Audrey Sutherland

The first time Audrey Sutherland explored the rugged northeast coast of Moloka’i, she swam the twenty-mile stretch. Forty-one years old, divorced, a mother of four, she swam alone with snorkel and fins, dressed in blue jeans and towing behind her an Army duffel containing a few essentials wrapped in a shower curtain and stuffed inside a weather balloon: camping gear and camera; food she’d canned and dehydrated at home on neighboring Oahu; red wine in film canisters.

In this way she traveled three to five miles a day, swimming in through the surf to camp, forage, and explore a part of the island that was terra incognita in the summer of 1962. She’d first seen Moloka’i from the air years earlier and become obsessed with the island’s northeast coast, where some of the world’s highest sea cliffs rise abruptly from the Pacific, punctuated by spectacular waterfalls, steep valleys, and a handful of narrow beaches. Details were scarce. Her map, published in 1928, was