The sparsely populated islets of Nomuka, Mango and Fonoifua were hit by waves almost 50 feet high, a Red Cross official said.

Seventy percent of Tonga’s roughly 100,000 people live on the biggest one, Tongatapu, a center for tourism and commerce, while the others are dispersed across about 35 islands — some home to just a few dozen families, appearing on world maps as little more than freckles of land in a seemingly endless sea.

“Homes have been completely wiped out,” Katie Greenwood, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross in Fiji, said of those three islands, Nomuka, Mango and Fonoifua.

Greenwood said Nomuka, Mango and Fonoifua were buffeted by waves almost 50 feet high, compared with waves of only four feet on Tongatapu.

The tsunami is known to have killed one person on Mango and another on Nomuka, as well as a British woman on Tongatapu who was swept away while trying to save her dogs.

The Tongan government has evacuated all of Mango’s residents to Nomuka, but people in Fonoifua opted to stay, said Dr.

Lynne Dorning Sands, a former teacher who has been traveling the world in a catamaran with her husband, Eric, visited Nomuka and Mango in 2016.

Dorning Sands visited the school: a single building, brightly decorated with students’ work and with a corner for reading.

Mote Pahulu, who was born on Nomuka and grew up on Mango, told the New Zealand news outlet Newshub that the woman killed on Mango was married to one of his cousins

Not only have we lost a relative, a very close relative, but everything else on the little island is gone,” said Mr

“It was a beautiful little island, it was a little paradise.”