In the early 1840s the United States Exploring Expedition, commanded by Charles Wilkes, swept through the Pacific charting islands and collecting specimens, and it eventually worked its way into these northern waters, where Wilkes named a great deal of what he saw. Many of the names he left behind commemorate his own officers and his own campaigns. This one does not. Ro Veidovi was a Fijian high chief, and the expedition did not invite him aboard - Wilkes's officers took him captive in 1840 as punishment for an attack six years earlier on the American trading ship Charles Doggett, holding his own king hostage until Veidovi surrendered himself in exchange for his family's safety. He never went home. Veidovi died in New York in June 1842, within days of the expedition's return, and naval surgeons removed and preserved his skull, which the Smithsonian Institution later catalogued as a specimen. An island on the far side of the ocean from everything Veidovi had ever known was given a version of his name, respelled along the way as Vendovi. The island kept the name. The man's own story did not stay attached to it, which is the usual arrangement when a place is named after someone who had no say in the matter.

The geography is compact: 217 acres of land, an island small enough to walk end to end in an afternoon. It lies in Skagit County rather than San Juan County, an administrative quirk that follows from its position on the eastern edge of the archipelago, closer to the mainland than to the islands most people picture when they hear the name San Juans. Samish Bay separates it from the Skagit shoreline. Guemes Island lies south, Lummi Island north. In census terms Vendovi is Block 1000 of Census Tract 9501, a designation that exists because the United States counts everything, including places where the count reaches two.

Before 2010, Vendovi was private property, held by the family of John Fluke Sr. A privately owned island in the San Juans is a particular kind of possession. It is not merely land; it is the absence of neighbours, the absence of a road, the absence of anyone arriving unannounced. It is also a considerable responsibility, because an island does not maintain itself and every gallon of fuel, every board and every visitor comes by boat. Families who hold islands for generations tend to be families who understand that trade.

In December 2010 the family sold the island to the San Juan Preservation Trust, a land trust whose work is the conservation of open space across the archipelago. That transaction changed the island's future rather than its appearance. Under a trust, the forest is not going to be logged, the shoreline is not going to be subdivided, and no one is going to wake up to a row of houses where there had been trees. Land trusts do quiet work, and their results are best measured by what fails to happen. In an archipelago where waterfront is among the most sought-after property in the Pacific Northwest, keeping 220 acres out of that market permanently is not a small act.

Vendovi today is a wooded island with a protected shoreline, reachable only by water, in a stretch of the Salish Sea busy with traffic that mostly passes it by. The ferries run elsewhere. The name on the chart still belongs to a man from Fiji who was carried here by an American naval expedition, a fragment of nineteenth-century Pacific history stranded on a small green island in Washington State. It is worth knowing, standing on the beach, that the name is not local, and that behind it is a person, not a landmark.