This week’s dream: A remote Pacific island lost in time
There aren’t many places like Palmerston Island anymore, said Alison Van Houten in Outside. The remote Pacific atoll, part of the Cook Islands, floats like a speck 2,000 miles northeast of New Zealand and 500 miles away from the Cook Islands’ own capital. The atoll has no airstrip and only 35 residents, “but if you can get there, the islanders are happy to host visitors, usually in exchange for gear like nautical rope.” I was accompanying my father, a seasoned sailor, on a 1,500-mile voyage to Tonga when we chose Palmerston for a stopover. An email to our potential host won quick assurance that we’d be welcome—especially if we brought tobacco. We were met by a man in a dinghy wearing purple shorts and a Budweiser T-shirt. He introduced himself as Edward Marsters, chief of police.
Nearly everyone on Palmerston, including Marsters, descends from an Englishman who arrived in the 1860s and fathered 23 children with four Polynesian women, three of them his wives. I wondered why the original William Masters might have chosen such a place—until I set foot on the atoll’s main island, where windswept coconut trees tower over “bone-white” sand and “screensaver-blue” waters. On Sunday, we joined virtually everyone on the island at the local church for an hour of “roof-rattling” hymns sung in both English and Maori. After the service, we gather in front of Ed’s house; our third shipmate, Mason, has developed an infection requiring help from the island nurse. No modern medical facilities exist on Palmerston—one reason why some locals want an airstrip. Another is that climate change has increased the odds that emergency aid could be needed. Cyclones are growing more severe, sea levels are rising, and “this is a place where the traditional advice for cyclones is to lash yourself to a coconut tree on Refuge Hill, the island’s high point at just under 20 feet.” Even so, Ed and others have so far vetoed an airfield, because of the threat it poses to their way of life. Because that’s a problem for another day, “we content ourselves on our wobbly plastic chairs, trying simply to enjoy the breeze as William Masters might have.”
Sailors traveling to Palmerston should email or call ahead, using contact information that can be found at Noonsite.com.