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ON PITCAIRN | by Dea Birkett

Pitcairn | Wileypics/Flickr

When you leave the theatre tonight, or travel home, or go to work tomorrow morning, imagine this. That the first step of your journey is to clamber a rope ladder, lashing in the South Pacific winds above the ocean swells. Then you can begin to know what it is like to leave Pitcairn Island. This fist of volcanic rock, marooned in the South Pacific Ocean, is joined to the rest of the world by no more than this lashing rope ladder. With no natural harbour, the islanders take out a longboat to passing ships. The ship throws down a rope ladder and they ascend the steel cliff-high side to the deck. This ladder is the sole means of arrival and of escape.

The islanders – those of them hearty enough to man the longboats – leap for the rungs on the crest of a wave like pirates, making it look easy. But behind their effortless ability lies eight generations of sea trading. The descendants of mutineers, they first benefitted from, then have battled with this sea-bound isolation for over two centuries. Less than 50 of them remain on Pitcairn.

The Pitcairn story began at dawn on 28 April 1789, in the South Pacific off Tonga Island, when Fletcher Christian, Master’s Mate of His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty, led a mutiny against Captain William Bligh. The Bounty was on a mission to collect breadfruit seedlings and transport them to the West Indies, to provide staple foodstuff for the slaves. But although Bligh was an outstanding navigator, having previously served under Captain James Cook, he was a poor commander, his stern, unforgiving manner losing the support of his men.

The Bounty had spent five months anchored off Tahiti as the breadfruit seedlings were gathered and grown. Here the crew lived on shore, had their buttocks tattooed Polynesian-style and shared their huts with local women. Returning to strict seaboard regime was like being cast back into a floating prison. The temptations of Tahiti still called them. Three weeks in to the return voyage, 24-year-old Christian rebelled, taking 25 of the crew with him.

Casting Bligh and his loyal followers adrift, the fugitives sailed back to Tahiti for women and food. Two thirds of the mutineers opted to stay, risking capture by the British. Just nine remained loyal to their new master, sailing off with 12 Tahitian women, six Polynesian men and one child. For nine months they dodged about the South Pacific, until stumbling across the tip of a volcano, mischarted by 200 miles, called Pitcairn Island. “Its beauty, its temperate climate and above all, in its now-demonstrated inaccessibility, Pitcairn was ideal,” recorded one mutineer. The Bounty was burned, and the mutineers’ one thread with the rest of humankind was cut. They disappeared from the face of the earth. For almost two decades, they were undiscovered. These are the years explored by Richard Bean’s Pitcairn. When contact was finally made by an American whaler in 1808, only one mutineer remained – with ten women and 23 children.

Over the following century, Nantucket whalers, British merchant ships, French adventurers and naval vessels from Portsmouth called on the island, each describing the community as a perfect, pocketsized community, close to Paradise. Born from mutiny, the Pitcairners continued to search out a new leader to free them from the infamy of their past. Messiahs washed up on the shore, promising to save the lonely flock, from the charismatic English adventurer George Hunn Nobbs to an American missionary called John Tay who arrived in 1886, clutching some Seventh Day Adventist literature. The whole island was converted and no other religion has been tolerated since.

The mutineers’ newfound land is still the smallest and most remote country on earth. Put your finger in the middle of the big blue blanket that is the South Pacific, and it will land near Pitcairn, although it’s too small to be marked. New Zealand is 3000 miles to the southwest, Tahiti 1300 miles to the northwest. The island covers under 1.75 square miles. There is no place you cannot hear the crash of the surf. The coast seethes with a white ruff of surf – cliffs and craggy rock faces battered by an untempered ocean. The only beach is Down Rope, called so because you have to climb down a rope nailed into a cliff face to reach it. It’s here the only evidence of inhabitants before the mutineers exists – petroglyphs scratched onto the rock by early Polynesians, probably passing through a couple of centuries earlier. There was no reason to stay.

Approaching the island from the sea – the only way, as there is no airstrip – it looks little bigger than a ship. Passing ships may spot the white houses of Adamstown, the only settlement named after mutineer John Adams - faint among the banana trees and coconut palms. The houses are constructed from hardboard with tin roofs to catch the rain. From the ocean, you cannot see that many of them are abandoned.

Today’s Pitcairn islanders, descendants of the mutineers and their Tahitian wives, are a bizarre hybrid race, some appearing thoroughly British, others Polynesian. They are huge, often obese, tall people with wide sprawled feet from walking barefoot. Overhearing a Pitcairn conversation is like listening to characters from the pages of Melville or Defoe. Guns are muskets, food is wekle (victuals) and to fall over is to capsize. It’s a stew of 18th century English, Polynesian, modern obscenities picked up from passing sailors, and seafaring terms like all hands for everyone, and deck for floor. Even though they’ve been a British possession since 1839, and Pitcairn remains Britain’s last overseas territory in the South Pacific, their tribal costume is T-Shirts and baseball caps sent by American wellwishers.

