashore and take his place alongside his friends in fighting off the company’s agents. That night the moon was bright and, when an opportunity a3

Sisters in the Sun

offered, Henry Mair slipped over the Ryno’s side and swam ashore. As he did so thoughts of man-eating sharks that frequent these waters must have been vivid in his mind. Arriving at the shore after his long swim he lay exhausted on the warm sand. Suddenly he heard a clink of metal and looked up to see a huge female turtle farther up the beach. The turtle was turning round and round as she dug a hole in the sand in which to lay her eggs. As he crawled over to investigate the turtle abandoned its eggs and Mair saw the corner of a rusted metal box protruding from the cluster of white spherical eggs. The box was broken and large silver coins and gold rings lay scattered in the sand. More were in the box. Henry Mair was wearing only a singlet and a money belt. He filled both with coins and rings, then made a hole in the sandy soil at the foot of a large tree and put his treasure trove in it. Several trips were necessary before he was able to transport it all to the tree. Before burying the others, he selected some coins as specimens and put them in his money belt, and then he placed some of the rings set with antique precious stones on his fingers. Carefully making sure that he would recognize the spot again he paced the distance from the shore and also took a bearing from a fixed star. Later, he discovered that the large silver coins were pieces of eight, the currency of much of the Pacific in the days of the Spanish hegemony, and still one of the coins usually associated with buried treasure and pirate hoards. The rings proved to be valuable, and some of them are still in the possession of the members of the Mair family, while the Spanish coins are now to be seen in the Auckland Museum. But by time the treasure was again buried there was an uproar on the Ryno, a sure indication that his absence had been noted and that a search was under way. Hurriedly he ran to the Sterndale bungalow and called for some clothes so he could appear decently clad once more. Sterndale, who was sick, recognized his voice and, after he had been given a pair of shorts, Mair went inside and was warmly welcomed. Shortage of water was by now a real problem, and Sterndale decided to venture out and try to obtain some. Soon after leayos

Handley Bathurst Sterndale

ing the house he unexpectedly encountered Captain Fernandez and two other men. Fernandez was wearing only a pareu, and reached into its folds as if to draw a revolver. Sterndale reacted by firing into the ground close to him and, according to Sterndale’s account, Fernandez dropped as though hit but made off at high speed in a series of crouching, frog-like leaps. Frustrated in his endeavour to obtain water, Sterndale retired to the house. Fernandez issued an ultimatum that the house would be set on fire unless Sterndale came out minus his rifle, otherwise the besiegers would open fire on him. A council of war was held, and it was decided to abandon the house and to try and hold out in the fort. But the move was a bad one, for next day Fernandez had his men cut down large numbers of branches from the nearby trees, and soon pungent smoke caused them to capitulate. The siege of Suwarrow had lasted seventeen days. Sterndale and his wife, Mair, the castaway crew of the Peerless and others from the settlement were taken back to Auckland in the Kreimhilda at the end of Ocober 1876, and the matter was soon before the New Zealand court. Charge and counter-charge took up much time, and included one of attempted murder of Fernandez against Sterndale. Finally, the court threw out all the cases, wisely deciding that it could not be concerned with a dispute which took place in such a noman’s-land as Suwarrow. This was the end of Sterndale’s association with Suwarrow, for neither he nor Henry Mair ever returned to dig up the hoard of silver dollars or rings deposited on that moonlit night on the edge of the bush. Henry Mair always had it in the back of his mind to charter a vessel and pick up the treasure, but instead he went recruiting labour for the Fiji plantations and was treacherously killed in 1880 when he landed at the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. Sterndale eventually went to San Francisco and settled there until his death. It is not known if the Spanish treasure was ever recovered by later adventurers. Since those days at least two terrific hurricanes have devastated Suwarrow. Some of the smaller motu were swallowed by the sea and the outlines of the others were changed. 45

Sisters in the Sun

It seems unlikely that any treasure has survived the prying eyes of the numerous assorted rogues who have known Suwarrow. It it has survived it may now lie fathoms deep in blue water, disguised by marine growth and guarded by sharks and ferocious Moray eels.

46

5

The Castaways Richard Branscombe Chave, a young Englishman who had run away to sea at thirteen, counted himself fortunate when late in 1870, at the age of twenty-two, he was employed by the firm of Houlder Brothers of London as manager of their guano diggings on Starbuck Island. The firm had leased this isolated speck in the Line Island Group, lying to the north-east of Tahiti, from the British government and Chave had two Europeans and fifty Rarotongans working on excavating guano. He was a cheerful young man with an inflated sense of his ability to handle any situation and a lack of knowledge of his own shortcomings. By mid-February 1871 there was a scarcity of provisions for the fifty-three men on Starbuck Island, and Chave began to worry about the possible fate of the brig which was to have replenished their supplies and shipped the guano which was piled near the landing place. Perhaps the vessel had foundered in a storm, he thought, and began to make preparations for a voyage to Malden Island 120 miles to the north-north-east, which was being worked by Messrs Grice, Sumner and Co. of Melbourne, Australia. On Starbuck there was a large wide-beamed, double-ended boat, a cross between a whaleboat and a jolly boat, and he selected this and three of the best Rarotongan workmen for the voyage. Because there was not enough suitable light material to make a whole suit of sails he used some half-worn guano sacks to make up the deficiency. At noon on February 26th 1871, without any idea of what perils and hardships lay ahead of him, but with a light heart and a favourable wind behind

him, Chave set off with his three companions. There was no chronometer on board and no means

of 47

Sisters in the Sun

gauging the rate of the current, and once he was out of sight of land his estimate of his position was hazy in the extreme. Four days out from Starbuck, Chave calculated that they were about forty miles east of Malden Island, and turned and ran westward until he had covered that distance. No land was in sight, so he continued for another six hours. Feeling sure by then that he had overshot Malden, he turned and tried to work back to Starbuck. A few days later, when one of the Rarotongans fell asleep at the helm, the vessel capsized, and much valuable equipment and all the food and water was lost. For five hours they struggled in the sea before being able to right the boat. Taking stock of their position, Chave decided that they could not hope to reach Starbuck, so altered course to try and find Penrhyn Island in the Northern Cook Group. By this time, although Chave still retained his youthful optimism, his three Cook Islands companions had turned surly and had grave doubts about his ability to get them out of their dangerous situation. Three days after the capsize, Chave’s optimism was vindicated, for low-lying Penrhyn was seen to the southward, and a few hours later they had reached safety. For six weeks before leaving Starbuck, Chave had suffered from dysentry, and was so weak on getting ashore that he staggered about like a drunken man. At that time Penrhyn had only one European inhabitant, a trader named George who ran the store and collected pearl shell for Captain Brothers, of Tahiti. George took Chave with him to his home on the other side of the island, and a few days later a square-rigged vessel arrived. This was the Susanna Booth of Sydney, commanded by Captain Clulow, with H. B. Sterndale, one of the most ubiquitious characters in the Pacific at that time, as supercargo. Sterndale soon made friends with Chave and told him many strange tales of the Pacific, including an account of Suwarrow. Once he had regained his strength, Chave was anxious to

return to Starbuck. Both Sterndale and the others attempted to dissuade him, and the three Rarotongans were adamant that

they would not accompany him. Finally he managed to persuade a young Penrhyn Islander, not more than sixteen years 48

illiam Marsters, Senior, with of his family descendants and some

Ned Marsters,

present head of the Marsters family and clerk-incharge of Palmerston Island

The Castaways

of age, named Barney, to go with him. The other Penrhyn Islanders were strongly opposed to the boy going, and ultimately Chave and Barney had to put to sea at night, knowing that otherwise they would have been detained. Sterndale claimed to have greatly assisted Chave, giving him a bolt of light canvas, helping him haul his boat ashore, and fitting it with a false keel, as well as supplying him with food and necessaries for the voyage. He also gave him sailing directions, while George supplied a compass. Later, Chave denied that Sterndale had given him the canvas. Late one night the two voyagers set off, and: once again, true to form, Chave was soon lost, but on April 18th he considered that they must be close to land as flocks of seabirds surrounded them all day. By that time they were about three weeks out of Penrhyn, and both were faint from lack of food and were tormented by thirst. Next day Chave felt better, having a strong presentiment that they would sight land that day. Just on sunset he saw an island to port and one to starboard, but as he could not reach them before dark he took in the sail and let the boat drift. Barney, who had been most despondent, brightened up considerably, for he admitted that he had given up all hope. He stated that he knew the islands and that they were inhabited, but in truth they were off the deserted atoll of Suwarrow, although they remained ignorant of that fact for the next two years. Chave thought they were off “Maataata Harbour, the most northerly and at the same time the most westerly of the Samoan Group”. They both lay down and went to sleep, but about midnight Chave awakened with the roar of surf filling his ears. Sitting

up, he saw waves breaking on the reef on either side of the boat. Calling to Barney, he shipped the oars and they pulled

away from the breakers as fast as they could. Half an hour later they again drifted close to the surf, but Barney refused pointblank to row any more and kept reiterating that they should let her go ashore. Chave argued that they should stay out to sea until daybreak when they could see what they were faced with, rather than plunge into that surf in the darkness.

Then he raised the tomahawk and threatened to kill Barney unless he pulled, but neither threatening or coaxing was of D

49

Sisters in the Sun

avail. Finding it of no use, Chave threw down the tomahawk, thrust his oar astern and turned the boat’s head into the rollers. He was just in time, for one was already astern. There was a fearful surf breaking on the reef that night and the long white sheet of foam was a magnificent sight. They struck with a crash and following waves rolled them higher and higher upon the reef. When the waves started to recede Chave stepped out of the boat and, through weakness, fell on the hard sharp coral, lacerating his knees and hands and cutting his only pair of trousers. They could not move in the darkness. Rain started to fall, so they spread out an oilskin and collected the drops. Daylight broke at last and they found themselves on a large reef about threequarters of a mile wide and seemingly extending for miles on either side. Inside the reef was a large lagoon and about seven miles across the lagoon, to their right, they saw a large island. Beyond, almost lost in the distance was another island, while a third lay twelve to fifteen miles away on their left. Nearby, a long barren sandbank extended for the full width of the reef. Each man found a stick with which to support himself, then they made their painful way towards the sandbank. The boat had been completely stove in by the force with which she had struck the reef. Chave could not keep up with Barney, whose feet were horny from walking on reefs since boyhood. Every step was torture to the young Englishman. On reaching the sandbank they were buoyed up with the thought that there were many people on the island who would answer a signal hoisted on a stick and soon they would be rescued. Once their signal—a silk sash—was erected they sat

down and gazed at the opposite island with eager eyes, expecting to see a canoe

coming towards

them

at any moment.

Gradually the long day passed, while they sought relief from thirst by plunging into the lagoon. Later in the day Barney, while exploring the sandbank, found pools of fresh water among the coral rocks. They drank until they became bloated and were sick.

Next day they returned to the boat, and took off a chest, a water bucket and an oil drum which they floated to the Exe)

The Castaways

sandbank. They had a little flour and rice, but Barney was too weak to ignite a fire. That morning Chave suggested that Barney swim across to the island, but the islander was not inclined to do so, feeling that it was too much exertion. Always they expected succour from the island, but in vain. On the third day without food, but still with enough water to drink, Chave began to construct a raft, but there was only a log about six feet long and some small sticks. When completed it would not bear them both, so Barney was persuaded to make the effort of reaching land. Returning once with only the big log, he was persuaded to embark again. He promised to light a fire on the island beach that night if he found it uninhabited, and also to come back and get Chave. Days went by and still there was no sign of rescue. By now Chave knew that the island was uninhabited, and he was under no illusions that Barney would return for him. There was still plenty of drinking water, but he was becoming weaker from lack of food. Suddenly he saw a school of about two dozen fish swimming close to his feet, where a small wave had deposited them. He tried to catch them but fell flat on his face, and managed to trap only one before they wriggled back to the sea. He killed it with his tomahawk, then ate it with a little flour. It was his first real meal since landing on the island ten days previously. Next day he saw something that sent his blood flowing faster and seemed to endow him with new life. The moon was at the full and the tides were getting both higher and lower. There, stretching before him, the reef was as dry as far as he could see. Next morning he set off to see if he could reach the island. Coral stones played havoc with his feet, but he plodded on. The tide fell and soon much of the reef was dry. Twice huge waves swept him off his feet, lacerating his skin against the coral. As the tide rose he had to swim in places, but just at dusk he reached a small island where he could rest in safety. There were bushes and thick grass here and to the weary, sunscorched man it seemed a paradise. His feet had swollen to twice their normal size and had been cut by the coral. Next morning he could not stand at first, so he crawled down to the beach where he found two birds’ eggs under a bush. They si

Sisters in the Sun

were half-hatched, but he ate them hungrily. Another island lay about twelve fathoms away, so he crossed to it and found a large number of half-fledged seabirds. On this second island he experimented with grass as food, finding it palatable and giving him strength to knock over a couple of young seabirds and eat their giblets. Two more small islands lay between him and the main island, but his way was blocked by deep blue

water. When, on the following day he tried to swim to the island, sharks brushed against his toes, but his greatest danger was in being carried out to sea. Swimming for an hour and a half, he eventually reached safety. He found many coconuts at the foot of a palm and, with great difficulty, succeeded in husking three nuts with his teeth. The fluid they contained helped him regain some of his strength. Next morning he determined to climb a palm and found one leaning at an angle. After climbing part of the way he could go no further and while he studied his position a voice hailed him from below. It was Barney. After two or three ineffectual attempts to descend he fell off the trunk. Barney helped him to a fallen coconut which was surrounded with dozens of green nuts. Barney husked one on an ironwood stake in a few seconds. Although he now appeared solicitous for Chave’s health, he readily admitted that he had not thought of returning to the sandbank to help him. Chave upbraided him bitterly even though he knew he risked his life in doing so. They enjoyed some utu, the germinated coconut, which forms a small apple-like shape in the nut and which is very nutritious. Gradually they exchanged news of their doings since they parted. Now that there was an abundance of food Chave felt extremely hungry and ate utu all day, in fact he was ravenous for about three weeks afterwards. Then the first finger of his right hand festered. It took a month to heal. Although he had not missed Barney before, he now felt that he could not let him out of his sight. The Polynesian soon

rigged up a shelter for them, and they settled down on the island on which they found several old native houses. They were in ruins, and there was the remains of one frame house which could have been built for Europeans. Several pearl shells were £2

The Castaways

also found on the island, indicating that the settlement had been used by a party of pear]-shell divers. Chave tried to talk Barney into going back to the sandbank to bring back the things they had left there. The islander offered all sorts of excuses before he finally set off in half a canoe which they had found. Instead of bringing back all their belongings he returned with only some of them and it became necessary to join two half-canoes together in which they both returned to retrieve the tomahawk, the iron bucket and the chest. Barney had sworn that they had been washed away, but they were found exactly where Chave had left them. They caught some fish in a pool and Barney created a cooking fire by vigorously rubbing two dried sticks together. Crabs, fish and coconuts formed their diet. As the months went by Chave kept a constant lookout for passing vessels, but Barney became increasingly morose and lazy, sleeping often and doing as little as possible. From Chave’s later account it seems that Barney was mentally defective—and Chave appears to have gone in fear of his life. The chest they had salvaged from the wreckage of their boat contained a Bible printed in the Rarotongan language, one of Barney’s few possessions, Chave’s Epitome of Navigation and about fifty pages of the second volume of Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son. Chave must have read the books a hundred times during his sojourn on Suwarrow. After building a house, Chave started to hollow out a canoe from a coconut log. Unfortunately, he became so enthusiastic that he not only cut his leg with the tomahawk but also cut through the bottom of the log, and they were never able afterwards to make it watertight. Barney helped by attending to the provision and cooking of food and by making sennit to lash the bulwarks to the hull. Chave wanted the canoe for fishing, and for transport should a vessel come to Suwarrow. He also thought of other people who might be cast away on the atoll, and planned to use the canoe to plant coconuts on each of the islands. Earlier, there had been a good many tamanu (calophyllum inophyllum) trees on the islands. They were known as ‘islands mahogany’ and were used by the pre-Christian Cook Islanders 53

Sisters in the Sun

for making idols and canoes. This was regarded as a sacred tree and was to the islanders what the oak was to the Druids. But the only tamanu Chave found were rotten. The rest had been cut down by earlier visitors who had either used the timber themselves or had taken it elsewhere and sold it. Several months passed uneventfully as they collected coconuts and fished on the reef and watched for a sail that might mean rescue. Barney was very reluctant to use the canoe after his first experience in it, with the result that they did not use it for fishing. In the course of time the fish on the reef became depleted and those that remained became wary of them. They carefully collected rainwater in the canoe and the bucket and only when this water was exhausted did they touch the drinking nuts. Although they made several attempts at digging wells they found nothing but salt water. Noticing that the coconuts were diminishing in number, Chave insisted that they ration themselves to two utu daily, one for breakfast and one for the evening meal. On their first Christmas Day their reef fishing was unsuccessful so two coconuts were their only food that day. Chave persisted in mastering the Rarotongan dialect so that he could read the Bible and converse more freely with Barney. In his spare time he wove himself a mat which he used as a blanket, and a hat to keep off the sun. Barney eventually became so hungry that he wanted to eat far more than their two nuts a day, but Chave’s anger got the better of him and he bitterly reproached Barney for not going fishing in the canoe. Afterwards Barney went outside and uncovered the canoe and paddled out across the lagoon. And here the long, vivid, but often verbose account which Chave prepared ends abruptly on page 208 of the typed version of which over 120 pages deal with his Suwarrow experiences. When and where he wrote it we have no means of knowing, but to be so detailed he must have kept a day-to-day diary. At the end of the last page is a note by J. L. Young: ‘“‘The remainder of the manuscript was missing when Chaye’s daughter gave it to me to have copied in 1897.”

Young was a prominent trader in the Pacific in the days of Louis Becke. Then the manuscript seems to have disappeared 54

The Castaways

until it was unearthed about 1968 in an old trunk, the contents of which had not been disturbed for a long time, by Mr Walter L. Young, of St Ives, New South Wales, who passed it to the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau. They in turn made a copy available to the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand. However, the New Zealand Herald of Auckland of May 28th and June 2nd 1873 ran two articles on the news which had just come to hand of the long period which the two men had spent on uninhabited Suwarrow. It was two years after their arrival on Suwarrow before they were rescued by a small schooner from Pago Pago which called at the island and took them to Atiu, one of the islands of the Southern Group of the Cooks. From there Captain Trayte of the schooner Edith took Chave to Rarotonga where the kindly L.M.S. missionary, the Reverend John Chalmers, cared for him until Chave could be returned to Starbuck. Having read the first account in the newspaper Sterndale immediately supplied more details, stating that it was Captain Ellicott, a Tahitian trader, who had picked up the men from Suwarrow. Sterndale claimed he had met the captain four or five years previously in Tahiti and had interested him in Suwarrow, giving him a sketch of the reef and the position of the entrance which he had explained was not dangerous. The captain had told him that he would visit the island on the first possible occasion, and this had arisen in 1873 when he went to Danger Island (Pukapuka Atoll) in the Northern Cooks in search of coconut oil. Sterndale also gives a reason why—apart from its isolation —Suwarrow was so seldom visited by skippers. They gave it a wide berth from its extremely dangerous appearance, the vast coral reef seeming to stretch from north to south as far as the eye could see, not more than fifteen feet above highwater mark in any place, with a tremendous swell even in calm weather, the result of the current. Moreover, at that time it was marked upon the English charts in italics as being “inhabited by hostile savages’’. This, Sterndale pointed out, was a great mistake as it had never been permanently inhabited,

though he had frequently found stone axes and other relics of a people who had disappeared. 55

6

Sovereignty and Trade Although Suwarrow was discovered by a Russian, almost all its settlers have been either British or Cook Islanders. Surprisingly, to those who regard Great Britain as a land-grabbing power in the nineteenth century, many requests to Britain to take over the Cook Islands, made by settlers, traders and local rulers, were ignored until almost the close of the century. Tension was mounting over rival claims to Samoa between Britain, the United States and Germany—and France was also a strong contender for Pacific territories. Someone must have drawn the attention of the British Admiralty to the fact that Suwarrow had one of the few safe anchorages—at that time drawing twenty feet in the passage near Anchorage Island—in that part of the Pacific. It was decided to forestall all other possible claimants.

Therefore, on April 22nd 1889, Captain William McCoy Castle, of H.M.S. Rapid, landed on the then uninhabited island, raised the Union Jack, and proclaimed the sovereignty of Queen Victoria. On account of the fine land-locked harbour, the southeastern part of Anchorage Island was proclaimed as a British Admiralty Reserve. Captain Castle, who was Deputy High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, caused a board to be erected on that day containing the wording of the proclamation. Many years later, Judge H. F. Ayson, C.M.G., who was Resident Commissioner of the Cook Islands from 1922 to 1937, on a visit to the island,

found the board and sent it to the Dominion Museum Wellington, where it arrived safely in January 1925. In 1888, at the request of the chiefs, Rarotonga

in

and the

southern Cook Islands were proclaimed a British Protectorate. 56

Sovereignty and Trade

This move followed approaches going back to at least 1865, partly as a result of trade with New Zealand, and partly because of fears of French annexation as had happened in Tahiti. A British Resident, nominated and paid for by the New Zealand Government, was appointed. Both in the Cook Islands and in New Zealand pressure continued to mount for a more positives connection. In 1891 a Constitution Act for the group was passed, and under this statute provision was made for the local government of each island in the group. The Premier of New Zealand, the Right Hon. Richard Seddon, moved the annexation of the Cook Islands to New Zealand in a resolution in the House of Representatives, Wellington, on September 29th 1900. This resolution included Niue, but it made no mention of Suwarrow, probably because of its special status under the British Admiralty, which would have to be cleared up with London. After the qualms of the Admiralty had evidently been satisfied, Sir Robert Stout, the Deputy Governor, on October 22nd 1900, acknowledged the receipt of a resolution passed by the House of Representatives approving of the alteration of the boundaries of the colony to include Suwarrew. As Lord Ranfurly had recommended, the question of more effective authority and the suppression of the abuses _ of the liquor traffic in the northern islands was dealt with by their inclusion in this extension of New Zealand’s boundaries. This was done by Order in Council of May 13th igor. The first tourists called at Suwarrow in 1890. Robert Louis Stevenson, the well-known author, and his party, in the Janet Nichol, an iron-screw steamer of 600 tons, out of Sydney on a trading cruise among the islands, called at “the wild, low, lonely islands of Penrhyn, Manihiki, Suwarrow, and Nassau; saw beachcombers and pearl-divers, traders and castaways. . .”. After the proclamation of British sovereignty an indenture was made on August roth 1892 between Her Majesty the Queen and James Morrison and Company, which may have either changed its name or assigned its interests to a firm named the South Pacific Trading Company. On November 22nd 1901 Lieutenant-Colonel W. E. Gudgeon, C.M.G., Resident Commissioner of the Cook Islands, wrote 57

Sisters in the Sun

from Rarotonga to the Premier of New Zealand, the Right Hon. Richard J. Seddon, as follows: I have the honour to report that on my return from Manihiki I visited Suwarrow, landing shortly after sunrise on the 4th instant. My visit was made partly to warn the residents that they were under the New Zealand Customs laws, and also to ascertain the value of the atoll. I found the lagoon in charge of a Mr Nagel, who is managing for the South Pacific Trading Company, the lessees, and has under his charge some forty persons who are engaged in the pearl-shell industry. From personal observations I am in a position to say that the real value of Suwarrow is the lagoon, from which nearly s0 tons of shell is taken each year. The small islands on the reef have been planted with the cocoa-nut palm, some of which are now bearing fruit; but I think that the whole of the islands of the reef will not have a greater area than s00 acres, and therefore are of no great value for raising copra. From the information J obtained from Mr Nagel I judged that the pearl-shell fishery is managed in a thoroughly business-like manner. No shell of less than 4% inches in diameter is taken, and every effort is made to increase the area of the shell beds. The diving is carried on by means of machines in water averaging from 20 to 28 fathoms, and the shell is of very good quality. The lessees of the island are about to give the shell a rest, or closed season, and intend to transfer the whole staff to Christmas

Island, near the equator. The survey of this lagoon is so complete that it is hardly necessary for me to say that comparatively large vessels can enter the lagoon and find good anchorage almost anywhere close to the shore.

