PALMERSTON ISLAND.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 17 May 1926, Page 10

PALMERSTON ISLAND.

HOME OF THE MARSTERS TRIBE

Palmerston Island, now reported as having been .swamped by a tidal wave, is the home of the Marsters family, or tribe (says “T.0.H.” in The Dominion). Between 60 and 70 years ago a Mr 'William Marsters was sent to the island by its lessee in charge of a gang of native labourers. The lessee died, and the island passed into Mr Marsters’s hands. According to Mr H. A. Hill, a Seventh Day Adventist missionary, who visited the island in 1921, the Marsters children and grandchildren and great-grand-children now number 230. The Palmerston atoll consists of eight little islets inside a ring of coral reef, the largest islet being about half a mile long by a quarter of a mile wide. So numerous have the descendants of the late Mr Marsters become than inn emigration policy apparently was essential, for the Palmerston homeland, according to the statistical returns, appears to- be supporting only 83 out of the 230 Marsterses, the rest being exiles from their native shores. The old maxim that we cannot all be Marsters evidently does not apply in the tropic isles of the Pacific.