Today, people permanently inhabit four of the islets on the atoll. Before the typhoon hit, Heine says, the Ebon population numbered several thousand.
#Ebon atoll series#
Moreover, in an unpublished interview series with Leonard Mason in 1949–1950, Dwight Heine (an Ebon local) tells of a legendary typhoon that swept Ebon sometime in the 1850s, the aftermath of which left the atoll population decimated. It is also curious to note that various German sources claim a significantly higher population – ranging from 1,000 to 2,000 people – in a 46-year period, 1860–1906. The same report also notes that Ebon is among the atolls and islands of the Marshalls with a positive net migration rate – even though the population has gone down with 196 people since the 1999 census. The most recent official census, conducted in 2011, has the total population at 706 people. The lowest count was under the Japanese colonial power in 1925, with 552 people, and the highest in 1999 – 20 years after independence – with 902 people. In the period between 19, different governmental officials have conducted eleven census reports from Ebon, with an average total population of 735 people. On 30 January 2014, castaway José Salvador Alvarenga, a Salvadorian national who had been working in Mexico as a fisherman, was found by locals from Ebon after he had pulled his boat ashore on Enienaitok Islet at the conclusion of a 14-month drifting voyage of 10,800 kilometers (6,700 miles) across the Pacific. At the end of WW II, Ebon Atoll became a part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands under the control of the United States, until the independence of the Marshall Islands in 1986. After World War I, the island came under the South Seas Mandate of the Empire of Japan, which had a garrison there late in World War II. Įbon was claimed by the Empire of Germany along with the rest of the Marshall Islands in 1884, and the Germans established a trading outpost. Missionaries sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston began missionary activities in the Marshall Islands in 1857, establishing a mission at Ebon. There were several motives, and by some accounts the ship's crew had been abducting island women for sale to plantation owners ( slavery) at other destinations. The schooner Glencoe was taken and its crew massacred by Marshallese at Ebon in 1851 – one of three vessels attacked in the Marshall Islands in 18. The last whaler known to have visited was the Andrew Hicks in 1905. The first such vessel on record was the Newark in 1837. Ebon Atoll was visited by commercial whaling vessels in the 19th century.