Three Years in Tristan Da Cunha

In 1906, Katherine Mary Barrow set sail for the most remote inhabited island on Earth. Tristan da Cunha sits alone in the South Atlantic, thousands of miles from anywhere, home to a few hundred souls who had lived in near-total isolation for generations. She arrived as a missionary's wife, but what she became was something far more interesting: a witness to a world that had almost ceased to exist. The Barrow family had ties to this place dating back decades, her husband's mother had been shipwrecked there as a child, and Katherine returned to a community that remembered. This is her account of that strange homecoming, of learning to live among people whose customs baffled her and whose kindness disarmed her, of the endless grey sea and the volcano that loomed over every waking moment. She describes the daily rhythms of a place without shops or roads or news from the outside world, where everyone's business was everyone's business and survival depended entirely on the kindness of the weather. Written with quiet observation and occasional dry humor, this memoir preserves a world that has since changed almost beyond recognition. For readers drawn to tales of extreme isolation, accidental anthropologist husbands, and women who found themselves strangers in very strange lands.