The Remotest Island

It's not hard to discover an island in the 21st century. Just zoom in on this tiny speck in the South Atlantic, roughly halfway in between Montevideo and Cape Town. That little pimple is the isolated British dependency known as Tristan da Cunha, which lays claim to the title of the remotest human settlement on the planet (the inhabitants of Easter Island would beg to differ). This tiny, volcanic island --nearly a perfect circle, with snow-capped Queen Mary's Peak rising 6,760 feet from sea level-- is home to about 300 people, descended from a handful of original settlers and shipwrecked sailors.

For reasons which I will shortly attempt to unravel, this island has become for me nothing short of an obsession. The past week I have scoured the Internet for information on Tristan --its geography, its people, and, above all, its inaccessibility. Tristan da Cunha has no airport or landing field; the only way to get there is by ship from Cape Town, and even then only about eight times a year (although the occasional cruise liner comes to call). But a ticket to Tristan da Cunha doesn't guarantee door to door service --sometimes the rough Atlantic waters and the island's shallow harbor prevent the landing of passengers and supplies altogether.

Undoubtedly part of my obsession with Tristan stems from the fact that it is so difficult to reach. For those of us who aspire to travel to exotic parts of the globe, Tristan is the holy grail. You can fly almost everywhere these days --Antarctica, Tahiti, even Svalbard-- but how many places are only accessible by ship 8 times a year?

Human nature draws us to the unknown. Like the explorers of the 15th century (Tristao da Cunha, discoverer of the island among them), we seek to discover something new and exotic, something that we can call our own. Is it the banality of our own lives that sends us out in search for new horizons --to seek out adventure or newfound riches-- like those illiterate Extremadurans who set out to conquer the New World? Or rather, the feeling that there must be something else out there, like radio astronomers scouring the skies for intelligent life?

While I'm not sure of the answer to this question, I think my attraction to Tristan da Cunha is multi-faceted. Take the sweeping beauty of the place: a lush, green mountain peak, it's summit obscured by wisps of white, rising abruptly from the depths of the Atlantic. Like the tip of an iceberg, Tristan da Cunha is merely the top of a giant underwater mountain the rises up from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (the second largest peak behind Pico in the Azores). Driven by the (to me) mysterious processes of plate tectonics and underwater subduction, this peak has emerged over thousands of years from the deep, the lone sentinel of a vast underwater mountain range. The contrast between what lies above the water, and what lies below, is at the same time beautiful and unfathomable.

More alluring even than Tristan's geology is its genealogy. Although the first attempt at settlement of the island failed in 1813, the British Navy set up a garrison on Tristan da Cunha three years later, mainly to discourage a rescue of Napoleon from St. Helena (a "close" island 1200 miles to the northeast). After the Navy left, William Glass petitioned the admiral to stay on the island, and thus began the strange history of the island's settlement. By 1826 there were five bachelors on Tristan; a persuasive ship captain managed to convince five mulatto women from St. Helena to come to the island and marry them. In the subsequent years the settlement, called Edinburgh of the Seven Seas after a visit from the Duke of Edinburgh in 1867, also absorbed a number of shipwrecked sailors, some of whom decided to settle permanently on the island.

As of today there are only eight surnames on the island, and the small gene pool has led to a high incidence of asthma among the islanders. Their isolation and diverse origins (settlers came from Scotland, Holland, the United States, and Italy) has also led to the development of a unique accent, which sounds like a mixture of a Scottish brogue and Australian English (listen here). Tristanians are united not only by these genetic and linguistic peculiarities, but by their determination and perseverance in an unforgiving environment. In 1961, a volcanic eruption forced the islanders to abandon Tristan, but they voted to return to the island two years later rather than stay in England. Not even awaiting an official decision by the British government, the group returned en masse to repair their settlement and their lives.

Today Tristan da Cunha straddles the line between remote outpost of humanity and integration into the 21st century. Although access to the island is limited by the sporadic shipping schedule, Tristanians are not as disconnected as one might think. My initial impression of the island as a retro-utopian commune, uncorrupted by modern technologies, was largely erroneous. Although once frowned upon, currency was introduced during World War II; the island now sports a pub where Tristanians can spend their meager salaries on cheap South African beer and mammoth lobsters, which are abundant in the island's surrounding waters. As a recent visitor recounted, homes on the island have modern amenities like refrigerators and televisions (although the only channel they get, a military channel from the Falkland Islands, plays incessant reruns of the British soap "EastEnders"). The Island Administrator has access to the only telephone and internet connection on Tristan, which makes communication with the outside world prohibitively expensive. Nevertheless, the island did finally receive a postcode (TDCU 1ZZ) from the British Royal Mail in 2005 in order to expedite the delivery of packages (the first item shipped from Amazon.com was a book about Tristan's history).

If Tristan da Cunha is not as technologically isolated as I initially envisioned, what continues to make it so alluring? Its remote geography and physical beauty certainly contribute to my obsession, but perhaps underpinning this whole pursuit is a desire for a deeper sense of belonging. To be an islander on Tristan da Cunha is to be part of an elite group of 300 people who all share a common history, dialect, bloodline, and physical space with those around them. Stranded in the middle of an unmerciful ocean, Tristanians rely on each other for almost everything (except, of course, the beer). Perhaps this sense of belonging is what keeps them on Tristan, despite the cultural pressures they face from the outside world.

Like other inspired travelers, I'll continue to hold a space in my passport for a Tristan stamp. Its doubtful I'll make it; perhaps my vision of what I might find there is too romantic for it not to be a disappointment. Still, there's something mystical about this tiny island that rises like a pyramid from the dark blue sea, and its 300 persevering inhabitants.

Let's just hope they don't build an airport.

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Pictures of Tristan da Cunha:
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/journeys/photo_feature/tristan_da_cunha/
http://www.sthelena.se/tristan/index.htm
http://www.tristandc.com/tour.php

Tristan Times:
http://www.tristantimes.com/

Sources:
http://www.tristandc.com/historyhome.php
http://www.btinternet.com/~sa_sa/tristan_da_cunha/tristan_history_2.html