An island is a natural experiment. Cut a patch of land off from everything else and the rules bend: birds grow too heavy to fly, lizards shrink, a lighthouse can move a national border, and one stone slab can carry three languages. These stories run from a volcano that built new ground in 1963 to a tortoise nobody had seen in 112 years.
Every tile in a Islands game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Famous Islands
nine stories
1The island that was born in front of witnesses
On the tile: Surtsey1963-1967
In 1963 the sea south of Iceland began to boil, and a black cone climbed out of it. By the time the eruption stopped in 1967 there was a new island. Iceland protected Surtsey from the day it appeared and kept almost everyone off, which turned it into a laboratory for one question: how does life reach bare rock? Seeds, spores, insects and birds arrived on their own. The waves have been busy too, and erosion has already halved the island.
When Krakatau tore itself apart in August 1883, the sound carried to Rodrigues Island, 4,653 kilometers away across the Indian Ocean, where listeners took it for distant gunfire. The explosions were heard over roughly a thirteenth of the earth's surface. The pressure wave did stranger work. Every recording barograph on the planet registered it, some of them as many as seven times, as the pulse bounced between the volcano and the far side of the world for five days.
The famous photograph shows stone heads on a grassy slope, and most people take that to be the whole sculpture. It is not. About 150 of the moai stand buried to the shoulders on the slope of a volcano, and those are the ones everyone photographs. Archaeologists have been digging out the torsos, which carry carvings the weather never reached. When pictures of the excavation spread by email in 2012, the Easter Island Statue Project's website took three million hits and crashed.
Mitsubishi bought a rock off Nagasaki in 1890 to reach the coal under the seabed, then built a town on it, stacking concrete apartment blocks behind a high sea wall. The silhouette earned a nickname: Gunkanjima, Battleship Island. In the late 1950s about 5,200 people lived there, among the most densely populated places on earth. The mine closed in January 1974 and the island emptied. The blocks still stand, crumbling and salt-bitten, and the ruins are now part of a World Heritage site.
Greenland is the world's largest island and it is mostly ice, so the name has puzzled people for a thousand years. The sagas give a blunt explanation, and Britannica repeats it: Erik the Red named the country Greenland in the belief that a good name would attract settlers. Exiled from Iceland about 980, he needed followers, and the pitch worked. His colony started with four or five hundred settlers and kept in touch with Europe until the fifteenth century.
In October 1961 the ground behind the settlement on Tristan da Cunha rose into a new volcanic cone. Within days the whole island left: 264 islanders and 31 others, evacuated by way of Cape Town to England. They spent two winters in a country most of them had never seen, with electricity, wages and traffic. Britain expected them to stay. Instead the community voted 148 to 5 to go home. An advance party sailed in 1963, and the settlement is still there.
The Sea Venture left England in 1609 as flagship of a convoy carrying supplies to the failing colony at Jamestown. On July 24 a hurricane caught the fleet, and the ship ended up on the reefs of uninhabited Bermuda. All 150 people aboard reached shore. They stayed ten months, built two small ships, and sailed on to Virginia, where the colonists had been starving. Accounts of the wreck reached London, and Shakespeare drew on them for The Tempest.
Ireland has no wild snakes, and tradition gives the credit to Saint Patrick. The keeper of natural history at the National Museum of Ireland has put it plainly: there is no suggestion snakes were ever there, so there was nothing to banish. The last ice age kept the island too cold for reptiles, and the sea cut Ireland off from Britain about 8,500 years ago, before snakes worked their way back north. Britain held its land bridge to Europe two thousand years longer and got three snake species.
A tunnel cut into frozen rock on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen holds backup copies of the world's crop seeds, sent in by gene banks around the world. It opened in 2008 against some distant catastrophe. The first withdrawal came seven years later, and not for a famine or a flood. Researchers needed to rebuild a seed bank near Aleppo that the Syrian war had put out of reach, so out came wheat, barley and grasses bred for dry country.
Every old drawing shows a waddling barrel of a bird, too heavy to move and too dull to survive. The Natural History Museum's reading of the remains says otherwise: the dodo was relatively slender and quite agile, heavy for a bird but no cartoon. It was a pigeon, and its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon of Southeast Asia. It lived on Mauritius, in forest and on the coast, and the last reliable sighting was in 1662.
The kakapo is the heaviest parrot in the world. Males reach four kilograms, well past what parrot wings can lift, so the bird walks and climbs instead. In a country whose only native land mammals are bats, that cost nothing. Then people arrived with cats, rats and stoats, and the kakapo very nearly went out altogether by the middle of the last century. Every survivor now lives on predator-free offshore islands or in a fenced sanctuary. The count stands at 325.
