Pitcairn, Mon Amour
The Search for Charted Desert Islands

By Keith Lubeley
April 10, 2007

They all look pretty much the same on my National Geographic World Map—barely discernable black dots set parallel to unfamiliar words: Bouvet, Clipperton, Grytviken. They are specks, really; bullet points scattered unevenly in blue voids like ships out of port. If the letters of their names were built to scale, they would stretch across the sea with ten, twenty, thirty times the sprawl of the islands they represent. Minami Torishima, in the northwest Pacific, is less than one square mile in area and doesn’t even take an hour to cover on foot. Tristan da Cunha lies in the middle of the Atlantic, 1350 miles from its nearest neighbor, and claims to be the most remote inhabited island in the world. In the South Pacific, Pitcarin Island, population 45, has one paved road—four miles in length—and one satellite telephone. You can call it. The number is 872 762337766.

When I received the map in the mail, I found myself drawn to these blank spaces and the tiny, emblazoned dots that punctuate them. I wondered who, if anybody, could make these islands home and if “home” was a notion that changed when applied to the far reaches of the world. No births have ever been recorded on the islands of Kerguelen, for instance, but as many as 100 scientists and researchers live on the mainland, a grim glacial land mass in the Indian Ocean called Desolation Island. In the Atlantic, Ascension Island is divided between the British and US Air Forces and hosts about a thousand servicemen and women and their families. When you look at it on the map you can practically squint it out of existence, so thoroughly is it surrounded by blue. But there is a whole life contained in this unassuming speck. Last week, for instance, a short piece ran in the Ascension newspaper (The Islander) announcing the baptism of “Demy Errol Benjamin-Herne, son to Errole and Christine.” Desolate or not, these mini-worlds have life on them, and even, to varying degrees, civilization.

Civilization, possibly, but aside from those places devoted wholly to science or to military infrastructure, what does civilization mean in these places? What do these people do? An interesting development finds many islands, particularly British territories, with economies devoted almost entirely to the production of postage stamps. Necessary items to be sure, but these stamps are intended less for correspondence than for collection, a way for islanders to make a buck off philatelists and passing tourists. Some of the older pieces fetch surprising sums on eBay. One recent listing displayed 38 vintage Pitcairn stamps with a Stanley Gibbons catalogue value of $340.00.

Stamp collection being mainly an antiques racquet--with many collectors simply trading amongst themselves--it is doubtful that many islanders see this money. Nevertheless, the fetishism of collection and the romanticism of desert islands complement each other in revealing ways. Stamps, insofar as the exoticism of their provenance elicits covetousness on the part of the philatelist, are the perfect export for a lonely outpost that has little to offer the world but the opportunity to marvel at its own perpetuation. In this respect, Pitcairn is an especially apt vessel, and the fact that its postage is frequently graced by the Queen’s placid visage only adds irony to imagery.

Why irony? The island’s occupation, you might recall, is the result of one of the most notorious acts of rebellion against the British crown in its long and eventful history. It was in 1790 that the famous mutineers of the HMS Bounty, led by master’s mate Fletcher Christian (immortalized by Marlon Brando, Clark Gable, et al) washed ashore along with a score of Tahitian “wives,” and secreted themselves on this volcanic rock while Captain Bligh was court-marshaled (and cleared—perhaps justly) and the island became a world to itself. The colony was discovered in 1814 by the British Navy, which took a benevolent rather than vindictive stance toward the castaways, and twenty-four years later the island was officially colonized. Thus were the mutineers, on paper if not in spirit, brought back into Britannia’s fold.

Fast-forward approximately 170 years and the island is still essentially as it was when its lawless ancestors first breached its sandy shores and burnt the unfortunate Bounty (still visible in charred but recognizable form at the bottom of Bounty Bay). The swarthy, puffy complexions of the current Pitcariners are living testament to their English-Polynesian lineage and the famous surnames of literature and film still prevail: Adams, Young, Brown, and, of course, Christian. However, with a citizenry so detached both physically and culturally from the modern English state—but wholly dependant on its support (very few Pitcairners “work”)—the island is struggling to justify its existence as a nostalgic holdover from the empire it once renounced but now sadly and begrudgingly represents. It is not so much that Pitcairn is ungovernable as it is that Pitcairn is ungovernable by England, a distinction that recently got the island into a whole lot of trouble and today threatens its survival.

