[2] Palmerston Island is one of a number of sandy islets on a continuous ring of coral reef enclosing a lagoon.

Clockwise from Home, these include: All the islets are wooded with coconut palms, pandanus, and native trees.

[4] The economy is based on fishing and though Palmerston's extreme remoteness makes a cash market difficult to maintain; in fact it is more like the subsistence ways of life in the northern atolls.

Communication to the outside world is provided by Vodafone Cook Islands, including landline, internet and cellular phone service.

[2][5] Cook named the island after Henry Temple, 2nd Viscount Palmerston, then one of the Lords Commissioner of the Admiralty.

[2] In 1863 William Marsters, a ship's carpenter and barrel maker, arrived on Palmerston from Manuae with two Polynesian wives.

[7] By the time his youngest daughter Titana Tangi died in 1973, there were over a thousand of Marsters' descendants living in Rarotonga and New Zealand.