In his annual report dated February 20th 1902, Gudgeon assessed the current copra output of the island at twenty-five tons, with a possible production of 100 tons in the future. The

pearl-shell production he assessed at fifty tons. He pointed out that pearl shell was to be found in abundance wherever there were beds of sea-grass, for the reason that the oyster feeds on a species of shrimp, which finds shelter in these submarine grass fields. 58

Sovereignty and Trade

The same firm, South Pacific Trading Company, owned Christmas Island as well as having the lease of Suwarrow, so there would have been no difficulty in transferring the staff and giving Suwarrow’s pearl-shell beds a long rest. Most of the workers were from Manihiki or Tahiti. Gudgeon was so impressed with the way in which Nagel had managed these pearl-shell areas in the lagoon that immediately upon his return to Rarotonga he prepared a draft set of rules which were adopted by the New Zealand government for all the pearl-shell lagoons within its jurisdiction. In 1903, when the licence of the South Pacific Trading Company had expired, the atoll was leased to Lever Brothers “for the purpose of removing guano or other fertilizing substances therefrom, and for planting the land with coconuts, and for collecting pearl shells, and for other purposes of a like nature”’. Three years later Lever Brothers made an attempt to transport gold-lipped pearl oysters to Suwarrow. Pearl shell has a high commercial value apart from the occasional highly-prized pearl which they sometimes contain. Pearls are the result of an accidental entry of some foreign matter into the oyster when irritation is set up. To counteract this the oyster coats the unwelcome intruder with nacreous material which is built up, layer by layer, to form a pearl. The colour of the pearl can | vary from rose to cream, white, black, bronze, or pastel shades of blue, lavender, yellow, green or mauve. Experts can easily identify the source of a shell or a pearl, and the colour is believed to be acquired from the colour of that part of the shell lining near where the pearl is secreted. Pearl shell, too, varies in colour and in quality. Many tons of pearl shell have to be harvested for very few pearls, but usually a ready market exists for the shells which make splendid buttons and are much in demand for souvenirs of various kinds. Professor Saville Kent persuaded Levers to invest $20,000 in the venture, and the gold-lipped pearl shells were sent from Thursday Island, in Torres Strait, on the company’s ship, Upolo, formerly a Union Steam Ship Company’s vessel. Captain Charles Menmuir, the commander of the ship, had the task of supervising their being kept alive in tanks, supplied with running sea water, during their long voyage to the atoll. In all, 30,000 oY

Sisters in the Sun

shells were shipped and deposited in the lagoon. The gold-lipped variety spatted (spawned) successfully in their new surroundings, but the results were not a commercial success, and before any further experiments could be made, Lever’s lease of Suwarrow expired and the New Zealand government declined to renew it. When Levers began their venture the gold-lipped shell was worth $180 a ton more than the black-lipped variety, and it therefore seemed a sound business proposition. At one time Levers had thirty persons working on the island in their various activities. Levers Pacific Plantations Limited made an application for an extension of their lease of Suwarrow, which was considered by the New Zealand Cabinet together with the recommendations made by the Resident Commissioner of the Cook Islands, Lieutenant-Colonel Gudgeon. The latter was advised by a letter dated April 11th 1906 that Cabinet had decided no extension would be granted. The company, through its Sydney office then asked about the possibility of securing a new lease, but they were advised that this, too, was not possible. In 1913 Captain Harries leased the island for a period at a rent of £110 ros. per annum. Then came the 1914 hurricane which not only spoiled the lagoon for pearl-shell operations,

but also did much damage to the copra plantations. Following this the rental was reduced to £50 a year. Shortly after this the lease fell into the hands of Messrs. A. B. Donald Limited of Auckland. In 1916 there were seven people living on the atoll, for the firm at first undertook the production of copra, and gave the pearl-shell beds a long rest. A German warship is said to have anchored in the lagoon in the early part of World War I to escape detection from British searchers, and to have completed a rendezvous with

a vessel which supplied her with coal to enable her to continue her depredations on unarmed merchantmen. In 1924 a diving party spent two months there and obtained only three hundredweight of good quality black-lipped pearl Shell, there being no gold-lipped at all. The party also made

twelve tons of copra. A. B. Donald’s held the lease until 1936, at the end of which they offered the sum of £10 a year for two more years, and 60

Sovereignty and Trade

the offer was accepted. They paid no rent but carried out minor repairs in lieu thereof. Then, in 1938, Suwarrow was leased to Captain D. H. Cambridge at £20 per year. Four years later the captain gave up his lease when, because of termite infestation, it was necessary to prohibit the export of copra from Suwarrow. This, of course, depreciated the value of the island. Termites, or white ants, had been attacking coconut palms on Suwarrow since the beginning of the century. The first termite specimens to be sent to New Zealand arrived there in 1914 and, although they were not specifically identified, it was considered that they were not native, but probably introduced from Australia. Soil had at that time been brought to Suwarrow from Australia, and it could have been in this soil that the termites were introduced. These destructive insects are now known to be present in palms at Suwarrow, Pukapuka, Nassau and Palmerston. There are over two thousand species of termites, the great majority of which are found in tropical zones, where they prove most destructive. Their principal food is cellulose contained in wood, grass and leaves, and they cause enormous damage in many countries. Multiplying rapidly—a single king and queen can produce up to 3 million termites—they are dreaded visitors in any new country. Probably their entry into Suwarrow could have passed unnoticed for several years and they would have had the opportunity of spreading unchecked with devastating swiftness. This particular species of termite at Suwarrow is very large eand is not a mound-builder. Unlike the majority of pest species, it attacks living plant tissues and does not confine its attentions

to coconut palms. Infestations are usually initiated by the winged forms which regularly disperse from established colonies and the first attack is probably at or near ground level. The

plant tissues are affected both below and above the surface, up to sixty feet or more up a palm trunk. Young and old palms are equally susceptible, and it is doubtful if any palms on Suwarrow are not attacked. In extreme cases, which are not uncommon, young palms will collapse, even on windless days. The drop in yield is considerable on infested trees, although it 6I

Sisters in the Sun

is almost incredible that heavily infested palms should appear as healthy as they do. It is possible to fell an affected tree with one blow of a bush-knife. Although no treasure has been found, or at least recorded, at Suwarrow in recent decades, the lure of fortune to be found has not diminished. During 1938, a group of five men in the yacht, Ngataki, skippered by Johnny W. Wray, a man who was later to become a well-known New Zealand yachtsman, arrived there to search for treasure. They brought with them some New Zealand kauri gum-digging spears and German bayonets which had been brought back to New Zealand at the end of World War I. They found no gold but greatly enjoyed their sojourn on Suwarrow, living largely on the plentiful fish in the lagoon. Seabirds are present in great numbers, and the atoll was declared a bird sanctuary by the New Zealand government on August 28th 1939. In 1941, the isolation of the island was temporarily broken when a New Zealand wireless and meteorological station was

set up there. This was one of the links in the coast-watching service, and was doubtless inspired by the memory of the German warship which used the lagoon during the earlier conflict.

The New Zealand government again set up a meteorological and radio station at Suwarrow

in July 1949, with a staff of

one European and four Cook Islanders. They arrived by the H.M.N.Z.S. Kaniere from Rarotonga, and Mr A. W. Hosking was in charge. In November of that year the American yacht,

Winds Will, called at the island from Rarotonga and left in December for Tahiti via Manihiki and Penrhyn. The station was

closed in December

1950 when

the staff

were withdrawn. Lonely Suwarrow had a small part to play in the important scientific activities associated with the International Geophysical Year 1957-8.

In 1958 a total eclipse of the sun occurred in the northern part of the South Pacific, and New Zealand, Russia and Japan

all sent observers. The Japanese despatched their fisheries training vessel, Oshoro Maru, which called at Rarotonga, port 62

Sovereignty and Trade

of entry for the Cook Islands on September 20th 1958, before proceeding to Suwarrow in time to have all the scientists ashore and ready when the eclipse occurred on October 12th. The team of distinguished scientists was led by Professor Yohio Kato of the Geophysical Institute, Tohoku University, and there were five separate parties working on Suwarrow. They were delighted with the results, which were highly successful and many interesting recordings were made. In addition they were also pleased with their stay on the lovely atoll and with its splendid lagoon. In 1964, the island was visited by the sixty-five-foot French schooner, Europe, sailing on a government scientific tour of the Pacific. The crew consisted of four men and three women, one of the latter being June von Donop, aged 42, who had been an accountant with a Honolulu firm until she became tired of modern living. She sold all her possessions except her scubadiving equipment, then signed on board Lee Quinn’s forty-fivefoot ketch as one of his all-girl crew. At Tahiti, after a “personality conflict’? with Quinn she left the Neotype and joined the Europe. At Suwarrow, she lived ashore by herself in Tom Neale’s house on Anchorage Island for a week, while the other four men and two women stayed on board the Europe in the lagoon. She slept on the floor of the house, and lived on island food, and enjoyed the happiest days of her life. When the week ended she cleaned the abandoned house, left a note of thanks for the uknown owner, plus a package of medicines, books and fishing gear for the next tenant, and then sailed sadly away. When the Cook Islands achieved internal self-government from New Zealand on August 4th 1965, Suwarrow, of course, came under Cook Islands government control. On June goth 1970, the American catamaran, Ariel, arrived at Suwarrow. The skipper-owner, Harold William Gelnaw of the United States was accompanied by two women crew members: Sandra Brook Johnson, also of the United States, and Suzanne Bawin of Belgium. The yacht was heading for Hawaii when it called in at Suwarrow and then at Penrhyn to repair , sail damage.

63

Sisters in the Sun

Other yachts have called in at Suwarrow and one of the most recent was the New Zealand vessel, El Hari, which took goods from Rarotonga for Tom Neale. Captain-owner Graham Hallan, who had three crew with him, reported that Tom Neale received all his goods and that he was in very good health. El Hari was bound for Honolulu and reached Penrhyn from Suwarrow on September 19th 1970.

64

7

Robert Dean Frisbie Although the American author, Robert Dean Frisbie, is usually associated with Pukapuka, another atoll of the Northern Group of the Cook Islands, he also knew Suwarrow well, and wrote about it. Frisbie was

born in 1896, in Cleveland,

Ohio, U.S.A.

His

father, a real-estate man, followed various fundamental religions at various times, and was an unbending disciplinarian with a puritanical nature. Father and son were incompatible. Florence Benson, Robert’s mother, came from Vermont, and the bond of love between her and the quiet, shy boy who tended to be anti-social, was a close one. Frisbie corresponded with her until her death in 1952. He was a thin, frail child—tall like his mother. Twice he rebelled and ran away from the strict discipline of the militarytype school to which his father sent him. An avid reader from early childhood, he studied all the South Seas literature he could find, and later, when he was leading a nomadic existence on lonely islands in the central South Pacific, he always had a large and catholic library with him. Robert Louis Stevenson, who also enjoyed the South Seas, became his boyhood hero. At the age of sixteen Robert Frisbie left home to “strike out for himself’. When the United States made its entry into World War I, Robert Frisbie joined the United States 8th Cavalry and was stationed in Texas. He was discharged from the Army as a private, with tuberculosis, in 1918. As a result he received $45

a month pension, which, in later years, was to make the difference between starvation and a comfortable existence in the South Pacific. In January 1920, after a year of fitful work as a columnist

EB

65

Sisters in the Sun

and reporter for first an army magazine and then the Fresno Morning Republican, he felt he had saved enough to start a new life of adventure, and departed for the South Seas. Frisbie was twenty-four when he landed in Papeete, Tahiti, in 1920, with a typewriter and a camera. He met James Norman Hall, also an American writer, in the bar of the Hotel Tiare and discussed writing plans with him—the first of many long and serious conversations with Hall. Frisbie bought a four-acre plantation about thirty miles from Papeete and built a Polynesian-style house and adjacent cookhouse on the property. His house had a roof of thatched coconut fronds, and shutters and walls were of plaited bamboo strips. Later, he joined forces with two other literary-minded Europeans to establish the South Seas News and Pictorial Syndicate. Charles Brown, a successful writer for Adventure magazine in the U.S.A., was president, Charles H. Norris was business manager, and Frisbie was managing editor. They covered news of all the islands of the Society Group, and as they had no competition, business was fairly good. In addition, Frisbie wrote articles which were published in the United States. By now he had realized that writing for a living required not only good contacts but a very great degree of skill and ability, and he strove to increase his skill. From the outset he was determined to learn all he possibly could about Polynesian

life in the shortest time, so he lived with the islanders, speared fish and dived for pearls with them, and learned to speak the language. He sailed on a visit to the Paumotu Islands, a distant part of French Polynesia, and while on Hikueru experienced his first natural disaster—a tidal wave. His ability to climb coconut palms stood him in good stead and saved his life. He fell in love with a Tahitian girl named Terii and lived with her for a few years without the benefit of marriage. Frisbie was friendly with both Nordhoff and Hall, the famous American authors who wrote several books about the South Seas,

both individually and as a team. Their most famous work was Mutiny on the Bounty, which was later filmed more than once. 66

Robert Dean

Frisbie

In 1921, Frisbie, still in Tahiti, in partnership with E. J. Spies and R. A. Sampson, bought and rebuilt a thirty-foot yawl, Motuovini. Both Frisbie and Spies were penniless, and a Mr Smith put up the money. The vessel was not ready for sea until July 1923, and immediately the three partners put to sea from Tahiti on a 3,000-mile voyage expected to last fourteen months. They planned to chart and explore islands and reefs near the Equator previously sighted by sailing vessels, but still uncharted. Frisbie had studied and mastered navigation. About this time, Frisbie’s girl-friend, Terii, left him and married a Tahitian. The yachtsmen first visited some small and uninhabited islands of the Society Group, then went on to Manihiki in the Northern Cooks where they received a tremendous welcome. After four days there they sailed to Penrhyn where they stayed almost a month. Frisbie was impressed with the pearl-shell beds of Penrhyn which had been discovered by Lamont in 1853. He also became attached to a girl named Teanua, and when he departed it was with the intention of returning and marrying her. Cruising towards the Equator they searched in vain for Victoria Island, then turned south and came to uninhabited Suwarrow. They sailed into the lagoon, and spent a lazy time . —swimming, fishing, sailing across the lagoon to the small motus, and exploring the islets and reefs. Like others before and since they probably spent some time searching, in desultory fashion, for buried treasure. Their stay on Suwarrow was most enjoyable, and it was with great reluctance that they sailed onwards. Frisbie always had a hankering to return, and was destined not only to pay two further visits to Suwarrow, but to inspire the most publicized of all hermits, Tom Neale, to settle there. Big welcomes met them in American and Western Samoa,

but when they reached Suva, Fiji, they had to sell the yacht to buy enough food to last them three months. By early March 1924 they were back in Tahiti, then Frisbie sold his plantation and sailed to Rarotonga with Captain Andy Thomson in the schooner Avarua. Andy Thomson was to remain a good friend of Frisbie until the latter’s death at Rarotonga in 1948.

67

Sisters in the Sun

Frisbie was appointed by A. B. Donald (Cook Islands) Ltd to go to Penrhyn and buy pearl shell and pearls for them. It seems likely that his underlying motive was to meet Teanua again, but when he did so he no longer found her so attractive. Some time later he sailed for Pukapuka in the schooner Tagua to take charge of A. B. Donald’s neglected store on that island, and became the first white man to settle there for fourteen years. He was searching for solitude so that he could develop his writing talent. Knowing that he could not indefinitely continue an unproductive vocation, he planned to spend five years reading books he had never found time to read before, and to write intensively. If he was still unsuccessful after this period he intended to try and earn a living some other way. The year was still 1924. Ample time was left after his duties in the store, and in 1927, 1928 and 1929 his stories about yachting and life in the South Seas islands were selling to American magazines. During this period he also wrote The Book of Pukapuka, published in

1929. In 1929 Frisbie married Nga (Ngatokorua-a-Mataa), a young and beautiful Pukapuka girl. But shortly afterwards he was longing for more stimulating and intellectual company than could be found on isolated Pukapuka, and he took her with him to Rarotonga. There their eldest child, a boy named Charles, was born. Not long after, Frisbie made a short visit to see his relations in San Francisco, but he was disillusioned with life in the United States and soon returned to Rarotonga, where he found his son, Charles, had been adopted by a great-aunt. Frisbie and Nga returned to Pukapuka, then he took her to Tahiti, again sailing with Andy Thomson. While in Tahiti, Frisbie wrote My Tahiti, which was not published until 1936. His eldest daughter, Florence, known as ‘Johnny’, who was later to become a writer also, was born in Papeete. Then he moved across to the island of Moorea where he established a chicken farm,

which still allowed him time for writing. His idea was that, if all else failed, they would not starve because they could kill

and eat the chickens. 68

Robert

Dean

Frisbie

During this time his second son, Jakey, was born, and Frisbie became infected with filariasis, a disease caused by mosquitoes and which causes horrible swellings of extremities or organs. This disease was then common in the South Pacific, and was not only unsightly, but very painful. In Frisbie’s time there was no known remedy of any value, and he suffered recurrent bouts until his death. Frisbie was asked by a Mr Starr to skipper his twenty-foot yawl on a voyage through the Cook Islands in January 1934. He undertook the job on the understanding that he would ultimately be landed with his family on Pukapuka. On the way they called in at Suwarrow where the four Frisbies stayed three months, exploring the outer islets and around the reef, living most of the time in the old clearing. This was one of the happiest times of Frisbie’s life, for they lived a carefree vagabonding existence, taking the children on their backs and spending several nights out under the stars on one of the distant motus around the reef, living off fish, birds, eggs and coconuts before sailing off reluctantly to their house in Pukapuka. This episode strengthened Frisbie’s desire to return once more to the island where twice he had known great happiness, and which enchanted him as much as it had enchanted others. The next recorded visit to the island was that of H.M.S. Leith, which called for a few hours in 1938 during a cruise around the Cook Islands, and then the following year the yacht Lorna D spent two days there. Captain Cambridge, of the Taipi, who had a great liking for Suwarrow and had grandiose ideas of establishing a tourist industry there, made a brief call in 1941. From Pukapuka Frisbie made another brief visit to the United States, but found it as unattractive as ever. He returned to Pukapuka

and in 1936 and

1937 his fortunes

changed

and

money began to come in from his writing. By 1938 his family had grown by two more girls, but his wife was now seriously ill with tuberculosis and Frisbie took her to Apia, Samoa, for medical treatment. The doctors could do nothing for Nga, and Frisbie, knowing she was dying, took her back to Pukapuka where she died in January 1939. Frisbie’s

69

Sisters in the Sun

third book, Mr Moonlight’s Island, was published in the same year. It was from Captain Cambridge that Frisbie learned in 1942 that the United States had entered the war, and he decided to return home to San Francisco. The first step in this decision was hastened by the fact that Cambridge, in the Taipi, was bound for Suwarrow and that they would have to stay a month there while the Taipi was refitted. So the family, together with a Pukapuka girl named Leeno whom Frisbie had hired as governess, took passage on the Taipi, taking their scant possessions and Frisbie’s library with them. They called in at Nassau Island, or Motu Ngaungau—Lonely Island—to unload a few stores and then headed in a leisurely way for Suwarrow. The journey was enlivened for Frisbie by games of cribbage with Captain Cambridge, who habitually left the management of his vessel to his small crew. At Suwarrow Captain Cambridge unloaded their effects and gave Frisbie a glowing account of the tourist paradise he hoped to establish there. When they landed they found the growth lush and everything overgrown owing to the long absence of any inhabitants. The old trading post was a wreck, but they

made a primitive shelter, and Frisbie built himself a treehouse between two stout tamanu trees. The children, ten-year-old Johnny, Jakey, the nine-year-old son, and the two youngest daughters, Elaine aged six, and Nga the four-year-old, thoroughly enjoyed this new and unspoiled island.

Once the Taipi had sailed to the Northern Cooks for a trading trip expected to last two to three months, the family was

left to its own resources. But they knew that Cambridge intended to return and take them on to Rarotonga.

70

Hurricanes All the violence on Suwarrow has not been man-made. The fury of the elements have also been unleashed in terrific hurricanes which have devastated the island on occasions. The Pacific is so vast that it is said that there is always a storm somewhere within its limits, and Suwarrow has suffered as much, if not more, than any other small area. In the last half century at least two hurricanes have struck the lonely island. Some of the smaller motu (islets) were swallowed by the sea, and the outlines of the others were changed. By a strange coincidence these occurred during each of the two world wars. In 1914, Motu Tou, the second largest island, was so badly swept by the sea during a hurricane that half of it, on the north and west sides, disappeared. Eight hundred coconut palms and many tou trees were destroyed, and the centre of the island was piled ten feet high with uprooted timber. But the islet soon recovered again. There was quite a crowd on Suwarrow when the second hurricane struck in February 1942. The two-man crew of the Vagus had arrived just a day or so before the storm broke, and they had experienced bad weather sailing there. Both were aged about thirty. The ownerskipper, John Pratt, had bought the Vagus and sailed from England just prior to the outbreak of World War II. With a companion he had reached Panama and then his shipmate returned home. Pratt then sailed across the Pacific to Palmerston, in eighty-eight days, never taking in sail even in stormy weather because the heavy canvas was almost too much for one man to handle. 71

Sisters in the Sun

John, who was a clever and successful commercial artist and who loved adventure, had a friend on Palmerston. This was Ronald Powell, whom he had met in England many years before. Ron had worked his way to Mediterranean countries as seaman, carpenter and writer. By the time he had reached the West Indies he had published a book and mastered navigation. For a while he was skipper of a wealthy American’s yacht in Panama. Then he tired of the joys of easy living and struck out for the lesser-known islands of the South Seas. He settled on remote Palmerston, married pretty Elizabeth, and became one of the self-reliant Marsters clan. For about four years he had lived in the Cook Islands before he again met John Pratt. Vagus was a good sea boat: a forty-two-foot doubleender, beamy, with a low freeboard, a strong hull of English oak, and had been designed as a North Sea pilot cutter. She had a single tall mast, a long gaff, teak decking, bronze fastenings and steel stays, as well as a serviceable diesel engine. Two days out of Palmerston, Vagus, with John Pratt and Ron Powell on board, encountered winds of gale force. Black storm clouds darkened the northern horizon, and it seemed that they were running straight into a hurricane. They decided to run for Suwarrow for shelter. Powell knew that Suwarrow had one of the finest lagoons in the South Pacific, and he believed that the atoll was hurricane-free. He knew that a New Zealand Ministry of Works team was at Suwarrow, and that one of their duties was to instal a mooring buoy capable of holding Catalina and Sunderland aircraft in a hurricane. Conditions were so bad when they reached Suwarrow that it took Vagus over four hours to breast the tide rip into the lagoon and make the half-mile journey between the mouth of the reef passage to the south point of Anchorage. As they approached the anchorage an outrigger canoe was paddled towards

them from the lagoon beach.