Island-looking landscape (actually Santa Barbara hills)

In September 2004, seven Pitcairn men (including Steve Christian, the mayor and a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian), were indicted on 55 charges of sexual offenses—many of them directed at underage girls. In the trial, Pitcairn’s remoteness and resultant lack of scrutiny were repeatedly cited to explain a culture that tolerated underage sex to a degree that it was scarcely thought unusual. “Child sex is common,” wrote one reporter in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “with girls made available at 12 or 13.” The age of consent is variously cited by Pitcairners—women included—as 12, but the rapes in the indictment claim victims as young as five years old. Numerous legal challenges were filed by the islanders in reaction, all pointing to the burning of the Bounty in 1790 as an act of rejection of British rule which would therefore have freed them from British prosecution. Ironically, this defense, had it been accepted (which it was not) would have certainly doomed Pitcairn to a swift and thorough demise, as the island is dependant on British aid. In any event, a slower, if equally devastating exodus is occurring gradually and may well condemn Pitcairn to a bleak future as a depopulated historical curiosity—a picturesque stop for adventurous South Pacific tourists.

• • •

Was or is Pitcairn barbaric? If so, is such the inevitable end result for such a spot where one is almost literally “off the map”? Left alone, do we naturally revert to our animal states and debase ourselves? Hobbes writes that man in a state of nature is constantly at war, where war is thought of as consisting not necessarily of “actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.” The degree to which one is in a state of nature depends, of course, on the desertedness of one’s desert isle. Ascension Island, for instance, remains under the firm and reassuring hand of the military which supplies its needs and settles its inhabitants’ disputes. Easter Island, 1300 miles to the east of Pitcairn, is governed by the Chilean regional government, which polices its several thousand inhabitants. Then there is Bouvet Island in the sub-Arctic Atlantic, which claims to be the most remote island in the world. Annexed by Norway and glacial to the core, it is uninhabited, and therefore needs little to no governance. Pitcairn, however, provides a case-study, not of Hobbesian anarchy, but of institutionalized immorality, a disturbing if not necessarily uncivilized form of decadence.

In 2002, Neville Tosen, a pastor who spent two years on Pitcairn, wondered how mothers and grandmothers could allow such abuse of their children. He was quoted in the Guardian as saying, “Their reply was that nothing had changed. They said: ‘We went through it, too; it’s all part of life on Pitcairn.’ One grandmother wondered what all the fuss was about.” Left to its own devices, Pitcairn settled into an institutionalized and accepted form of child-abuse, and now struggles on as a cautionary example of unsupervised island governance.

Having delved unwittingly into Pitcairn’s romantic past and unsavory present, I noticed how unappealing island isolation seemed to me now. I never thought of it as an option for me, but now even its contemplation seemed slightly repulsive. The very thought of subjecting oneself to interminable isolation struck me as madness or madness-inducing and I wondered what healthy example of ends-of-the-earth society I might locate to sate my curiosity. In my search, I stumbled upon a set of articles written by Matthew Parris for the Times of London. Parris is a journalist and former conservative English politician who, in 2000, spent a winter on the remote Desolation Island, one of the Kerguelen Islands. He wrote about his time there in a series of quirky, and ultimately, moving articles for the Times. In one of his earlier pieces, before he has set out, he writes:

“Did you ever, as a child, pore over those great world atlases, in Mercator's projection, with Baffin Island very big and all the British bits in red? I spent a boyhood doing so. What fascinated me were places that looked remote.”

Yes! I thought. Here is a man I can follow, trace his journey to the far reaches of the world with an amateur’s enthusiasm, reflecting that he too is an amateur and that his enthusiasm is mine. “Everyone should make a new year's resolution,” wrote Parris in 1997. “Mine is to start making serious plans to reach Kerguelen.”

And with this middle-aged, childish (in the best way) whimsy, Parris sets the wheels in motion and after some logistical legerdemain, manages to actually get to Desolation three years later. The journey itself is difficult and involves a rough and lengthy ride on the French cargo ship—doubly unpleasant for the easily seasick Parris—that delivers supplies to the scientists stationed on Desolation two or three times a year. When he arrives, Parris is filled with anxiety. The island, home to about 100 French scientists—mostly men—is a wind-swept, dreary outpost, overrun by rabbits and devoid of trees. “It looked ugly, dispiriting,” he writes.

