In a recent BBC talk Sir Harry Luke told listeners about an island in the Pacific Ocean which disappears from time to time. This does not mean that cartographers are doubtful as to its exact position, but sometimes the island is there and sometimes it is not, as it subsides beneath the sea and vanishes from sight every few years. This jack-in-the box island is part of the Kingdom of Tonga, which is an independent monarchy under British protection, and has been ruled for the past thirty-four years by Her Majesty Queen Salote, G.B.E., a lady of great dignity and stature. The name of the island in Tongan language is "Fonaufo'ou", but in England it is known as Falcon Island. It was first sighted by the crew of one of Her Majesty Queen Victoria's ships in 1865, when it was given this name, but another British ship which was in the same locality twelve years later saw nothing but smoke rising from the sea where the island was reputed to be. When Falcon surfaced again in 1885, it was formally annexed by King George I of Tonga, but once again it sank slowly and by 1898 nothing more than a breaking shoal was visible.

This time the island remained submerged for nearly thirty years until in October 1927 it shot up again with such vigour that by 1930 it finally attained four-hundred-and-seventy-five feet, its greatest height yet recorded. Steam and smoke rose several thousand feet in the air and could be seen clearly from the Tongan capital, forty-five miles away. As soon as the news reached the late Prince Tungi, who was then Queen Salote's consort and Prime Minister, he sailed to Falcon and planted the Tongan flag on its elusive shores, before they had time to vanish again. Since then there has been a steady diminuendo.

In 1937 the island's height was only two hundred feet at the beginning of 1938 it had dropped to eighty-five, and by the end of the same year it was reported as only twenty-five feet.

Two years later, when Sir Harry Luke visited Tonga, he determined to set foot on Falcon Island, and at dawn one morning sailed from the Capital, with a party of five Europeans and five Fijian boatmen, in the hope of finding Falcon still above the surface. After about five hours, a thin black line was sighted on the horizon, which as they approached was revealed as a steep beach of blacky volcanic sand, hideous and forbidding, swept by an angry surf.They boarded the ship's life boat, and towed by a motor skiff, looked for a landing. At last they cast off from the skiff, the life-boat was rowed in, and eventually, battered and drenched, they scrambled out of the water on to one of the oddest and most repellent shores in the world. Inland it was found to consist of warm black volcanic ash, so soft that they walked ankle-deep in it, and just not too hot to be uncomfortable.

Sir Harry went to Tonga again in August 1941, to condole with the Queen on the death of Prince Tungi, and during the course of his visit flew over Falcon Island, and had an excellent view of its whole expanse. He found out later that he had only just been in time, for in 1943, when an American geologist flew over the site, he saw only a black spock or two showing above the water. Last year the Crown Prince of Tonga, Queen Salote's elder son and heir, paid his first visit to England to see the Festival of Britain, and told Sir Harry that once more Falcon Island had subsided completely. "Not a vestige of it could be seen", he said.