New Ireland is shaped like a long green blade laid across the sea northeast of the rest of Papua New Guinea. The main island stretches for hundreds of kilometers but is only a few dozen wide, and the province gathers up dozens of smaller islands and atolls along its flanks. The land area totals about 9,600 square kilometers, but the ocean around it feels like the real territory. Around 120,000 people live here, speaking roughly twenty languages and up to twenty-five dialects. The economy runs on timber, coconuts, cocoa, and fishing - plus the Lihir gold mine off the north coast, which is estimated to hold around forty million ounces of gold and ranks among the largest in the world.

The island's spine is the Boluminski Highway, running from Kavieng in the north down to Namatanai two-thirds of the way south. The road is paved for much of the distance and gives way to a surface of crushed white coral as it approaches the end. It is named after Franz Boluminski, the German District Officer who built it by compelling the coastal villages to construct and maintain their sections. The coral brightens under the sun; the palms lean over the road; the story of how it got there is the story of colonial coercion, and the road remains the most useful thing on the island. These are the kinds of contradictions New Ireland has learned to live with.

The cultural tradition that makes northern New Ireland famous in the art museums of Europe is called Malagan. The word names both the ceremonies and the carvings made for them - masks, poles, and figures of wood, paint, and shell, rendered in a visual grammar so intricate that scholars still argue about its meaning. Malagan ceremonies honor the dead. The carvings capture something of the spirit of recent ancestors so that the living can release them properly. Historically the objects were burned when the ceremony ended; today most are kept, because few carvers remain who can make them. The art the colonial administrators carried home now sits in museums in Berlin and Paris. The knowledge to make new ones lives, for now, in the memory of a shrinking number of elders.

Kavieng, the capital, faces open ocean on almost every side, and New Ireland's draw for travelers has always been what is wet. From November to April, North Pacific swells curl into the northern coast and surfers follow. From mid-May through October, southeast trades provide steady sailing, and the absence of cyclones - too close to the equator - means yachts can cruise with a confidence that is rare this far into the South Pacific. Divers find big pelagics, coral walls, and World War II wrecks. Fishing charters pull black marlin, sailfish, yellowfin, and giant trevally out of waters that seem to stretch forever. The reefs off the northern and northeastern coasts are particularly good from August to October, when the water is clear enough to see the shape of everything at once.

People have been arriving in New Ireland for a very long time. Lapita pottery fragments, scattered across several sites, mark an early Austronesian wave that passed through on its way south into the Solomons and the rest of the Pacific. The Dutch came in 1616, Abel Tasman in 1643, sailing home from discovering Tasmania. From the late 1700s, ships from Sydney bound for England threaded the passage between New Ireland and New Britain. Missionaries arrived in 1875, and so did the blackbirders - traders who seized New Irelanders for plantation labor in Queensland and Fiji. Germany colonized the island in 1886 and kept the labor trade running. Australia took over in 1914, and Japan occupied the island from 1942 to 1945. The island has absorbed all of it and remained, stubbornly, itself.