In the canoe were

a

white man and four children. The man was a spare, sun-dark fellow in his late forties, with a small moustache, deep-set eyes and a square jaw. He was Robert Dean Frisbie, the American

author of South Seas novels. Frisbie, 72

who

had

lived

for many

years

under

primitive

Hurricanes

Islands’ conditions, was impressed with Vagus, especially the provisions, which included an eighteen-months supply of Hormel hams, chickens, corned-beef hash and chili con carne, besides cheese biscuits, dill pickles and Roquefort cheese. Vagus was outfitted with only the best, from running gear and navigational instruments to bedding, food and liquor. They went ashore and met the Ministry of Works party— R. E. Clark, surveyor and party leader, Ellenden, the radio operator, and their three assistants from the Cook Islands: Ngahora, Jimmy Koteka and Theophilo. Clark told them that the mooring buoy had not yet been installed, which meant that the Vagus would have to remain anchored, fully exposed - to northerly weather. In the event of a big blow there would be a considerable risk of the anchor cable being fouled by coral heads which could result in a snapped cable and a lost ship. Pratt and Powell explored Anchorage Island, noting a clearing in the centre where five tall tamanu trees grew in a row. Nearby were the ruins of an old timber cottage. The wood had rotted and the roofing iron was badly rusted. There were also the remains of an old pearling cutter, completely rotten and useless. The following day the weather worsened and the wind shifted more to the north, and the two yachtsmen slept ashore that night. Pratt went with Frisbie to the tree house the writer had built between two closely spaced tamanu trees. The tamanus were big and sturdy, with dark glossy leaves and gnarled trunks. They sloped to the west at forty-five degrees ’ and were easy to climb. Powell didn’t fancy the tree house, for he could hear it creaking and groaning as violent wind gusts shook the tough old trees. Next day the wind swung to the east-north-east and blew at Force Eight on the Beaufort Scale—a fresh gale. Dead branches snapped off trees and there was danger from falling coconuts. The passage was a jumble of high, confused and violent seas that would have meant destruction to any yacht attempting to sail through them. The men went out to the Vagus and let go a second anchor, for they realized they were in for a hurricane. During the night the seas carved a channel right across Vig

Sisters in the Sun

Anchorage Island, from the sea beach to the lagoon, and flooded about five acres at the northern tip. Next afternoon one of the yacht’s anchor cables parted when the wind and seas became even fiercer, but the cutter now lay under the lee of Anchorage Island. Big seas were sweeping round the northern point and rushing down the lagoon beach. They smashed against the coral jetty, covering it six feet deep before surging away inland. Before nightfall they managed to get another 100-pound anchor out on the vessel, and collect four bottles of rum which they took ashore. That night, because of the danger from encroaching seas, they all slept in Frisbie’s tree house. Frisbie stuffed cotton wool into his ears to keep out the noise of the storm and the groaning of the trees. ~ Vagus still tossed at anchor next morning. Fallen trees littered the beach and the standing trees were heavy with roosting seabirds. Maimed and exhausted frigate birds lay around and provided the party with easy meat for lunch. During the night the seas had destroyed much of the jungle and now there was only white coral where hours before had grown thick bush. The waves in the passage were fear-inspiring, forty feet high and breaking in confused fashion. Above them clouds of wind-driven spray obscured all sight of the Gull Islands, normally visible from Anchorage Island. All that day coconut palms crashed down around them. Just before dusk Pratt, Powell and Frisbie went to the lagoon to take a look at Vagus. She was taking a terrible beating. About 7 p.m. the barometer hit a new low of 29.42. Frisbie dressed his children in their warmest clothes and tied twelve-foot lengths of rope around their waists, and one around his own. In the event of their being obliged to take to the trees to avoid drowning, he would use the ropes to tie them in. They all crowded into the beach shack that night, but could not sleep because of the noise of the wind and the breakers. By 4 a.m. on the morning of February 22nd the barometer had fallen to 28.40.

Then a gigantic comber struck the shack and the walls and roof fell in, and they were underwater. Powell got his head above the sea and fought his way clear of the wreckage in total darkness. The wind almost knocked him down as he staggered

74

Hurricanes

away towards the five tamanu trees that stood in a row on the highest point of land. He was caught by another huge wave and hurt by a sheet of roofing iron, but eventually reached safety in a tree, with his legs partly paralysed. In the driving spray and rain he began to shake with cold; and hung on grimly with the waves twenty-five feet higher than normal, clutching at his feet. He thought that there was no possible hope of the others having survived, but by a miracle no one was lost and the neighbouring trees had provided shelter for them all. Piece by piece the rampaging seas tore Anchorage Island to bits. Waves ripped away the underbrush and washed away the coral shingle and sand, leaving only bare rock. The roots of the tamanu now stood exposed like those of a pandanus, but the five trees had been planted so close together that their roots were interlocked. That had saved them from being uprooted and the tree dwellers from being swept to their deaths in the lagoon. Some time later the stout-hearted Ngahora climbed Powell’s tree with an axe and a saw, and made him understand by gesture that he intended to cut off the top of the tree to reduce wind pressure and the chances of the tree being uprooted. No shouted words could have carried in the infernal shrieking of the wind. Powell was secretly worried. The tamanu was fully four feet in diameter where Ngahora intended to cut, and he visualized that heavy mass of falling timber crushing him and the young Frisbie girl who was now also sheltering in his tree. Ngahora struck several blows with his axe. Then the weighty tree top snapped off and was whirled away by the fantastic strength of the wind. It did not seem possible that the storm could worsen. But it did. The wind reached new peaks of force, and even bigger combers swept the almost denuded island from north to south. A great sea rushed at them, a coconut palm and coral boulders visible in its crest. The tamanu tree shook under the impact of the boulders, but the coconut palm speared into the ground before them, angling across the tamanus. Following waves bombarded them, and tons of sand, rock, broken trees and other debris began to pile up behind the coconut palm to 75

Sisters in the Sun

form a natural barricade. The barricade grew to a height of about six feet and its great weight held down the roots of the trees and saved their lives. Frisbie had rum with him, which he dispensed to even the youngest child to keep them going in the bitter cold and terrible conditions. Hours later—which seemed like days—the wind finally began to decrease in force and visibility improved. But it still rained, and rained and rained. Anchorage Island looked like a magazine artist’s conception of a desert island. There were only bare rocks where luxuriant jungle had crowded down to the beaches. The ferocious breakers had cut the former island into three rocky little cays from which rose an occasional wind and sea-blasted palm. The ground was cluttered with tangled masses of uprooted trees, and coral boulders weighing tons apiece, had been wrenched from the reef and hurled ashore by the seas. Ninety per cent of the coconut palms had been destroyed, and one of the tamanus was down. Six small huts which Clark’s party had brought with them had vanished, as had the work boat. The beach shack had also been washed away. When they looked out across

the lagoon they received another jolt. Vagus was no longer there. Her cable had parted and she had been carried across the churning lagoon to destruction on the southern part of the fringing reef some eight miles away. Although most of them had been cut and bruised, nobody had been seriously hurt. They decided to check the water supply while the rain still poured down. The ‘tank’ was really a well, a huge, brick-lined affair below ground level and protected by a galvanized iron

roof, but now both roof and well were buried deep beneath debris. The water in the well was contaminated by salt water. However, the Ministry of Works party had brought four galvanized iron water tanks with them, and each tank had a

capacity of 400 gallons. After a thorough search they located one—the others were probably at the bottom of the lagoon. They cleaned it out and set it up. When the rain ceased there was about 100 gallons in the tank. 76

Hurricanes

Now they could see how badly Suwarrow had been hit. There had been over twenty islets on the thirty miles of reef that encircled the lagoon. Only six, reduced to sandbanks, were left. On one of them a lone coconut palm had somehow survived, and it now appeared to be growing out of the sea. It was a depressing sight, but their escape from death had been little short of miraculous. Had the hurricane raged for a few more hours it is doubtful if any one of them would have survived. There were thirteen of them, eight men, one woman, and four children, and they realized that it would be tough going to keep on living. They could not expect the lagoon fish to return for days, or possibly weeks. They might find a few coconuts buried in the rubbish if they were lucky. Clark and his men had arrived with a two-years’ supply of canned food, but there was none left on the surface. Soon they began to search among the debris, and found scores of dead crabs, birds and rats. They could not hope to bury them all and flies would breed in their decomposing corpses and spread disease. Then Frisbie found the medicine chest under a pile of rubble, and there was a halt in the scavenging to have their wounds cleaned and dressed. Once sodden matches had been dried out “next day they could light a fire, which was a major contribution towards survival. A few seabirds were still around. These perched on the piles of uprooted trees, as dazed and weak as the humans. They made no effort to fly away when approached, and a few of them were caught for the pot. That night they ate their first real meal for days, which put fresh heart into them. Frisbie salvaged some sheets of roofing iron blown off the old timber cottage, and Johnny, his eldest girl, plaited some

pandanus fronds. With these they built a sort of lean-to shelter in the lee of the barricade the seas had piled against the leafless tamanu trees. There the Frisbies slept and sheltered from the sun.

Pratt and Powell found the corner of a sail protruding from a heap of rocks. It took them two days to dig it out of the rubble. This proved to be one of the cutter’s staysails, and they used it to make a primitive sort of tent. They also dug up Ph

Sisters in the Sun

a wooden floor, the sole remains of a Ministry of Works hut, and used this in the tent. Ellenden, the radio operator, found the wreckage of another hut from which he built himself a shelter. One day, when Powell was groping under a pile of debris, his fingers closed over the edge of a can. Carefully he dug it out. The label had gone, but he recognized it as a twelve ounce can of foodstuff, probably corned beef or some other kind of meat. His cry of joy brought the others running, and they burrowed under the wreckage and soon unearthed several more. Clark came bustling over and told them to leave the food alone as it was the property of the Government, but they ignored him. The terrible days lengthened into weeks. There was no escape from the cruel sun which slowly dehydrated their bodies, and no shade except in the crude shelters. The intense glare from the white coral boulders hurt their eyes, and it was agony to walk barefoot. The dwindling water supply was strictly rationed, and each received one cup of tea daily. Each day was just like the last—searing sun, blinding glare, hard blue skies with not a cloud in sight. And the flies! Millions of them bred in the stinking bodies of fish, birds and animals. They were constantly brushing them from their eyes, and soon learned to eat only during the cool dark hours of early morning and late evening. If they attempted to eat at other times the exposed food was quickly covered by a black, crawling mass of flies. Their days were spent in foraging for food. Some reef fish returned, and they began to catch increasing quantities off the ravaged islets to the north of Anchorage. Mature nuts were found among the debris and they ate the white flesh and nutritious uto kernel. Seabirds were killed and much canned food was discovered and devoured in spite of the over-zealous Clark’s protestations that they were stealing government supplies. But the water situation became alarming, and it seemed that it would never rain. Among the various things unearthed was a four-gallon tin of icing sugar, a downpipe, tools and a tin of coffee beans. Using the can, tools and downpipe the ingenious Powell rigged up a rough sort of water distilling plant. The 78

Hurricanes

water tasted terrible on its own, but when they had roasted the coffee beans and added icing sugar it was just palatable and gave them an extra two cups of coffee a day. Some time later Powell discovered that Clark possessed a properly designed water-distilling plant. It had been damaged and Clark swore that it could not be repaired. Powell soon had it in working order, and the water situation was further relieved. Meanwhile, Ellenden had been working doggedly on his radio, which had been damaged. Two and a half weeks after the storm had passed he had it working again and lost no time in sending out an S.0.S. However, there was no way of telling when a relief ship would reach them. There was a war on, and little hope of assistance from naval vessels. The only vessel then operating near the Cook Islands was Captain Cambridge’s ancient and unreliable Taipi. Cambridge was somewhere at sea, heading north for Manihiki, when the hurricane hit Suwarrow. Powell, who knew the Taipi well, considered that if even the edges of the storm had struck the vessel she would have foundered. Powell’s wife, on Palmerston, was pregnant, and he was worried about her. Palmerston had a radio station so she must have heard something about the hurricane. Ellenden flatly refused to send a private message from Powell to his wife telling her that he was fit and well. It was against the rules, he said. The ordeal through which they had passed had shortened tempers and strained relations. Most of the Europeans were morose, and Clark was close to a nervous breakdown. The Polynesians and the Frisbie children were more resilient and formed an encampment of their own where they were soon joined by Powell. Leeno, the girl from Pukapuka, and the gallant Ngahora were soon engrossed in a love affair, while the children spent their time hunting seabirds and catching fish. No rain fell for over a month and the water tank almost dried up. Without the distilling apparatus they would have died of thirst. Then, on March 2__ f

7

-

| ew bal _ i

PART

TWO

Palmerston

12

Palmerston

Island

One of the most interesting, as well as one of the most isolated of the Cook Islands Group is Palmerston Island, and it has a remarkable history. It lies right in the track of the south-east Trade Winds, in latitude 18°04’S, longitude 163°10’W, some 198 miles northeast of Aitutaki, 270 miles north-west of Rarotonga, 280 miles south of Suwarrow and 400 miles east of Niue. Palmerston now consists of six sandy islets totalling 500 acres strung on a coral reef which itself covers 3,600 acres and extends seven miles north and south and five miles east and west. The reef encloses a shallow lagoon of 5,000 acres. The settlement is on the northern part of the western islet, known officially as Palmerston Island, but referred to as Home Island. In the Maori translation of a Cook Islands Gazette notice of 29th April 1902, the island is referred to as ‘Pamati’. The number of islets has varied over the years, depending upon the ravages of hurricanes or the slow growth through years when winds have been normal. The Reverend Gill, about 1875, stated that there were thirteen islets. Until 1934, there were said to be eight islets. According to the Rarotonga Survey Office’s chart of Palmerston, compiled from aerial photostats supplied by New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Department in October 1951, the following ten islets were strung on the square-shaped reef : Palmerston Island (the only one inhabited) Cook’s Island Tom’s Island Primrose Island Suatumu Island

H

113

Sisters in the Sun

Leicester Island Karakerake Island Lee Island Tara i Tokerau Island North Island

In addition the following sandbanks have been named after shipwrecks: Thistle Bank, Spa Bank, Julia Cobb Bank, Kitsap Bank, and there is also Marion’s Bank, named after Marion, the eldest child of William’s second wife, Tepou Tinioni, who was drowned when the ship Araura was lost off Aitutaki. The atoll reaches an extreme height of twenty feet in a sandhill where the islanders take refuge when a hurricane strikes their island. Because it is so low-lying the atoll is a hazard to shipping, particularly at night, and there have been nine wrecks on or near its reef. There is no safe navigable passage for large vessels into the Palmerston lagoon, but there are three boat passages situated close together on the western side of the reef near Palmerston Island. Big Passage has a minimum depth of four feet six inches and is about forty feet wide. Double Passage is dangerous and little used. It is about twenty feet wide, but there are numerous rocks in the channel. Small Passage is most generally used. It is about sixteen feet wide, with three to five feet of water at high water spring tide, and about three feet at low water spring tide. The current changes direction with the tide, except in heavy seas when it runs seaward.

The islanders are skilled boatmen. Fine weather anchorage is available about 400 yards from the reef at its most westerly point, and small schooners can also use an anchorage in nine

fathoms about 100 yards from the reef opposite one of the boat passages.

Strong winds are frequent during the months of January and February, and sometimes these winds reach hurricane force. All the islets are wooded with coconut palms, pandanus and other trees. Papaya (paw-paw) and breadfruit are carefully cultivated, and native arrowroot grows well, as does taro.

Copra is the main commercial product. 114

North

Island

Tamaketa 3

*

“ot et pank ¢

E O

ee

ae

Big Stone 40 *

t ;

'

pank

Probe Bank

4

ee

3

$

:

ys ; oee

43 e

eae

r

seq, Bird Islands & Aaron's Point p John’s Point £ Small Cooks e ‘Karakerake

SCALE

Miles i 3/4 1/2 1/4 0

Compiled

from

t

2

Aerial: Photographs

3 Miles

Sisters in the Sun

Giant clams, the biggest in the Cook Islands, are found in the lagoon, and crayfish and other lagoon and deep-sea fish are plentiful. Sea birds incubate on some of the islets in great numbers—curlews, noddies, boobies, plovers and a kind of parakeet, and frigate birds and tropic birds. The long red tail feather of the bosun bird is highly prized, and the meat of the young bosun birds is also keenly sought after between June and December. Although the climate is warm there is a substantial rainfall, averaging 81.4 inches a year. During 1967, for example, 93.44 inches fell on 166 days, with the greatest fall of 15.08 inches during March and less than an inch for August. Water supplies are dependent upon rain catchment, but are ample owing to the erection by the administration of large concrete tanks.

116

13

The Island where Nobody Wanted to Live In contrast to most of the Cook Islands, the Polynesian history of Palmerston is scanty indeed. According to a tradition narrated by Mr Araitia Tepuretu, M.B.E., of Rarotonga, Palmerston was discovered many generations ago by a Polynesian named Ti, who settled there with a group of his people. They found the island insufficient for their needs as it was a low atoll and did not produce enough food. Ti and his followers had come from Aitutaki, 198 miles away, the nearest of the Southern Cook Group to Palmerston. They did not stay long at Palmerston, and, again under the leadership of Ti, they sailed off in search of a new home. Ultimately they settled in Niue, finding that island adequate to their needs. Palmerston has a Polynesian name, but Mr Tepuretu could not recall what it was. The Reverend Gill, an early L.M.S. missionary in the Cooks and the author of some books about them, stated that Palmerston was known as Avarau. Twelve ancient graves were found on Palmerston Island according to the Reverend Gill, and numerous basalt adzes have been picked up on the island. These adze heads were of different sorts and sizes, and some were embedded in the roots of coconut palms. Thirty or forty of them were found in the central area of the main island. Captain Cambridge donated a fine specimen of these adzes to the Cook Islands Library and Museum in Rarotonga, where it is on display. Drift canoes from Atiu and Aitutaki would fetch up at Palmerston with the south-east Trade winds, and the voyagers 117

Sisters in the Sun

could easily have returned in January and February when the north-west Trades begin. Although the first white man to discover the then uninhabited island was the famous British navigator, Captain James Cook, who visited Palmerston on his second voyage, it is possibly one of the few islands sighted by Magellan on his historic voyage over four centuries ago, and named by him, San Pablo. Ten days after leaving Raiatea (now in French Polynesia) Cook was near an island in the Southern Cooks. Shortly after sunrise on Thursday 16th June 1774, the lookout saw tall coconut palms in the distance, indicating the existence of a low-lying atoll. Soon they could see the islets joined by a reef enclosing the central lagoon. Although Cook sailed along the coast he could find no place to anchor, or any sign of life on the various motu. However, he noted the large number and variety of birds, and the plentiful supply of fish. Cook named the atoll Palmerston in honour of the second Viscount Palmerston who served for forty years in the House of Commons and who was at that time the First Lord of the Admiralty. He was the father of Lord Palmerston who later became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Leaving the island, Cook sailed west by south, and with the help of a strong easterly wind the ship made such good progress that Niue was reached four days later. In less than three years time Captain Cook was back at Palmerston, for as day broke on the morning of Sunday 13th April 1777, the island was sighted again. However, it took until 8 a.m. on the following day before the ships were close enough to shore for Cook to despatch four boats, three from the

Resolution and one from the Discovery, to search for a good landing place. Cook had cattle on board and these animals were almost starving, so it was essential that food was procured for them. Because of the deep water no anchorage could be found for the two large vessels. The boats, however, landed on an islet on the south-east of the atoll, and they returned early in the afternoon with young coconut palms as food for the cattle, and a large quantity of purslane (pokea), a fleshy weed-like plant which Cook called “scurvy grass” as he found it excellent 118

The Island where Nobody Wanted

to Live

in preventing scurvy. The collected food had to be carried half a mile along the reef through waist-high water. Before evening Captain Cook and Captain Clerke went ashore in a small boat. They landed at one of the boat passages, and found that the island was not more than three feet above sea level, with the soil consisting of coral sand and a small amount of dark mould. When Captain Bligh, on return to England after the famous mutiny of the Bounty, told his tale, the British Admiralty determined to bring the mutineers to justice as soon as possible. The Pandora, a frigate of twenty-four guns and 160 men, was commissioned for the task and placed under the command of Captain Edward Edwards, a most cold and cruel character whose reputation ever since has been tarnished by his treatment of his prisoners. The Pandora arrived at Tahiti on 23rd March 1791, and very soon seven of those who had been left on the Bounty when she was seized by the mutineers came on board, and later another seven were captured. Although some of them had not actively participated in the mutiny, Edwards had them all handcuffed and put in close confinement, with their legs in irons. They were all placed in a small deckhouse on the afterpart of the quarterdeck and two armed sentries were stationed upon the roof of the prison with orders to shoot if the prisoners attempted to escape, or even if they tried to communicate with the Tahitian frends who came off to see them. Captain Edwards’s instructions were to search for the mutineers at Tahiti and the neighbouring islands, and he carried out this order in an attempt to find Fletcher Christian and the eight others. On 8th May 1791, the frigate left Tahiti accompanied by a small schooner that some of the mutineers had built in Tahiti. Calls at numerous islands were made, without success. It was then that Palmerston had its next recorded visitor, for the Pandora and the schooner called at Palmerston. Lieutenant Corner was landed with a party on one of the islands of Palmerston and they found a yard and some spars marked with broad arrows, denoting that they were from one of His Majesty’s vessels. The yard was marked “Bounty’s Driver Yard”, and the spars also had “Bounty” marked on 119

Sisters in the Sun

them, from which Edwards deduced that he was close on the track of the men he was looking for. However, these spars were all lying at high-water mark, and they were worm-eaten from long immersion in the sea. They must have been the spars lost when the Bounty was being warped through the shallow lagoon at Tubuai in the Austral group, now part of French Polynesia, and when it became necessary to lighten the ship. Some booms and spars were cast off and moored to a grapnel, but a strong wind cast them adrift and they were lost. The normal set of wind and current could easily have taken them north-west to Palmerston. The discovery of this evidence induced Captain Edwards to cause a most thorough search to be made of all the islets around the Palmerston reef, and while this was being conducted a strong wind forced the Pandora out to sea. Then thick and hazy weather closed in over the area, and the small schooner and a jolly boat which had been launched from the Pandora with a midshipman and four seamen on board became separated from the frigate. Edwards and his men found the schooner when they reached Samarang, in Java, after the Pandora was shipwrecked on the

Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland. But the jolly boat, which was without food except for one piece of salted beef, was never seen again. Perhaps the men returned to Palmerston, to live on the uninhabited atoll until they died. They may even have reached Suwarrow Island, and the three skeletons found there could have been those of British sailors from the Pandora. Or, more likely, as with countless others lost in the vast Pacific, they drifted helplessly until death by hunger and thirst overtook them. Having failed to find the mutineers at Palmerston, Captain Edwards continued his search elsewhere. In 1797 the London Missionary Society’s ship, Duff, was bound for Tonga from Tahiti, and stopped off at Palmerston, which was still uninhabited. On 1st April 1797, after several

attempts had been made to land, one of the Tahitians on board swam ashore. After staying a few minutes on the island he returned and stated that he had taken possession of it for

young King Pomare II of Tahiti. Part of a double canoe was 120

The Island where Nobody Wanted to Live

found lying on the beach, and appeared to have been there for a considerable time. Later, the Tahitians landed and brought off coconuts and caught some of the seabirds. Numerous sharks were seen around the island and some of them were also caught and taken on board the Duff. The first European settlement at Palmerston was an abortive one, but was the first commercial establishment in the Cook Islands. Simeon Lord, a former convict who had been emancipated in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, was a most enterprising merchant who was involved in pioneering the South Pacific sandalwood trade and was prominent in New Zealand trade circles. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a flourishing trade had grown up of supplying béche-de-mer, the edible sea-slug found in abundance in many Pacific Islands’ jagoons, in dried form, to the China market, where it fetched a good price. Fiji was a splendid source for béche-de-mer, but, as Simeon Lord knew, the risks of landing men on those then warlike and cannibal islands were very great. He therefore directed Captain Michael Fodger, who was master of Lord’s brig, Trial, to land Captain John Burbeck on uninhabited Palmerston Island with three other Europeans, plus an American, a Brazilian, and several Tahitians to collect béche-de-mer, shark fins and anything else of commercial value. Burbeck knew the central South Pacific well, having twice visited Tahiti in command of the schooner Venus. Fodger landed the party on 14th July 1811, then sailed away. The following year, on 26th September 1812, Fodger again left Port Jackson (Sydney) on the brig Daphne for Calcutta, via the Eastern Pacific, where he expected to collect sandalwood, pearl shell and other islands’ produce for the Bengal market. Fodger was a vicious scoundrel with no feelings for anyone but himself. On his voyage east he sailed past Palmerston, presumably out of curiosity as to the fate of the men whom he had left there. When seven miles off-shore the vessel was hailed and boarded by a swimmer. He brought the news that Burbeck and another European were dead. Another European had been speared, but was possibly still alive, while he I21I

Sisters in the Sun

himself had been hiding in the bush for the past thirteen months. It thus appeared that trouble had broken out within a few weeks of the party being put ashore. The crew of the Daphne offered to forego their wages and remain on half rations if Fodger would attempt to rescue the wounded European. Instead, Fodger pressed on to the Austral Group. Retribution overtook Captain Fodger when his Tahitian and Tuamotu divers finally murdered him. Another Sydney-side vessel, the brig Governor Macquarie, under Captain R. S. Walker, called in at Palmerston during March or April 1813. No trace of any inhabitants was found, although there was a cache of béche-de-mer in a spoiled state. About 1850, the Merchant of Venice, a ship belonging to J. Dunnet, called at the island and found there four white men, headed by Jeffrey Strickland. They were starving, and had probably been employed by a merchant to collect béchede-mer and turtles for the Chinese market. These men made arrangements with Captain Bowles, master of the Merchant of Tahiti, to give them passage to Rarotonga. In return they passed over to him their ‘rights and titles’ to the island. After the death of Dunnet, Captain Bowles is said to have passed these ‘rights’ to John Brander, by whom he was then employed. Brander was a Scottish planter and trader who had settled in Tahiti and had married into the Tahitian royal family. Brander then placed a man named Sweet on Palmerston,

again presumably to collect and cure béche-de-mer. Another account states that he decided to establish a coconut plantation. Sweet tired of the lonely life and demanded to be taken

off. In 1860 the Rev. William Gill met a numerous family on the island of Mangaia in the southern Cook Islands, who had

drifted from Fakaofo, one of the Tokelau Islands, via Nassau Island in the northern

Cooks

and Palmerston,

a distance of

1,250 miles to the south-east. There is no indication as to how long they stayed on each of the two intermediate islands, and whether they found them occupied.