At Chester Zoo in England a Komodo dragon named Flora laid a clutch of eggs in 2006, and her keepers had a puzzle on their hands. Flora had never been kept with a male. She had conceived without one, by parthenogenesis, and five of her eggs hatched the following January. It is a useful trick for an animal that lives on islands: researchers suggested that a female washed up alone on a neighboring shore could start a colony by herself.
Christmas Island lies 1,500 kilometers from the Australian mainland and belongs, for a few weeks a year, to its red crabs. The first rain of the wet season sends millions of them out of the forest and down to the sea to spawn. Park staff put up barriers, shut roads and funnel the animals over bridges built for the purpose. Residents keep rakes and leaf blowers in their cars, and employers accept crabs as a reason to be late.
The coconut crab is the largest land arthropod on earth, weighing about four kilograms with a leg span of up to a meter. It begins life as a hermit crab in a borrowed snail shell, then gives that up for good and carries a tough shell of its own. It climbs trees for fruit and cracks open green coconuts with serrated pincers that squeeze far harder than a human hand. It breathes air through lungs rather than gills, and an adult left underwater long enough will drown.
Galapagos marine iguanas graze algae off the rocks, and when El Nino warms the water their good algae is replaced by brown species they can barely digest. Martin Wikelski and Corinna Thom tracked hundreds of them and found something no animal with a backbone was supposed to do. The iguanas got shorter, by as much as 6.8 centimeters, up to a fifth of their length. The ones that shrank most lived longest, and when the algae returned, so did the length.
7A tortoise found a century after the only other one
On the tile: Fernanda2019
The Fernandina giant tortoise was known from exactly one animal, a large male collected on that Galapagos island in 1906, and everyone assumed the volcano had finished the species. In 2019 a search party found a small female, about fifty years old, under the scrub. Yale researchers compared her genome with the 1906 specimen and reported in 2022 that the two are closely related. She is called Fernanda, she doubled the known population of her species, and the search for others goes on.
Lemurs live on Madagascar and nowhere else, on an island isolated for nearly 90 million years. The explanation scientists favor is stranger than a land bridge. Storms washed trees and mats of vegetation off Africa, the current carried them east, and small animals rode across. Modeling puts the crossing at roughly 30 to 35 days. A land bridge would have delivered species in surges; instead the arrival dates are scattered across millions of years, which is what rafting looks like.
Alfred Russel Wallace collected specimens across the East Indies and noticed something no map showed. Bali had the barbets and woodpeckers of Asia. Lombok, fifteen miles east across the strait, had cockatoos. The boundary named for him runs up the Lombok Strait, north through the Makassar Strait between Borneo and Celebes, then east, south of Mindanao, into the Philippine Sea. Zoologists now argue about whether it counts as a true regional boundary, but it still marks an abrupt limit for many major animal groups.
Tupaia was a high priest and star navigator of the Society Islands who joined HMS Endeavour at Tahiti in July 1769. Joseph Banks had argued for taking him aboard. He piloted James Cook through islands the British had never charted, reading star paths, currents and birds, and in New Zealand he turned out to speak a language Maori understood, which made him the expedition's interpreter. Cook and Banks came home famous. Tupaia was a forgotten figure for 250 years.
2The first woman around the world, signed on as Jean
On the tile: Jeanne Baret1766-1774
French navy ships did not carry women. So when the botanist Philibert Commerson won a place on Bougainville's voyage around the world, he brought a valet named Jean. Jean was Jeanne Baret, and she did much of the collecting: working with Commerson she gathered over 6,000 plant specimens. The pair stayed behind on Mauritius in 1768 when the expedition sailed on, and she did not reach France until late 1774, which made her the first woman known to have sailed around the world. She died in 1807, aged 67.
Five people and a cat landed on Wrangel Island in 1921 to claim it: four young men and Ada Blackjack, an Inupiaq seamstress from Alaska, hired to sew. The relief ship never got through. Three of the men set out in January 1923 to walk for help and were never seen again. The fourth died that June. Blackjack taught herself to trap and shoot and kept the camp going alone until a ship reached the island on August 20.
Alexander Selkirk was not shipwrecked. In September 1704, after a quarrel with his captain, he asked to be left on uninhabited Mas a Tierra in the Juan Fernandez group, 400 miles west of Valparaiso, and then watched the boat pull away. He was alone there for more than four years, until an English ship under Woodes Rogers called in February 1709. Rogers published the story, Daniel Defoe evidently drew on it, and Robinson Crusoe followed in 1719.
When the Bounty's crew mutinied on April 28, 1789, William Bligh and eighteen men who stayed with him were set adrift in a small open boat with 25 gallons of water, 150 pounds of bread and 30 pounds of pork. Bligh navigated west across the Pacific, weighing out each bread ration against a pistol ball of one twenty-fifth of a pound, and reached Timor on June 14, seven weeks later, after about 3,600 miles. Whatever else is said about Bligh, that voyage is still studied as seamanship.
