OBSERVING WILDLIFE often requires a keen eye: a rare bird or a big cat is typically gone as quickly as it arrives. Not so on Macquarie Island, a rugged, 127-square-kilometre strip of rock halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica. As I set foot on one of its black-sand beaches one blustery January morning, I was plunged into a bustle of weirdly wobbly and outrageously coiffed life forms jostling all around me and conversing in a raucous language of honks, moans, grunts, and clacks. To my right, several pairs of sparring elephant seals were rearing up to nip each other’s necks. To my left, an aged male of the same species lay dying in the surf. And at my feet a royal penguin, its bright yellow crest plastered to its head like Donald Trump’s hair after a shower, pecked at my boots.
Macquarie was the first stop on a two-week tour of the Subantarctic Islands and the fjords of New Zealand’s South Island. The Subantarctics, or Subs for short, include Macquarie Island, Campbell Island, the Auckland Islands, and a trio of jagged outcrops called the Snares—so named because of the hazard they once posed to whaling and sealing ships. (With the exception of Macquarie, which belongs to Australia, all of the islands we visited are officially part of New Zealand.) Separated by hundreds of miles of open ocean from the mainland and from one another, the Subs are among the most isolated places on earth. Because they’re too rough and exposed to land a plane on, the only way to reach them is by sea. To protect their ecosystems, whose biodiversity is comparable to that of the Galápagos, visitor numbers are tightly controlled. In 2018, more than 2,75,000 people visited the Galápagos. Fewer than 430 landed on the Subs.
I had arrived at Macquarie two days earlier on board a small ship, more yacht than cruise liner, that’s named after an explorer who went missing in 1788 while exploring the Solomon Islands in the South
