Palmyra Atoll 🏳

Fanning, sailing to Asia aboard the Betsy, claimed to have sighted the reef later known as Palmyra after heaving to overnight on a premonition. The claim has been disputed on the grounds he may only have reached Kingman Reef, 34 miles away. It remains the earliest recorded European-American encounter with the atoll.

The vessel Palmyra struck the reef on 7 November 1802 and the atoll took the ship's name. Sowle recorded no inhabitants and no fresh water, but abundant large coconuts and fish. No evidence of pre-European settlement has been reported.

The atoll was visited as part of the United States Exploring Expedition, with live plant and animal samples collected. Wilkes recorded the island as inhabited and urged regular visits by national vessels. It was the first systematic scientific documentation of the atoll.

Both men lodged claims to the atoll under the 1856 Guano Islands Act. No guano deposits were found, so the claims were abandoned. The episode marked an early, unsuccessful American assertion of possession.

On 26 February 1862 the king commissioned Captains Zenas Bent and Johnson Beswick Wilkinson to take possession, and formal annexation followed on 15 April 1862. Bent and Wilkinson became joint owners, beginning a century of private title-holding. This annexation later underpinned Palmyra's inclusion in American Hawaii.

Bent sold his rights to Wilkinson in December 1862; the atoll passed to Kalama Wilkinson and in 1885 was divided among four heirs. Shares moved through William Luther Wilcox, the Pacific Navigation Company (liquidated 1897), William Ansel Kinney and Fred Wundenberg. The fragmented title would generate decades of litigation.

A British naval commander asserted a claim over the atoll in ignorance of the Kingdom of Hawaii's 1862 annexation. The claim was never pursued. It illustrates the contested sovereignty of remote Pacific islets in the era.

The annexation of the Republic of Hawaii carried Palmyra into American possession. A subsequent Act of Congress of April 1900 made all of Hawaii, including Palmyra, an incorporated territory. This status is the legal foundation of Palmyra's unique position today.

On 14 June 1900 the atoll was formally incorporated into the Territory of Hawaii. It would remain administratively part of Hawaii for nearly six decades. Its incorporated status, unlike other US insular areas, meant the full Constitution applied.

Wundenberg's widow sold the two-thirds undivided interest to Cooper on 12 June 1911, and in 1912 Cooper bought the Ringer daughters' rights and petitioned to register title to all of Palmyra. The Supreme Court of Hawaii held his ownership subject to rights sold to Henry Maui and Joseph Clarke. These competing native Hawaiian interests fuelled litigation into the 1990s.

With the Panama Canal nearing completion and Britain operating an All Red Line cable station on nearby Fanning Island, Palmyra gained strategic value. On 21 February 1912 American sovereignty was formally reaffirmed at the atoll. Palmyra land was also registered in the Hawaii Land Court that year.

Rock accompanied Cooper to the atoll in July 1913 and wrote a scientific description; the unusual palms were identified by Odoardo Beccari as a variety unique to Palmyra, bearing the world's largest and most triangular coconuts. The 'mammoth coconuts' were displayed in Honolulu in 1914. The find established Palmyra's distinct botanical standing.

A small detachment was sent as part of a national effort to document outlying American territory, taking aerial photographs over two days of favourable weather. The USS Eagle Boat 40 transported aircraft and equipment. At the time only three Americans lived on the atoll.

On 19 August 1922 Cooper sold his interest, excepting two minor islets, to Leslie and Ellen Fullard-Leo for $15,000. They established a copra business harvesting the atoll's coconuts. The Fullard-Leos would hold the atoll for nearly eighty years and successfully defend their title against the federal government.

The family sought to lease the atoll to the Navy, prompting the government to sue, claiming Palmyra had never been privately owned. The case ran through the Second World War while the Navy occupied and built on the atoll. It reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Navy selected the site for an airfield in 1938 despite Interior Secretary Harold Ickes's plea to Roosevelt to preserve the atoll's scientific and scenic value. The first construction group sailed from Honolulu on 14 November 1939. A 2,000-yard unpaved airstrip was built on Cooper Island.

Following a 1939 Attorney General determination that Palmyra was US public land and the Fullard-Leo claim invalid, Roosevelt placed the island under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Navy. This was the first official assertion of naval jurisdiction over the atoll. Claims that a 1934 order had done so are unsupported.

Extensive military development consolidated and reshaped the land during the Navy's occupation. The alterations permanently changed the atoll's physical geography and hydrology. Much of the base was demolished after the war, with debris burned, dumped in the lagoon or left as unexploded ordnance.

Dredging opened a channel from the open sea into the previously non-navigable West Lagoon, reached on 15 May 1941. Islands were joined by causeways, new islands built, and runways laid on dredged coral spoil. The works blocked water flow and are believed to have severely damaged lagoon ecology.

