Subtitled "On Lonely Sea Spots of Pirate Lore and Shipwrecks Seven Families Live Happily Far From War Rumors and World Changes”
The Tristan da Cunha group, consisting of five islands, is situated near the center of the South Atlantic Ocean, about midway between South Africa and South America.
Until early in 1937 Tristan, the largest of the group, was the only island inhabited. Aptly named Inaccessible Island is 24 miles southwest of Tristan and 13 miles to the northwest of the Nightingale group-Nightingale, Middle, and Stoltenhoff Islands.
This lonely outpost of the British Empire is one of the most difficult in the domain to visit. There is no regular steamship service to Tristan, no trade or manufacture offering inducement for making it a port of call; no harbor or safe anchorage except in fair weather; and, more often than not, communication with the outside world is rendered impossible by dense fogs, fierce gales, and mountainous seas.
Until the middle of the last century the ocean surrounding Tristan da Cunha was a favored hunting area for American whalers out of New London and New Bedford; 60 to 70 whalers have been known to be in the offing at one time. In the age of sail, inhabitants carried on a brisk trade by bartering potatoes, other vegetables, and fresh water for the supplies they lacked.
With the advent of steam, and the movement of whales south to the neighborhood of South Georgia, Tristan ceased to be visited habitually by whalers or other vessels. Calls at the island became less and less frequent. Several years passed during which not one vessel put in at the settlement, and Tristan became known as the "Lonely Island."
From 1886 until the beginning of this century the British Admiralty dispatched a warship annually from False Bay, near Capetown, with mails and stores for the isolated community.
The mailbag was a postal curiosity. The average accumulated correspondence of twelve months rarely exceeded a dozen letters. Parcels were a rarity. Within the past two decades, however, the world has displayed a keen interest in the well-being of the inhabitants, and nowadays the mail for Tristan, when chance offers to deliver it, is of considerable size.
My voyage to Tristan was the worst I have experienced in forty years' travel about the seven seas. The whaler was tossed about like an empty barrel; the stench of whale oil was nauseating; the food plain and the cooking of it crude; and the accommodation available was of the roughest type-for, after all, a whaler is not built for luxury.
Approaching Tristan da Cunha, we encountered strong gales and for several days in succession had no glimpse of the sun. A hint of even more tempestuous weather when eventually we closed with Tristan Island did not augur well for my chances of landing there. The Danish captain was not enthusiastic about the prospect, and still less so about taking me off again.
The island is green and the towering cliffs are mostly fern-clad; yet Tristan can only be described as forbidding. As we closed with Falmouth Bay, the roar of the surf on the rocky coastline was almost deafening.
Tristan is an extinct volcano, the crater now filled with a lake of ice-cold water which makes a natural reservoir. The island rises sheer out of the sea to a height of 1,000 feet; and above that there is a cone, the Peak, which has an altitude of 7,640 feet above sea level. The circumference…"
These are pages from an actual 1938 magazine.
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