Mutineers’ Descendants Prefer British Control

When the sun finally sets on the British Empire, the last rays may touch Pitcairn Island, the tiny island where a few dozen descendants of the HMS Bounty mutineers still live.

They are happy, comfortable and content with British administration.

Britain “tends to be looking after us quite well,” Jay Warren said in an interview conducted via the island’s only telephone over several thousand miles of ocean. Warren, the local “magistrate,” serves as mayor and local administrator.

There was no such amiability when Fletcher Christian led a mutiny against Capt. William Bligh in 1789. But then, it’s been 200 years.

Residents of the island currently number 40 descendants of the mutineers, plus an imported schoolteacher and a Seventh-day Adventist minister with a wife and two children. A few Pitcairners are away for medical treatment or higher education.

Warren said life on the island is “beautiful” and everyone plans to stay forever, so they may outlast the Falkland Islands as Britain’s last colonial outpost.

“We won’t be leaving, I don’t think,” was how he put it.

Garth Harraway in Auckland, New Zealand, British commissioner for Pitcairn, said the island’s “infrastructure has been improved in recent years, making their lives easier and chores more manageable.”

On Pitcairn, 14 or 15 able-bodied men do the heavy work, principally loading the 30 to 60 tons of supplies that arrive by freighter two or three times a year into longboats that carry the goods to shore.

Reefs surrounding the island often damaged wooden longboats, putting them out of commission for fishing or other chores, so Britain has provided two 40-foot aluminum boats. It also gave the island better electricity generators and the satellite telephone.

The telephone is so expensive that the islanders save it for emergencies or special occasions, using ham radios to chat with faraway relatives and friends.

Anyone not on the island is far away indeed. Pitcairn, only two miles long and one mile wide, is in the middle of the South Pacific, about 5,100 miles east of Australia.

Its isolation was the reason for its settlement.

After Christian and his mutineers set Bligh adrift in the Bounty’s launch with 18 other officers and crewmen, they sailed back to Tahiti and embarked again with nine mutineers, six Polynesian men, 12 Polynesian women and a girl.

Christian headed for Pitcairn, discovered in 1767 by Capt. Philip Carteret. Carteret had mischarted the island by 177 miles, so it was years before any ship other than the Bounty found it.

Madness and murder quickly wiped out nearly all the mutineers.

The Polynesian men rebelled when a mutineer tried to take one of their wives. Christian, four other mutineers and all the Polynesian men were killed in the battles that followed. Another mutineer, William McCoy, leaped off a cliff to his death while drunk on home-brewed liquor.

After Matthew Quintal’s wife died, he went mad and threatened to kill the remaining mutineers, Edward Young and John Adams. They killed him with an ax first.

Young died of asthma in 1800 and Adams became the communal husband of the nine remaining Polynesian women, bringing up the mutineers’ 19 children by strict moral rules.

When two British warships arrived in 1814, they found a community so peaceful and respectable that they did not interfere or arrest Adams, who died in 1829.

Today’s Pitcairners spend much of their time fishing, cultivating their gardens and carving wooden curios to sell to passing ships. The island also makes money from postage stamps and from the interest on investments worth about $1.7 million.

At the end of the interview, Warren said his work was waiting.