They spend their days fishing for nanwe (oily, bone-ridden flat fish) from the rocks or giant wahoo and shark from flat-bottomed wooden canoes, and farming. Orange, mango, plantain, grapefruit, avocado and banana trees flourish alongside the ubiquitous coconut. Fresh vegetables are grown in small family plots scattered all over the island. Tomatoes, cabbages, peas, sweet potatoes, cassava and beets can be planted year round. The earth is rampantly fertile - lettuce and beans sowed from seed are ready to eat within two months. There are annual harvests of arrowroot and sugar cane. Breadfruit – brought from the Bounty – are knocked from the trees with live bullets in their muskets.

Pitcairn’s death knell has been sounded several times since its discovery in 1808. Two attempts were made to abandon the island – one to Tahiti in 1831, and another to Norfolk Island in 1856. Both failed, and the Pitcairners, diminished in number, returned to their rock. At its height, in the 1930s, the population was more than 230. But babies are few, and Pitcairn marriages are not made in heaven. Now there are just nine families, sharing four surnames – Christian, Young, Warren and Brown. The choice of mates is limited – you will have known them all your lives. Romantic love is not only rare, but in some aspects illegal. Local Pitcairn law forbids expressions of affection in public places. When I was on the island, this yoke of conformity was felt keenly by the younger generation, who undertake their own mutiny by importing alcohol from the ships, smuggled ashore in plain brown bags. On Friday nights, the most sacred evening in the Adventist week, these rebels gathered to dance and drink. At the sound of the Tahitian song Waikiki Tamure, banished from the island for more than a century, they put down their cans of New Zealand beer and swing their hips to the seductive rhythm. It is as if a long-buried Polynesian cultural gene is rising.

Pitcairn lies on the Panama Canal to New Zealand shipping route, and vessels working that passage may pass within a few miles of the island. But there is no certainty when the next ship will call. There may be two in one month, then not another for four. When a ship is sighted offshore, the bell in the square rings five times and the whole island hurries down the unpaved Hill of Difficulty to the Landing. The men haul the longboat into Bounty Bay. The bay is no more than a dent in the iron-clad coastline, and provides no natural harbour. The 40-foot longboat is packed with people and goods for trade – fresh fruit, fish, baskets woven from pandanus, wooden carvings of the Bounty. (The islanders were taught to carve by an Austrian in 1920s and use a video of the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty movie as the guide for their models, even though it no more resembles the real boat than Clark Gable accurately portrayed Fletcher Christian.)

Ten years ago, on the last day of August 2004, this familiar scene unfolded. The longboats aligned themselves against the side of the ship and a rope ladder was thrown down from the deck. The men scrambled on board and began to lower the cargo over the side, taking care in the pitching open sea. But among the regular goods – sacks of flour, drums of cooking oil, boxes of basic medical supplies, barrels of fuel – was a large consignment of high wire fencing and massive steel gates. The wire fencing and steel gates were for a new development on this remote outcrop. Pitcairn was building a prison.

Seven Pitcairners – almost two-thirds of the men on the island – were on trial for sexual offences ranging from gross indecency and indecent assault to rape. The accused - Jay Warren, Dennis Christian, Len Brown, Terry Young, Dave Brown, Steve Christian and Randy Christian - faced 96 charges between them. All were against children. (Jay Warren was acquitted.) Some argued that it was their hybrid Polynesian heritage that allowed them to have underage sex, even though there is no evidence that this was the case. Since then, more Pitcairners have been charged and found guilty. Four police officers are now permanently posted on the island. Pitcairn has become the most heavily policed community in the world.

The guilty men have to be let out of their newly-built prison to man the longboats when a ship calls, and clamber up the rope ladder. There wouldn’t be enough capable men otherwise. As each ship raises their anchor for the world beyond, the islanders bid farewell from the longboat with a rousing sea shanty. Callers have reported hearing it for over a century. Strong voiced above the pounding swell, they sing the Goodbye Song. They wave to those high above on deck – ‘We part but hope to meet again – goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.’ At this last line, the ropes are cast off and the longboat turns towards Pitcairn, filled with a handful of fallible human beings, imprisoned by the ocean, bound by their past.

Dea Birkett is author of Serpent in Paradise, about her time on Pitcairn Island.