Wellington-based author Shona Riddell's great great great grandparents sailed from England in 1849 with three children under the age of five to be part of a new but ultimately doomed whaling and farming settlement on the Subantarctic Islands, 465 kms south of Bluff. Shona's great-great grandmother Harriet was one of very few people to have ever been born there.
Shona has made her own pilgrimage there, resulting in new book Trial of Strength - Adventures and Misadventures on the Wild and Remote Subantarctic Islands, telling a tale of human endurance amid this little known, isolated, rugged and climatically challenging landscape.
