“What drama, we wondered, was attached to this strange discovery.”

Crawford's reflection on finding an unmarked, abandoned lifeboat on Bouvet Island in 1964 — a reminder that even the world's most remote, uninhabited places hold human mysteries.

“It is the most isolated spot in the whole world — a fact which anyone who cares to spend an instructive five minutes with a pair of dividers and a good globe can easily verify.”

Gould used Bouvet Island as the ultimate real-world example of geographic isolation, a claim easily proven with basic measurement.

“Around Bouvet Island, it is possible to draw a circle of one thousand miles radius, having an area very nearly that of Europe, which contains no other land whatever.”

A concrete illustration of just how vast the emptiness surrounding Bouvet Island truly is.

“The DXpedition team members are all extremely disappointed that we were not able to complete our mission.”

Spoken after the 2018 3Y0Z expedition was forced to abort before reaching Bouvet Island due to a mechanical failure at sea — honest disappointment paired with acceptance of a safety-first outcome.

“I am of the opinion that what M. Bouvet took for land, and named Cape Circumcision, was nothing but mountains of ice, surrounded by field ice.”

Cook's conclusion after searching the reported position of Bouvet's 1739 sighting during his second voyage — the first scientific disproof of Cape Circumcision as land, decades before the island's true position was confirmed in 1808.