Adamstown

Polynesians lived on Pitcairn for a time and had gone before Europeans found it. A British ship sighted the island in 1767 and recorded its position three degrees wrong, a mistake that later helped conceal the people who settled there. In 1789 the crew of HMS Bounty mutinied in the Pacific near Tofua, in Tonga, and in January 1790 nine mutineers with eighteen Polynesians — six men, eleven women and a baby — landed on Pitcairn and burned the ship in the bay below the present village. They built their houses on the northern slope that became Adamstown.

The first decade was violent, and within twenty years only one mutineer, John Adams, remained alongside the women and the children born on the island. He taught from the Bounty's Bible and shaped the community's religious life, and the settlement was named after him. Outsiders found the island again in 1808, and by the time Adams died in 1829 Adamstown had become a settled village of houses, gardens and a chapel.

The whole population of 193 people moved to Norfolk Island in 1856; seventeen returned eighteen months later and twenty-seven more five years after that. Missionary contact brought conversion to Seventh-day Adventism in 1886, and the church and the square became the island's civic centre. Numbers peaked at around 230 in the 1930s and have fallen ever since as families left for New Zealand. A series of sexual-abuse trials in 2004, held in the village, convicted several men and marked the community deeply. Repopulation is now the island's stated priority, with migrants admitted subject to review by the Island Council.

Adamstown is a single community rather than a town, and almost everything about it is communal. A handful of surnames — Christian, Warren, Young — covers most of the island, and each adult holds one public role or several, from radio operator to engineer to longboat coxswain, with the elected Island Council, which doubles as the island's court, settling day-to-day affairs. Public work days for roads, tracks and buildings are part of the calendar, and the arrival of a ship pulls in everyone able to lift cargo.

Seventh-day Adventism shapes the week. Saturday is the sabbath, kept quietly, with services in the church by the square; the once-strict dietary rules and the ban on alcohol have eased. English and Pitkern, the creole of eighteenth-century English and Tahitian brought together in 1790, are both spoken, and Pitkern words and place names — Down Rope, Tedside, Isaac's Valley — carry the island's history in plain form.

Craft and produce are the outward face of the place: bowls, sharks and models carved from miro and other island woods, woven baskets and hats, honey from one of the world's few disease-free bee populations, and the stamps and coins that collectors buy. Visitors are absorbed into household life, fed generously and expected to join in, and the descent of the community from the mutiny is worn as fact rather than performance.

A few dozen people live in Adamstown, which means the village functions more like one large household than a settlement. The island has Pulau School, which teaches children up to the age of twelve while older pupils study in New Zealand or by correspondence, a health clinic, a government store, a post office that handles the stamp trade, a museum and the church. Quad bikes on dirt tracks do the work of cars.

Income comes from British budget support together with honey, stamps, coins, the sale of ".pn" internet domains, carvings and the fees paid by the few visitors. Households grow much of what they eat, fish from the longboats and smaller craft, and keep chickens; a resupply of frozen and packaged goods arrives with the ship from Mangareva. Electricity comes from a diesel generator, with home solar systems now carrying much of the load, and water from rainfall stored in tanks. Satellite internet links the island to the world, slowly.

The day begins early and ends early, and work is broken by the sabbath and by whatever the sea demands. Depopulation is the constant background concern: recruiting new residents, keeping enough able crew for the longboats and enough children for the school. The 2004 trials still shape how the outside world sees the place and how carefully the community talks about itself.

Food on Pitcairn comes mostly from the gardens on the slopes above the village and from the sea below it. Breadfruit, bananas, taro, sweet potato, sugarcane, citrus, mango, pineapple and passionfruit grow in household plots, and fish — caught from the rocks, from a longboat or by diving with a spear gun — is eaten fried, baked or salted.

Pitkern dishes are simple and filling. Pilhi is a baked pudding of grated starchy vegetables or banana, the sweet-potato version — kumara pilhi — being the best known; mudda is a dumpling of green banana; pota, the most traditional dish of all, is a mash of palm leaves and coconut; and fish and breadfruit appear in some form at most meals. Pitcairn honey, from one of the best examples of a disease-free bee population anywhere, is the island's signature product and is exported to New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Because deliveries come only with the ship, cooking works around what is in the freezer and the garden. Flour, rice, tinned goods and frozen meat are landed in bulk and rationed until the next sailing, so shortages of a particular item are normal and unremarkable. Meals for visitors are cooked by their host families, and the biggest spreads of the year are communal — Bounty Day in January and the shared tables laid out when a ship is in.