Tromelin Island
— — a flat speck of coral that remembers.
Not only on a wall.
“A low island of sand and coral in the western Indian Ocean, about 450 kilometres east of Madagascar. A little more than a square kilometre, never more than seven metres above the sea. France administers it from the Scattered Islands of the southern lands. A weather station, a runway, almost nothing else. The island holds the memory of the Utile, the slave ship that wrecked here in 1761, and of the survivors left behind for fifteen years.
Tromelin Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Tromelin is a flat coral and sand island in the western Indian Ocean, about 450 kilometres east of Madagascar and 535 kilometres north of Réunion. The island is roughly one square kilometre in area and no point on it rises more than about seven metres above the sea. It is one of the Îles Éparses, the Scattered Islands of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, administered by France from Réunion. There is no permanent population, only a small rotating meteorological staff.
The island carries one of the hardest stories in the Indian Ocean. In 1761 the French slave ship Utile struck the reef. The crew built a small craft and sailed for Madagascar, leaving roughly sixty enslaved Malagasy on the sand. Fifteen years later, in 1776, the Chevalier de Tromelin returned and found eight survivors, seven women and an infant, who had built shelters of coral block and kept a fire alive that whole time. The story was largely forgotten until French archaeology campaigns from 2006 to 2013 brought it back into view.
Tromelin is not open to general visitors. Access is restricted to the French weather staff and authorised scientific missions, supplied by the patrol vessel Marion Dufresne and occasional military flights into the short runway. The island is a protected nature reserve under TAAF management, important as a nesting site for green turtles and for masked boobies. The shoals around the island are dangerous and unlit, and the same reef the Utile struck still ringed the wreck site when divers returned in 2008.