Pitcairn Islands: The Mutineers' Refuge

The smallest jurisdiction on Earth

The Pitcairn group is four islands in the middle of the South Pacific — only one, Pitcairn itself, inhabited — and it is a British Overseas Territory with a population of around 35, the smallest of any polity in the world. Everyone there descends from a single event: the 1789 mutiny aboard HMS Bounty, after which nine of the mutineers and a group of Tahitian men and women hid on this uncharted island and were not found for eighteen years. The islanders still bear the mutineers' surnames and speak Pitkern, a blend of 18th-century English and Tahitian.

A short history

1. c. 11th century onwards

   Polynesian occupation

   Islanders live on Pitcairn for centuries, then abandon it.

2. 1767

   European sighting

   A British ship names the island for the midshipman who spotted it.

3. 1789

   The mutiny

   Fletcher Christian and others seize HMS Bounty from William Bligh.

4. 1790

   Settlement

   Nine mutineers and 18 Polynesians land and burn the ship.

5. 1808

   Rediscovery

   An American sealer finds one surviving mutineer and many children.

6. 1831, 1856

   Relocations

   The community is moved to Tahiti, then Norfolk Island; some return.

7. 1838

   British colony

   By the islanders' reckoning, Pitcairn becomes a British colony.

8. 1886

   Adventism

   The island converts to Seventh-day Adventism.

9. 2004

   The trials

   Six men are convicted of sexual offences after a British investigation.

Occupied, then empty

Archaeology — stone tools, petroglyphs, burial sites — shows that Polynesians lived on Pitcairn and nearby Henderson Island for several centuries in the second millennium, trading with Mangareva, before the settlements failed and the islands were left uninhabited. The Bounty's people found no one there. When Pitcairn was sighted by a British naval expedition in 1767, it was recorded in the wrong position on the charts — which is precisely why it made such a good hiding place.

The mutiny and the settlement

HMS Bounty had been sent to Tahiti to collect breadfruit plants for transplanting to the West Indies. On the return voyage in April 1789, acting lieutenant Fletcher Christian led a mutiny against Lieutenant William Bligh, setting Bligh and 18 loyal men adrift in an open boat — a voyage of some 6,500 kilometres they astonishingly survived. Christian's party, after a failed stay on Tubuai, took on Tahitian companions — mostly women, some of them abducted, and six Polynesian men — and searched for somewhere the Royal Navy would never look. They landed on Pitcairn in January 1790 and destroyed the ship.

Eden and its collapse

The colony's first years were murderous. Tension over the unequal division of land and women between the Europeans and the Polynesian men erupted in killing: within a decade most of the adult men, including Christian, were dead by violence, and one mutineer, a heavy drinker of spirit from his homemade still, had thrown himself from a cliff. By the end of 1800 only one adult male remained — John Adams — living with nine women and 19 children. Adams turned to the Bible, imposed a strict Christian regime, and by the time an American ship stumbled on the island in 1808 the community was famously pious and orderly, a story that delighted the Victorian public.

A managed territory

Pitcairners date their becoming a British colony to 1838, when a visiting naval captain gave them a law code that made the island one of the first places anywhere to let women vote; Britain formally annexed it only later in the century. Overpopulation led to two mass relocations: to Tahiti in 1831 (a failure, ended by disease) and to Norfolk Island in 1856, after which some families returned. The island converted en masse to Seventh-day Adventism in 1886, which still shapes daily life. Administered from Fiji until 1970 and since then by the British High Commissioner to New Zealand, Pitcairn lived on subsistence farming, fishing, the sale of postage stamps and carved curios to passing ships.

The trials, and decline

In the late 1990s a British police investigation uncovered a long pattern of sexual abuse of underage girls on the island. In 2004, in trials held on Pitcairn under British law, with judges and lawyers flown in, six men — a large share of the adult male population, including the mayor — were convicted; several served sentences in a prison built for the purpose. The cases exposed deep problems in so tiny and isolated a community and strained its relationship with Britain. The population, already falling, has continued to shrink and age; the territory now actively seeks new settlers, so far with only modest results.

What Pitcairn carries

Pitcairn exists because of a crime at sea and the need to hide from its consequences, and its whole history has been shaped by extreme isolation — the violence of the first years, the relocations, the religious revival, and the abuse cases that isolation helped conceal. It is a functioning British territory with a council and a school, and it may not have enough people to remain one for much longer.