an island on the edge

After being cast adrift in a small open boat somewhere off the coast of Samoa on April 28 1789, Lieutenant William Bligh and 18 loyalists watched the Bounty slowly slip from view. Across the waves, they heard a final cry from their mutinous shipmates: “Huzzah for Tahiti!” The crew were jubilant because they thought Bligh would die at sea while they were setting sail for a beautiful new life in Polynesia.

They were wrong on both counts. When the mutineers returned to Tahiti — an island so divine they were willing to betray king and country to live there — their group fractured again, with some choosing to stay in their new homeland and nine others fleeing on the Bounty. Fearing that vengeful British forces would one day come looking for them, they enslaved 20 Tahitians and disappeared into the Pacific under the command of master’s mate Fletcher Christian.

Their paranoia was not misplaced: despite impossible odds, Bligh made it all the way back to England and duly reported the mutiny. Soon the admiralty dispatched HMS Pandora to seek terrible justice. Eventually all 14 mutineers who had remained on Tahiti were captured, to be taken back to Britain. Three were eventually hanged for their crimes; four died in transit when the Pandora shipwrecked in the Torres Strait.

Many people know versions of this story, mostly through sanitised and misleading film adaptations. There have been several major motion pictures, with Fletcher Christian variously played by Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and Mel Gibson. In each instance, he is a hero.

The films keep some notion of the event in the public consciousness but do little to cover the wretched reality of the mutiny. Importantly, they also don’t honestly answer the question of what happened to those final runaway mutineers, the ones who really didn’t want to get caught — the ones for whom even paradise wasn’t enough.

Dawn in the south Pacific was blinding, the low sun reflected across a glittering ocean. Pitcairn Island lay dead ahead, but only when the sun rose into a more benign position could we discern its ragged profile. “The perfect island on which to seek refuge,” said one of the guides on the Aranui 5, a combined freight and passenger ship that connects Polynesian islands. As we sailed closer, it began to look like a fortress, an ancient citadel hewn for defence. It was here that the final mutineers settled — and it is here a vanishing handful of their descendants still live.

The Aranui had taken just five days to get here from Tahiti. Fletcher Christian, his loyalists and their slaves, took almost four months to do the same journey, by which stage supplies and patience with the criminal captain were running low. Shortly after they made it ashore, the Bounty was set alight by one of the mutineers, turning Pitcairn into a prison island for the settlers.

For all the research I’d done ahead of time, I was woefully underprepared for Pitcairn’s gorgeousness

For better and worse, today it is a singular place, not just unique, but actively unlike anywhere else on Earth. In the days leading up to arriving, I asked various Aranui guides what they thought of the place. Their responses were variously “a funny place”, “not Polynesian” and, perhaps most damning of all, “interesting”.

Lying almost exactly halfway between Auckland and Lima, Pitcairn is Britain’s only outpost in the Pacific and could stand as a definition for remoteness. In the late 1700s, it was almost impossible to find, in part because of the incompetent charting of those who had named it in 1767. When the Bounty crew finally found it, they were 188 nautical miles from the spot recorded on naval maps. This inaccuracy coupled with the imposing topography must have seemed ideal to Christian and anyone still listening to his commands.

Even now landing is infamously testing, but on the morning we arrived, favourable conditions allowed Aranui crew to get us ashore with remarkable efficiency. Most of the island had gathered at the dock to greet us at the bottom of the Hill of Difficulty.

As we exchanged niceties, I leaned in to listen to the local accent. Being cut off for so long, the dialect is said to mimic sailor talk of the 18th century, a sort of archaic, loose-mouthed patois that is frequently indecipherable for outsiders. It did not seem put on for show — several times I overheard Pitcairners using it with each other — but when talking to us the islanders were easy to understand, sounding approximately Kiwi.

“Most of our young people went to New Zealand for boarding school — I went myself,” said Kevin Young, who had been assigned a group of visitors to guide around Adamstown, the only significant settlement on the island. It is not a large place — Pitcairn currently has only 38 permanent residents. With three other islands, all uninhabited, it officially constitutes a British Overseas Territory, and is sometimes referred to as the world’s smallest democracy. I asked about the future — a tipping point for viability must be coming soon. “Oh, we’re well past that,” said the guide flatly. “The number of roles [job vacancies] is going up, but the population isn’t.”

Young is one of the descendants of the Bounty and like many islanders spent years living abroad. Unlike most, he decided to come back. This emigration is one reason the population is in terminal decline, but there are several more.