The bird, extinct in the wild and existing only in captivity since the 1980s, was released on the atoll. The introduction made Palmyra a refuge for a species with no remaining native habitat. It marked a significant step in the atoll's role in global biodiversity conservation.

The partnership targeted dominant Cocos nucifera palms, the legacy of former copra plantations and military activity. By December 2019 half a million coconut sprouts had been removed. The ecosystem's response is being monitored closely.

A programme begun in 2011 targeted non-native rats that had arrived during the Second World War, at one point numbering as many as 30,000. They ate seabird eggs and destroyed seedlings of one of the largest remaining Pacific stands of Pisonia grandis. The rats were eliminated in 2012.

The proclamation of 6 January 2009 grouped Palmyra with Baker, Howland, Jarvis, Johnston and Kingman Reef, extending 50 nautical miles offshore. It is managed jointly by the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA. The grouping was renamed the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument in 2025.

The station was set up to study global warming, coral reefs, invasive species and other environmental concerns. It built on earlier work such as the 2003 study of fossilised coral used to reconstruct 1,000 years of El Niño behaviour. Palmyra became a significant Pacific scientific research platform.

In March 2003 TNC transferred the land to federal ownership, adding a further 28 acres in 2005. TNC and Cooper descendants retained remaining private tracts. The conveyance consolidated federal conservation management of the atoll.

Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt's Order No. 3224 of 18 January 2001 designated Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, covering the tidal lands, submerged lands, lagoons and waters within the 12-nautical-mile US territorial sea, which were transferred to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Accompanying regulations closed the refuge to commercial fishing while permitting limited recreational fishing; displaced commercial licensees later sued unsuccessfully under the Takings Clause, losing on appeal in April 2009. The atoll is today part privately owned by the Nature Conservancy and part US Government-owned, administered as a nature preserve.

The Conservancy purchased the majority of the atoll from the three Fullard-Leo brothers for coral reef conservation and research, leaving only the Home and possibly Sand islets in other hands. The sale ended nearly eight decades of family ownership. It transformed Palmyra into a conservation and scientific research site.

Heirs of Henry Maui claimed inherited interests in the atoll and contested the legality of the Newlands Resolution annexing Hawaii. They also intervened in a federal salvage claim over a supposed treasure ship at Palmyra. The cases were dismissed on procedural grounds before trial.

In 1980 two members of a visiting amateur radio DXpedition were injured badly enough to require airlift to Honolulu, and the injured surgeon sued the owners. The atoll was closed to visitors for most of the 1980s while cleanup was undertaken. Radio expeditions had been its most consistent visitors since the 1940s.

From early 1979 officials considered siting spent nuclear fuel storage on remote Pacific islands including Palmyra, with a formal proposal written by 1982. Critics warned of the devastating consequences of a leak. The idea was abandoned soon after and no facilities were built.

A wealthy San Diego couple, Malcolm and Eleanor Graham, disappeared at the atoll; the pair were arrested in Honolulu after returning aboard the stolen yacht Sea Wind and convicted only of theft. Eleanor Graham's remains were found in a lagoon chest six years later; Walker was convicted of murder in 1985 and Stearns acquitted in 1986. The case produced the book And the Sea Will Tell and a CBS miniseries, making the atoll internationally notorious.

About forty people carried out observations of nuclear weapons tests conducted high above Johnston Atoll, supported by around ten more. It was the atoll's principal Cold War military use. No permanent installation resulted.

Effective 10 October 1961, the order made the Department of the Interior responsible for all executive, legislative and judicial authority of Palmyra's civil administration. This filled the governance vacuum left after Hawaiian statehood. The Air Force ceased maintaining the main airfield the same year.

When Hawaii was admitted as a state, Palmyra was explicitly excluded and remained a federal incorporated territory. It has since been the only incorporated US territory. No Act of Congress since has specified how it is to be governed.

The Court quieted good land title against the federal government in favour of the Fullard-Leos and Cooper heirs. The base was consequently returned to private ownership in 1947. The ruling preserved private landholding on an incorporated US territory.

On 16 January 1942 six Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers arrived from Hawaii. Marine Corps VMF-211 pilots also used the airfield. Palmyra served through the war as a refuelling and training station rather than a combat front.

On 24 December 1941 the submarine fired twelve 120mm rounds at the atoll's radio station, hitting the dredge Sacramento with one shell. A 5-inch coastal battery returned fire and forced I-75 to submerge and withdraw. It was the atoll's only enemy attack of the war, causing no significant damage.

Executive Order 8682 of 14 February 1941 created naval defensive sea areas in the central Pacific, covering Palmyra's territorial waters out to three miles, plus a Naval Airspace Reservation. Only authorised US government ships and aircraft could enter. The Navy formally took the atoll as Palmyra Island Naval Air Station on 15 August 1941.