Nikumaroro

Surf breaks white over the reef where a steamship has rusted since 1929, and behind the beach the scrub forest has swallowed a whole colonial village. Nikumaroro looks like any uninhabited Pacific atoll until you learn the question it carries: whether the world's most famous missing aviator ended her flight on this exact reef in 1937.

The theory runs like this: out of fuel short of Howland Island, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan put their Electra down on Nikumaroro's dry reef flat and radioed for help until the tide took the aircraft. It is a hypothesis, not a finding; decades of expeditions by the TIGHAR research group have recovered aircraft aluminium and period artefacts without conclusive proof. The atoll's strangest chapter is documentary fact, though: in 1940, settlers clearing bush found a skull, and the administrator Gerald Gallagher excavated twelve more bones and shipped them to Fiji, where they were measured, argued over and then lost. Modern re-analyses of the seven surviving measurements still disagree, ranging from a European male to Earhart herself. The certain history is worth the voyage alone: a British colonial village founded here in late 1938 was abandoned in 1963 after years of drought and thin supply, its ruins now shared between hermit crabs, coconut crabs and seabirds, with the Norwich City's wreck still on the reef where she grounded. Landing requires a PIPA visitor permit and genuine expedition logistics; the mystery does not make the crossing shorter.