Long before the whalers came, the Mapuche knew this island and gave it a meaning far heavier than its size. They believed Isla Mocha was where the almas, the souls of the dead, traveled after life ended. To stand on its shores was to stand at a threshold between worlds. That belief lingers in the feel of the place even now: a small island, roughly oval, with steep mountains pushing up through the middle and a single road looping the whole of it. Mist gathers in the central heights. The Pacific stretches unbroken to the west. It is easy to understand why a seafaring people looked at this lonely green hill in the ocean and decided it was a doorway to the afterlife.

The waters around the island were rich hunting grounds, and in the early 1800s they became the haunt of a single, famous animal. Mocha Dick was real, an albino or near-albino bull sperm whale that whalers encountered again and again near Isla Mocha. Reynolds described him in The Knickerbocker magazine in 1839 as a creature of prodigious size and strength, white as wool, a survivor of countless skirmishes. When he was finally killed, his body was said to measure around 70 feet. Melville read accounts like this and fused them into Captain Ahab's obsession. So the name Moby was likely Mocha, softened, and Dick was simply the name sailors gave a great whale, the way they might have called any nameless beast. The legend was born here, in the swells off a Chilean island most of the world has never heard of.

Isla Mocha is ringed with the history of ships that did not make it. The island is noted for its many historic shipwrecks, drawn onto the rocks and shallows by storms and bad luck over the centuries. Pirates haunted these waters in the 1700s and 1800s, using the island as a waypoint in the empty South Pacific. Today the danger is more often the sea itself. During a tsunami, three Chilean hikers sleeping on the beach were swept out and never came back, and the locals will tell you plainly: do not sleep on the sand. The northeastern shore still carries tsunami damage, ruins that have become an unexpected sight for the rare traveler who makes it out here.

For all its legends, Isla Mocha is a working island of farmers and fishermen. Roughly 45 percent of its 48 square kilometers is protected as the Mocha Island National Reserve, home to small deer in the central mountains and a startling variety of birds. The rest is dotted with little farms, a handful of stores, a school, a church, and a police post, mostly along the eastern side. Getting here is half the adventure: a short, cheap flight from the mainland, or a slow ride on the barge that runs out semi-regularly. There are no restaurants, so visitors bring their own food, though if you are lucky a fisherman's family might wave you in to dinner and a plate of whatever the boats brought back. The local accent is famously hard to follow, the beaches are spectacular, and the whole island can be walked in a single long day.