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Tristan da Cunha is the world’s most isolated inhabited island.

Around 270 people (the population does not vary much over the years) make a living on the only inhabited island of four essentially from growing potatoes and exporting crayfish tails.

There’s no jetty or proper harbor, landing is done through the surf by longboat and it isn’t unknown for a visiting cruise ship to not be able to land any passengers at all for days.

If you’d like to know more about the islands then I suggest this book. Written by a man who was Governor of the islands for three years in, I think it was, the 1960s. It’s a good overview of both what life is like (or at least was those few short decades ago) and of the history of the settlement. Be warned though, while interesting, it’s not about to win any literary awards.

Another fun book is this one, looking at the various remnants of the British Empire. Essentially, now reduced to those places that could not make it on their own, like Tristan da Cunha and various other islands, and places which don’t want to, like Bermuda.

To give you an idea of how little is written about the place, the last entry on Google News was this one, from yesterday. And that’s the Times of Tristan da Cunha keeping an eye on what the rest of us are saying about them. The article before makes this comment:

the older citizens—some of whom still speak in an old-fashioned manner with “thee”s and “thou”s—call “the houtside warl.”

One of the strangenesses is that the Tristan accent is closely related to that of the Falklands and of St Helena, each thousands of miles away. And all three are closely related to an archaic form of an English West Country accent. Your humble correspondent once phoned up the newspaper in the Falklands (long story as to why) and the accent on the other end of the line transported him to the back room of a pub in deepest darkest Dorset, talking to those who had been born there 90 years before.

But then this isn’t all that unusual, that places connected only by the sea (Tristan and St. Helena have no air contact with the outside world at all still) should have the accent, suitably varied, of the ports that connect them.

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