The Stain on a Speck in the Sea

When Fletcher Christian and his crew of Bounty mutineers landed 214 years ago on tiny Pitcairn Island, its remote location halfway between New Zealand and Peru made it the perfect place to hide. Its isolation has protected the little colony’s customs -- some quaint and some sinister -- ever since.

Now the Pitcairn way of life is being challenged by a modern world that believes basic legal standards, including laws against rape, sex with underage girls and child molestation, should be enforced in even the most inaccessible places on Earth.

The British government, which has jurisdiction over Pitcairn, contends that a culture of rape and sexual abuse has long permeated the South Pacific island, with some of the community’s most influential leaders routinely preying on young girls.

Prosecutors have charged seven men -- nearly half the colony’s adult male population -- with 55 counts of rape, indecent assault and sexual abuse of girls as young as 5. The cases date from 1964 to 1998.

Among the accused are the mayor, the postmaster and a former magistrate. At least three of the seven are direct descendants of Christian, the master’s mate who led the Bounty mutiny and brought the crew to Pitcairn to avoid the law.

“Everyone thinks Pitcairn is a paradise,” testified one woman who said she was raped repeatedly as a girl, “but it was sheer hell when I was growing up there.”

Some wonder if the colony, with only 47 permanent residents, can survive the turmoil and humiliation of sex crime trials.

The accusations first came to light in 1999 when a British policewoman was training officers on Pitcairn and a female islander told her of abuse. That triggered a lengthy international inquiry in which detectives sought to interview every Pitcairn woman living on or off the island.

Since the first of the seven trials began Sept. 29, two defendants have pleaded guilty to charges of indecent assault and await sentencing. Six other Pitcairn men living in Australia and New Zealand face trial next year on 41 counts of sex crimes they allegedly committed on the island.

Authorities say the charges against the 13 men represent a small fraction of the rapes and indecent assaults on Pitcairn. The government says it had solid evidence against more defendants but had to drop the cases because the alleged victims, including some living on the island, backed out amid pressure from their families.

Eight accusers, all of whom have left the island, portray Pitcairn as a closed society in which the most vulnerable members were easy prey and had nowhere to turn for help.

Their testimony is being transmitted by videoconference from New Zealand to the courtroom on Pitcairn. The islanders, unhappy with earlier news coverage, banned journalists in the 1990s. But for the trials, the British government brought in six reporters from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and all testimony quoted in this article comes from their reports.

“Men could do what they want,” testified one woman, 51, who says she was raped and abused as a girl by several of the defendants. “They seem to be a rule unto themselves. That’s the way it is on Pitcairn. You get abused. You get raped. They just do what they want with you and then leave you in the gutter. It’s a normal way of life on Pitcairn.”

But not all the Pitcairn women blame the men.

As the trials began, some island women called a news conference to support the men and make the case that sex between men and girls on the island is consensual.

They said that initiating girls into sex at the age of 12 or 13 is a tradition passed down from their ancestors -- the mutineers and Polynesians who first inhabited the island.

“There’s never been a rape on the island,” Carol Warren, 51, told reporters on Pitcairn. “I was one of them. I had sex at 12. I went in fully knowing what I was doing and I wasn’t forced.”

Said Darralyn Griffiths, 26: “I was 13 and I thought I was hot. I felt like a big lady. I wanted it.”

Despite the romantic Hollywood myths surrounding Fletcher Christian and the Bounty mutiny, Pitcairn’s history has been one of violence and self-indulgence from the start.

The Bounty sailors, stung by mistreatment and not wanting to leave their Tahitian girlfriends for Britain, seized the Bounty from Capt. William Bligh in 1789 while it was at sea and forced him into a small boat with 18 loyalists.

The mutineers returned to Tahiti, picked up 12 Polynesian women and six men, and sailed southeast until they found Pitcairn, an uninhabited volcanic outcropping 3,300 miles east of New Zealand. Their new home was only two square miles. Whether the Polynesians agreed to a life of exile is unclear. But when fire destroyed the Bounty, any chance of leaving the island vanished.

Fighting over the island’s women soon tore the new community apart.

At first, each mutineer had a wife; the six Polynesian men shared three wives. But when one mutineer’s wife fell off a cliff and died, he took a new one from the Polynesian men, touching off a wave of jealousy and killing. Within a decade, 12 of the 15 men had been slain, including Christian.

When an American whaling ship happened upon the colony in 1808, only one man was still alive, mutineer John Adams, along with seven women and 24 children.

By then, based on Adams’ teachings from the Bounty’s Bible, the Pitcairners had found religion. When word of the colony reached Britain, Pitcairn was hailed as “the world’s most pious and perfect community.” In a spirit of forgiveness, Britain decided to spare Adams from prosecution and preserve the tiny settlement.

In 1856, Britain moved the entire population of Bounty descendants nearly 4,000 miles across the South Pacific to the larger and more habitable Norfolk Island, now a flourishing, self-governing territory of Australia. Eventually, a handful returned and resettled Pitcairn.

Today, the inhabitants survive by farming, fishing and selling handicrafts to tourists who stop by on cruise ships or to the few visitors who make the arduous journey by cargo ship.