122

14

William Marsters Founds

a Dynasty Sweet’s demand to be taken off led to the arrival at Palmerston of William Marsters, the man who was to dominate the island in his lifetime and whose character has indelibly affected Palmerston ever since. There has been so much incorrect information and so many tall tales told of Marsters in various articles and books that today it is difficult to ascertain the true facts. According to one account William Richard Marsters was born in Birmingham, England, in 1821, and brought up by his grandmother in Leicestershire. Other accounts say that he was a Gloucestershire farm boy. At the age of eighteen he ran away to sea, serving for some time in whaling ships, and eventually went ashore in California to join the gold rush for a time. He is said to have been successful in gold-digging, but could not have stayed long, as in 1850 he was again serving on a vessel in the South Pacific Ocean. He jumped ship at Penrhyn Island in the northern Cooks in that year. At that time, two years before Christianity came to Penrhyn, the islanders had a bad name among seamen for being savages. But Marsters seems to have fitted into the local pattern and soon married the chief’s daughter. He did not remain all the time at Penrhyn but roamed the central Pacific, visiting the other Cook Islands and Samoa. At Penrhyn he also took another wife, a cousin of his wife’s, and had two daughters. Stories of how he arrived at Palmerston vary. Usually it is stated that he arrived there in 1862 with his two wives, and

was shortly joined by another woman whom he also took as his wife. 12%

Sisters in the Sun

A more detailed account says that he went to Palmerston in 1860 with a gang of Penrhyn and Paumotu islanders to plant coconuts for John Brander. Although the contract was for one year, the entire party was left on the island for six years before a ship from Tahiti brought Brander’s son-in-law with news that Brander had died some years before. Marsters presented the newcomer with a bill for his labour and for stores which he had purchased with his own gold from whaling ships, which at this time were frequenting this area. Being either unable or unwilling to pay the bill, the son-in-law agreed to Marsters taking over the ownership of the island as settlement. Brander was said to have a lease from the Fiji Government. A third account is to the effect that Captain Hart of the Aorai, a ship belonging to Brander, found Marsters destitute on Hervey Island (Manuae) and took him to Palmerston to replace Sweet, landing him with “his woman and one or two children” on 8th July 1863. This date has been verified by the United Kingdom Commonwealth Relations Office on the basis of the ship’s log. It is said that Marsters went ashore with a mixed labour force of Penrhyn and Puamotu Islanders and a twelve months’ contract to collect béche-de-mer. According to Ned Marsters, his grandson, old William left Penrhyn with his wife and went to Samoa, where his daughter was drowned. This fatality caused the family to return to Penrhyn and from there he went to the neighbouring island of Manihiki to recruit labourers whom he eventually took to Suwarrow. From Suwarrow they were taken to Manuae where the schooner left them and sailed to New Zealand to obtain provisions. After the schooner returned to Manuae Marsters made a return journey to Aitutaki, and was then taken, with his two wives and John Fernandez and his wife, to Palmerston on the Aordai. Marsters was a practical and hard-working man, a competent shipwright and house carpenter. He planted coconuts which provided his large family with food and drink and also gave them an income from copra. There was no room on Palmerston for slackers and any men who proved to be slackers were expelled. The women became skilled weavers of native hats

124

William Marsters Founds a Dynasty

and mats, and the quality of their products has made them famous. Shortly after Marsters reached Palmerston the sailing ship, Annie Laurie, was wrecked on the reef, and from the timbers of this and subsequent wrecks Marsters built a house as strong as a fort, a house that successfully withstood the hurricanes and storm-driven seas that inundated the island from time to time. He used eighteen inch by eighteen inch ship’s timbers as combined foundations and wall studs, sinking them down to water level at fourteen feet, and bolting six inch by twelve inch and six inch by eighteen inch timbers to them to form the walls. Before the wall studs were sunk into the ground they were charred to preserve the timber. His rafters were as massive as his wall timbers, and he used ten inch by two inch planking for sarking and nailed roofing iron on top of that. This house is used today as a combined storeroom and dispensary, and the original roofing iron, although badly rusted, still serves. Not all the timber was used for housing. The surplus was loaded on to a schooner and sent to Brander in Tahiti. Marsters waited in vain to hear of its receipt from Brander, but no word came. One day William Marsters found a ship’s anchor half-buried in the centre of the island. Thinking that this might be a marker for hidden treasure he dug down under it—but discovered nothing. Considering the matter carefully, it occurred to him that the anchor might have another significance, that it might have been planted as a claim to the island. He therefore carried it to the shore and dumped it in the lagoon. Later, in 1865, Jeffrey Strickland returned to Palmerston and claimed the island by virtue of his former occupation and the fact that he had held the lease before Brander. Marsters asked him if he could prove this. Strickland said that he had buried an anchor at a certain spot, but when they went there the anchor was non-existent. By his forethought, Marsters had saved himself a great deal of legal trouble. In 1867, John Lavington Evans, a wandering seaman-trader, who was also associated with Suwarrow, applied to the United

125

Sisters in the Sun

Kingdom government for a licence to cultivate Palmerston for a period of seven years. This licence was granted that year on the strength of Evans’s statement that the atoll was uninhabited. Evans never used his licence, but it remains historically important in that enquiries made as a result of his application revealed that Palmerston had not been claimed previously by any other Power. The granting of Evans’s licence thus became the first formal claim to Palmerston on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. It is said that Brander also applied for a licence on Palmerston in 1867, but that it was refused on account of Evans’s previous application. Nothing more seems to have been heard about the island until

1887 when

a Mr

Darsie, who

had married

Brander’s

widow, hearing that the island had become a valuable property owing to the work done by Marsters, wrote to Marsters staking a claim to the island through his (Darsie’s) wife. Marsters refused to admit this claim, and Darsie threatened to invoke the aid of the French government to expel Marsters, who thereupon applied to the United Kingdom government for a licence. A temporary licence was issued to him on 12th May 1888, it being held that the licence previously issued to Evans had lapsed. On hearing that this licence had been issued, Darsie protested to the United Kingdom government and sought to establish his own prior claim by virtue of his wife’s inheritance through Brander. A good deal of argument then ensued as to

whether or not Marsters held the island as an employee of Brander, or whether his arrangement with Brander was merely to sell exclusively to him the surplus produce of the island.

Darsie claimed that there was a written agreement which put Marsters in the position of employee to Brander, but was unable to produce it. In the course of the correspondence it emerged that up to 1870 Brander’s ships had called regularly at Palmerston at six-monthly intervals, but that from 1870 to 1878, they called only three times and thereafter not at all. On the evidence it was held that Marster’s predecessors on the island had never established any legal rights in it and that in equity Marsters was entitled to the licence he had asked for. 126

William Marsters Founds a Dynasty

Thus in 1892 a licence was granted to him to replace the temporary one of 1888. Although in most accounts it is stated that his first and second wives were sisters, this is not correct—the first three wives were cousins. William Marster’s second wife was named Tepou Tinioi, and she had six children, the eldest of whom, Marion, was drowned when the Araura was lost off Aitutaki. The girl Marsters married at Penrhyn was Sarah Akakaingaro, who was to be the mother of nine of his children. During the next few years she travelled with him to various Pacific islands where he was employed as an overseer of native labour. Their first child was a daughter, Ann, who at the age of two years was drowned in the Vai Sinane River, in Samoa. Tragedy struck again when their second child, another daughter named Elizabeth, died on Manuae, in the Hervey Islands of the Southern Cook Group, at the age of one year. Marster’s first son, Joel, was born in Palmerston in 1860, according to family tradition, but other authorities say the year was 1863. When Joel grew up he found he could not get

on with his disciplinarian father. Neither did he get on well with his brother, William, who spent most of his life on Palmerston, interspersed with years at sea. So Joel moved on to Aitutaki after being at sea early in life. In Aitutaki he married a woman by the name of Takapu, and spent the remainder of his life there. The second son, William, who was to succeed to the head position in the clan, was born in 1862, and in many accounts he is stated to be the eldest son. Joel is said to have died in 1918, and thus outlived his father by nineteen years. The story of the third wife is a complicated one. She was a cousin of the other two wives, and was named Matavia. While serving on whaling ships, William Marsters had as a shipmate a man variously described as a ‘““Hindu—Portuguese”’ from Goa,

a “Portuguese

sea-cook’”,

and

a “native

of the

Fernando Noronha Islands off the east coast of Brazil’. By all accounts he was dark-skinned, and was probably a Goanese, for many seamen came from the tiny Portuguese enclave of Goa on the east coast of India. This man, named Jean Baptiste Fernandez (or Fernandos), 127

Sisters in the Sun

had become friendly with Marsters, and when he again met his old companion on Manuae he decided to jump ship and join him. Soon he became attracted to Matavia and married her at Aitutaki. When Marsters went to Palmerston he asked Fernandez to accompany him, and the two families moved to their new homes. At Palmerston Fernandez and Matavia had a child named Mahuta, who was known to be their true son. It is recorded that Brander sent ships regularly to Palmerston at six-monthly intervals for several years after Marsters settled there, and it is possible that Fernandez signed on one or more of these vessels and thus spent much time away from Palmerston. His wife had three more children, and as they were fairskinned he suspected that Marsters was their father. On the last occasion when he returned home to find his wife was pregnant he was furious, as he knew he was not the father, and he had a terrific row with Marsters. He then abandoned his wife, went to Atiu where he married again, and ultimately about 1895 he was drowned in Avatiu Harbour, Rarotonga, while drunk. He was also known by the name of John Parekaa. On Fernandez’s departure Marsters then took Matavia as his third wife. Apart from the oldest son, Mahuta, she had seven chidren, who appear on the official records as Marsters. In most accounts it is merely stated that Fernandez abandoned his wife, who was then taken by Marsters. Very little is known about Marsters’s fourth wife, who is

usually not mentioned. She was Arehata and they had one daughter named Ritia, who married William Ford, a trader of Penrhyn. The family was thereafter known as Ford, and is not included in the Marsters family. From his four wives William raised a family of seventeen children, who in turn produced fifty-four grandchildren, and

by the fifth generation they had reached over one thousand. From the three wives have come three branches of the Marsters family, and each still has its own head even today. Sometimes the families—as is normal—have

their differences,

but usually they work very closely together for the good of the island as a whole. 128

Island buildings: original

house,

(top) The church and water tank; (bottom) built

by the first William

Marsters

and

the

the only

building to retain its position during the 1926 hurricane

A Palmer

ston W

roman huskin g coconuts

William Marsters Founds a Dynasty Apart from a subsistence existence on the island, Marsters lived by what he could sell to and purchase from visiting vessels. The items he found a sale for were firewood, salt pork, dried fish, coconut oil and fresh foods. The firewood was cut from tamanu wood by his sons, and stacked near the landing place in cords ready for the first purchaser. Fish were, and are, particularly plentiful in the waters of the lagoon and offshore at Palmerston. Despite the story that Marsters was picked up destitute on Manuae there is another account that he had four jars of gold nuggets with him on Palmerston. He used some of this gold for the purchase of supplies from passing whaling ships, and for the payment of the native labourers. Fernandez manufactured earrings and finger rings from some of the remaining gold. At the end of the twelve months’ contract, the Penrhyn and Paumotu Islanders were returned home on passing whalers which were frequenting the Central and South Pacific at that time. The Rev. Gill who visited Palmerston at an unknown date (possibly in 1875) reported that Marsters was a short, well set-up man of about sixty years, very active, but with an uneasy expression of countenance. He stated in his book Jottings in the Pacific that Marsters always carried a loaded revolver with him. “A few years previously a plot had been laid to kill Marsters while asleep and to drown his children

in the lagoon. The women were engaged in the plot. . . . This may have accounted for the presence of two large fierce dogs. Marsters’s word is law, and must be implicitly obeyed.” This may not have been an imaginary danger, as about this time three white men were murdered at Suwarrow by their native companions. Because of the threat to his life Marsters turned to religion, and invited the London Missionary Society to send a missionary to Palmerston. Before this he and Fernandez had built a school which was taught by old William, and this building also served as the first church. The missioner who was sent by the London Missionary Society was a Cook Islander from Penrhyn named Akarongo, who was probably trained in the Mission School at Rarotonga. Akarongo performed the double role of i 129

Sisters in the Sun

schoolteacher and parson. When he finally left Palmerston, William Senior picked three of his sons, two from one branch and one from another, to take the services. These were William Marsters, James Marsters and Tom Marsters. William Marsters was a patriarchal figure, and he raised his family on the Bible and a discipline of plenty of hard work. Because of the limited livelihood available from the land itself, it was necessary to rely largely on fish from the lagoon and the open sea. The boys and the girls thus soon became skilled seamen and learned to handle boats, both sailing and rowing, early in life. Some of them later reported that they had often been made to row nine miles across the lagoon and back before breakfast. From the beginning he would not allow his children to speak any other language than English, with the result that today the Marsters family speak with a distinctive old English (Gloucestershire) accent. On Palmerston Island itself English is still the primary language, but in the last three generations they have learned Cook Islands Maori as well, for otherwise they would be at a disadvantage when they emigrate to the other Cook Islands, where Maori is the main language of the people. Because of isolation, marriage of the seventeen sons and daughters of the family presented a problem. William wisely refused to allow the marriage of a full brother and a full sister, but it was allowed between half-brother and half-sister. When

opportunity offered marriage took place with Cook Islanders from nearby islands, particularly from Penrhyn, Manihiki, Rakahanga and Aitutaki. One of the last official acts of William Marsters Senior was to notify the Cook Islands Gazette of 16th January 1899 that he had severed all business transactions with G. S. Browne and the Cook Islands Trading Company, and had bound himself

until further notice in all trading transactions,

buying or

selling, to Thomas Harries, Trader of Rarotonga. William died at last on 22nd May 1899, mourned by his many children and grandchildren, and he was given a big

funeral. Later, over his grave, was erected the grandest headstone on all Palmerston Island. 130

William Marsters Founds a Dynasty

He left behind a legacy of little money but strong ideals among his descendants, and the influence of no man in the Pacific has persisted so long or so strongly as that of this onetime whaler and gold-digger who turned his talents to cultivating a large family and a lonely island.

IZ

15

Trouble in Paradise Within two years of the death of the patriarch there was trouble on Palmerston Island, caused by the uncertainty about who was going to be the new leader, and of the place of each of the families on the island. Knowledge of the trouble reached Rarotonga when the German warship, Cormoran, arrived at Rarotonga from Samoa via Palmerston. When the courtesies had been completed Captain Grapow handed Lieutenant-Colonel W. E. Gudgeon, the British Resident, a letter in German from himself and one in English from William Marsters. The latter read : Cormoran Palmerston Island 17th August 1901 I beg the captain of the German cruiser Cormoran to tell the Governor of Fiji the following thing: I am living on this island together with two brothers of my own and fourteen halfbrothers of the other two mothers. We three brothers are in a quarrel with the fourteen half-brothers. The latter want to take possession of the island and send us three away, though we think ourselves the real and first owners of the island from my father, who took possession of the island. He died two years ago. About three months ago there came a schooner to the island and brought a lot of guns for these people. I told the skipper not to bring these guns ashore, as there was no need of guns at all on the island. I succeeded in preventing him from taking the guns ashore, and the schooner left the island. About one week later

on there arrived another schooner, who stayed here one day to get copra. One of these half-brothers, called John, went on board

the schooner and went on to Tahiti, to buy something as he said. As he has no business at all in Tahiti, and as, therefore, I suppose he has gone to buy other guns to quarrel again, I beg the Gover-

132

Trouble in Paradise

nor of Fiji to send us help as soon as possible, and to settle the question about the heritage. William Marsters.

Gudgeon acted quickly, even though the letter purported to be addressed to the attention of the Governor of Fiji. John Marsters was at Rarotonga at the time, and the British Resident gave him a stern warning to beware how he disturbed the peace of the islands. He also took the precaution of writing to Captain Macalister of H.M.S. Torch, at Tahiti, asking him to call at Palmerston, although he did not anticipate that there would be any trouble there unless one of the wandering French schooners called at the island and landed liquor, as was their custom. He reported to the Governor of New Zealand that during May r1gor the Reverend Mr Lawrence had called at Palmerston and found the people suffering from the effects of spirits landed by Johnson, a Tahitian trader, who had already been fined for landing liquor at Penrhyn. Gudgeon stressed that this demoralization of the islands in the British Pacific could not be prevented so long as these Tahitian traders were allowed to visit any of the islands without entering at Rarotonga and clearing therefrom. At that time any schooner could land arms or spirits unchecked. The New Zealand Gazette No. 44 contained a notice appointing Rarotonga as the port of entry and clearance of ships visiting the islands of the Cook Group as from 24th September I90I, so quick action was taken on Gudgeon’s advice to halt importation of arms and liquor to the outer islands. Gudgeon, writing to the New Zealand Governor, Earl Ranfurly, from Rarotonga on 27th September 1901, informed him that he had left Nive on 12th September and had arrived at Palmerston on the 16th. He found the sixty members of the Marsters family living in apparent peace, but anxious that one of them should be appointed to govern the island and act as magistrate. After some discussion, during which the will of the late William Marsters was produced, showing that the patriarch desired that his eldest son, Joel, should be appointed chief of the island, Gudgeon endorsed the will by appointing him as ° agent to the British Resident, and as Magistrate for Palmerston. 133

Sisters in the Sun

This decision, Gudgeon reported, seemed to satisfy all parties, who evidently feared that the second son, William Marsters Junior, might be appointed. On leaving the island that same day the party experienced a very strong gale which meant that they had to beat against it for nine days for almost 400 miles to cover the 270 miles between Palmerston and Rarotonga. The Cook Islands Gazette of 30th September 1901, carried a notice appointing Joel Marsters as government agent and magistrate for Palmerston from 16th September 1901. Then, in the Gazette of 29th April 1902, his appointment as magistrate is shown as dating from 7th April 1902, which was when it had been approved by the Governor of New Zealand. The same Gazette notified that the following residents had been appointed as members of the Palmerston Island Council: Joel Marsters, president; members, John Marsters, Thomas Marsters, Andrew Marsters, Turn Marsters and James Marsters. Joel’s original appointment was without salary and was made at the same time as three others for various islands in the group.

134

16

Palmerston’s Land Problems The ownership of land is a problem in any country, and it is magnified many times in a small Polynesian island, for there is nobody more attached to his land or aware of the prestige it brings than the Polynesian or part-Polynesian. The records of the land court in any Polynesian country abound in detailed decisions, and as generation succeeds generation the land rights often become so complex that it is difficult to obtain agreement as to how it is to be developed. There is constant reference to land quarrels in the correspondence between the Cook Islands and New Zealand in the early years of this century, but this is not apparent in the case of Palmerston. Yet, beneath the surface, there boiled fierce resentment in Palmerston, in many quarters. While old William Marsters was alive his autocratic tendencies submerged any opposition to his dictates, but there was growing up a group of three families which needed more and more land for their sustenance. Fortunately, a student of land problems in the central South Pacific, Dr Ronald G. Crocombe, made a study of this tiny island and wrote a paper entitled Land Tenure in a Test Tube: the Case of Palmerston Atoll. The early history of the land has already been told, and it is amazing in how many ways the influence of William Marsters reaches through a century to affect his descendants.

Nowhere is this as important as in land holdings. Even today inheritance from Marsters through one of the three branches forms the basic tenet of land rights on the island, and these rights stem from the so-called ‘laws’ which he enunciated to settle any disputes between his descendants over the ownership of the 357 acres in the six islets and the tiny sand cays that make up Palmerston. 135

Sisters in the Sun

Although some of the decisions which are made today reflect the general tenor of customs and laws of the Cook Group, these have not necessarily the force they have in the other fourteen inhabited Cook Islands. In this, as in other ways, Palmerston has an individuality of its own. Marsters divided the land into segments which were allotted to each of his three families, and they in turn subdivided certain lands used for specific purposes among themselves, usually through the control of the chief person of each lineage. Marsters seems to have been a fairly unlettered man, yet the ‘laws’ which he made have formed a firm basis on which to evolve more technical ownership. Here was a community starting from scratch as far as laws and land ownership were concerned, for the outside world had little impact on them. Since 1898 a complex family land tenure system has grown up and been accepted. At first the Marsters worked the island as a unit under old William, and he shared out any benefits, monetary or otherwise. Not until his sons grew up and married and wanted more of their own belongings and sources of sustenance did any worries arise. Even today no survey has ever been conducted to ascertain land rights on Palmerston, nor has there been a call from any of the islanders to have such a survey undertaken. Unlike the other islands, there is no written record of ownership, and the various sections are bounded either by coconut palms in double rows, or by puka trees. William divided the land area, with the exception of the settlement, into straight sections stretching from the beach on the ocean side to the lagoon beach. Inside the boundaries of lineage land, the family plots are simply marked by artificial soil ridges, or by stones, footpaths or trees. But the beaches, lagoon and reef do not belong to any particular person, but to the population as a whole. Ten acres of land were set aside for government purposes, such as a school and a radio station, but this has not been defined, and the facilities have been built on lineage land. When shipping, particularly whalers, which had been the first source of William Marster’s income dwindled, the family turned to copra as a substitute, and this has remained the 136

Palmerston’s

Land Problems

Marsters’ main source of income until today. At first the old man handled the whole income, but later he had to grant his sons half the proceeds of the copra he produced, on the understanding that, in turn, the sons gave their mothers one third of their shares. Later, the sons of each family combined to handle the copra-making for their areas of land on a communal basis, still giving their mothers their shares. Even today by far the largest area of land is planted in coconuts. Problems have arisen over the distribution of profits, and in 1926 the Governor General of New Zealand ruled that shares must be strictly divided equally among all in the family, regardless of age, sex or status. As he grew old William realized that there was no one who would have the same powers as he had possessed over his family, and he determined to change the system from one of production rights to ownership of the land itself. This was particularly necessary as members of the second and third lineages made no secret of their fear that the members of the first wife’s family would oust them from Palmerston once he was dead. Therefore, in 1898, he carried out a partition of the land areas of Home Island, dividing them into three approximately equal divisions, and after his death the heads of the three . families partitioned the remainder of the islands. Once he had made the division, he gave his eldest son of the first family, then living on Palmerston, the first choice of one of the three portions. When the time came to divide the second islet, it was the second wife’s oldest son who had the choice, then the choice on the third islet went to the third family, and so on until it was all divided. A special exception was made in the case of Primrose Islet which was shared between two unmarried daughters, while a third unmarried daughter obtained Primrose Bank as her portion. This worked out well, as the three girls were each from a different lineage. As mentioned elsewhere, the land area of Palmerston, as of Suwarrow, is subject to violent fluctuations due to hurricanes, and this factor led to the ‘law’ that the original boundaries must remain. For example, the small area of Tom’s Islet was

washed away by a storm to a new position in front of the 137

Sisters in the Sun

land of another lineage. It remained the property of the original owner, and was treated not as a new accretion, but as the removal of old land to a new site. Over the decades many of the family have moved away from Palmerston Island and there have been accessions, mainly through marriages to local girls. These have created problems as to ownership of land on the atoll. As in most families, quarrels broke out over the division of money, and in the second family dissension was so rife that by 1922 it became necessary for a division of the land held by that family into six portions, one each for the four sons and the two daughters. But the daughters married outside Palmerston, and so, by 1959, the six portions were held by three resident sections only. Their shares were unequal, and some of those who would otherwise have suffered took copra from some members of the first family, to whom they were linked by adoption. Following discussions it was agreed that in 1946 all the three families would pool their copra resources and all resident descendants would take equal shares. However, this arrangement lasted only until 1946, after which the second family withdrew. The other two families continued the pooling arrangement of the work and the income until more members of the third family returned to the island, and then each went its separate way once more. A serious dispute flared up in 1947 over the sharing of receipts from copra among the second and third lineages, and the problem was referred to the Resident Commissioner of the Cook Islands, based in Rarotonga. He insisted that each member, regardless of age, sex or status, should receive equal shares —as the first family had done since 1926. Although this ruling was followed it, in turn, led to trouble in the second family, in which some individuals owned more land and more coconuts than the others. They cut just enough nuts to equal the output of the more crowded families and refused to allow the latter to harvest more nuts from their uncut share. This resulted in production being lower than it need have been.

