Norway's Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic is likely the world's most remote island—and fewer than 100 people have ever set foot there. Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings explains.
Are you a fan of The Lonely Island, the music-comedy trio behind Saturday Night Live hits like “Lazy Sunday” and “I’m on a Boat”? Let me introduce you to the original lonely island: The most remote speck of land in the world. I’m wiling to bet you haven’t been to Bouvet Island, in the middle of the vast South Atlantic Ocean. It’s (fairly literally) the ends of the earth.
Bouvet Island has a complicated history. It’s named for the French sailor who first sighted it in 1739—and back then, before the discovery of Antarctica, it was believed to be the southernmost point of land on Earth. But Bouvet misrecorded its location, so other explorers, including Captain Cook, looked for it in vain for the next 70 years. It was finally rediscovered by a pair of 19th-century British expeditions, who renamed it Lindsay Island and then Liverpool Island.
In 1927, a Norwegian Antarctic expedition claimed the land for Norway. Britain, having realized that a tiny, harbor-less island in the middle of nowhere was of no use to the Crown, gave in. Today, Bouvet is Norway’s only real overseas dependency (they claim part of Antarctica too, but international treaties mean that Antarctica really belongs to no one), so it’s officially a tiny bit of Norwegian soil almost 8,000 miles away from Oslo.
Bouvet is an uninhabited, volcanic, glacier-covered wasteland about half the size of Manhattan. Because the closest bits of land are Gough Island, 1,000 miles north, and the Antarctica coast, 1,100 miles to the south, ships crossing the South Atlantic must go days out of their way to check in on Bouvet—and unless the weather is unusually good, there’s no way to land there anyway. The only research station on Bouvet was knocked out by a 2006 earthquake, and today the island’s only residents are more than 100,000 penguins. It’s an internationally recognized nature preserve for birds and seals.
The difficulty of visiting Bouvet makes it a sort of great white whale for obsessively completist world travelers. John Clouse, once the “world’s most traveled man” according to The Guinness Book of World Records, counted Bouvet among only two world destinations on the Guinness list he never visited. Clouse’s successor, Charles Veley, made it to the island in 2003, but it took 72 days and a dangerous helicopter landing. He joined a short list: in all of human history, fewer than 100 people have set foot on the world’s loneliest island.