Vernacular Names of the Plants of Bikini, Marshall Islands 
Pacific Plant Studies 12^ 
Harold St. John and Leonard E. Mason ^ 
In 1946, in connection with the atomic bomb- 
ing at Bikini, "Operation Crossroads,” gen- 
eral scientific studies were made upon this 
coral atoll in the northern Marshall Islands, 
in the central Pacific Ocean. In the plant 
kingdom general collections were made, even 
of the bacteria and the phytoplankton. The 
remaining plant groups were collected in 1946 
by Dr. W. R. Taylor, a specialist on marine 
algae, and he studied and reported on most 
of them. His general account of the flora has 
now appeared in book form (Taylor, 1950). 
In this book he includes 41 species of angio- 
sperms as composing the terrestrial flora of 
Bikini. Taylor did not obtain a record of the 
native names of the plants in use by the 
people of Bikini, who had already been re- 
moved to Rongerik atoll, since their home 
island was to become dangerously radioactive. 
They went first to Rongerik which, after 2 
years of residence, proved inadequate, then 
temporarily to Kwajalein until a final reloca- 
tion was made in November, 1948, at Kili 
Island in the southern Marshalls. 
Appreciating the value of the Marshallese 
ethnobotany, St.John urged Mason, who was 
^ This is the twelfth in a series of papers designed 
to present descriptions, revisions, and records of Pacific 
island plants. The preceding papers were published as: 
Bernice P. Bishop Mus., Occas. Papers 17 (7), 1942; 17 
(13), 1943; 18 (5), 1945; Amer. Fern Jour. 35: 87-89, 
1945; Torrey Bot. Club, Bui. 73: 588, 1946; Pacific Sci. 
1(2): 116, 1947; 2(2): 96-113, 1948; 2(4): 272-273, 
1948; 5(3): 279-286, 1951; 6(2); 145-150, 1952; Web- 
bia 8: 225-228, 1951. 
2 Chairman, Department of Botany and Chairman, 
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Univer- 
sity of Hawaii, respectively. Manuscript received May 
10, 1951. 
about to visit Kili and the Bikini people on an 
inspection trip, to attempt to compile it from 
native informants. On August 14, 1949, Ma- 
son spent 2 hours collecting plants, beginning 
at the village on the north shore, following 
the beach westward to the end of the island, 
and then cutting back to the village through 
the interior of the island. The plants collected 
and here listed are those recognized as char- 
acteristic Bikini plants by Jibaj, Ejkel, and 
Joaj, male adults and former residents of 
Bikini, who were selected because of their 
knowledge of Bikini’s plant life. Seventeen 
plants common to Kili and Bikini were col- 
lected, and they have been identified by St. 
John and deposited in the Bishop Museum. 
The informants were in unanimous agreement 
about the naming of 16 of them, but one man 
disagreed on the spelling of a single vernacu- 
lar name, that for Eleusme indica, although the 
difference in their spelling and pronunciation 
was slight and was due to the inadequacies of 
the orthography used by the Marshallese in 
spelling their language. 
The orthography here used is that estab- 
lished by the Protestant Mission and pub- 
lished in their Bible in Marshallese, printed 
in 1885. Vowel pronunciation is as follows: 
a, e, o, and u are like those in Spanish; a, as 
in English hat; i, as in bit; o is a central vowel 
somewhat like the u in English cut but higher 
in the mouth. Frequently certain vowels are 
preceded by a definite w sound. The conso- 
nants t and d are spelled as t, but when placed 
medially in a word are pronounced more like 
d; the same applies to the pair k and g, k 
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