Matthew Flinders took the Investigator around Australia and closed the circuit in 1803. The first maps he drew afterward carried the name Australia, and the name was eventually adopted. Heading home he stopped at Mauritius for repairs, not knowing Britain and France were at war again. He was arrested as a spy and spent six and a half years under house arrest on the island. His ship's cat, Trim, who had made the entire voyage, vanished there.
In 1960 the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad followed a hunch to the tip of Newfoundland, where local people walked him out to some grass-covered mounds. The digging was his wife's work. Anne Stine Ingstad, an archaeologist, led the excavations from 1961 to 1968 and established that the site was Norse and eleventh century, which made L'Anse aux Meadows the first known European settlement in North America. The discovery is usually filed under her husband's name.
Vitus Bering sailed east from Kamchatka in 1741, sighted the Alaskan coast and turned for home. Scurvy and storms caught the expedition short of the mainland and drove the ship onto an unknown island. Thirty men died there over the winter, Bering among them in December. The survivors built a boat and got out. The naturalist Georg Steller described a huge, slow sea mammal that grazed the kelp there; hunters wiped it out within three decades.
Abel Tasman left Batavia in August 1642 with two ships and orders to settle whether the known western coasts of Australia belonged to a great southern continent. He ran far south, then east, and on November 24 sighted land he named Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania. In December he became the first European to see New Zealand. He also found Tonga and Fiji. The one thing he never sighted was the Australian mainland he had just sailed around.
A wooded sandbar in the Bidasoa River, about 700 feet long, spends half the year as Spanish territory and half as French. The two countries picked the neutral spot to sign the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, but the rotation came later: the Treaty of Bayonne of 1856 made it a condominium, and Spain now governs it from February through July, France from August through January. The routine has broken once, when the island stayed Spanish through two pandemic years.
Big Diomede belongs to Russia and Little Diomede to the United States, and at their closest the two sit 2.4 miles apart in the Bering Strait. The International Date Line runs between them. In standard time Big Diomede is 21 hours ahead of its neighbor, which is why they are nicknamed Tomorrow Island and Yesterday Isle. Stand on the American side on a clear day and you are looking across a few miles of water at tomorrow.
On the Philippine island of Luzon lies Lake Taal. In that lake sits Volcano Island. In the crater of that volcano sits another lake, and in that lake sits a rock called Vulcan Point. Geographers call such a thing a third-order island, and Vulcan Point was long called the largest in the world. Satellite images gave the title elsewhere: an unnamed four-acre islet on Canada's Victoria Island, which likely no human has ever set foot on.
A whaling ship reported Sandy Island in the Coral Sea in 1876, and a British admiralty chart printed the long dark shape in 1908. Some cartographers hedged and marked it ED, for existence doubtful. It survived anyway, straight into online mapping. In 2012 the Australian research vessel Southern Surveyor, with Maria Seton of the University of Sydney aboard, sailed through the spot and found a mile of open water under the keel. Her team published its obituary in a journal.
Hans Island is a bare rock of about 1.2 square kilometers in the Nares Strait between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, and Canada and Denmark both claimed it from 1973. From the 1980s the campaign was waged by bottle: visitors from each country planted their own flag and left a drink for the other side, whisky from Canada, schnapps from Denmark. In June 2022 the two governments split the rock roughly in half and gained a shared land border.
In the summer of 1831 a volcano off the Sicilian coast pushed a cinder cone about 65 meters above the waves, and Europe's navies went straight for it. A British ship reached it in July and the name Graham Island stuck to their charts. The Italian geologist Carlo Gemmellaro landed on August 11 and named it Ferdinandea for his king. In a few months above water the island collected at least seven names and claims from three nations. Then the sea took it apart.
Okinotori is a coral reef in the Philippine Sea whose exposed parts, after erosion, came down to two outcrops usually described as the size of king-size beds. The law of the sea treats the difference as enormous: an island that can support human life brings a 200-nautical-mile economic zone, a bare rock almost nothing. Japan ringed its outcrops with thick concrete and steel breakwaters and draped a titanium net over the smaller one. Neighboring countries still call it a rock.
About 420 wild horses live on Sable Island, a crescent of sand off Nova Scotia, and the story everybody tells is that they swam ashore from one of the wrecks that litter the sandbars. A genetic study found no support for it. The prevailing account credits a Boston merchant, Thomas Hancock, who shipped horses seized from Acadians being deported from Nova Scotia and landed them there around 1760. People kept selling horses off the island until 1961, when Canada banned all interference.
Bishop Rock is a splinter of stone at the western end of the Isles of Scilly, facing open ocean. Engineers first tried an iron tower on legs, reasoning that waves would pass harmlessly between them. On the evening of February 5, 1850, a gale swept the whole structure away before it had ever shown a light. The granite tower built to replace it was lit on September 1, 1858, and a later storm still managed to tear a 550-pound fog bell off its gallery.