A custom dating back to early times has been the imposition of a rahui, a prohibition on the cutting of coconuts for speci178

Palmerston’s

Land Problems

fied purposes for a limited period of time. Details of these rahui vary from island to island and, in the early days of New Zealand administration, their imposition and stated lengths of times were matters normally for the island councils to decide. These decisions were printed in the pages of the Cook Islands Gazette, above the signatures of the chairman of the island council and of the resident commissioner. As usual, Palmerston Island was the odd man out. Although they wisely ordered a rahui when it seemed appropriate, they did so without referring to Rarotonga, and without formal notification in the Gazette. Tubers such as puraka, taro and sweet potatoes, and also bananas, are grown in artificially constructed pits which are carefully tended by family members. The land utilized for the growing of arrowroot, which takes several years to mature, is regarded as personal land belonging to the person who plants it, rather than lineage land, as in the case where coconuts are cultivated. But even in coconut-bearing lineage land there are exceptions, particularly when a child is born. The placenta is buried and a coconut is planted on this spot, and sometimes another one where the withered umbilical cord is buried. These trees are the sole property of that child. Also, two coconut palms are set aside for the personal use of each person for food and drink. Other trees which grow on Palmerston belong to the person who plants or inherits them, although it is normal to seek permission from the family head to plant them unless it is done in a pit already owned by the person concerned. House sites are selected from unused lineage land on approval of the family head, and a hedge is planted round it. This site then belongs to him and can be disposed of with his other property. Two important documents relating to land on Palmerston are the Crown Lease of 31st December 1941, and the Cook Islands Amendment Act, 1954. The 1941 document leased the atoll to the then heads of the three family groups and their survivors, which gave them the inference that non-residents had no rights on the island, but there was a later section of nS?

Sisters in the Sun

the lease which stated that the lessor granted exclusive rights to the lessees and ‘‘others, the issue of William Marsters deceased”. The Act was more specific. It vested the atoll in those descendants of William Marsters who were then living on the island. It, however, gave rights to those who were there in 1954, and to their descendants who subsequently left the island. Confusion could arise, though, as it was stated that the land would be held under “Native customary tenure’, which has never been defined, but which would seem to give rights to those normally living there but absent in 1954. Some persons have returned since and claimed their land without any friction.

Although there have been problems, they were not as great as would have been the case had all members of the families remained on Palmerston. Only one in eight is still a resident. Those who have emigrated still look on themselves as Palmerston Islanders and retain a fierce pride in their descent from Marsters and their origin in this unique island community.

140

17

South Seas Elopement Both Palmerston and Suwarrow are linked in a story of a South Sea elopement. The young Maori men of the Pacific Islands, like young men elsewhere, sometimes feel an overpowering urge to roam when they feel at odds with their environment, or when they quarrel! with their relatives. This has happened since primitive Polynesians, then the most daring navigators in the world, began to explore the vast Pacific centuries before Columbus discovered America. They would build an outrigger canoe, or, after the arrival of the Europeans, sometimes steal a whaleboat, throw in a few provisions, and, without knowledge of navigation and lacking instruments or charts, sail lightheartedly for another island some hundreds or thousands of miles away. Optimism was in — their hearts on leaving, but this was often followed by prayers to Tangaroa, the god of the sea, for assistance. Sometimes a family group, or a group of families, would sail together. It is far less common to hear of young men sailing away with their unmarried girl-friends, but this happened on at least one occasion in the Cook Group. The saga started at 2 a.m. on the Monday morning of 9th August 1920. The inhabitants of Omoka, the larger village of Penrhyn Atoll in the northern Cooks, slept peacefully, unaware that the first step of a daring double-elopement was already under way. Four young Cook Islanders, led by James Marsters, were in the act of stealing a whaleboat from the village wharf. The boat, twenty-four-feet long and with a beam of seven feet six inches, already had mast and rudder in position. Jimmy and

his girl-friend, Tepou, with his friends Samuela and his girl, 141

Sisters in the Sun

Urau, were about to sail for Suwarrow Atoll, over 200 miles south-west of Penrhyn. They tossed their few possessions into the boat, the girls’ bundles of clothing, a sleeping mat and two pillows, a sharpened harwood stick for husking coconuts, and an iron bar to crack them open with, and a piece*rof pearl shell for scraping out the ‘meat’, They had nothing else—not even matches or a bushknife. Young Jimmy Marsters, like most of the male members of his clan, had spent some years at sea; and, with the optimism and ignorance of youth, believed himself capable of navigating without the aids of compass and charts. He sailed the boat to the nearby reef islet of Molokai, then a leper settlement, and the adventurers loaded the boat with 240 green and ripe coconuts. Five gallons of drinking water were obtained from Tokerau, another reef islet, then they sailed through Sekelangi reef passage and into the open Pacific. Jimmy and his girl were Palmerston Islanders, and were considered by the elders of the Marsters clan to be too closely related to marry—a contrast to the earlier days of the clan when such marriages were common on Palmerston. When the decision was announced Jimmy argued against it, but the elders were adamant, so the couple left their island in May 1920 for Penrhyn, where they intended to live with friends. They sailed on the Cook Islands’ trading schooner Tiare Taporo. During the voyage north the vessel called at Suwarrow Atoll, and Jimmy was impressed by the quantities of fish in the huge lagoon, the number of coconut palms on Anchorage Island, and the fact that at that time Suwarrow was again uninhabited. The crew told him that only occasionally was the lonely island visited by copra makers and gangs of pearlshell divers. Like almost all visitors, he fell in love with the lonely spot and wanted to return. At Penrhyn, Jimmy and Tepou soon discovered that their relatives there were just as much opposed to their proposed marriage as the Palmerston people. They became friendly with Samuela and his girl, Urau, who also lived in Omoka and had troubles similar to their own. Hearing enthusiastic accounts of

142

South Seas Elopement

Suwarrow from Jimmy, Samuela suggested that they make a double elopement to that island, where they could live, unmolested, an idyllic existence on coconuts and fish. After a year’s stay they would return to Penrhyn by which time, they hoped, objections to their marriages would have been forgotten. As Jimmy steered the boat down Penrhyn’s western side he noticed that Samuela and Urau were arguing in the bow, but paid no further attention to them. When they were a quarter of a mile off the small reef passage of Taruia Ava, Samuela and Urau jumped overboard and swam for the passage. Jimmy and Tepou, scared of being left alone, tried -to sail the boat for the land, but the wind was against them and they made no headway. Before long they were too far from shore to think of swimming, and they knew that the ocean around Penrhyn was overpopulated with hungry sharks. They lost heart and lowered the sails and let the boat drift. Dawn light revealed Penrhyn many miles away, and the atoll remained in sight all day although they continued to drift away from it. The following morning all signs of land had disappeared, and Jimmy made sail, intending to make landfall at either Manihiki or Rakahanga, two islands about twenty-five miles apart. Should they miss these islands, he reasoned, they stood a good chance of fetching up at Pukapuka, as all three islands lie west-south-west of Penrhyn. But without a compass to aid him he became hopelessly confused, and, as later events proved, he sailed north-west into an empty ocean. Five days passed without sighting land so Jimmy altered course, sailing into the sun with diminishing hopes of now reaching Penrhyn. Another seven days went by with nothing to break the monotony of a glaring sun and the heaving blue wastes of the Pacific. Their fresh water ran out and they began to live on a daily ration of three coconuts. Jimmy kept check of the passing days by making marks on the boat, and during the early morning of Sunday, 22nd August, they received their first visitor. Tepou, sleeping on the bottom boards, was awakened by the shaking and jerking of the boat. She sat up and looked over the

143

Sisters in the Sun

side of the gunwale at a huge blue shark, several feet longer than the boat. The brute was rubbing its skin free of parasites against the hull. After about half an hour the thirty-foot shark attacked the rudder, snapping at it several times. It then swam away and disappeared. At midday that day Jimmy began to steer north under the mistaken impression that they were heading for Malden Island. He refused to admit, even to himself, that he was hopelessly lost. Three days later their second visitor, a booby, alighted on the boom and disgorged two flying fish. They ate the fish raw and caught the booby. But as they had no means of making fire they reluctantly allowed the bird to escape. By this time Jimmy and Tepou rarely spoke and spent most of the time dozing as the boat drifted with wind and tide. They were reconciled to their position, but deep within them hope still glowed dimly. No rain had fallen since they’d left Penrhyn and the coconut fluid failed to quench their rapidly increasing thirst. Then a squall hit them and Jimmy refilled their five gallon water can. Three nights later Tepou was awakened by a fish leaping about in the boat. It was a silver-blue ra’i about eighteen inches long, a type of mackerel that made a succulent meal, even when eaten raw. Four more sun-searing days followed. Their water ran out again. Then a severe gale hit them—a storm that lasted two nights and two days. Waves continually swamped the boat, making sleep im-

possible and compelling them to bail for their lives, but the rain gave them fresh drinking water. Several days later they saw an island.

They had been at sea for twenty-eight days and had only sixty nuts left when the island appeared above the rim of the horizon. It was many miles away and upwind, and Jimmy realized that they’d sailed past it in the darkness. As they sailed closer they saw a crowd of savages running down the beach. They wore only loin coverings of ti leaves,

144

(above) Young turtles bred in captivity at Palmerston. (below) Turtles’ eggs

Unloading supplies from Akatere, the island trading vessel

Commander

Clark’s ketch, Solace, being launched Island after being repaired there

at Palmerston

South Seas Elopement

and their wild appearance made Jimmy think they had arrived at one of the cannibal islands of the Solomons. He was about to sail away when a white-clad European strode between the palms. The white man and his native overseer, both armed with rifles and revolvers, put out in a canoe to meet them. The white man proved to be Mr Felhall, an American in charge of copra makers. The island was Hull, one of the Phoenix Group which lies over 700 miles west-north-west of Penrhyn—in a straight line. Felhall suggested that Jimmy join his labour force until he and Tepou could be repatriated, and Jimmy willingly agreed. He found that he was no weaker as a result of his enforced diet of coconuts than when he left Penrhyn. Nine months later he and Tepou left, with Mr and Mrs Felhall and a crew of three, for Funafuti in the Ellice Group. Jimmy left the stolen whaleboat at Hull, intending to recover it later. After four months’ work as a seaman on inter-Ellice Island boats, he returned to Hull to claim the whaleboat. But the craft had again been stolen, this time by six Tokelau youths who reached Nukunono in the Tokelau Group in it. Jimmy Marsters sailed from Hull Island with Tepou on the Dawn, and after calling at several islands they eventually reached Apia, Western Samoa. There, Jimmy obtained temporary employment as a seaman, and some time later he and Tepou reached New Zealand in the Tofua. They returned to Rarotonga, Cook Islands, by the Marama, on 12th January 1922, twenty months and several thousands of sea miles after leaving Palmerston and without even sighting Suwarrow again. Jimmy was obliged to pay for the stolen boat. Then he and Tepou had a violent quarrel in spite of all they had been

through together. She left him and married a Manihiki man. Jimmy ‘Bosun’ Marsters spent the rest of his working life as a seaman in the Pacific.

K

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Shipwreck Island Of the nine vessels which have been recorded as being wrecked on Palmerston Island, only one, the last, has been refloated. From the wrecks of the others the thrifty Palmerston people have salvaged and utilized every piece of timber and equipment. Possibly there have been earlier shipwrecks on the island, but nothing is known of them. Shortly after William Marsters arrived, the sailing ship Annie Laurie was wrecked on the reef. Then, at some unknown dates, three more ships were lost. These were the Bella Sammy, which drove on the reef in a hurricane, with the loss of all hands. The Spar, an English sailing ship with a cargo of timber was lost there in a storm. There were no survivors. The third was the Julia Cobb, also

with a cargo of timber. This vessel was smashed up in a storm, and captain and crew all lost their lives. On 28th May 1886, the barque, Kitsap, of Port Townsend, U.S.A., was wrecked and became a total loss on Palmerston’s reef during the night. Captain Robinson and his crew arrived

at Rarotonga on 28th June of the same year in “an utterly destitute condition”. They were looked after by Mr Henry Nicholas of Avatiu, Rarotonga. In 1906, the four-masted English barque, Thistle, was swept to destruction on Palmerston’s reef by a powerful current— without loss of life. She was carrying a cargo of American

pine to Australia for use in the Broken Hill mines. Between 600,000 and 800,000 feet of timber were salvaged, but a dispute broke out with Donald and Edenborough about the price

to be paid for the timber. Some 42,486 feet were sold to Captain 146

Harries

of the Vaite for the sum

of £90, and the

Shipwreck Island

remainder was used to build part of the church and additional houses. A few years later, about 1913, a French sailing vessel, La Tour D’Auvergne, bound for Noumea from Tahiti with a cargo of coal, was also wrecked one fine moonlit night when a current dragged her on to a submerged reef. Besides coal there was also a considerable quantity of rum and wine on board. The islanders heard the captain say that he would destroy the remainder once the crew had taken their requirements, and they remonstrated about this and eventually succeeded in buying the ship and the liquor for £30. No less than 350 bottles of wine were taken from the contents of one cask. The bottles were corked, sealed with pitch to make them airtight, and were then buried in the sand until required for use. There was no loss of life in this shipwreck, and the master and crew made an abortive attempt to reach Rarotonga in the ship’s boat. They returned to Palmerston and after a stay of five months were taken to Tahiti by a French ship. In 1948, Captain Cambridge, who sometimes resided on the island, took his battered old ketch, Taipi, to Palmerston for repairs. The shallow winding reef passage is generally acknowledged to be navigable only for canoes and whaleboats, but somehow Cambridge got his twenty-ton vessel through the passage and into the lagoon. He beached the Taipi, but the ketch never sailed again. The vessel looked like an old coal hulk in miniature, and had no keel worth mentioning. She could not be sailed to windward. The timbers were full of worms, and the hole which had previously held the propeller had been blocked up. A piece of bush timber, unpainted and untarred, made up the rudder, while the shrouds were made fast to the chain plates with pieces of chain or bits of wire and rubber. In keeping, the running gear was worn and frayed. However, with all its shortcomings, the Taipi had survived all hazards, including being beached at Ngatangiia, Rarotonga, after a hurricane, only to end its days in Palmerston.

She disintegrated on the sand, and a swarm of Norwegiantype rats that had lived in the ship invaded Palmerston and caused

great damage

to the copra

crops. The

native rats,

previously resident on the island, do not attack the coconuts. 147

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Mr G. Nevill, Resident Commissioner of the Cook Islands, saw the worm-eaten remains of the ketch stacked on the beach when he visited the island in 1952. The latest wreck on the island was the one which has been successfully refloated and lived to sail another day. This was the nine-ton, thirty-one-foot English ketch, Solace, owned and skippered by Commander Victor Clark, Royal Navy, retired, who had as his crew member a young West Indian named Stanley Mathurin whom he had signed on at Saint Lucia in the West Indies. They arrived off Palmerston

Island in November

19454 and

anchored with a long cable in the lee of the atoll’s reef. During the night of 14th November the wind was blowing strongly from the south-east and there was a threat of more wind in the clouds banking up on the horizon. Clark, a tall, spare and bearded man, awakened about midnight and realized that the noise of the surf on the reef sounded much closer, and that, whereas it had earlier come from the bow of his vessel, it was now coming from aft. The wind had shifted several points and the sea had developed an ugly chop. The ketch had swung round, the stern was close to the coral,

and she was rearing and plunging as she snatched at her anchor cable in vicious jerks. Clark called Stanley and they attempted to let out more cable. The winch was being dragged almost through the decking, for the cable had become shortened, as the change of wind had caused it to become wrapped round a submerged coral head, and placed a terrific strain on the links.

As they worked, the yacht suddenly rode free. Either the cable had snapped or the anchor had dragged, and the wind forced them towards the breakers. There was no time to do anything more. The auxiliary engine was out of commission, and it was impossible to make sail in time. An immense comber lifted the Solace and hurled her into a maelstrom of white water. There was a jarring crash that

flung the two men flat on the deck and the ketch heeled to starboard at an alarming angle. Tons of water smashed down on them. Fortunately they had been flung right on the reef by a giant ninth wave. Had they struck the side of the reef the 148

Shipwreck Island

vessel would have gone straight down, and it is unlikely that they would have survived. Early next morning the Palmerston Islanders saw the wreck, and came out in canoes to rescue them. For a few days the two men wandered around the island, making friends and waiting for the weather to moderate. A broad road extends from the beach through the settlement, which consists of timber houses, a church, a small school and a tiny radio station which had been opened in September 1939. When the winds and seas died down an inspection was made of the wreck. A huge hole had been smashed in the hull, and there was nearly half a mile of jagged coral between the ship and the lagoon. The position looked hopeless. But Ned Marsters, the white-bearded leader of the Marsters clan, thought otherwise. Coconut rollers were placed in position and the islanders began to haul the ketch on her side towards the lagoon. There were only seventeen able-bodied males among the population, but they all helped, from the youngest lad of fifteen to the oldest inhabitant, Aaron Marsters, aged seventytwo. The womenfolk, who as a result of their manual toil-are noted for their physical strength as well as their good looks, also lent able assistance. It proved to be a hard and exhausting task. Coral rocks and boulders obstructing the path had to be smashed to pieces with crowbars before progress could be made. Several days of effort passed before the Solace lay at the lagoon’s edge. Then empty oil drums were secured in the cabin to give bouyancy, and other were lashed outside the hull together with baulks of timber; then the yacht was floated across to the beach with the aid of blocks and tackle, temporarily fixed to the coral heads which cluttered the lagoon waters. After being hauled up on the beach the Solace was shored up with oil drums and baulks of timber, and a palm thatch canopy was built over her to protect the hull and decking from the sun. Then the full extent of the damage could be seen. Most of the starboard side had been stove in, so that it was possible to walk through the side of the ship into the cabin. 149

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Tamanu, the ‘mahogany of the islands’, once grew quite extensively in the Cook Islands and has been used since earliest times for canoe building. There were still a few tamanu trees standing on Palmerston, and two of these were felled, suspended between trees and cut with two-handed saws. First the main frames had to be adzed to shape. It was of vital importance that the starboard frames should be exactly the same as those of the port. In all, nine main frames, eighteen smaller timbers and seventeen planks were cut and fitted. The skill of the island carpenters, working with primitive tools and under even more primitive conditions, soon became apparent when the main frames were placed in position and no faults could be detected. The accuracy of their work was confirmed when the cabin fittings were installed and it was found that these came to within a quarter of an inch of their former positions. Later, the acid test was passed when it was found that the sailing qualities of the ketch had in no way been impaired. The hull planking came from previous wrecks and was in poor condition, partly rotted and riddled with nail holes. Each hole had to be carefully plugged, each rotten part cut out and a fresh patch put in. The larger copper nails had to be made from copper piping. Such things as paint, putty and marine glue were unobtainable at Palmerston. Although the Marsters were masters of improvisation, it was not possible to find substitutes for these items. No ships were expected to call for several months, so Commander Clark made radio contact with Rarotonga and arranged for these supplies to be air-dropped with a forthcoming parachuting of medical supplies and flour for the island.

The last planks were fitted and the buckled decking was straightened out. A few coats of paint and the Solace was ready for launching. It was then that a new problem appeared—how to get the

ketch down to the beach and across sixty yards of shallow water in an upright position before she could be refloated.

This had to be accomplished without the aid of cradles or any orthodox 150

slipping gear. For the first part of the journey

Shipwreck Island

Solace was kept upright by oil drums and beams pushed under the hull and blocks and tackle rigged to the trees. When the Solace floated, two local sailing boats were used to tow the ketch to the largest boat passage, known as the Big Passage. The yacht’s draught was five feet six inches, and she bumped the bottom in many places, in spite of the removal of all ballast. Solace had to be eased carefully downwind for 300 yards before reaching deeper water. Then Commander Clark set his staysails, and with a great sense of relief sailed out into the open Pacific. This was on 1st October 1955, and almost a year of resolute effort had passed since the ketch was wrecked. When Solace sailed for Rarotonga on 7th October Commander Clark took four of the Marsters men with him to give them navigational experience. The exacting task of repairing the ship had proved that the

skills of old William Marsters had not been lost in subsequent generations, and that resourcefulness was still one of the prime attributes of his widespread and remarkable family.

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Disaster Takes Its Toll Over the decades hurricanes have taken their toll of Palmerston Island, but the Marsters family, resilient as ever, have risen from the wreckage of their homes and grimly started life again with their pitifully few possessions and a faith in the future that nothing can daunt. Palmerston is subject to strong winds, particularly during January and February, and these are apt to assume hurricane force. In December 18873 a severe storm destroyed the coconut palms. A hurricane and a tidal wave in 1914 which had caused much damage in the Central Pacific, ruined crops and demolished houses at Palmerston. In 1923, most of the houses were levelled and crops destroyed. Then came the big blow of 1926. The sea was calm and no waves rippled the surface of the lagoon on the morning of 31st March, when a group of Palmerston Islanders came ashore to clean their catch of fish. Presently they noticed black clouds forming to the north and huge waves building up far out to sea. Then the leader of the family, William II, came down to the beach to warn them that the glass was very low and still falling, and that a big blow was imminent. Quickly they dragged the boats up the beach and began to scoop the copra from the drying racks and take it into the houses. Before they could finish the task the first wave rushed across the lagoon and reached the road. Successive waves surged through the settlement and the

people hurried to the strongest house, that built by the founder of the colony. Tree branches and coconuts hurtled through the air, and sheets of roofing iron were wrenched from roofs. Soon it became apparent that all the islanders’ possessions 152

Disaster

Takes Its Toll

would be lost. The waves were undermining the houses, breaking them up and sweeping everything before them. Sodden clothing was salvaged before it was swept away, and taken to the old house. Black clouds obscured the sun, bringing premature darkness to the stricken island. As one house after another was swept way, there were fears that even the one in which they sheltered would not remain safe much longer. William Marsters, his dark, bearded face creased with worry, raised his voice in order to be heard above the storm, and ordered the group to move to ‘the mountain’. He referred to the mound, about twenty feet above normal sea level, which had been made from the coral sand excavations for the taro patch which had been dug down to water level and then filled with soil. An additional hazard was that the trees which grew near ‘the mountain’ might fall and kill them. Some of the men dodged the flying sheets of iron and the towering waves and made for the carpenter’s shop to collect axes, which were used to fell the trees. Then the entire Marsters’ clan, with the exception of one woman who was later found trapped and drowned under a house, took refuge on ‘the mountain’. By morning the storm had passed and the islanders saw the full extent of the damage. The entire settlement, with the exceptions of William Marsters’s house and the church, had been swept into the sea. All the boats had gone, and the copra was all lost. They had little more than the clothes they stood in. Coconut palms had been uprooted or stripped of nuts and fronds, and piles of coral and dead fish littered the beach. William Marsters’s house, though badly damaged, remained unmoved. It still dominates the rebuilt main village street, its leaning high walls and splitting timbers showing the ravages of more than a century—but still indomitable as the spirit of

its builder, William Marsters. The church had been lifted and carried 200 yards, the windows had been broken, and part of the roof, uncompleted at the time of the hurricane, was damaged. Rough shelters were erected for the women and children, and the church was moved 153

Sisters in the Sun

back to its former position by the use of coconut log rollers and an old ship’s capstan. This proved a laborious task, but was necessary because the people’s water supply depended upon rain water drained from the church roof into a concrete storage tank—and the tank could not be moved. The contents had been fouled by seawater and had to be cleaned out. Immediate needs of the Palmerston Islanders ranged from basic foodstuffs, matches and medical supplies, to carpenter’s tools and building material. By a great coincidence, the Governor General of New Zealand, Sir Charles Fergusson, had planned a visit to the island, the first ever by a Governor General. With Lady Fergusson he arrived in the Tutanekai not long after the hurricane. It had not been possible to send news from the devastated island, but once the vessel had anchored the ship’s radio was used to send an urgent message of distress to Rarotonga and to New Zealand for help and supplies. The island was cleaned up and all refuse was burned to prevent disease sweeping Palmerston in the wake of the big blow. Shortly afterwards it rained and the islanders found some coconuts under the debris. With these, and the supplies which the Tutanekai was able to spare they were able to exist until supplies arrived in May from Rarotonga on the Hinemoa and the schooner Tiare Taporo. The industry of the Marsters clan soon had the island clean and beautiful, and in a matter of weeks Palmerston was again

dotted with huts which, though primitive, housed a happy and contented people.

