I can’t for the life of me remember where I originally saw the link to the online Tristan Times, but ever since finding it, I’ve been involved in a little Tristan da Cunha obsession.

Tristan da Cunha is the most remote inhabited island on Earth. It’s located in the south Atlantic, and just about 300 people live on it in a single settlement called Edinburgh of the Seven Seas. Its remoteness both fascinates and appalls me. Living in a remote location on land is one thing, but living on the side of a volcano in the middle of the ocean, with thousands of miles of water between you and everything else in the world - well, frankly, the very idea of it terrifies me, but it also makes me want to go to Tristan da Cunha just to see what it’s like.

Since it is highly unlikely that I will ever step foot on Tristan da Cunha (though you never know…), I’ve had to satisfy my curiosity about the place by sailing around the Web looking for insights into life on the island. I’ve found several interesting things. First of all, I found out that there was a reverend who lived on the island in the 1880s named E. Dodgson, who was the brother of Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. I also found this glossary of The English of Tristan da Cunha, which is several decades old and quite intriguing.

But I found the most absorbing document at the St. Helena Virtual Library and Archive (St. Helena is a nearby neighbor of Tristan da Cunha - just a four-day ship journey away!). It’s an account of life on Tristan da Cunha written by a missionary’s wife, Rose Annie Rogers, who went to live on the island with her husband in the early 1920s. Her account is called The Lonely Island, and it’s filled with fascinating descriptions of her “great adventure” in the south Atlantic - an adventure which was sometimes rather more grim than great.

I was several chapters through the account when I realized that Rose Annie Rogers must have been only 19 or 20 when she went off to Tristan da Cunha for three years with her husband (who was about 43). She even gave birth to a baby on the island, and while she puts on a brave face in her account of events on Tristan da Cunha, it’s evident that her life there was more than a little trying. At the end of her account, she says that living on Tristan da Cunha was “almost like living in the moon” - a description which perfectly conveys the feeling of isolation I imagine anyone in her circumstances would have felt.

I’m sure a great deal has changed in the 80 years since Rose Annie Rogers lived there, but the physical remoteness of Tristan da Cunha has not changed, and it is this unfathomable remoteness that has enthralled me. Technology may make it seem like the world is getting smaller every day, but it hasn’t changed the fact that Tristan da Cunha is very, very far away from anything I can even imagine.

Updated on September 26, 2012:

Radio New Zealand has an interesting 15-minute interview with Dawn Repetto, a Tristan da Cunha local who wrote a book of island recipes in 2010 (which you can order from the Tristan da Cunha website.