Three years in Tristan da Cunha

Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Bidwell
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
K. M. BARROW Wife of the Rev. J. G. Barrow, Missionary Clergyman in Tristan Da Cunha and fellow-worker with him on that island.
With thirty-seven original illustrations from photographs, and a map.
The aim of the following pages is to give a simple and true description of daily life among a very small community cut off from the rest of the world.
No attempt is made at literary style, the language being almost entirely that of letters to a sister or of my journal.
In the first and third chapters free use has been made of the Blue Book (Cd. 3098), September 1906; and of the Africa Pilot , Part II, Fifth Edition, 1901.
I desire gratefully to acknowledge to Mr. Casper Keytel of Monille Point, Cape Town, his very kind permission to use the excellent photographs taken by him; and also my indebtedness to my husband for help in the revision of these pages.
1910
Tristan da Cunha, a British possession, is an island-mountain of volcanic origin in the South Atlantic ocean. Latitude 37° 5' 50 S.; longitude 12° 16' 40 W. Circular in form. Circumference about 21 miles. Diameter about 7 miles. Height 7,640 feet. Volcano extinct during historic times. Discovered by the Portuguese navigator Tristan da Cunha, 1506. Occupied by the British, 1816. Nearest inhabited land, the island of St. Helena, 1,200 miles to the N.
In the autumn of 1904 we saw in the Standard a letter which arrested our attention. It was an appeal for some one to go to the Island of Tristan da Cunha, as the people had had no clergyman for seventeen years.
Now, Tristan da Cunha was not an unknown name to us, for as a child my husband loved to hear his mother tell of her shipwreck on Inaccessible, an uninhabited island twenty-five miles south-west of Tristan da Cunha.