Gough and Inaccessible Islands

Gough Island is a volcanic island in the South Atlantic about 400 km south-east of the Tristan da Cunha archipelago. Portuguese maps named it after the navigator Gonçalo Álvares, credited with finding it. On 3 March 1732 Captain Charles Gough of the British ship Richmond reported it as a new discovery, and it later took his name. Inaccessible Island, in the Tristan da Cunha group, was found in January 1656 by the Dutch ship Nachtglas.

Sealers sometimes lived briefly on Gough in the 19th century, and house mice reached the island in the same century. The Gough Expedition of 1955 mapped the interior, and since 1956 South Africa has kept a weather station there with British permission. It is usually staffed by about six people and is important for forecasting South Africa's winter weather.

Gough was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1995, and Inaccessible Island was added in 2004. A study published in 2007 found that mice preying on seabird chicks could drive the Tristan albatross and other species to extinction; the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds carried out a large eradication, but a live mouse was seen after it ended, and by December 2021 the project was considered a failure. Inaccessible is one of the few oceanic islands with no introduced mammals and is home to the Inaccessible Island rail, the smallest flightless bird in the world.