TIN CAN ISLAND
Our dramatic and unusual philatelic story isn’t just a piece of history. There are several hundred residents of Niuafo’ou today, and the island is still occasionally sighted by passing cruise ships. So the Tin Can Mail still exists, but that is not a very correct way to describe how mail – at least tourist and philatelic missives – might get there.
You may be excused if you don’t quite know where Niuafo’ou is. That’s understandable, since very few outsiders have ever landed on it, and it’s way off the standard tourist track. To find it, you first have to find Tonga. Far to the north of the main group, over 200 miles of open sea, lie the Niuas. These are a very scattered group of volcanic isles. Niuafo’ou is the westernmost of the Niuas, and it lies in splendid isolation. It is round shaped, with a beautiful large lake in the centre – actually a caldera-a volcano currently dormant but which has erupted many times in recent history.