It was decided that as many as possible of the younger people should leave for other islands, as Palmerston could no longer support so many. Owing to their skill and industry

the exiled Marsters had no difficulty in obtaining employment in Rarotonga and other places. Taro was successfully introduced into Palmerston from Pukapuka, and gambusia, a mosquito-eating fish, was installed in the taro swamps.

One of the losses in the hurricane was the family papers— the diaries from the early settlement of the island and the 154

Disaster

Takes Its Toll

genealogy of the family from the first William onwards—plus all the school books. The senior members of the clan set to work to try and reconstruct the family tree, and soon 900 names had been completed. One of those who became intensely interested in the story of Palmerston Island and the Marsters family was Mrs M. Paget. She spent many years in the Cook Islands and, after the hurricane, set to work to collect all the data she could. Gradually, she compiled the comprehensive family tree which is still in use today. Major assistance was also required in February 1931 after the island sustained heavy damage and in 1935, Palmerston was hit by another hurricane which swept away the young coconut palms planted just after the 1926 storm. Houses and copra sheds were destroyed while the people clung to ‘the mountain’. The inhabitants were again solely dependent upon fish for food until the New Zealand government could send a relief ship. Until then Palmerston had eight islets (motu), but two were washed away in this hurricane. After another devastating wind in 1936 Captain J. Benton took twelve men, women and children to Manihiki. More help was needed in 1942 because of a hurricane, but by 1946 the island was well planted with coconuts which were bearing heavily, and thirty tons of copra was made. The latest disaster to strike was the hurricane of 15th to 18th December 1967, when seas estimated to be 100 feet higher than normal swept the boat sheds away, but did not do great damage to the village. Winds gusting up to eighty knots uprooted fifty coconut palms, scattered about 4,000 drinking nuts over the sandy soil and severely damaged banana plants and breadfruit and paw-paw trees. The family living on Palmerston has greatly appreciated the generous assistance which has been accorded to them when disasters struck. New Zealand and the Cook Islands government,

members of the family living away from the island and friends have often come to their assistance in the past.

When

the time came

those in need they were

when

they themselves

not tardy. In November

could help 1970 the

greatest civil disaster in modern times struck East Pakistan, 155

Sisters in the Sun

when hurricanes and tidal waves devastated low-lying terrain and the loss of life reached staggering proportions. The governments and peoples of many countries sent financial and other aid, and the Rarotonga Rotary Club launched an appeal to help the sufferers. Among the earliest responses from the outer islands of the Cook Group came three telegrams from tiny Palmerston, pledging in total the sum of $31.50, or slightly more than thirty-six cents from each of the eighty-seven individuals living on the island. Although they have no electricity or motor vehicles, very few worldly goods and a tiny income they knew, better than most, what havoc a natural disaster can create. Their response to the appeal was both quick and generous.

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The Schooner ‘Tiare Taporo’ People who live in large countries, especially those far inland, have little conception of the importance of shipping in their lives. They are served by well-stocked shops, and seldom know what it is not to be able to go in and purchase exactly what they want, even to the name-brand they prefer. But those who live on tiny Pacific atolls, where the arrival of any vessel, even a tiny yacht, is a major event in their lives, know just how dependent they are for the necessities of life —they seldom even see luxuries—on the arrival of trading vessels. The local store-keeper, who is probably employed by one of the large firms in Rarotonga, might not be busy for most of the year, but he has to be far-seeing in forward ordering, or he can bring misery and want to all his customers. Not only the physical appearance of the trading vessel, but each member of’ the crew is soon well known to the island dwellers. The captain is a most important figure in this tiny world surrounded by the limitless ocean. The islanders are often very dependent upon his whims and fancies, for a good skipper can be of great help to them, staying longer off their reef to enable their goods to be loaded and their supplies offloaded. Some will take more risks than others, some do not care if they sail before vital supplies are ferried ashore, or all the copra is stowed on board. A skipper can find extra space to take another passenger, or leave them on the reef until another vessel calls months later. Each of the captains is a character in himself, for this part of the Pacific seems to bring out the good or the bad in a man more than other parts where life is more impersonal, and where few people ashore get the opportunity of knowing a captain of a vessel. 157

Sisters in the Sun

The vessels themselves have a character and a personality which is never better understood than in a tiny island where their comings and goings are major events. Palmerston, with its small population, has seen far too few trading vessels in its day. Perhaps they can all be roughly summed up in the story of one of the best known of all the schooners to trade in the Cook Islands—the Tiare Taporo. This veteran islands trading schooner was one of the last fore and aft rigged ships to be built in New Zealand for the islands’ trade. Her name means ‘Flower of the Lime’ in the Tahitian language. She was built to the order of A. B. Donald Ltd, an Auckland firm with branches in Tahiti and the Cook Islands. Charles Bailey Junior was the shipwright, and he completed her on 24th June 1913. Only the best of New Zealand timber went into her construction—a keel of heart kauri, frames of pohutukawa and planking of kauri. She was fitted with an auxiliary diesel engine, and her registered net tonnage was 137.33 tons. She was placed in the service of Donalds for the Society Group and was based at Papeete. Her first skipper was Captain Joe Winchester, who on retirement settled in the Tuamotu Islands. During World War I Tiare Taporo was in continuous ser-

vice in the Society Islands and escaped being sunk by the German sea raider Seeadler commanded by Von Luckner. The schooner sailed to Mopelia to uplift Allied seamen who had been left there after Von Luckner had sunk their ships. In 1918, the Tiare Taporo went to San Francisco and loaded a cargo of case oil for Auckland, where she arrived on 8th January 1919 after a fifty-eight days’ voyage. After overhaul the vessel was cleared for Rarotonga and entered the service

of A. B. Donald’s Cook Islands’ trade, and began her long association with both Palmerston and Suwarrow. Captain Viggo Rasmussen, a courteous, genial and hospitable Dane who had lived in Tahiti since 1896, commanded the vessel for the next seventeen years. ‘Papa Viggo’, as he was fondly known among Cook Islanders, took a keen interest in Palmerston, championing it to the authorities when necessary and his name is still held in high regard by the people of 158

The Schooner Tiare Taporo

Palmerston. During his time as master of the Tiare Taporo the schooner called at Palmerston two or three times a year. Despite the scanty accommodation the vessel afforded, she remained a firm favourite with both official and non-official travellers between the Cook Islands, and there is no doubt that a great deal of her popularity was due to the kindness and geniality of ‘Papa Viggo’. He was a jolly fellow, especially when sharing a glass or two with friends or guests. In the 1930s the Tiare Taporo seldom visited Tahiti, but she made one such voyage in March 1936 under Viggo’s command. The schooner took a cargo of copra from Penrhyn and Manihiki, and also the usual consignment of pipi pearls from the famous lagoons of those islands. After shipping a new mast, which was waiting for her at Papeete from San Francisco, the Tiare Taporo left again for the Cook Islands on 7th April. When he first came to the Cooks Viggo Rasmussen settled on Mitiaro Island, where he built a house and married a local woman. Painting seascapes was his hobby. Later, when he spent most of his time at sea, social problems developed, and in the end he divorced his wife. When he retired from the sea he was appointed resident agent of Manihiki and for a time was resident agent of Penrhyn. By this time he had married a Penrhyn woman called Reremata, by whom he had three children—Peter, Joe and Dane. Official records say he suffered a stroke in April 1945, and those who knew him say he was never the same man again after being struck by a falling coconut at Penrhyn. He spent a period in Rarotonga Hospital, then returned to Penrhyn, where he died in Omoka village on zoth January 1947. However, his name still lives on in Penrhyn, where his son Dane was sworn in as resident agent in May 1968, and in 1971 he still held that responsible position. Two temporary masters were appointed after Viggo gave

up his command of the Tiare Taporo in 1936, and they continued until 1939. It was during this period that the Palmerston

people existed for three years without a visit from a trading vessel. Captain Andy Thomson then took command of the Tiare Taporo after the sale of the schooner Tagua, which he had previously skippered. 159

Sisters in the Sun

Andy Thomson was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 21st January 1887 and grew up on Long Island, which in his day was crowded with square-rigged ships as well as big steamers. He served his apprenticeship on square-riggers in the Atlantic, had a turn as a quartermaster on ships in the Great Lakes, and made voyages out of Seattle and San Francisco, including trips to Alaska, before coming to the South Pacific. He first saw Rarotonga from the deck of a Boston barque when he was fifteen, and thought it was the place for him. Four years later, in 1908, he spent two months ashore there, became the lessee of six acres of land, and knew he would settle there permanently. After returning to California he came back and settled permanently in 1912, marrying a Rarotongan girl. Captain Andy has never worn glasses, and still has his goldcapped teeth, eleven of which were broken in an accident over half a century ago when he was on a railway construction job in Alaska. His knowledge of railways was not only on the construction side, for as a youngster he ‘rode the rods’ as a hobo over the greater part of the United States, and he has some wonderful tales to tell of his experiences of this tough way Of life. Andy went to sea again in 1920, sailing the schooners Avarua and the Tagua for ‘Boss’ McKegg, a well-loved identity who ran the big trading concern, the Cook Islands Trading Company, in Rarotonga. After twenty years with McKegg the Tagua was sold and Andy Thomson became skipper of the Tiare Taporo, a position he retained until 1949 when the vessel was re-transferred to the company’s trade in the Society Islands. Captain Thomson, who had been placed in charge of the M.V. Charlotte Donald, was transferred back to the Tiare

Taporo which he commanded until his retirement at the age of 74: Captain Archie Pickering, an ex-Fiji resident, then took over command from his former position as mate, and during this period the vessel lost one of her masts in a storm. Archie Pickering is still serving Palmerston, but is now the captain of the M.V. Akatere, one of the fleet of vessels belonging to Silk and Boyd Ltd of Rarotonga.

The Tiare-Taporo gave A. B. Donald Ltd fifty years of con160

The Schooner Tiare Taporo

tinuous service, weathered several hurricanes and never had a serious accident—something very rare in the islands’ trade. The veteran schooner was later sold, and within a couple of years was destroyed by fire in another Pacific port. Like his ship, Captain Andy Thomson has a unique record. In sailing among the islands for half a century he never lost a ship or a man, and never bumped a reef. One of his ex-officers, Roy Lidgard, recalled that when he was mate on the Tiare Taporo, a live chicken was lost overboard. Captain Andy put the ship about immediately and posted lookouts up the masts. After half an hour they picked up the chicken. When Lidgard asked the skipper why he went to so much trouble for a chicken, Andy replied that he did it first for practice, and secondly to impress the crew that if they were washed overboard, even at night, they should keep treading water, because he would go about and find them. During his Jong service Andy Thomson had dozens of crew members and some passengers go overboard—and everyone of them was picked up alive. When he retired Captain Andy Thomson settled on a thirtytwo-acre plantation near the sea at Arorangi, Rarotonga. He still lives there, although his family of five sons and two girls have all made their homes in New Zealand. His eldest son, Tony, carved out his career from the sea, like his father. For some years now he has been the first officer of the N.Z.G.V. Moana Roa, the 2,750-ton supply and passenger vessel that serves the Cook Islands from Auckland. On occasions Tony has acted as the ship’s master. He is married and lives in Auckland. At 84 Captain Andy Thomson is still active, cycling in several miles two or three times a week to Avarua, the capital, to go shopping and visit old friends. He prefers to use a push bicycle rather than a car because, he says, it keeps him fit. A wonderful raconteur, he has a fund of stories about the United States and the Pacific Islands, and an even more wonderfully racy vocabulary.

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Boat Day at Palmerston The arrival of a vessel at an island such as Palmerston is a great event in the lives of the people, and also a time of feverish and carefully planned activity. The captain of the vessel will not thank the islanders for delays, for he has a schedule to meet and shareholders to satisfy with a profit. As soon as it is definitely known when a ship is to call, the preparations start, and gradually build up until the arrival time. The produce which has to be sent on board—normally copra in the case of Palmerston—has to be transported to the landing place, the boats have to be in a state of readiness and the men to man them have to be available when needed. People who are coming ashore have to be taken care of, and if they are to stay then accommodation has to be arranged. Those who are merely spending a few hours ashore while the loading and unloading takes place need to be met, and people have to be spared to entertain them hospitably and show them around. Farewells have to be said to those going away, possibly for years, possibly forever. But experience gained over many years makes the planning simple, and the confusion is more apparent than real. Each one knows what he has to do, and the spirit of co-operation is evident. For more than four years W. H. (Don) Percival had waited for an opportunity of visiting some of the less accessible of the northern islands, and the opportunity came when he was convalescing from a badly burned leg in Rarotonga in September 1956. The M.V. Charlotte Donald was due to leave Rarotonga for

the north and he was able to walk again without the aid of a stick. He was also overdue for annual leave. 162

Boat Day at Palmerston

At the time he wrote an account of boat day at Palmerston, which gives an indication of what happens: The Pacific sun sent fierce heat down upon the Charlotte Donald’s deck as she swung at anchor a short distance from Palmerston Island’s reef. Beyond the reef the large lagoon scintillated in the sunlight, the dark blue where it met the reef three miles away merging into subtle tones of turquoise and emerald in the nearby shallows. Palmerston, the largest of the motu threaded like green beads upon the connecting string of the reef, lay half a mile away, its narrow strip of white coral sand blazing beneath the drooping plumes of the coconut palms and the green tangle of pandanus and ngangie bushes. Six canoe sheds of brown palm thatch stood out boldly against the coral sand and a boat was drawn up on the beach. Across an unwrinkled ocean of technicolour blue I watched three boatloads of islanders coming out to meet us. The leading boat had six people on board, and it flew the New Zealand flag from its stern. In the sternsheets sat a grey-bearded man wearing a blue shirt, long trousers and a peaked, flat cloth cap. He was Ned Marsters, grandson of William, the founder of the Marsters clan, and the recognized chief of the three families living on Palmerston. Ned Marsters climbed on board and went straight to the wheelhouse where he shook hands with Captain Andy Thomson and other old friends. Then, as soon as the preliminaries were over, he pulled papers from his shirt pockets and began to talk business. After spending several hours ashore while the Charlotte Donald discharged and loaded cargo, I had been able to make friends with many of the islanders, and to learn something of the island’s history from Ned himself. He found time to take me round the settlement and explain details about the construction of William the Founder’s house, and those of the church. He answered my many questions and I made mental notes and used my camera. During those few hours I learned much more about Palmerston and got the ‘feel’ of the place. Back on the ship, I saw the last boatload of outward-bound passengers curving towards us through the reef passage. The whaleboat was borne swiftly on the outgoing current—and it had a green-painted outrigger canoe in tow. The oarsmen slowed their progress, easing the heavily-laden craft carefully through the shallow channel. The tide was on the ebb and there were

only inches of water beneath their keel. Then they were safely 16%

Sisters in the Sun

over the lip of the reef and rising and falling on the ocean’s smooth swell. Minutes later the whaleboat rubbed and bumped along the Charlotte Donald’s side. Lines were heaved and secured. Then the business of boarding began. Shouts and good natured laughter floated across the water as brown-skinned islanders of both sexes and all ages scrambled up the ship’s side. Infants were handed up to the people who crowded the bulwarks, then came rolls of sleeping mats, crates of chickens, cardboard

suitcases lashed with rope, baby turtles,

dried fish, bunches of coconuts, and baskets of plaited coconut fronds filled with reef fish and taro. The black-bearded helmsman of the whaleboat, Bob Marsters, who is also one of Palmerston’s policemen, bartered with Captain Andy Thomson during this apparent confusion. Bob offered live chickens and freshly-caught reef fish, which were finally accepted after the usual haggling. Captain Andy .. . is not a man to let opportunity pass him by. Deep sea fish are plentiful off Palmerston and we had caught several large dog-fish tuna by trolling close to the island’s reef. Since then tuna had appeared with every meal. I handed a baby girl back to her smiling mother. The last of the passengers were on board, but not the last of their luggage. Amid a pandemonium of shouts, orders and laughter the green outrigger canoe was winched on board and finally manoeuvred into position on the small, cramped boat-deck. The engines shuddered into life, bells clanged, and we began to go ahead. Polynesian seamen moved about the well deck and fitted hatch covers into place over holds partly filled with Palmerston copra. Tarpaulins were then rigged, tent fashion, over the derrick’s boom, forming a shelter for the deck passengers who then moved into their temporary home. They spread sleeping mats over the hatch covers, sorted out their various belongings and arranged themselves into family groups. The remainder of the deck was cluttered with the ship’s work boats, crates of chickens and tethered pigs. The odours of dried fish and copra hung everywhere, and as the Charlotte Donald began to roll in the swell the first signs of seasickness appeared among the new arrivals.

164

22

Wealth from the Sea In his annual report to the New Zealand government of 20th February 1903, Lieutenant-Colonel Gudgeon, British Resident of the Cook Islands, mentioned that Palmerston’s lagoon did not carry pearl shell, although it seemed possible that if spawn was introduced from Suwarrow, it might thrive. At that time copra was the only source of income for the islanders, who were rapidly multiplying. Copra production at that time was 100 tons annually, and Gudgeon estimated that possible production could rise to 180 tons. The 1903 report also expressed the pious hope that pearl shell would be introduced from other islands, but nothing seems to have been done to carry out this policy for over half a century.

Mr Ronald Powell, who also features in the Suwarrow story, and who was married to a Palmerston girl, was the Fisheries Officer for the Cook Islands. He returned to Rarotonga on the schooner Tiare Maori in late October 1957, after successfully transplanting 2,000 live pearl-shell oysters from Manihiki to

Palmerston’s lagoon. The live shell was conveyed in specially designed trays with wire mesh bottoms. These trays were fitted into a tank secured on the vessel’s deck, and a continuous supply of fresh salt water was pumped over the oysters. It takes a long time for oysters moved from one lagoon to another to become established, and conditions have to be just right for the change to be successful. Joaba Marsters, who had served with Ron Powell on a move to transplant pearl shell from Manihiki to Nassau lagoon, as a Palmerston Islander, naturally has a keen interest in following the experiment on his own island. In October 1970, he 165

Sisters in the Sun

captained the Cook Islands fisheries vessel Ravakai on a voyage from Rarotonga to Palmerston. The object of the visit was to study the possibility of promoting the crayfish industry at Palmerston on a business basis, and also to look at the progress of the mother-of-pearl]-shell beds. On his return he expressed great satisfaction at the way they were progressing, and it is possible that pearl-shelling will ultimately provide an additional source of income for the Marsters family. During the Palmerston voyage the Ravakai called in at Aitutaki and took on board four orange cases of trochus, which were taken to Palmerston and planted on the eastern side of the reef. Within a few years, if all goes well, this useful sea creature could prove another asset to the islanders. Trochus is a marine animal which inhabits a conical shell and travels like a snail along the sea bottom. They live in warm, shallow tropical waters, usually close to reefs, and are brought up by local skin divers. These molluscs are herbivorous in their habits and produce heavy, conical shells of iridescent, nacreous material which has a certain commercial value and is used for the manufacture of buttons. Before World War IJ and during the period when the bottom fell out of the copra market, the more enterprising copra planters in New Guinea turned to trochus fishing for a living. Prices for trochus shell were then high and the ex-planters saved themselves from bankruptcy, and no doubt some showed worthwhile profits. In New Guinea waters trochus shells grow to a considerable size—some four to six inches across. But in early 1971 the value of this shell had dropped to about £100 sterling per ton, probably due to competition from plastics and synthetics. However, the price could improve, and trochus has other uses. It is an edible seafood popular with Cook Islanders, and in Tahiti the shells are polished and sold to the tourists. Ultimately much of Palmerston’s income could come from

the sea, for the atoll is fortunate in that it has a very large fish population in the lagoon, and deep-sea fish abound offshore. It could, with the growth of the tourist industry in the Cook Islands become one of the big game-fishing islands of the 166

Wealth

from

the Sea

group, with keen fishermen being based ashore and going out each day to try their luck and skill against the big fish. When a fishing fleet is established in the Cook Islands it seems certain that Palmerston will play an important part in the fishing industry, both for manning the vessels and as a prime source of supply. The aim is to make the Cook Islands as self-supporting as possible in food supplies, and many tourists in the Rarotongan hotels will possibly be eating Palmerston fish and crayfish. Indeed, in the past, when opportunity offered, the Marsters have shipped crayfish to Rarotonga for sale. In April, 1968, Palmerston exported a quarter of a ton of crayfish by the M.V. Bodmer skippered by Captain Derek Lumbers. The crayfish had been pre-cooked on Palmerston, and some of them were huge. They sold out quickly on Avatiu wharf, by the bucketful, to a crowd of jostling, fish-hungry Rarotongans who arrived in trucks and cars, eager to buy. But not all ventures have proved so successful, for shipping has always been uncertain, even in modern times. An example was when, late in 1970, in expectation of a call by a ship in a few days, the islanders collected 300 large crayfish ready to send to Rarotonga. But the vessel did not call at Palmerston and the opportunity of selling those crays was lost. For a time, owing to the efforts of Mr William H. Watson, a member of the Legislative Council, there was an export of dried fish in Captain Cambridge’s vessel, Taipi, adding not only to the revenue of the Marsters family, but also to the many smells of this malodorous ketch. But once again a promising start of a new industry was killed through uncertainty of supply. Another source of wealth from the sea comes from the turtles which frequent the island. Palmerston people sometimes catch turtles on fine moonlight nights by chasing them into caves where they sleep. This is dangerous and tricky work, for the submarine reef caves are located near the reef channels where there is always a strong surge of water. The swimmer may be badly cut on the coral, or may encounter a shark or a Moray eel. The sharp-eyed islanders wait until the dim shadow of a homing turtle is seen against the sandy bottom, then they 167

Sisters in the Sun

swim after it into the cave, seize a flipper and steer it to the surface. Many green turtles are caught and eaten on Palmerston. When the turtle’s eggs are discovered they are dug out of the sandy soil and eaten. Many turtles are speared from canoes; others are approached silently by boat and are captured by grasping the shell, or one of the flippers. This operation is more dangerous than it sounds and requires much skill, for although the turtle has no teeth it does have a sharp bony edge to its jaws capable of severing a finger. A turtle is sometimes caught by a man who leaps upon its back, seizes the front and rear ends of the shell and steers it to the beach. This technique is not for beginners, as there have been occasions when

the animal

has sounded

and taken its

would-be captor down to his death. A fully-grown turtle weighs up to 350 pounds, and may require four strong men to carry 12

Turtle breeding has also been successfully tried on the island. In 1958, young Charlie Marsters, then aged seventeen, helped his uncle Ioaba Marsters, to capture green turtles for breeding in captivity. During the calm, moonlit nights of September and October, Charlie and Ioaba sailed across the lagoon to the reef islets and sandbanks. They searched for the tracks of the female turtles which come ashore looking for places to lay their eggs. Hidden in the bushes just above high water mark they watched for large green turtles creeping cautiously up the beach. Satisfied that she was alone, the turtle would scoop out a hole in the sand with her hind flippers, and then begin to lay her eggs. The white, spherical eggs that look like table-tennis balls and are about the same size, would be dropped on to a hind

flipper and lowered carefully into the two-foot-deep hole. When all her eggs were laid the turtle would cover them with sand that she beat down with her fore flippers. She would then break off pieces of plants and use them to camouflage the area. Using a different route, and moving at high speed, she would then re-enter the lagoon. Charlie and his uncle dug up the eggs and took about fifty of them to the main island. There they reburied them in the 168

Wealth

from

the Sea

sun-warmed white beach sand, knowing that the eggs would hatch out in about three weeks’ time. Each turtle lays between seventy and 200 eggs at a sitting, the number and size of the eggs varying with the age and size of the turtle. The total number of eggs laid in a season by a single turtle varies between 300 and 400. A few days before the eggs were due to hatch out, Charlie built a small palisade of sticks round the spot where they were re-buried. The young turtles scratch their way to the surface and at once make a desperate rush to the water, many of them being killed by predators on the way. The stick fence was to prevent them escaping should they emerge when no one was watching. In the meantime, Ioaba had made a special box with a raised lid of wire netting. The box was partially submerged in the lagoon shallows and anchored there. Thirty turtles were eventually hatched and placed in the box. By this method they were kept in fresh salt water, and the raised lid of the box allowed them to rise to the surface to breathe. Charlie fed the tiny turtles daily with fish, shellfish and kitchen scraps. The turtles were kept until they were three years old. Then they were killed and eaten. The shells were cleaned and polished and exported to Rarotonga for sale, making excellent wall decorations. Fried turtle meat tastes like prime beef steak, and it also roasts well. The flippers are cut up into small pieces and stewed, and are delicious eating. The eggs can be eaten raw

quite safely. Charlie and other Palmerston Island boys learned the technique of handling turtles at an early age. A large turtle is secured in the lagoon by a rope, and the boys are taught how to hold it and how to ride on its back.

