Following the invasion and enslavement of the Tiamo nation more than a millennium ago, the southern lands were largely left abandoned. In the years that followed, Manatu Island was settled by the Aboyan peoples from the east of what is now modern Irukandji. (see also Tiamo Reef Memorial)

In 1858, the island, then called East Pearl Island, was annexed by the British under the command of Lord Governor Ernest Recreant. He established a garrison on Old Fort Island to the east. History would record him as a fair man, but to this day, rumours remain regarding his suspected involvement in the sugar slave trade, which eventually decimated the Manatu people.

With his teenage wife recently dead from childbirth, he saw the chance to mend ties by marrying Uba Uba, youngest daughter of the Aboyan chief. The couple had several children before Lord Recreant's death in 1877 at the hands of natives. Uba Uba married a British soldier, Archibald Quintessa, and moved to the garrison on Tamita Island.

This move saved her and her progeny the fate shared by the other Pearl Island natives, when the sugar slave trade reached its zenith in the 1890s.

Manatu Island finally gained its name upon the fabled return of the tribal chief Pinjarra, who rose to became a legend to his people in the early 1900s. (see also Tale of the Twin Pearls)

Upon her second husband's death, Uba Uba Recreant returned to Manatu Island with her large family and the population began to grow again.  Given their mixed Aboyan-British heritage, the paler-skinned modern Manatuans regarded themselves as a separate tribe to the Aboyans.

In 1943, as an identified British citizen, 88 year old Uba Uba was interred in a Japanese prison camp and died soon after. She is buried beside here first husband, Sir Ernest, and is remembered as the Matriarch of Manatu.

In 1979, torn between its ancestral ties with the Pinjarrans and its fear of the Tamita elders, the Manatu natives remained neutral in the war for control of the kingdom. (see also The Tamita-Pinjarra War)

Rightly or wrongly, this earned the Manatuans a reputation for being untrustworthy, and when the Tamita elders emerged victorious, they deemed Manatu to be conquered territory with no right to place an elder on the Council of Princes.

This animosity has thinned in recent times, and one of Sir Ernest's direct descendents, Lemuel, later served as Irukandji Police Commissioner. (see also History of Irukandji Police)

The Recreant Family Plot still stands today as an historical site on Manatu Island on the grounds of what is now the Irukandji Fish Farm.