Reaching the Farthest Corner of the World Is One Rough Trip
There are no stories of pirates in the South Pacific. While the Caribbean contains thousands of islets where marauding ships could find a sandy beach to stash their stolen treasure, the South Pacific is mostly water—punishing amounts of navy blue water. A desert of ocean, really.
Here, passing vessels never fell prey to peg-legged rumrunners. Instead, tales of moral depravity are relegated to the specks of land themselves, so impossibly far from one another—and away from watchful eyes—that only they bear witness to the bleakest forms of moral turpitude. This is where darker thoughts have their lease, where the scarcity of resources allows the rational mind to act with reckless desperation.
Early European explorers filled their journals with the grim details of cannibalism and human sacrifice, but the region’s modern-day history is just as rife with disturbing accounts of torture, incest, and vanishing tourists. The deeper one travels toward the brink of civilization, the more improbable the stories become. In the 1980s, an actual witch hunt took place on the distant isle of Faaite, wherein a mob of religious zealots slaughtered six of their neighbors, whom they believed to be possessed by demons. Until as recently as the ’90s, the atoll of Mururoa, more distant still, was used as a live nuclear testing site by the French government, which dropped almost two hundred bombs—some a hundred times stronger than the atomic weapons that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki—then tried to cover up the side effects: rampantly rising rates of cancer and deformities in eastern Polynesia.