169

23

Sovereignty When the drafting of an Act to deal with the future of Palmerston Island was being considered in 1953, a Crown Law opinion concerning various matters associated with its sovereignty and the rights of the Marsters family was obtained. This was a learned and detailed document, from which it emerges that the Cook Islands generally, which had been placed in 1888-89 under British protection, apparently did not form part of the British Dominions until they became, by proclamation of 11th June 1901, part of New Zealand. The position was otherwise in respect of Palmerston Island, for it must be regarded as having being annexed by Great Britain when the first licence to William Marsters was issued by the Crown in 1888.

It appears that questions pertaining to the exercise of jurisdiction in the smaller and remoter islands of the Pacific gave the British government considerable concern during the second half of the nineteenth century. Hall’s Treatise on the Foreign Powers and Jurisdiction of the British Crown, published in 1894, in a footnote on page 2373 stated: ‘““Amongst the Pacific Islands are some which have been occupied by British subjects, under licence from the Crown, for the purpose of collecting guano, planting cocoa nuts, and other like industries. They were not inhabited before they were so occupied, and they are now inhabited only by the licencees and their servants; they are consequently regarded as territory acquired by settlement, and as forming part of the British Dominions.” As the licence issued to Evans in 1867 proved abortive, even though Marsters was living on Palmerston, until 1888 the

island must be regarded as a terra nullius for the purposes of international law, since neither Marsters nor any other occu170

Sovereignty

pant of the island could, as private individuals, acquire the sovereignty in their own right. Occupation could only take place by and for a state. It is the act of appropriation by a state through which it intentionally acquires sovereignty over such territory as is at that time not under the sovereignty of another state. The opinion that British sovereignty over Palmerston Island was acquired when the first licence was issued to Marsters in 1888 is confirmed by the express terms in which the language of the second licence of 1892 which superseded the first, was couched. Whatever de facto ‘rights’ of interests Marsters or any other occupant of Palmerston Island may have had in or to the island prior to 1888, the legal opinion was abundantly clear that since that time their rights and interests in the island have been governed and defined solely by the terms of the licences or leases which had been issued to them by the Crown. On 23rd May 1891 Commander C. L. Kingsmill of the Royal Navy paid a visit to the island, and discussed with William Marsters the question of the lease. In 1892, Marsters was granted a formal second lease of the island by the British government. The term of the lease of 1892 was twenty-one years, and this was subsequently extended for additional terms of ten years each, the last term expiring on 1st January 193%. The rent was fixed at £25 a year, and the New Zealand government renewed the leases after 1913. By 1924 the rent had been increased to £50. In 1941, a further lease was negotiated for a period of twenty-one years retrospective to 1933, thus expiring in 1954. From 1926 onwards the poverty of the inhabitants, owing to the devastation of hurricanes, had been such that they were unable to pay the rent, which was waived in whole or in part every year, with the exception of 1946, when the rental of that year alone was paid by Teraia Marsters from the proceeds of copra from Palmerston. A perusal of actual income received by the islanders over the years shows the exaction of this payment to have been harsh, the 1951 income of £7.15.6 per head of population being insufficient for maintenance of the islanders’ boats, fishing 171

Sisters in the Sun

gear and the barest food essentials. The total island income for the years between 1926 and 1951 was estimated not to exceed £1,500 for that period, or less than £1 per head per annum. Undoubtedly money and goods had been sent to the islanders by relatives, and government assistance following hurricanes had periodically helped to re-establish them. In 1953 the licence, which had later been made out to William Marster’s descendants through the heads of the families, expired and was not renewed. Instead, an amendment to the Cook Islands Act in 1954 vested the island in the inhabitants as native customary land, except for ten acres set aside for Administration purposes. Mr A. E. Currie, the late Crown Solicitor of New Zealand, stated: “The purpose of the lease is not so much a source of revenue as to prevent the inhabitants from acquiring a title of freehold in fee simple by prescription against the Crown. |

think that there can be no question that the instruments are effective in law for that purpose.” One of the terms of the cancellation of the lease and the new status of the island was that Ned Marsters was now to be paid a representation allowance of £25 for undertaking the duties normally carried out on other islands by resident agents. The Resident Commissioner, in a comprehensive summing up of the position, pointed out that the cancellation of the lease and the granting of native customary title to the occupants of the island would, while being a token gift on the part of the Crown, confer an assured title on the people and be deeply appreciated by them. It should, he considered, be made clear that no applications by islanders to clothe their accepted share with title would be entertained and no native land court would visit the island. This was again, he pointed out, the wish

of responsible members of the community who had no desire for individual titles and were opposed in principle to this occurring. A restriction of this nature would be acceptable in all respects. At no time has the native land court ever sat in Palmerston. The island is included in the Rarotonga electorate for the

purpose Assembly.

re

of representation

in the Cook

Islands

Legislative

24

Present-day Life One of the diseases which proved a scourge to the Polynesians of some islands was leprosy, and it touched the lives and affected the fortunes of some of the Palmerston people. Ned Marsters considers that leprosy was first introduced into Palmerston by a man from Penrhyn who married one of Old William’s daughters by the latter’s first wife. Later, Joel Marsters, the eldest son of William I, adopted one of the daughters of the Penrhyn man’s family, from whom he himself contracted leprosy. Joel acted as leader of the clan, with a council of six other members of the family, presumably two from each of the three branches, as the island council. By 1903 the population numbered 115, and according to the official report the planting of the land was being well looked after by the family. Joel was still there in 1905. But Joel was a restless man who had earlier been to sea, and he tired of living at Palmerston, and moved to Aitutaki with his wife, who owned land there. Possibly family quarrels or the ravages of his disease caused him to move. Most of the accounts of Palmerston Island make little or no mention of Joel Marsters, and even members of the family consider that William I was succeeded immediately by his son William II, but this was not the case. However, after Joel moved away the next son, William II, ultimately took over the leadership, continued in the family traditions and was in charge until his death at the age of 84, in 1947. Since then the clerkin-Charge has been Ned Marsters, the grandson of the founder of the dynasty. Even on such a self-sufficient and unspoiled island as Palmerston disputes and squabbles sometimes break out among 173

Sisters in the Sun

the inhabitants, and in early February 1947, for the first time in the atoll’s history, a member of the community was appointed commissioner of the Cook Islands court. The honour went to Ned Marsters, the white-bearded patriarch who for ten years had been Palmerston’s unofficial clerkin-Charge and the recognized head of the three Marsters families. Palmerston was given a proper court and legal procedure, and Ned was assisted in maintaining law and order by three honorary policemen, each representing one of the families. The policemen—Bob Marsters, Tutai Marsters and John Dick Marsters—although unpaid, were given the same powers as regular Cook Islands policemen. There is no jail at Palmerston, and it was not thought necessary to establish one there. The old family homestead of William Marsters I still stands in the main village street and the other important building on the island is the Cook Islands Christian Church, which was ingeniously constructed from the timbers of the wrecked French ship, La Tour D’Auvergne, in 1914. The floor of the church, characteristically canting, was formed from the deck timbers; the cabin doors, joined side by side, form part of the walls; while the ceiling came from the boards lining the cabins. To shut out the storms more cabin doors were used. The pulpit is reached by a steeply-slanting ship’s gangway, and the islanders are called to worship by an old ship’s bell. Near the church is the village well, equipped with one of the pumps from the same vessel.

Life for the Palmerston

Islanders

is normally

peaceful,

healthy and happy. Money is relatively unimportant, and as late as 1953 the annual income was less than £10 per head, which sufficed for necessities like clothing, knives, fishhooks and kerosene. There are times when leaden skies make the place look very forbidding, and not everyone visiting Palmerston for the first time would think of it as a paradise or a haven.

Owing to its isolated position, Palmerston is seldom visited by medical officers, but the health of the islanders is unusually good, as is their general standard of hygiene.

At Christmas 1940 the yacht, Te Rapunga, called at Palmers174

Present-day Life

ton from Honolulu and reported that there had been a serious epidemic of ‘fever’ in Hawaii. However, they had not suffered themselves during the voyage. They left Palmerston on New Year’s Eve, and before they departed they left clothing and food gifts behind them. At that time many of the girls had nothing but a dress made from an old tarpaulin or mailbag, and some of the boys had nothing to wear at nights when they were fishing in the spray and rain. After the yacht departed a ‘fever’ struck Palmerston and caused two deaths, and the islanders thought it must have originated in the supplies left behind by their generous visitors. However, there was reluctance to suggest that the clothes should be burned, as in some cases they were all that the people owned. The Palmerston Islanders were very concerned when they learned of the intention of the British government to explode hydrogen bombs at Christmas Island, 800 miles to the northeast. They feared that these experiments would generate a tidal wave which would engulf their idyllic little world. In March 1957 Mr Winton H. Ryan, who was then Superintendent of Public Works, Rarotonga, journeyed to Palmerston to carry out minor improvements to the reef passage. He cleared it of rocks by blasting them out with redundant depth charges obtained from the Royal New Zealand Air Force. One of the most observant visitors to Palmerston was Dr Ronald G. Crocombe, who went there in November 1959 and stayed a month to study the land tenure system on the island. Dr Crocombe, the author of Land Tenure in the Cook Islands, published in 1964, is the outstanding expert in this field, and he was particularly interested in the growth of the ‘laws’ which had grown up of necessity due to the increase of Palmerston’s population. Out of his researches came an eighty-three-page

cyclostyled report: Land Tenure in a Test Tube: the Case of Palmerston Atoll. A visit of such a long duration by a nonMarsters or a non-resident official is comparatively rare and was made possible by the fact that, on that occasion, the trading vessel that called there on its way to the Northern Group stopped en route to unload cargo and then returned on its south-bound voyage to load copra for Rarotonga. 175

Sisters in the Sun

A visitor to Palmerston in late December 1961 was the famous ninety-six-foot, steel-hulled brigantine Yankee, owned by a syndicate, Windjammer Cruises Incorporated. This vessel, with a small nucleus of trained and paid crew and a complement of young American paying passengers, made several world cruises, calling at out-of-the-way places en route. Books and magazine and newspaper articles had made Yankee world famous. She finally ended her days on the reef at Avarua, Rarotonga, when she dragged her two anchors in rough seas at 4a.m. on 24th July 1964. On this particular visit to Palmerston public relations on board were far from happy among the crew of twenty-three. All along the route Yankee dropped disgruntled passengers, but none stayed ashore on lonely Palmerston, preferring to leave the ship at more popular ports such as Panama, Papeete, Apia and Cairns. The Royal Yacht, Britannia, bound for Fiji to pick up the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who were arriving there by plane, called at Palmerston at 1 p.m. on 20th January 196%. Not knowing that the vessel was calling, the islanders were unaware of the ship’s identity until they put out in their boats and were invited on board. Naturally, the splendid vessel made a great impact on the visitors who had previously only known small trading vessels, and even smaller yachts. The immaculate condition of Britannia astounded them and this was the subject of conversation for a long time afterwards. While the Palmerston Islanders were being shown over Britannia, three of the royal yacht’s officers paddled one of the yacht’s rubber dinghies ashore and were themselves impressed by the dignity and bearing of the Marsters clan. The mystery of why skippers of Cook Islands trading ships

have had difficulty in finding Palmerston Island despite most carefully-laid courses was solved during a cruise in the central Pacific during June and July 1969 of H.M.N.Z.S. Lachlan. Under Commander I. S. Munro the vessel visited many of the Cook Group and took the opportunity to observe the positions of these islands. On this survey cruise the ship found that Palmerston’s

position on the charts was about nine miles in longitude and two miles in latitude from where it was supposed to be. 176

Present-day Life

When the Lachlan arrived at Suva, Fiji, her navigating officer, Lieutenant F. G. George, said the error was not really surprising as fixes on the island taken by the Lachlan were the first since Captain James Cook took some in 1774. Captain Cook used one of the first chronometers ever made, but it seems to have been out only about thirty-six seconds when he made his observations at Palmerston. It was because of the incorrect position shown on the charts that Cook Islands’ skippers usually missed the low-lying atoll and had to beat up and down until they found it. Only primary-school education is available to the children of Palmerston and those proceeding to high school must travel to Rarotonga, where they board either with friends or relatives. Earlier, the London Missionary Society provided educational facilities, but it is now undertaken by the Government. The number of schoolchildren attending the primary school dropped to under half of what it was in 1964, when there were thirty-four pupils, to fourteen in 1969.

English continues in daily use as well as Maori, and prayer meetings are held twice a week as well as three Sunday Services. Mr W. H. (Willie) Watson, a leading businessman and political figure in Rarotonga for many years, always took a great interest in the fortunes of the Marsters family. He was instrumental in the Marsters starting in the dried-fish business in the 1940s, and he dealt with the Rorotonga end of their business. Small quantities had been sent down previously, but he organized it in lots of about five tons. The dried fish was packed in huge woven baskets, rivalling the tripots of the whalers in size. These baskets were fitted with lids and the dried fish was transported in the ketch, Taipi, skippered by Captain D. H. Cambridge. Cambridge had swarms of cockroaches on the Taipi, especially in the hold, and Willie Watson once suggested to him that he should take on board some of the leanest and hungriest of the Palmerston Island chickens and let them feast on the cockroach sea-borne army, thus fattening them for the Rarotonga market.

Willie, M

with his pawky

sense

of Scottish

humour,

was 177

Sisters in the Sun

joking, but Cambridge took him seriously. It was found, however, that even really hungry hens made but little impact upon Cambridge’s cockroach army. When the M.V. Bodmer called at Palmerston in October 1969 she uplifted twenty-three tons of copra and 1,500 crayfish. This was the largest amount of copra exported from Palmerston for twenty-two years. One of the Palmerston Islanders’ blessings is a plentiful supply of fish, but some fish, and turtles, are seasonal. Female turtles crawl ashore on Palmerston’s sandy beaches during the fine, moonlit nights from October to December, to lay their eggs. In early January 1971 two female turtles, each weighing about 400 pounds, were captured whilst laying their eggs. Three hundred of the eggs were placed in special enclosures for observation, as described in a previous chapter, and were hatched in February. In mid-December 1970, 5,000 maemae, a flat fish which grows to a length of six inches, were caught by the men, women and children of Palmerston in three days’ fishing. This was during a full moon period and the fish were caught from canoes and boats. From 1ith to 16th January 1971, a further 7,000 maemae were caught. As these were more than the atoll’s small population could eat, many of the fish were salted, and others were dried in a copra drier, with the purpose of exporting most of them to the other Cook Islands. Although Hurricane Dolly passed Palmerston roo miles away on

2oth

and

21st February

1970,

it caused

a considerable

amount of damage there. Winds gusting to over sixty knots flattened all the banana palms and a thatched house, and did a great deal of damage to coconut palms, breadfruit and paw-paw trees. Very rough seas washed through the boatsheds and nearby cookhouses. No deaths or injuries were reported, but on 25th February the Royal Yacht, Britannia, called in at Palmerston for an hour, and the ship’s doctor went ashore and gave the islanders

a medical check-up. When a survey was made a few days later, Palmerston reported an estimated sixty per cent damage to coconut palms,

seventy per cent damage to breadfruit trees and ninety per cent 178

Present-day Life

damage to paw-paw trees. All the banana palms were blown down. Sir Gordon Taylor, when he ran the flying-boat service for passengers among the Pacific Islands, and when flying between Samoa and Aitutaki, always made a point, if possible, of flying low over Palmerston. As he described it in his book, Bird of the Islands, the atoll looked like one of those ocean worlds which came up out of the blue ahead, suggesting in fabulous colours a life as remote as the stars. Several times he flew around the lagoon, longing to take his aircraft down and to call on the Marsters family. But though he found it would be possible to land there, the lagoon was a trap which could pin a flying boat down until the wind and the light and the altitude of the sun chose to combine for vision and direction for take-off. Whenever he flew over low the Marsters would come out of their houses and wave to the crew and passengers. When, late in 1970, Air New Zealand instituted an interim

air service from Fiji using Hawker Siddeley 748 planes, flying to Rarotonga via Pago Pago the passengers were also given an opportunity, without diverting from their course, or flying low, to view Palmerston Atoll. There are no motor vehicles and no electric power supply on Palmerston. Although there are co-operative societies on eight of the fifteen islands which make up the Cook Islands, there is none on Palmerston. But in a sense the islanders themselves have a more perfect form of co-operation than any other island, for they work together as three big families and share land and produce together. The men continue in the useful trades of husbandry, fishing, carpentry and boat building, while the women make mats from pandanus and hats of remarkable craftsmanship from the midribs of coconut palm fronds. Sturdy and self-reliant, the Marsters have a keen pride in the founder of their family, and a strong love of their island. Many of them have moved away from their home island, but wherever they are they still retain their close association with the family, and the sense of being from Palmerston Island. 179

Bibliography A. J. S. (A. J. Shortall), “Captain Andy Thomson and his Three Sailor Sons’, Pacific Islands Monthly, September 1951. Appendices to the Journal (of the House of Representatives, New Zealand) Pacific Islands, A to J, A-3, 1902, p. 45. Cook and Other Islands Report, A-3B, 1903. Pacific Islands, A-EF, 1901. Cook and Other Islands, A to J, A-3, 1906. Barrow, John, The Mutiny of the Bounty, Blackie, London and Glasgow, 1961. Republication of a book first published in 1831. Blanc, R. R. V., West Wellington, 1949.

of 170 Degrees,

Island Education

Division,

Bryan, Edwin H. Junior, American Polynesia, Tongg Publishing Co., Honolulu, Hawaii, 1941. Byron, Kenneth W., Lost Treasures in Australia and New Zealand, A. H. and A. W. Reed, Wellington, 1965. Clark, Commander

Victor, On the Wind of a Dream, Hutchinson,

London, 1960. Cook Islands: N.Z.’s Tropical Paradise, 1950. Cook Islands Gazette, 16th January 1899, zoth September 1901, 7th March 1902, 29th April 1902, 16th July 1902, 6th February 1906, 20th March 1906. Cook Islands News, 15th October 1945, 16th November 1960, 21st June 1961, 20th December 1961, 21st January 1963, 22nd Jan-

uary

1963, 4th November

1965,

22nd

November

1965, 2nd

December 1965, 17th November 1969, 27th July 1970, 6th October 1970, 27th October 1970, 20th January 1971. Cook Islands Review, Taveuni Departs for Suwarrow, Vol. 2, No 5

May 1956. Cowan, James, Suwarrow Gold, Jonathan Cape, London, 1936. Crocombe, Marjorie, Two Hundred Changing Years, Island Education Division, 1962.

Crocombe, R. G., Land Tenure in a Test Tube: the Case of Palmerston Atoll, unpublished MSS. Cumberland, K. B., South West Pacific, Whitcombe, 1954. 180

Bibliography

Fisher, John, The Midmost Waters, Naldrett, 1952. Frisbie, Johnny, The Frisbies of the South Seas, Doubleday and Company Inc., New York, 1959. Frisbie, Robert Dean, The Island of Desire, Doubleday, Doran and Company, New York, 1944. Gilmore, Robert, “Cap’n Andy sails in out of the Past’, (Auckland newspaper, name unknown, but probably The New Zealand Herald of early October, 1962). Helm, A. S., Notes by Mr Aratia Tepuretu, unpublished MSS. Helm, A. S., Notes by Mr W. H. Watson, unpublished MSS. Long, Dwight, Sailing All Seas in the Idle Hour, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1940.

Luke, Sir Harry, Islands of the South Pacific, Harrap, London, 1962. Maude, H. E., Of Islands and Men, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1968.

Maps of the Cook Islands, Government Printer, Rarotonga. N.D. Morrell, W. P., Britain in the Pacific Islands, Oxford University Press,

1960.

Nena, T., “Suwarrow’s Hermit Stays Put in Paradise’, Pacific Islands Monthly, January 1966. New Zealand Freelance, 15th August 1923. New Zealand Official Year Book. Government Printer, Wellington, 1955. Notes on Latest Hermit of Suwarrow—Michael Swift. Information source: Mr Don Silk, Master of M.V. Tagua. Notes on Tom Neale. Information sources: Messrs Ian Forbes and Ronald Powell, of Rarotonga. “Not

Paradise—but

Heaven

on Earth’,

The Honolulu

Advertiser,

2eth June 1964. Pacific Islands, Vol. Il: Eastern Pacific, Geographical Handbook Series, November 1943. Pacific Islands Monthly, March 1957, p. 83, pp. 83-91, pp. 130-131, “The Curing of Béche-de-Mer. Smoke-Out Ended the Siege of Anchorage Islet’. June 1961, “How the Russians Came to the South Pacific Islands’, by Robert Langdon. June 1962, pp. 103-106, “Yankee’s Troubles’. June 1963, p. 24, “Ketch Wrecked in Cooks”. June 1964, “Famous Old Schooner Back in the Cook Islands”. November 1965, ‘“‘Suwarrow’s New Hermit Costs Yachtsmen £100”. January 1966, Editor’s Note. March 1967, “Suwar181

Bibliography row’s Hermit, Tom Neale, tells his Story’. December 1967, “Forgotten History of Suwarrow’s Pearls’—Letter to the Editor. February 1970, pp. 89-90; “‘An Epic Defence!’’ October 1969, p. 47, “Tom Now (Officially) can look out for mail’. Pacific Islands Year Book, 19s0, 6th Edition; 1959, 8th Edition; 1968, roth Edition. Pacific Publications, Sydney. Percival, W. H., “Marooned by Request”, Pacific Islands Monthly, September 1954, Pacific Publications, Sydney, Australia. Percival, W. H., “New Zealand Crusoe—Hermit-Like Existence on Remote Treasure Atoll”. The Weekly News (Auckland), 29th December 1954. Percival, W. H., “Rogue and Trickster—the Good and Bad in ‘Bully’ Hayes’, The Weekly News (Auckland), 27th March 1947. Percival, W. H., “Catch Those Fish—Polynesian Style’, Better Business, March 1968, Auckland, New Zealand. Percival, W. H., “South Sea Elopement’, Better Business, September 1959, Auckland, New Zealand. Percival, W. H., “Breeding Turtles in the South Pacific’, Boy’s Own Paper, November 1959, London. Percival, W.

H., “Modern

Crusoe

of Suwarrow’’,

Better Business,

November 1961, Auckland, New Zealand.

Percival, W. H., “The Lonely Old Hermit of Suwarrow New

Zealander Who

Chose

Isolation’,

The Weekly

Island: A News,

4th

March 1964, p. 8, Auckland, New Zealand. Percival, W. H., “Suwarrow’s Crusoe Goes Back to Civilisation”, Pacific Islands Monthly, March 1964, pp. 83-85. Percival, W. H., “Hermit Swift Stays on Suwarrow, Pacific Islands Monthly. An untitled news item following T. Nena’s piece, “Suwarrow’s Hermit Stays Put in Paradise’, January 1966. Percival, W. H., “The Hurricane That Did Not Miss’, Cook Islands Review, March 1968. Percival, W. H., Trapped on Shipwreck Island. Unpublished MSS. Percival,

W.

H., Michael

Swift—Suwarrow’s

Latest Hermit.

Un-

published MSS. Percival, W. H., Ordeal on Suwarrow, by Ron Powell as told to W. H. Percival. Unpublished MSS. Percival, W. H., Suwarrow—Isle

of Violence. Unpublished MSS.

Percival, W. H., Life on Shipwreck Island. Unpublished MSS. Percival, W. H., Notes on Jeffery Strickland. Unpublished MSS.

182

Bibliography

Percival, W. H., Sunlight and Coral Sand. Unpublished MSS. Percival, W. H., Shipwrecks at Palmerston Island. Unpublished MSS. Rainfall Observations for 1967. New Zealand Meteorological Service. Redwood, 1966.

Rosalie, On Copra Ships and Coral Isles. Hale, London,

Sterndale, H. B., “A Lone Land, and They Who

Lived on it’, The

Monthly Review, Vol. 2, pp. 195-279, Wellington, 1890. Taylor, Sir Gordon, Bird of the Islands. Cassell, Australia, 1964. “The

Cook

Islands’, New

nology, April 1928.