Some newcomers have married into the population over the generations, but Pitcairn’s isolation has helped preserve the colony’s original language, Pitkern, a blend of 18th century English and Tahitian.

The rugged island has no airstrip, no pier and no roads. The only way to get there is by ship. There is one phone, and electricity is available only part of the day. Indoor toilets are a rarity. The residents get around the island on four-wheeled motorbikes. Many go barefoot.

Breadfruit, sought by Bligh on the Bounty mission in the hope it could feed slaves in the Caribbean, is a Pitcairn staple. The islanders harvest the starchy, coconut-sized fruit by shooting it down from its 30-foot trees with rifles, which they call muskets.

But isolation from the outside world is not complete. Residents watch videos from abroad, and in recent months, some have hooked up to the Internet via satellite. Many Pitcairners also have lived for a time off the island -- and are well aware of sexual standards in other countries.

The defendants in the sex abuse cases argue that British justice should not apply to Pitcairn because their Bounty ancestors renounced British citizenship when they founded the colony. Last week, the Privy Council in London, Britain’s highest appellate court for overseas territories, agreed to hear the islanders’ challenge next year. In the meantime, the trials are proceeding.

To stage the trials, Britain and New Zealand sent more than 20 judges, lawyers and court staff. They had to fly to remote Mangareva island in southeastern French Polynesia and then sail 36 hours to Pitcairn. When their ship reached the island, the legal troupe was brought ashore in a motorboat manned by the islanders -- including some of the defendants.

Earlier, some of the defendants were hired to help build a new jail on Pitcairn. For now, the defense lawyers and other court officials are living in it.

When the trials began, prosecutor Simon Moore singled out Steve Christian, 53, the island’s charismatic mayor and a former magistrate, as “the leader of the pack.” His family historically has ruled the community. He is charged with six counts of rape and four of indecent assault dating from the 1960s and ‘70s.

“It was as if the accused was exercising some right which he believed to be his,” Moore told the court.

One woman testified that she was 12 when Christian raped her while two of his friends held her down. Another said that after Christian raped her, taking her virginity, he laughed at her.

“Steve seemed to take it upon himself to initiate all of the girls on the island,” one of his alleged victims, now 44, told the court. “It was like we were his harem.”

Reporters covering the trials say few locals are attending, preferring not to know the details of the charges against their relatives and neighbors.

Nearly every Pitcairn family has a defendant or a victim. Many have both.

In the Christian clan, the defendants have included Steve, the mayor; his son Randy, 30; and his cousin Dennis, 49. Also charged were his father-in-law, Len Brown, 78, and brother in-law Dave Brown, 49. The other two are Terry Young, 45, the island electrician, and Jay Warren, 48, a former magistrate.

The surnames -- Christian, Brown, Young and Warren -- represent the four main families that have made up the Pitcairn community for more than a century.

With so many of Pitcairn’s able-bodied men on trial, some islanders worry about the community’s future. The men are vital to the settlement, they say, especially to operate the longboat that meets passing ships and offloads supplies -- the colony’s only means of obtaining goods from the outside world. Steve Christian is not just mayor. He is also chief engineer, dentist and captain of the longboat.

British officials deny charges that the government’s real motive is to close down the colony, noting that it plans to spend millions of dollars to improve facilities on Pitcairn. They say Richard Fell, the British governor of Pitcairn who also is Britain’s high commissioner to New Zealand, ordered the trials to proceed because he could not allow the sexual abuse of young girls to continue.

“When the governor became aware of it, he had to take action,” said Bryan Nicolson, Fell’s spokesman in Auckland, New Zealand. “Somebody had to put a stop to it. Hopefully, new generations will be able to grow up in a much kinder environment.”

The accusers, who cannot be identified publicly, paint a picture of a dysfunctional community where every girl was vulnerable to abuse. The women said they learned to avoid trouble but that sometimes it was impossible. The men would seek them out and accost them while they were collecting firewood, swimming, working in the garden or even visiting the church.

The alleged victims said they didn’t report the attacks because no action would have been taken. In some cases, they said, the perpetrators were close family members of the island’s leaders. The rapes and assaults, they said, were common knowledge.

“It was an act that everybody on the island knew was happening,” one woman told the court. “Nobody wanted to talk about it and say it was wrong.”

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has stationed pastors on the island for decades, but the church contends it was unaware of the abuse.

Last month, the defendants were offered the chance to avoid trial by going through a reconciliation process, but none of the seven were willing to admit guilt.

After the trials began, however, two changed their pleas.

Dennis Christian, the postmaster, pleaded guilty to committing three sexual assaults on girls as young as 12 in the 1970s and 1980s. A fourth charge was dismissed.

Dave Brown, the island’s tractor driver, pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting a 14-year-old girl and molesting a 15-year-old girl in the mid-1980s. He faces 12 other charges, including forcing a 5-year-old girl to perform oral sex.

In an interview with police videotaped in 2000 and played for the court, Brown said that having sex with underage girls was “done right down through the ages” on Pitcairn.

At the time, he said, it didn’t seem wrong.

“I regret it now,” he said. “Times are changing. Things are moving forward, and obviously what we did then was not normal.”