Episode 240: Islanders

This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate. They were called into the principal's office. and asked if they wanted to go on an adventure. They probably knew they weren't going to get in trouble, those first boys, the six of them. They were good kids, some of the best students and best athletes at the best boys high school in Honolulu. They were just about to graduate, on their way to big things, going places in their lives. That was why one's parents agreed to send you away from home.

in the Kamehameha school to seek opportunity. And here was one seeking them. Their principal explained that he had been visited by an envoy from the United States government. He was organizing expeditions to a handful of islands in the South Pacific. They were Tiny. They were deserted, they were among the most remote places on Earth, smack dab halfway between Hawaii and Australia. There were scientists, it seemed, who wanted to study them.

All overseen by a renowned naturalist from Johns Hopkins, a man who'd been alongside Admiral Byrd during his first and second expeditions to Antarctica, and who had recently been in the news there in the middle of the drawing. For leading an expedition to the Gobi Desert that had brought back dinosaur eggs. This new expedition needed some assistance.

So why not graduating seniors from the illustrious Kamehameha school? Young men who not only excelled academically, but who were also children of the Pacific Islands? Kids who had grown up fishing and swimming and camping, who were athletic and hardy and resourceful. The principal made it clear. This was a great honor for the An opportunity they simply could not pass up. Though why would they want to?

And so in March of 1935, a naval ship manned by twelve crew members and six recent graduates of Kamehameha High set out from Honolulu Harbor. A week at sea, sixteen hundred miles, in the land of no land. Just rolling hills of rolling ocean, sometimes sprawling plains, sometimes canyons cleaving the landless landscape. Sometimes mountains rising and roaring, and then breaking like a spell. And then Lando. The cry came up from the crew as they approached the first of three islands.

But what was this land? It was hardly land at all. The first stop was Jarvis Island. At only one point seven square miles, it was twice the size of the other two islands on the itinerary, When they got off the boat and explored the They quickly discovered that there was nothing really to explore. 1.7 square miles is nothing. From farthest point to farthest point, it took you only 20 minutes to walk across. And these weren't Hawaiian islands, weren't the islands that they knew.

Lush and rainbowed. Jarvis, like Howland, like Baker, were deserted desert islands, no people, no water, no streams or springs. There were no trees, there was little shade. There were no exotic animals, just birds, and mice living among whatever grass and scrub and shrubs that had managed to take root among the rocks and the sand. And as they explored or wandered around for a bit, same thing.

There wasn't a single moment when they couldn't turn and see other people on the island. There wasn't enough distance to allow them to disappear into the distance, nor could one descend out of view over yonder hill when there were no hills.

And in April of 1935, on each of these three islands, in the precise center of absolutely nowhere, two Hawaiian kids and four Navy men were left with tents, some meager supplies, And enough fresh water to last them the next few months until the ship came back from the water. Their instructions were to set up camp, to keep a precise log of weather conditions, to collect specimens of the scant flora and fauna. to plant coconut palms, taro, and other Polynesian staples they brought with them.

The boys knew how to do that. They had grown up fishing and foraging. could hunt and pluck a bird and make a fire to cook it over. The sailors knew all that too. They had been trained, had read their manuals. They could do it. But they kind of hate. It? At least there? When one enlists in the Navy, when one lives in, say, the Texas Hill Country or California's Central Valley or the pine scented woods of southeastern Vermont, wherever.

One could be forgiven for resenting having been sent to this tiny desert island when you had just been stationed in Oahu. And so later that summer, that summer spent a stone's throw away from the equator on an island with no water and no shade. When a naval vessel appeared in the horizon, more or less on schedule, which was a relief, they had no radio, no way to communicate, so they'd just been holding on hope that their ship would come in.

The three military men were delighted to hop on board and put their time on this desert island behind them. The two Hawaiian kids stay behind. The captain of the relief ship had come with orders. Someone had to stay on the island. And with those orders came the ability to order the sailors to do just that. But the boys volunteered.

Entertainmentless isolation of Jarvis and Howland and Baker, the young graduates of Kamehameha High School were having the time of their lives. Fishing, swimming, making surfboards out of discarded crates. Doing push-ups, singing songs, finding a really cool stick, running on the beach, looking at the room. Grabbing a rag, figuring out some way to tie it into a tight little ball that they'd never quite be able to replicate. was super fun to throw around for a while until it kind of unraveled.

I'd grown up in rural Hawaii in the 1920s and 30s. Kids of pineapple farmers, weavers, and fishermen. They knew it was kind of long. It was better by far than that that had been led by a previous generation of Hawaiian men who had been brought to those same islands. Some fifty years before, in the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties, crews of men sailed there as part of a rush for guano.

All over the world, the great powers of Europe, the emerging ones of the Americas, scoured the seas to find and occasionally fight over islands devoid of humans, but filled with birds. Birds who, over the centuries of nesting and resting, covered those islands with thick coats of feces, nitrogen-rich feces. that could, if harvested, be brought back to places where humids did live to fertilize its fields and increase crop yields to feed growing human populations.

So these men were put to that task. It was as disgusting and as grueling as you might allow yourself to imagine. The work lasted only as long as the guano did. It took about a decade to harvest it all. It is likely that no one set foot on those three islands until the boys of Kamehameha High School did. From nineteen thirty five to nineteen forty two, one hundred and thirty-five young men, just like these first six who had been called to the principal's office, all Hawaiians.

At first, recent graduates, and then as time went on, high school seniors and some juniors were sent from Honolulu to these far-flung desert islands. In teams of two and later four, they would live there in shifts, typically for three months at a time, though often they would choose to extend their stay, stick around for another tour of duty, Two of the kids in that first expedition stayed on Jarvis Island for nine months straight.

