![]() ![]() Polynesia is believed to be one of the last areas on Earth settled by humans, and that ancient people sailed across this void in narrow canoes from places like Indonesia and the Philippines seemed nearly impossible. The blue intensity astonished me as much as the immensity of the water. After a night in Papeete, I boarded a two-hour prop plane to Napuka.įor the first hour, I watched the empty ocean far below me. ![]() I opted out of scurvy and long months at sea in favour of the 18-hour flight to Tahiti from Washington DC, measured out in cups of fresh pineapple juice poured by flight attendants wearing floral prints. This was my ultimate desire as a traveller: to show up unannounced like those ailing British sailors, open to the naked fate of true exploration. No hotels, no restaurants, no tourist industry – it sounded like paradise to me. She had never been to Napuka, but as the author of Lonely Planet’s Tahiti & French Polynesia guidebook, she spoke from personal experience: “Those really remote atolls in the Tuamotus don’t really know what to do when visitors show up.” “You should arrange a place to stay beforehand,” my friend Celeste Brash recommended. Once I stepped off the plane, I would have to stay. Located nearly 1,000km from Tahiti’s capital, Papeete, Napuka is one of the most isolated islands in French Polynesia, and a quick stop on a larger circular air route. #We were here chess explorer route full#“You can fly to Napuka in February,” she explained in French, “but then you have to stay a full month.” And so I travelled in the better weather of May, when scheduled flights still gave me a minimum eight-day stay. I spent three weeks making cold calls before I got hold of an agent. Flights to the larger atoll of Napuka are not even listed on Air Tahiti’s international website. Could I get there, and would I be disappointed, too?Īnd yet, 254 years after Byron’s attempt, the Disappointment Islands still proved difficult to access. This green teardrop banded by sandy beach upon a deep blue ribbon is also the tiny island where Byron failed to land. Measuring just 4 sq km, Tepoto is one of the smallest of the 118 islands and atolls that comprise French Polynesia. Peering down on Google Earth, the smaller of the two Disappointment Islands resembled a single-cell organism floating alone in the ocean. But the name checked out online, pointing to Napuka and Tepoto, a pair of far-flung dots in the South Pacific, etched upon the blue surface of the Tuamotu Archipelago, the largest group of coral atolls on the planet. The name, now commonly listed as ‘Disappointment Islands’, sounded more like the title of some back-shelf Tintin comic than a real place on Earth. I laughed out loud when I first spotted the name in Byron’s sea log during a bout of insomnia, and was instantly hooked, reading line by line through the night until dawn. The map was published following his round-the-world journey, and the moniker has stuck ever since. ![]() Less than 20 hours after arriving, Byron sailed away, marking his frustration onto a new map of the world by naming these atolls the ‘Islands of Disappointment’. Byron only convinced the islanders to back off when he shot a 9lb cannonball over their heads. Meanwhile, natives armed with spears and clubs followed the longboat in the surf, using “threatening gestures to prevent their landing”. “ set up one of the most hideous yells I had ever heard, pointing at the same time to their spears, and poising in their hands large stones which they took up from the beach.” The British made a go at frantic diplomacy by throwing old bread at the islanders, who refused to touch the stale food but instead waded into the water and tried to swamp the longboat.īyron backed off and instead set sail towards the larger neighbouring island, but he again failed to anchor along the ringed coral atoll. “They would kill us… if we ventured to go on shore,” wrote Byron, who attempted one more landing in a longboat before giving up. ![]()
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