The tiny volcanic island of Tristan da Cunha officially became an outpost of Empire in 1816, after an extremely cautious decision by the Admiralty to station a small garrison of men there lest the French attempted to use the island as a staging post to rescue Napoleon, who was imprisoned on St Helena, some 1300 miles to the north.

The island was not uninhabited: an elderly man named Thomas Currie and his young Spanish servant, Bastiano, lived there. Currie was the only survivor of the first colonisers of Tristan, a group of three pirates under one Jonathan Lambert, who had sent a letter to every government in Europe proclaiming himself owner and ruler of the small island group that he had renamed ‘The Isles of Refreshment.’ The three men had hoped to make a fortune selling potatoes to passing ships, but by 1816 only Currie and Bastiano were still alive, the others having been either drowned at sea or possibly murdered (Mackay, 1963, 30-6).

The garrison was then removed in 1817. There was precious little further intervention, and though Tristan was assumed to be a British possession, the claim was never tested. The population grew mostly through arrivals by shipwreck. Missionaries bound for the East occasionally called at the island, and in 1851 it had gained its first priest, William Taylor, despatched by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (S.P.G.). At this point there were about 80 inhabitants.

The S.P.G., which was well established in southern Africa and throughout the colonies, continued to take an interest in the spiritual wellbeing of Tristan’s people and subsequent appointments to the island continued to be made by them (although when Taylor left in 1856, no-one replaced him for 25 years). The S.P.G. also regularly interceded with the authorities on behalf of the islanders, asking for ships to be diverted and necessities dropped off (Cannan, 1992: 200-8).

It was the S.P.G. that appointed Rev. H. Martyn Rogers to Tristan in 1921, after he had answered an advertisement placed in The Times and The Guardian. He took with him his 17-year-old wife, Rose Rogers, and the couple stayed on the island until 1925, when they left ‘due to bad feeling’ (ibid., 212). It was during Rogers’ tenure that the ship The Quest, on its way back to South Africa from South Georgia after the aborted Shackleton-Rowett Antarctic expedition, stopped at Tristan for a period of five days between the 19and 25 May 1922.

It was on this visit that the expedition’s naturalist, G. H. Wilkins, took the film that was used for Tristan Da Cunha. Rose Rogers, writing in her memoir The Lonely Island, recalls spending a day with Wilkins as he filmed and photographed the island, noting that some of the photography was ‘for film exhibition’ (Rogers, 1926, 67). The diary of Alexander Macklin, Shackleton’s surgeon on the expedition, is precise about the date, noting that on the 20^th May, ‘Wilkins took his cameras and cinematograph machine, and had a busy day photographing the people in the various stages of their work, family groups, cottages and, indeed, anything of interest’ (Wild, 1923, 231). Both H. Martyn and Rose Rogers appear in the film.

Wilkins’s footage was used for the 1922 film Southbound with The Quest, a record of the expedition. Tristan Da Cunha, produced in 1927 by the S.P.G., is edited from Wilkins’s film, with added titles that give some background to the island and the events pictured. It is not clear how the footage was obtained by the S.P.G.

Rev. Rogers died in 1926, and Rose Rogers’s memoir, dedicated to him, appeared that year. She subsequently gave lectures about life on the island under the auspices of the S.P.G. Volume 2 of the Tristan Da Cunha – Cuttings preserves two press clippings from 1928 giving notice of lectures by Rogers ‘illustrated by a film’, and also contains notice of a lecture ‘illustrated by Films and Lantern Slides’ to take place at the Imperial Institute on 6 December 1928. This last gives the strongest hint that the film shown was Tristan Da Cunha, as the event was chaired by the secretary of the S.P.G. (Cuttings, vol 2, 64).