The Marquesas island where Melville jumped ship — volcanic peaks, stone tiki, and the most remote inhabited place in the Pacific
Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Archipelago is one of the world's most remote inhabited islands — over 1,400km northeast of Tahiti, with no lagoon, no reef, no protected anchorage, and no tourist infrastructure designed for mass consumption. What it has is scenery of violent drama: volcanic peaks rising from the sea, deeply indented bays, waterfalls dropping from 300m cliffs, the Hakaui Valley with the Vaipo waterfall (one of the tallest in the world at 350m), and a landscape of such raw power that Herman Melville, who jumped ship here in 1842, called it his inspiration for Typee. Pre-contact Marq…
The Marquesas were settled by Polynesian navigators around 200 BCE, some of the earliest settled islands in the eastern Pacific. Marquesan navigators in turn spread Polynesian culture across much of the Pacific — genetic and linguistic evidence suggests Hawaii was settled from the Marquesas around 400 CE. Contact with European whalers and traders from the 18th century onward brought catastrophic disease: the Marquesan population declined from an estimated 80,000–100,000 at contact to under 2,000 by 1900. French annexation occurred in 1842, the same year Melville arrived. The current populatio…