Misima is a volcanic island - steep, forested, and considerably higher than it looks from a passing yacht. Mount Koia Tau reaches 1,036 meters, the tallest peak in the entire Louisiade Archipelago. Improbably, it was not summited on any recorded climb until 24 December 2016, when a Papua New Guinean geologist named Kolbe Bare and two Misiman companions, David Kaliton and Kaliton Ada, hacked their way through the forest to the top. Kolbe noted something unusual: though the peak is barely ten kilometers from salt water, the vegetation at the summit was distinctly high-altitude in character - cool, mossy, a different forest from the coastal jungle. The island measures only forty kilometers by a few kilometers wide, 214 square kilometers altogether, but its vertical relief makes it feel larger. Forty-five named villages cling to the coasts and the valleys between ridges.

Louis Antoine de Bougainville sighted Misima in 1768, and in 1793 Antoine Bruni d'Entrecasteaux explored it during a French expedition looking for the lost navigator La Perouse. The island's name owes itself to a lieutenant on that voyage, Elisabeth-Paul-Edouard de Rossel - whose name would later be attached to the larger island at the eastern end of the archipelago. For nearly a century Misima went by St. Aignan on European charts. In 1888 the British Empire annexed the island as part of its grab for New Guinea, and it became part of the Territory of Papua administered by Australia. Independence came with Papua New Guinea in 1975. Misima has been inhabited continuously by Austronesian-speaking peoples since roughly 1500 BC - eight times as long as any European map has known it existed.

The modern Misima mine opened in 1989, a joint venture between Placer Dome and the state-owned Orogen Minerals. For fourteen years it was one of Papua New Guinea's largest gold and silver operations, providing steady wages for hundreds of islanders and a scale of economic activity Misima had never seen. The mine officially closed in 2004, citing environmental and public health pressures; in 2012 Barrick Gold, which had inherited the project, shut its post-closure monitoring office in Bwagaoia after declaring the sites successfully rehabilitated. The closure has marked Misima's last two decades. Villages that had depended on mine wages have seen people leave - often for Alotau on the mainland - and the island's population, once growing, now shows signs of decline. An association called MAGMA, formed in 2007, represents the artisanal miners who still work the old ground by hand, panning alluvial gold the industrial operation left behind.

For families outside the mining economy, income has always come from cash crops and the lagoon. Coconut plantations line the north coast, their fallen fruit dried into copra and shipped out to Alotau. Cacao grows well in the volcanic soil, and a trickle of fine chocolate beans leaves the island every year for roasters who value tropical island origins. A commercial fisheries project has been proposed more than once but never developed; the waters around Misima teem with tuna and mackerel, yet the infrastructure to catch them at scale - ice plants, freezers, reliable transport - does not exist. So the fish stay local, traded in villages or sold at the small Bwagaoia market. With a population of around 19,300 spread across seventy-eight villages, Misima is by far the most heavily populated island in the archipelago.

Bwagaoia sits on the southeast corner of the island and serves as both the main town and the seat of the Samarai-Murua District. It holds the hospital, the high school, the post office, and the ferry dock. Getting to Misima has always been difficult. Airlines of Papua New Guinea runs four flights a week from Port Moresby via Alotau - when the runway is open; recent suspensions have forced islanders back to the ferry, which takes seventeen to nineteen hours from Alotau at 150 to 200 kina a seat. A three-million-kina airport upgrade was announced, progress has been slow, and locals continue to travel by sea. The island's seventeen endemic species of bats, some found nowhere else on earth, carry on without noticing which transport link is currently functional. The Misima bat in particular - a small trumpet-eared species - exists only on this single volcanic cone in the Coral Sea.