Zealand

Journal of Science and Tech-

index Acapulco, Mexico, 21, 22, 2%

Austral Group, French Polynesia,

Acushnet

122 Australia, 30, 61, 105 Avarau, Palmerston Island, 117 Avarua, Rarotonga, 161, 176

(whaler), 81

Adventure Magazine, 66 Air New Zealand,

179

Aitutaki Island, Cook Islands, 81, 109, II3, 314, 117, 124,127; 128,

130,

166,

173, 179

Akakaingaro, Sarah, 127 Akarongo, Cook Islander,

129

Akatere, M.V., 11, 107, 108, 109, 160 Alaska, 18, 160 Alexander Turnbull — Library,

Wellington, New 55 Amoy, China, 21 Anchorage Island,

Zealand, 9,

Suwarrow, 18, 21, 24, 26, ZI, 41, 42, 56, 63, 72-84, 92, 93-104, I07, 108, 142 Anglo-Saxon (see Rona)

An Island to Oneself, by Tom Neale, 99

Annie Laurie, 125, 146 Anson, Commodore George, R.N., 25 Antarctic Continent, 18, 97 Aorai, 124 Apia, Western Samoa, 24, 26, 34, 69, 106, 144, 176 Araura, 114, 127

Arie] (catamaran), 63 Arorangi, Rarotonga, 161 Atiu Island, Cook Islands,

Ayson, Judge, H. F., C.M.G., 56, 102 Bagnall, A. G., 9 Bailey, Charles, Jnr., 148 Barber, Noel, 97-8 Barney, Penrhyn Islander, 49-55 Bawin, Suzanne, 63 Becke, Louis, 53 Belgium, 63 Bella Sammy, 146 Benson, Florence (Mrs Frisbie),

65

Benton, Captain J., 155 Better Business Magazine, 9 Big Passage, Palmerston Island, 114, ISI Bird, Joseph, 29-34 Bird of the Islands, by Sir Gordon Taylor, 179 Birmingham, England, 123 Black, Captain J. S., 42 Blenheim, New Zealand, 106 Bligh, Captain William, 119 Bodmer, M.V., I1, 99, 100, 167, 178

56,

117, 128

Auckland, New Zealand, 12, 13,

17, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44. 55, 60,

109, 158, 161 184

Avatiu Harbour, Rarotonga, 128, 167

Bora Bora, French Polynesia, 86 Bounty, H.M.S., 119 Bowles, Captain, 122 Brander, John, 122, 124, 126 Bristol, England, 29

125,

Index

Britannia

(Royal

Yacht),

176,

178 British Admiralty, 56, 57, 119

British Honduras, 80 British Resident, 12 Brothers, Captain, 48 Brown, Charles, 66

James,

RN.,

Cook Islanders, 11, 62, 88, 158, 166

55, 56, 57, 60, 63, 69, 72, 86, 91, 94, 945, 99, 102, 104, 106,

Buckingham, Rona, 130 Burbeck, Captain John, 121 Australia,

Callao, Peru, 29

California, 27, 123, 160 Cambridge, Captain D. H., 13,

61, 69, 70, 79-84, I17, 147,

167, 177-8 Canton, China, 18, 22 Caroline Hort, 24 Castle, Captain William McCoy, R.N., 46 Cayagan, Philippines, 105 Ceylon, 86 Chalmers, Reverend John, 55 Charlotte Donald, M.V., 160, 162-4 Charlton, Tom, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31-4 Chatham, 29 Chave, Richard

Captain

118-9, 177 Cook Islands, 11, 12, 17, 18, 27,

Browne, G. S., 130

Cairmms, Queensland, 176 Calcutta, India, 121

Cook,

Branscombe,

cHaA

Cheerful, 27, 28

Chichester, Sir Francis, 85 China, 213, 37,38

LOO; 16, C117, 121,012.75 20, 12%, EZ, 156, 128, 141,148, TEL, 258, 160, 161, 166,167, 170, 176, 179 Cook Islands Amendment

Act,

1954, 139 Cook Islands Christian Church, 174 Cook Islands Government, 20 Cook Islands Gazette, 113, 130, 134, 139 Cook Islands Legislative Assembly, 172 Library and Cook _ Islands Museum, 9, 117

Cook Islands Trading Company, 130, 160 Cook’s Island, Palmerston Island,

113

Cormoran, German warship, 132 Corner, Lieutenant, 119

Cowan, George, 9, 27 - [AIMS 970 12,.13,-35 Crocombe, Dr Ronald G., 9, 135, 175 Croisselles Bay, New Zealand, 39 Currie, A. E., 172

Cuthbertson, Bern, 109

Christian, Fletcher, 119

Christmas Island, 58, 59, 175 Circular Saw Shipping Line, 40, 41 Clark, R. E., 73-84 ——,Commander Victor, R.N. (Retd.), 148-41 Clerke, Captain,

119

Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., 39, 65 Clulow, Captain, 48 Colombus, Christopher, 141

Daily Mail, London, 97 Danger Island (see Pukapuka) Daphne (brig), 121-2 Darsie, Mr, 126 Dart, 29, 30

Dickens, Charles, 53 Discovery, 118 Dombey and Son, by Charles Dickens, 53 185

Index

Dominion 56

Museum,

Wellington,

Donald, A. B., Ltd, 60-1, 68, 107, 148, 160-1 Donald and Edenborough, 146 Donaldson (Apia merchant), 25, 26 Donop,

June von,

63

Double Passage, Palmerston Island, 114 Duff, (LMS vessel), 120 Duke

of Edinburgh,

H.R.H.

176 Dunnet, J., 122 Durban, South Africa,

II, H.M.

——, Nga, 70 ——, Robert Dean, 84, 9I

68,

65-70,

72-

Funafuti, Ellice Islands, 145 Gem, 24, 27, 29

107

Queen,

Harold

Geophysical

176

Fakaofo, Tokelau Islands, 122 Felhall, Mr, 145 Fenua-Ura (Scilly Islands), 27, 34 Fergusson, Sir Charles, 154 Fernandez, John (Jean Baptiste), 124, 127-8, 129 , Mahuta, 128

, Captain Tom, 13, 43-5 Fiji, 30,445, 00,0 1055 124, 1122, Finland, 20 Fodger, Captain Michael, 121-2 Ford, John, 128 France, 56 Free Lance, 35 186

, Florence (“Johnny”), 79; 77 , Jakey, 69, 70

Genlaw,

Ellenden, Mr, 73-84 Ellicott, Captain, 55 England, 24, 71 Entrance Island, Suwarrow, 96 Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, a5 Europe (schooner), 63 Evans, John Lavington, 24, 25, 35-8, 40, 125-6

176, 179

. Elaine, 70

the,

East Pakistan, 155 Edith (schooner), 55 Edwards, Captain Edward, 11920 El Hari (yacht), 64 Elizabeth

French, 20 Fresno Morning Republican, 66 Frisbie, Charles, 68

William,

Institute,

63

Tohoku

University, 67

George, KRN.ZN:

Lieutenant

F.

G.

177

Gerbault, Alain, 85 Germany, 56, 60 Gibson, Mr, 27 Gill, Reverend

1t%;

William,

11740228520 Glacier, U.S.N.S. (Icebreaker), 97 Glennie, David, 106 , John, 106

Governor MacQuarie (brig), 122 Grapow, Captain, 132

Great Barrier Reef, Queensland,

120 Great Britain, 56, 118 Grice, Sumner and Co., 47 Guam, 23 Gudgeon, Lieutenant-Colonel W. LEA ya Sole WW Phemrae 9U6) Gulf of Finland, 18 Gull Islands, Suwarrow,

74

Hall, James Norman, 66 Hallan, Graham, 64 Harries, Captain, 130 Hart, Captain, 124 Haua, Mrs Sarah (Mrs Neale), 95-6 Hawaiian Islands,

175

23,

Tom

63, 86,

Index

Hayes, Captain William Henry (“Bully”), 38-40 Heather, 107 Helm, Craig, 9

Henderson and MacFarlane Ltd, gions Hervey Islands (see Manuae) Higginson, Morgan and Co, 42 High Island, Suwarrow, 96 Highlight (trimaran), 106 Hikueru, Paumotu Islands, 66 Hinemoa, 154 Home

Island,

Palmerston,

137 Home Island, Suwarrow, Hong Kong, 105 Honiara, British

113,

Solomon

_§Is-

lands, 105

Island, Society Islands,

27 Hull Island, Phoenix Group, 145 Idle Hour (yacht), 85-90 International Geophysical Year, 62 Italy, 20

Janet Nichol, 57 Japan, 62 Java, 22 Johnson, Mr, 133 , Sandra Brook, 63 John Williams II (ship), 38 Jottings in the Pacific, by the Reverend Gill, 129 Julia Cobb, 146 Julia Cobb Bank,

Island, 114, 146

Kathleen Del Mar, 109 Kato, Professor Yohio, 63 Kent, Professor Saville, 59 Kingsmill, Commander RIN. ty1

C.

L.,

Kitsap (barque), 146 Kitsap Bank, Palmerston Island, 114 Koteka, Jimmy, 73 Kriemhilda, 43-5 Kronstadt, 18

96

Honolulu, Hawaii, 64, 99, 175 Honu Island, Suwarrow, 96 Hort Brothers, 24, 27 Hosking, A. W., 62 Houlder Brothers, 47 House of Representatives, Wellington, N.Z., 57 Huahine

Kaniere, H.M.N.Z.S., 62 Karakarerake Island, Palmerston, 114

Palmerston

Lachlan, H.M.N.ZS., 176-7 Lamont, E. H.,° 29-20). 67 Land Tenure in a Test Tube: the Case of Palmerston

Dr’R. G.-Crocombe, 175

Atoll, by

9,. 135,

Land Tenure in the Cook Islands, by Dr R. G. Crocombe,

La

Tour

D’Auvergne

175

(sailing

ship), 147, 174

Lauthala Bay, Fiji, 87 Lawrence, Reverend, 133 Lazareff, Lieutenant Mikhail, 18, 20, 21 Lee Island, Palmerston Island, 114 Leeno, Pukapuka girl, 70, 79 Leicester Island, Palmerston Island, 114 Leith, H.M.S., 69 Leningrad (Petrograd) US.S.R., 18 Lever Brothers, 59, 60 Levers Pacific Plantations, 60 Lidgard, Roy, 161 Line Islands, 20 Lloyds of London, 81 London, England, 47, 57, 81, 104, 106, 109 London Missionary Society, 29, 55, 129, 177 Long, Dwight, 85-90 187

Index

Lord, Simeon, 121 Lorna D (yacht), 69 Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., 86 Loy, Mr, 86

Lumbers, Captain Derek, 167 MacAlister, Captain, 137 Madrid, Spain, 23 Ferdinand,

174

, William Richard (I), 123-

31, 134-40, 146, 151, 153, 155, 16%, 170-2,°17%,

974

, Reverend William, 9 Family, 9, 12, 72, 87-90,

1%2-4, 152-6, 166, 177, 179 Martin, Captain Thomas, F.,

118

Mahurangji, 92, 94 Mair, Henry, 41-4 Malden Island, 47, 48

%0-1 Matavia, Mrs William Marsters,

Mandalay (yacht), 95 Mangaia Island, Cook

127 2029

Islands,

12 By O07 tee

Manihiki Island, Cook Islands, Nap Nee Way Ae pei aed eardopeASF

42, 43, 57, 58, 59, 62, 67, 79, 102, 124,10 20,004%,

Mathurin, Stanley, 148-51 McKegg, Robert (“Boss”), 160 Melbourne,

Victoria,

Australia,

29, 35, 47

Melville, Herman, 81

IOI,

Menmuir,

Captain Charles,

2A5, LEG,

Merchant

of Tahiti, 122

86, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100,

1£9, 165

Manila, Philippines, 21, 22, 23 Manila Galleons, 21-23 Marama,

, Lutal,

, William (II), 127, 130, 132, LAS es Se) Ses

Lurline, S.S., 86, 90

Magellan,

——, Tom, 88, 130 , Lun, 134

59

Merchant of Venice, 122 Metcalfe, Captain, 42 Mexico, 21, 22 Millar, Captain, 41

145

Marion’s Bank, Island, 114

Palmerston

Mitiaro Island, Cook Islands, 159 Moana

Roa, N.Z.G.V.,

161

Marsters, Aaron, 149 , Andrew, 134

Mokotupu, Dr Koekoe, 9 Molokai, Penrhyn Island, Moluccas, 22

——, Arehata, 128 , Bob, 102, 164, 174

Moorea Island, Society 4o, 68, 91

——, Charlie, 168-9 ——,, Elizabeth, 127

Mopelia Island, Society Islands,

Mar-Quesa

(yacht), 102

142

Islands,

158

, loaba, 165-6, 168-9

Morrison, James and Co, 57

, James, 120, 134

Moscow, U.S.S.R., 20 Moss, F. J., British Resident, 12 Motu Tou, Suwarrow, 26, 71, 94, 104, 107 Motuvini (yawl), 67

, Jimmy, 141-5 —, Joel, 127, 133, 134, 173 , John,

132-7,

174

, John Dick, 174 ——, Marion,

127

, New, 87-90, 124, 149-51,

LOZ 7258 724

, Ritia, 128 ——, Tepou, 141-5

——,, Teraia, 171 188

Mr Moonlight’s Island, by R. D. Frisbie, 70

Munro,

Commander

I.

§&.,

R.N.Z.N., 176

Mutiny on the Bounty, 66 My Tahiti, by R. D. Frisbie, 68

Index

Nagel, Mr, 58, 59 Napoleon, 20 Nassau Island, Cook Islands, 17, 57,0013) 70; 107, 122,) 165 Neale, Arthur, 96

, Mrs Sarah, 95-6 ——, Stella, 96 ——, Thomas Francis, 64, 67, 9I-104,

13, 63,

Okhotsk, 18 Omoka Village,

Penrhyn,

Onward, 42 Oshoro Maru, Japanese fisheries vessel, 62

106, 108-9

Neotype (ketch), 63 Nevill, G., 92, 148 New Caledonia, 42 New South Wales, Australia, 27 New Zealand, 12, 20, 56, 57, 62,.63; SO; 99,-107;7-11%,

120,

Pacific Islands Trading Company, 35 Pacific. Ocean, 12,°17, 18, 21; 25 Paget, Mrs M., 155 Pago Pago, American Samoa,

17, 55, 90, 97; 99, 106, 179

124, 133, 135, 137, 139, 145, 158, 170-2 New Zealand Gazette, 137%

Pamati, Palmerston Island, Palmerston, Lord, 118

New

Panama, 71, 72, 176

Zealand

141,

142, 159 Onrust (yacht), 93

Government,

40,

, Viscount,

113

118

£7,456, £9,:62; ‘106, TEE, 165 New Zealand Herald, Auckland,

Pandora, H.MS., 119-20 Papeete, Tahiti, 26, 40, 66, 68,

55 Ngahora, Cook Islander, 73, 75,

109, 148, 159, 176 Paumotu Islands, French

79 Ngataki (yacht), 62 Ngatokorua-a-Mataa

nesia, 27, 29, 66, 124, 129 Payne, Frank, 29-z0 Peerless (schooner), 42 . Penrhyn Island, Cook Islands,

(Mrs

Fris-

bie), 68, 69

Ngatangiia, Rarotonga, 147 Nicholas, Henry, 146 Nilsen, Larry, 107 Niue Island, 31, 38, 39, 57, 113, 117, 13% Nordhoff, Charles Bernard, 46 Normandy, France, 33 Norris, Charles, H., 66 North America, 18, 22 North Island, Palmerston Island, 114 Northern Coop Group, 26, 31, 55, 67, 70, 99, 102, 122, 123, 141, 175 Noumea, New Caledonia, 42, 147 Nukuhiva, Marquesas Islands, 80-81 Nukunono, Tokelau Islands, 145

Poly-

29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 48-9, 57,

62, 6%, 64, 67, 68, 86, 87, 102, 12%, 124, 128,°329,/1720,. 173; 141-3, 145, 159, 173

Percival, W. H. (Don), 9, 162-4 Peterson, Peter, 41, 42 Petrograd (Leningrad), U.S.S.R., 18 Philippines, 21, 22

Pickering,

Captain

Archie,

108-9, 160

Poland, 20 Polynesians, 11, 13, 18 Pomare II, King of Tahiti, 120 Port Jackson (Sydney), 122 Port Townsend, U.S.A., 146 Powell, Elizabeth, 72 ——, Ronald, 9, 72-84, 165 Powhatu, 32 Pratt, John, 71-84 189

Index

Primrose Bank, Palmerston land, 137 Primrose Island, Palmerston land) 1232127 Prussia, 20 Puget Sound,

U.S.A.,

Is-

Sailing all Seas in the Idle Hour, by Dwight Long, 85

Is-

St Ives, N.S.W., Australia,

42, 86

Pukaki, H.M.N.ZS., 99 Pukapuka Island, Cook Islands, 55, 61, 65, 67, 69, 87, 98, 100,

107, 154

Quinn, Lee, 63

St Lucia, West

Indies,

55

148

Samarang, Java, 120 Samoa (brig), 34°

Samoa

Islands, 30, 32, 35, 36,

Al, £6, 67.5074,

12%) 124

179 Sampson, R. A., 67 Samuela, Penrhyn 141-3 San Bernardino

eoe

Islander,

Straits, 23

Rannah, M.V., 94

San Diego, California, U.S.A., 86 San Francisco, California, U.S.A., Z0, 42; 45,, 68,°70;.86,) tec. 159, 160 San Francisco Bay, 18 San Juan Islands, British Columbia, 86

Rapid, H.M.S., 56

San Pablo, 118

Rarotonga Island, Cook Islands,

Savage Islands (see Niue)

Rabaul, New Britain, 105 Raiatea Island, French Polynesia, ET cL19 Rakahanga Island, Cook Islands,

27, 29, 31, 33, 40, 42, 130, 143 Ranfurly, Earl, 57, 133

9, IL, 17, 34, 35, 36, 40, 47,

£G;16,550, 62,.07;,00,.70 401,

82, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, TOG, P7Oel 147,

IOI, I0S, 106, 112,117, 9122, 524 25, a124) 150-1, 154, 157,

107, 108, 1 20,0120; £50,040, 160, 162,

165, 172, 175, 177, 179

Rarotonga Rotary Club, 156 Rasmussen, Captain Viggo, 158-9 Ravakai,

Cook

Islands

Govern-

ment Fisheries vessel, 166 Renton

Holmes

and Co, 42

Reremata (Mrs Viggo Rasmussen), 159 Resolution, 118 Robinson, Captain, 146 Rockefeller, James, 95 Rona (brig), 38, 39 Russia, 18, 20, 62

Russian American Company, 18 Ruxton, Captain, 27, 28, 29 Ryan, Winton, H., 175

Ryno (brig), 41-4 190

Savai'i

Island,

Samoa,

24

Scilly Islands, French Polynesia, 27 Seattle, Washington, 86, 89, 90, 160

U.S.A., 85,

Seddon, Right Hon. Richard, 57, 58 Seeadler (German warship), 158 Sekelangi Reef Passage, Penrhyn, 142 Short, Hon. Apenera, P., ror Silk, Don, 105 Silk and Boyd, Ltd, 160 Small Passage, Palmerston Island, 114 Society Islands, 27, 66, 67, 86, 158, 160 Solace (ketch), 148-51 South China, 18 Southern Cook Group, 55, 56, TI,

21

So2. 127

South Pacific Trading Company,

57, 58, 59

South Seas News Syndicate, 66

and Pictorial

Index

Soviet Union, 20 Spa Bank, Palmerston Island, 114 Spain, 21 Spar (sailing vessel), 146 Spies, BE. J., 67

Starbuck

Island,

Line

Islands,

Line Islands, 47, 48, 55 Starr, Mr, 69 Sterndale, Handley Bathurst, 20,

21, 24, 24, 29, 32, 34, 345-45, 48-9, Sf

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 57, 65 Stout, Sir Robert, 57

Straits of Magellan, 21 Strickland, Captain Jeff., 35, 39,

40, 122, 125

Suatumu

Island,

Palmerston

Island, 113 Survey Department, Rarotonga, 9 Susanna Booth, 48

Sustenance,

Samuel

S., 29, 30,

32 Suva, Fiji, 67, 106, 177 Suvarov (see Suvorov) Suvorov (Suwarrow), Alexander

Vasilievich, 20 Suvorov (Suvarov), Suwarrow Gold,

18 by

James

Cowan, 9, 27

Sweet, Mr, 122; 12%, 124 Swift, Michael, 105-9 Switzerland, 20 Sydney, N.S.W., Australia, 56,45, 67, 60, 121

27,

Tagua, M.V., 11, 68, 84, 99, 100, 105, 106, 149, 160 Tahiti, Society Islands, 20, 24,

27, 39, 40, 47, 48, £5, 59, 63,

67, 68, 86, 9% 98,° 106, 119,

£20; 3227-024; 125,132, 147, 159, 166

Tahiti (yacht), 96 Tailby, A., 92

133;

Taipi (ketch), 13, 69, 70, 79-84,

147, 167, 177

Takapu, (Mrs Joel Marsters), 127 Tara-i-Tokerau,

Palmerston

land, 114 Tariau, Hon. J., 107-9 Taruia Ava, Penrhyn, Taveuni, M.V., 96 Taylor, Sir Gordon,

_Is-

143

178

Teanua, Penrhyn girl, 67-8 Tefaoora, Timi, 86-90 Temata, Mrs C., 9 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 17 Tepuretu,

Araitia,

M.B.E.,

117

Te Rapunga (yacht) Terii, Tahitian girl, 66-7 The Big Blow, 9 The Book of Pukapuka, by R. D.

Frisbie, 68 Theophilo, Cook Islander, 73 Thistle (barque), 146 Thistle Bank, Palmerston Island, 114 Thomson, Captain Andrew (Andy), 13, 67, 68, 91, 98, 159-61, 163, 164 , Tony, 161 Thursday Island, Queensland, 59 Ti, Polynesian explorer, 117 Tiare Maori (schooner), 165 Tiare Taporo (schooner), 13, 91, 98, 142, 154, 158-61 Tiburon (yacht), 98-9 Tickler, 30 Tinioni Tepou, 114, 127 Tirel, Jules, 31-3 Tofua, 145 Tohuku University, Japan, 6% Tokelau Islands, 31, 122 Tom Island (see High Island) Tom’s Island, Palmerston Island, 113, 137 Tonga, 98, 107, 120 Tongatabu, 42

Lore, H.M:5.,. 133 Traveller (schooner),

35, 38

Trayte, Captain, 55 I9I

Index

Treatise on the Foreign Powers and Jurisdiction of the British

Crown, by Hall, 170 Trial (brig), 121 Trochus shell, 166 Tuamotu Islands, French Polynesia, 86, 158 Tubuai, Austral Group, French Polynesia, 120 Turtle Island, Suwarrow, 93, 94 Turtles,

167-9

Tutanekai, 154 Tyack, Captain John, 35 Typee, by Herman Melville, 80-1

Vermont, U.S.A., 65 Vessey, Ed., 98-9 Victoria, H.M. Queen, 56 Victoria Island, 67

Von Luckner, Captain, 158 Vostok Island, 20

Waipu, North

Auckland, New

Zealand, 41 Walker, Captain, R. S., 122 Washington State, U.S.A., 85 Washington, University, 85 Waterman, Captain, 40 Watson, Graham, 9

, William H., 82, 167, 177-8 Weil, Danny, 98

Union Steam Ship Company, 59 United Kingdom Commonwealth Relations Office, 124 United States of America, 12, 18,

56, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70 Upolo (ship), 59 Upolu, Samoa, 31

Urau, Penrhyn Islander, Vagus (yacht), 71-76 Vaimou, 32 Vai Sinane River, Samoa, Vaite, 146 Van Kamp, Mr, 30

Venus (schooner),

192

122

141-3

127

Weld, Bill, 86 Wellington, New Zealand, Ve West Wind (yacht), 98 Wide World Magazine, 9

21,

William, Tekake, 99, 100 Winchester, Captain Joe, 158 Windjammer Cruises Inc, 176 Winds Will (yacht), 62 Wray, Johnny W., 62

Yankee (brig), 176 Yasme III (yacht), 98 oung, J. 5% , Walter L., 54

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