They got paid pretty well actually. Three bucks a day, which was about twenty percent more than most of their fathers were earning every day on pineapple plantations. It became a particularly prestigious thing at the school. You wanted to be chosen. You wanted to go and test your mettle out there in the sun. Like those other guys had done. They looked up to them, so they followed in their footsteps.

They logged the weather, they collected biological samples, they planted a garden with limited success, they built semi-permanent shelters, built a makeshift lighthouse on one of the islands, radio towers, And they did all the rest on those islands where there was nothing. They swam, surfed. They fished, there were so many kinds of fish. They collected shells. Each was so different, if you just took the time to notice. There was so much there.

One of them was a particularly good writer. He would go on to work at newspapers and write books. George knew a new West, and while he was paid to watch the weather, he saw so much more. Like this. We were stopped by the sight of the ocean covered with leaping porpoises. From one corner of the eye to the other, and this far out toward the horizon all we could see were scattered porpoises moving rhythmically in the same direction, like a grand military review.

Circumstance drew them into brotherhood. If things started to get tense, if they started to annoy each other, they had this ritual where they'd play two on two football, full contact, and they'd get it out of their system, and things would be fine after. They'd gone to school together. They had all grown up the same way. And there just wasn't that much stuff to fight about. There was nothing to compete over. No grades, no rewards, no girls.

There were sharks, there were storms, there were times when things got hairy, when the ships would be delayed, and they wouldn't know how long they would be delayed for, and they started to worry about water. There was one time that one of the kids, Carl Kwae-Loué, got sick.

They had to radio for a pickup, and they'd never had to make that kind of call before. And they waited for days and he just got sicker, and by the time they got him on the ship it was clear that his appendix had burst and he died on the way home. And it was just brutal for him, for his family, for his three friends who he'd gotten to know better than his family in some ways, his friends who had tried to keep him.

At one point, and this was incredible, the guys could not have been more excited. They heard that they were going to have a visitor. Amelia Earhart was planning her solo circumnavigation of the globe and Howland Island was going to be one of her refueling stations. And a bunch of Navy guys showed up and they all worked together to build an airstrip and build an actual building, a place with walls and a roof and a shower fit for the famous aviator.

One of the kids' mothers sent them curtains to maintain everyone's modesty when this woman arrived in the land of men and boys. Before that, none of the guys had even thought to put anything up to block the sun. And they were thrilled. And she never showed. And then the sailors left to go search for her and her drowned plane, and the boat that was supposed to come and relieve the boys, bring more water, send some of them home, was conscripted in the fruitless search for Amelia Erhard.

And it didn't come back for them for three hundred. Three months of rationing and of rationalizing, of bringing into reason their unreasonable state. of solitude and maybe heartbreak. Maybe fear. Things they didn't write down in their logbook.

At some point, we do not know the specific date, or if there was a specific date, whether this information came in slowly over time. Or even if it ever truly became clear to them during their time on the island of the world. If it was only later on. But at some point. They learned why they were really there. That their mission, either as told to their principal by that government agent, or merely as their principal chose to tell them, wasn't scientific. Was it about flora or fauna?

It was strategic. When the first wave of colonization swept through the South Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as England claimed New Zealand and Fiji, as the French dominated Tahiti, the Spanish, the Philippines, Germany, Guam, and on and on. There was little use for places like Jarvis and Howland and Baker. There wasn't enough guano there anymore, and there was no water or precious metals or lumber or labor to exploit.

But in the nineteen thirties, the United States government found new value. The islands were small, but they would be big enough to land an airplane someday. If America's emerging airline industry wanted to fly people from San Francisco to Sydney, they would need places to stop and refuel. But moreover, if America itself needed to fly to Japan or to China to drop bombs one day,

They wanted these islands. An international law said that a country couldn't claim territory as their own if no people of their own live there. So FDR's government got to thinking and sent an envoy to Kamehameha High School. Three young men lost their lives as unwitting colonists. The first of natural causes, his burst appendix, But the other two, they were just out cleaning fish down by the beach one day when they heard Japanese planes.

It was the day after Pearl Harbor. They'd received a radio report about the attack just hours before. And now four of them were running for cover on an island where there was no cover. And two of them were blown apart. The other two were left to bury them. and barely survive other attacks, and wait fifty five days until the navy, scrambling toward war, could spare a boat for their rescue.

The young men returned home. and were thrown into the war like the world's other young men. They were told not to talk about the roles they played as the first colonists of what was then an American territory. And so they didn't. Not for seventy years. In 2002, an archivist working in a natural history museum in Honolulu found one of their logbooks and noticed that some of the entries were written by someone who had the same last name as one of her co-workers.

It turned out to be her grandfather. That started a research project in oral histories, that led to a museum exhibit, and books. a television documentary on Hawaiian public television, and in twenty fifteen the one time colonists were given formal recognition by the United States government for their service to their country when they were young men. Few of them were still alive to receive it. They had all just left the islands and lived their lives.

They grew up to be writers and professors, cops, one was a mayor. They had families, illnesses, accidents. Many perfect days, whether they noticed them as they were happening or not. They remembered their time on the islands like it was yesterday. Some days the whole thing felt like a dream. Some nights it would be. They got home. They lived their lives. There was so much there. This episode of the Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMeo, in february of twenty twenty six.

This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw. It is a proud, proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent, artist-owned, listener-supported podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you ever want to drop me a line, you can send me an email to nate at thememorypalace.us. You can follow me variously on Blue Sky at NateDameo, on Facebook at the Memory Palace, and on Instagram or threads at the MemoryPalace Podcast. I'll talk to you again.