We know this for a fact:

The island of  Tristan da Cunha is the most remote inhabited location on Earth.

The Hawaiian Islands are more remote, collectively, but seven of them are inhabited. If you tire of one, you can hop over to the next.

Can’t do that at Tristan da Cunha. The nearest humans not already on your liferaft of an island are in St. Helena — 1,243 miles away.

South Africa is the nearest bit of Africa to Tristan da Cunha, nearly 1,500 miles away. And South America is 2,088 miles in the other direction.

At last count, 297 people lived in Tristan (as it is known, in brief), and are British citizens.

And I wouldn’t know a thing about it if not for the Volvo Ocean Race.

Three years ago, the Puma-sponsored VOR boat named Mar Mostro was slammed by the destruction of its mast, which broke into three pieces in the middle of the south Atlantic.

Mar Mostro (it means “sea monster” in Latin) made its way to the nearest inhabited piece of the planet — Tristan da Cunha.

That took the crew out of danger, but also put them in a place that is remote in ways beyond geography.

The volcanic island has no airstrip, and ships come calling only a few times a year. Eventually, a container ship was dispatched from Cape Town and picked up the crew and Mar Mostro, enabling them to resume the 2011-12 VOR.

A former colleague at The National, Chuck Culpepper, one of the most peripatetic humans in the history of the race, wrote about Mar Mostro’s stay, three years ago and, knowing Chuck’s apparent goal of touching down at every exotic place on the planet, I am sure he was yearning to be in Tristan, as he wrote about it, three years back. (And I wonder if he has snuck over there, in the intervening years.)

So, back to Tristan. Everyone there descends from 15 people. The island has only eight family names. Things appear to be held communally — making it perhaps the most successful example of an equal society ever established.

Tristan came up again last week when Amory Ross, the VOR on-board reporter for the Alvimedica team, who had the same job with Mar Mostro, three years ago, recalled the Puma team’s stay on the island, three years back.

Go back to the wiki page, and skim the entry. It’s just amazing stuff, from its inhabited origins about 200 years ago to the present day, when it seems even further from everywhere else because the British ship that once visited regularly now drops in only every few years.

How the 297 people there do not go mad is something that could be studied by anthropologists, particular if/when the human race gets ready to go to Mars.

Many Californians have visited Catalina Island, but soon feel more than a little stir crazy there — at a place that is all of 22 miles from the mainland and is populated by more than 4,000 full-time residents.

Catalina is Manhattan compared to Tristan da Cunha.

And this is why I love the Volvo Ocean Race. It’s like a floating geography lesson.

Tristan da Cunha. Who knew?

As of 2011, followers of the Volvo race did.