Pitcairn Islands

One of the most remote inhabited places and least peopled countries in the world, the Pitcairn Islands are an utterly singular frontier of Polynesia. Only one of the four islands—Pitcairn itself—is settled, and even then only by a few dozen residents (who can trace some of their ancestry to the legendary mutiny on the HMS Bounty in 1789).

The HMS Bounty was transporting Tahitian breadfruit to the West Indies as part of an effort to introduce it there in cultivation, but part of the crew rebelled a few weeks after leaving Tahiti; the mutineers banished the ship’s captain, William Bligh, and several others to a boat (all but one of whom—John Norton, killed by Tofua natives—survived to reach safety in the Dutch East Indies). Seeking a remote haven, some of the mutineers, eventually reached Pitcairn Island in early 1790. The Bounty was then purposely sunk offshore; and divers nowadays can visit the wreck in Bounty Bay.

The British eventually claimed Pitcairn, and, as David Stanley notes in his Moon Handbooks South Pacific, “It’s one of the ironies of history that Pitcairn, born out of treason to the British crown, was the first Pacific island to become a British colony (in 1838) and remains today the last remnant of that empire in the Pacific.”

Besides the Bounty legacy, the Pitcairn Islands are notable for Henderson Island, one of the most pristine coral atolls in the world. Its long isolation from the heavy hand of humankind makes Pitcairn a precious global laboratory, and a number of endemic plants and birds, including the flightless Henderson crake, call it home.

Strange history, a gloriously wild atoll, and, everywhere, a sense of almost bewildering remoteness: That's the Pitcairn Islands, about as isolated as the South Pacific gets.