“The heart sank,” he continues, “I videoed the territory's only two trees, imported conifers cowering behind a hut. The whole complex scores a great gash from waterfront to hilltop. The sub-Antarctic environment being as fragile as it is harsh, rabbits have eaten off chunks of the slow-growing vegetation, eroding the soil beneath. To what sort of hell-hole had I condemned myself until August?”

With effort and imagination, our hero rallies and overcomes his dread, improving on his “school French” and earning the trust and friendship of his slightly bemused comrades. A bon vivant and well-known political figure in Britain, Parris is stymied by his lack of language and reference on his “desert isle,” and finds himself reduced to smiling and nodding: “Cut down to size, I am learning what it is like, not only to be an Englishman among the French, but also to be the kind of shy, halting Englishman with no particular gift, who lacks confidence among his own people.”

The Kerguelen articles Parris writes from the island are lengthy and arrive on a weekly basis. They are witty, anecdotal and highly personal, dealing with the difficulty of adjusting to a primitive lifestyle and the boredom that disconnectedness from the modern world entails. There are many stories of scientific expeditions with various teams, and a thrilling piece about an old abandoned whaling station that is discovered on the island.

The articles take a sudden and dramatic turn, however, when, during a hunting expedition, the senior doctor on the island falls in the snow and accidentally discharges his gun and shoots his friend in the back. The friend, a fellow Frenchman and soldier, dies instantly. The reaction of the islanders is stoic almost to the point of emotional paralysis. They do not blame the doctor for the accident but no one reaches out to him. Writing several weeks after the accident, Parris describes the feeling on the base and ascribes it to the necessarily tight-lipped silence of such a small and solitary society where even the slightest rupture or discord could sever a tenuous but vital bond. “Close communities avoid talking about things that touch deeply,” he writes. “Life at the edge does not invite the heart-to heart.” It is a more self-conscious existence, Parris informs us, providing, perhaps, a clue to both the perversity that was accepted at Pitcairn, and to the sober silence that tortures the guilty but guiltless doctor on Kerguelen who, in an accident that, as Parris writes, “could happen to anyone,” killed his friend.

• • •

The appeal of the island is the appeal of escape and of salvation, of the exotic and of the gratifyingly familiar. The burdened urbanite contemplates the stressful streets of Manhattan and dreams of pristine beaches and swaying palm trees. The lost marine, adrift in an endless expanse of water, yearns for land and the comforts of civilization. To those of us, myself included, for whom even a day away from the conveniences of dining options and transportation alternatives is a day too long, the very notion of consigning oneself to a walkable radius with limited to no Thai restaurants seems peculiar to say the least. The problem is, of course, that there is no escape from your escape. The shores of your paradise can quickly become the walls of your prison.

I wonder: if I was forced to, would I be able to endure such isolation? The idea that you can adjust to anything seems true as far as it goes, but my compulsory e-mail checking and newspaper reading is so hardwired now that I have no idea whether or not I would be able to kill the impulse. I suppose finding out is the appeal.

The cause of the mutiny on the Bounty has long been a mystery. Typical mutinies of the eighteenth century involved overdue pay and were the naval equivalent of labor strikes and, as such, they usually met with little or no punishment. The Bounty mutineers, however, made no demands, asked for no payment, but violently took control of the ship and set its captain adrift at sea. To this day there is no consensus regarding the mutineers’ motivation and the cause of their dissatisfaction with Captain Bligh. Perhaps, after all, it was pay. Perhaps it was anger over a mismanaged expedition. Perhaps it was a personal dispute between Christian and Bligh. The possibility remains, however, that the mutineers were simply tired of being told what to do, tired of being ordered around, tired of the rigid and routine naval code they had subscribed to for most of their adult lives. Their rebellion was one of  the spirit more than of maritime principle, perhaps. Perhaps they just wanted to see if they could do it.

The mutiny, of course, was one thing, and Christian and his crew managed that fairly successfully. Their dispatch of Bligh and the loyalists complete, the mutineers picked up their girlfriends in Tahiti and escaped to the nearest rock they could lay their hands on. Little could they have known what lay in store for them in the life they had, however unknowingly, signed up for. The world was all before them, as Milton would put it, but it was a much smaller and much stranger world than the one they had left.