Since this happened in the middle of the Covid pandemic, DHL was flying only one plane a week to Tonga – but without the internet, Vea couldn’t file or receive manifests online. With the fracture of a single cable, Tonga was plunged into the kind of isolation it hadn’t seen in more than a century. The chief executive of Tonga Cable was, at the time of my visit, a dapper, genial man named Semisi Panuve. To contact SubCom, Panuve found a satellite phone that Tonga Cable owned. Only in August 2023, more than 18 months after it was first cut off, did broadband internet return to Vava‘u.