Jarvis Island
— a coral island the sea forgot.
Not only on a wall.
“A flat coral island in the central Pacific, halfway between Hawaii and the Cook Islands. Two and a half kilometres long, no fresh water, no harbour, no people. The United States holds it as a National Wildlife Refuge inside the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. Frigatebirds and sooty terns nest in the millions. A short-lived guano industry ran here in the 19th century; nothing remains of it but a daybeacon on the western shore.
Jarvis 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.
Jarvis Island is an uninhabited coral island in the South Pacific, lying about 2,400 kilometres south of Honolulu and just south of the equator at roughly 0.37° S, 160.0° W. The island measures about 4.5 square kilometres, rising only 7 metres above sea level at its highest point. It is an unincorporated unorganized territory of the United States, administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as the Jarvis Island National Wildlife Refuge within the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument.
There are no permanent residents and no scheduled visitors. The island has no fresh water, no anchorage, and no airstrip. What it has is birds: frigatebirds, masked and red-footed boobies, sooty terns, and brown noddies nest in colonies estimated in the millions across the flat coral surface. The surrounding reef holds healthy populations of grey reef shark and giant clam, protected since the monument's expansion in 2014. The wind across the island runs the southeast trades almost continuously; that wind is most of what a visitor would hear.
Captain Brown of the British ship Eliza Francis first recorded the island in 1821. The American Guano Company worked it heavily through the 1860s; phosphate-rich seabird deposits were removed for fertiliser before the workings closed. The United States re-asserted the claim in 1935 and briefly settled the island with young Hawaiian colonists through the Department of the Interior, part of a programme known as the Hui Panala'au. They were evacuated in 1942 after a Japanese attack early in the Pacific war. It has been uninhabited ever since.