Pitcairn was chosen by Fletcher Christian precisely because of its isolation. Back then, the enslaved Polynesians could demonstrate how to live off the land but farming such steep terrain is arduous and drought not uncommon. So, despite the lush gardens, rampaging banana trees and bountiful ocean, 80 per cent of the island’s produce is now imported. Most people on Pitcairn are related in one way or another, and so younger, fitter islanders leave, often permanently. Consequently, 35 per cent of the dwindling population is over 65.

The extreme inaccessibility would still have an appeal for some people — this is the ultimate getaway — but in the early 2000s the island was torn apart by a series of sexual abuse scandals. Trials and convictions followed, a #MeToo moment that affected every islander to varying degrees. Eventually a jail had to be built, mostly by men who were defendants and later convicts. The world would never look at Pitcairn the same way again.

More recently the island became perhaps the unlikeliest of the many casualties of Brexit as EU funds to improve infrastructure dried up. The British government has not made up the shortfall. Covid-19 provided another blow to the island’s already malnourished economy when valuable cruise visits such as Aranui’s disappeared.

In two days on the island, it was difficult to find much hope for the future of the community. A newly opened science centre for study of the Pitcairn Islands Marine Reserve will probably bring some new faces, but how many will be willing or able to stay long term? Perhaps a bigger question is: will they be able to integrate even if they do?

Sid Gould is the last person to have permanently moved to the island. Originally from Warwickshire, he spent 10 years in the UK then New Zealand armies, then took high-paying, high-risk underground explosives work that allowed him to retire, unharmed, at 51. Rather than be stuck in “perpetual mortgages” he cashed in and moved here. When we spoke he was managing the museum but he’d really come to Pitcairn to open a diving business. He’d brought money and ideas to the island, but in 15 months he’d found it hard to fit in. “I’m slowly getting accepted, and I knew it’d be a long haul, but they’re still keeping me at arm’s reach,” he said of the native settlers. “But I hope they’re starting to see that I’m of some value and not just a rich prick who’s turned up looking flash.”

Still, he found the island as surprisingly beautiful as I did. For all the research I’d done ahead of time, I was woefully underprepared for its gorgeousness: the humpbacks breaching for hours offshore; valleys perfumed by Norfolk pines; the perilous splendour of the Gannet Ridge hike. It might not have been as idyllic as Tahiti, but there was still satisfying turquoise water in St Paul’s Pool, too. If you were raised in a grey building in a grey town, that colour alone might be enough to roll the dice with a mutiny.

By the time the Bounty’s colony was discovered in 1808, just one man, John Adams, survived along with nine women and 19 children. In the years that followed, Adams told conflicting tales to visiting ships, but those were his stories rather than verified histories. When he signed up for the voyage in 1787, he used a false name, and it’s impossible to truly know how Adams came to be the sole survivor — perhaps even conqueror — of the mutiny.

Today the people of Pitcairn wouldn’t move from under the shadow of the Bounty, even if they could. The ship’s salvaged anchor is proudly displayed in the town square, and almost all merchandise sold to visitors mentions the mutiny. Below an EU flag, the port’s welcome sign describes the island as “Home of the Descendants of the Bounty Mutineers”.

Emily Christian is a 9th-generation descendant of Fletcher Christian and was my driver as we toured much of the island by quad bike. At just 20, she was one of the youngest inhabitants, though two weeks after my visit she would leave for New Zealand, for work in Wellington (population 440,000) as an apprentice locksmith. I asked how she was feeling about the prospect of swapping dusty tracks and quad bikes for flat tarmac and electric cars.

“Oh I’m not looking forward to it — I wish I could stay,” she said, despite having not been off island since 2020. “But there’s just a lot we don’t have here.” She told me she would return one day, though, and hopefully raise a family on the island, so that her kids could have the sort of semi-wild upbringing she did. She spoke with the certainty of many 20-year-olds, and I chose not to press her on the prospect that population decline might eventually force the community to abandon their home. Instead, I asked whether she ever got bored by the relentlessness of the Bounty legend.

She assured me she didn’t and said she hoped the story would be told forever. And what of Fletcher Christian? Hero in some versions of the tale, villain in many more. What did she think of him? “Well, to me he’s family,” she said. “And if he hadn’t done what he did, I wouldn’t be here.”

This is true for generations of Pitcairners, several of whom are in the island’s cemetery (John Adams has a separate plot). I took a walk around the tombstones, past a strangely written acknowledgment and near-apology to the historic abuse victims. The graveyard was filled with names from the ship’s manifest: Browns, Youngs, McCoys and, inevitably, a great many Christians. Looming bamboo creaked above, while below graves were covered with wild daisies and fallen coconuts. Some of the inscriptions had no birth dates, while others lacked a date of death, suggesting immortality — or at least that the dead might outlast the living.

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