Five unremarkable shorelines picked for deep water and shelter, where the wires that first shrank the world came up out of the sea and turned months of waiting into minutes.
The 1866 cable came ashore at Foilhommerum Bay here; the Great Eastern spliced on and steamed west on 13 July, landing the far end fourteen days later. The station on the island stayed in service until 1966 — exactly a hundred years.
The brick station worked transatlantic traffic for 99 years before closing in 1965, with four more cables landed here in 1873, 1874, 1880 and 1894. The restored building is now a provincial museum.
CS Hibernia laid the final section into this beach on 8 June 1870, the British end of a chain of wires reaching to Bombay; a fortnight later the first message ran the whole way to John Pender's house in Arlington Street. By the inter-war years fourteen cables came ashore here, making it the largest submarine telegraph station in the world.
The submarine cable from here to Port Darwin was finished on 19 November 1871, and the Australian Overland Telegraph met it the following 22 August — but the sea cable had broken in June, so the first message actually ran from London to Adelaide on 22 October 1872, in hours instead of the months a ship took.
From 1902 this atoll relayed the Pacific Cable's 3,458-nautical-mile span from Bamfield, British Columbia — the longest single stretch of cable in the world at the time. A landing party from the German cruiser Nürnberg wrecked the station on 7 September 1914.
Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.