The Last Place on Earth (2013)

I recently read what you might call an "apprecation" of the Sextant, the navigational instrument -- it was a mix of a travelogue of the author's trip across the Atlantic, a narrative history of nautical navigation, and a technical exploration of the sextant itself.

The relevance here is the history of navigation -- finding, losing, re-finding, and re-naming islands happened a lot, especially in the south Pacific. Nice reminder that the growth of knowledge isn't always linear.

The book is "Sextant: A Voyage Guided by the Stars and the Men who Mapped the World's Oceans", by David Barrie.

See also perhaps "Point Nemo":

> The oceanic pole of inaccessibility, also known as Point Nemo, is located at roughly 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W[19] and is the place in the ocean that is farthest from land. It represents the solution to the "longest swim" problem.[20] This problem poses that there is one place in an ocean on earth where, if a person fell overboard while on a ship at sea, they would be at a point that is the longest distance to any land in any direction.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Oceani...

* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/nemo.html

Not even many ships go by it, as there aren't really (m)any shipping lanes in those parts. More likely to be sailing ships, especially those involved with racing (who don't go through the Panama Canal):

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAOMtCzLKWE

The closest other humans would probably be those in orbit on the ISS about 320-420 km up.

The Kerguelen Islands are also a funny spot for people who like weird remote islands. I think there are people year round on Kerguelen too. I think Tristan da Cunha is the most remote regularly inhabited island by normal people who are not scientific researchers. It doesn't seem like such a bad place.