IT WAS MY last night on the Snares. I walked back to the research station—a cluster of huts on a forested spur—in the late afternoon, leaving the albatross team to its work of weighing chicks and calculating how much the parent birds were feeding them. During the short winter days of mid-July, the three researchers invariably made the return trip from their study site well after dark, picking their way through the forest by torchlight.

Not far from the huts I branched off the main track—a switchback trail in places knee deep in black peat soup—to look one last time at a pair of sealers’ blubber pots which lie like discarded bowler hats under some trees. Sealers, ever alert to new hunting prospects, first visited the Snares in 1792, scarcely a year after the group’s European discovery, and continued to call on the islands throughout the 1800s.

Aside from the pots, however, there is no visible sign of their having passed this way. No evidence remains, either, of the seven-year stay of a gang of escaped convicts who were exiled on the Snares in 1810. The experience of being abandoned in so desolate a spot mentally unhinged one of the men, which so alarmed his three companions that they pushed him over a cliff. The survivors were eventually picked up by an American whaling ship.

I’m impressed by the fortitude of such men. On a good day, Snares weather can be benign enough—even pleasant—but the islands lie deep in the Roaring Forties, and sailors don’t coin such terms without reason. In 2001, a few months before my first visit, one of the research huts was pushed off its foundations by storm waves. To live seven years in such an unforgiving climate, eating sea lions and penguins plus whatever scrawny potatoes you were able to grow, would challenge the most sanguine constitution.

A tomtit hopped on to the rim of one of the rusty pots and watched me with a bright, quizzical eye. This endemic species of the Snares is lucky to be still in existence. Had rats come ashore with the sealers and established themselves on the islands, the tomtit, along with the rest of the Snares birds, would certainly have disappeared. It is extraordinary the degree to which ecology turns on the throw of the dice. Somehow, the Snares threw a double six, and are today one of the few environments in the world to have escaped human modification.

The first European to see the Snares was George Vancouver, after whom Canada’s Vancouver Island is named. Vancouver had sailed with Cook on his second and third voyages, so was acquainted with New Zealand waters. He was making for Dusky Sound when he was caught in a gale south of Rakiura/Stewart Island. With two metres of seawater in the bilge and his casks of beer and drinking water “stove to pieces,” he was obliged to let his ship Discovery “scud before the wind and sea” while the storm ran its course.

On the morning of November 24, 1791, Vancouver sighted “a cluster of seven craggy islands.” Doubtless relieved that he hadn’t come upon them in the darkness, he named them the Snares, on account of their being “very likely to draw the unguarded mariner into alarming difficulties.” (As with most New Zealand islands, the group already had a Maori name, Tini Heke, of which Vancouver was unaware.)

Vancouver cannot have approached the islands very closely—or perhaps they were shrouded in mist at the time—for he wrote that they were “destitute of verdure.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. Eighty per cent of North East Island (at 280 ha the largest Snare by a factor of five—though little more than a tenth the size of Auckland’s Rangitoto Island) is covered by forest, and much of the remaining 20 per cent by shrubland or tussock. Nearby Broughton Island, named after the captain of Vancouver’s second ship, has a similar mix of vegetation, and even the Western Chain, a string of islets south-west of the two main islands, has at least some tussock cover.