How These 62 People Survived 160 Years on a Pacific Island

#Palmerston #CookIslands #RemoteIslands #PacificIsland #IslandSurvival


On the 8th of July, 1863, a carpenter from Leicestershire named William Marsters landed on a coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with three wives, a handful of tools, and a set of rules he wrote himself.

He never left.

One hundred and sixty years later, sixty-two people still live on that island. Every single one of them is descended from him. Every single one of them carries his name. And every single one of them lives by the rules he wrote.

The island is called Palmerston. It sits five hundred kilometres from the nearest city in the Cook Islands, surrounded by open Pacific in every direction. There is no airport. There is no regular shipping lane. The reef passage that separates the island from the outside world is considered one of the most dangerous boat landings in the entire Pacific Ocean. Supply ships arrive a few times a year. When they do not come, the island waits.

William Marsters built his house from shipwreck timber washed up on the shore. That house is still standing. He divided the island into three zones — one for each of his three wives — and made one rule that has never been broken since: you may not marry within your own family branch. Sixty-two people on a 2.6 square kilometre coral atoll have followed that rule for one hundred and sixty years.

They speak a dialect of English brought from the Midlands of England in the 1850s that has evolved in complete isolation ever since. They fish the same reef their ancestors fished. They run the island through a council of three family branches that has not changed in a century and a half.

They have survived the hurricane of 1926 that stripped the island of every coconut tree. They have survived the death of their founder. They have survived the slow exodus of their own children to Rarotonga and Auckland.

The question now is not whether they survived. It is what comes after the proof.

This is the story of Palmerston Island — one founder, three wives, three zones, and one hundred and sixty years.

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