Trouble in Paradise: Uncovering the Dark Secrets of Britain’s Most Remote Island

As I waved my phone around like a conductor’s baton, searching for a signal, I reflected on the weeks that lay ahead of me. Pitcairn would be no run-of-the-mill assignment, that was clear. And it was clear, too, that the story was about more than just the child abuse trials. It was about a strange little community, marching to its own tune in the middle of nowhere—and at the core of which we were now ensconced, rather uneasily.

CHAPTER 2 Mutiny, murder and myth-making

The next morning I got up and took a hot shower. Only later did I realise that, on Pitcairn, hot water does not simply arrive through the tap. A wood fire in a little shed near the house heats a copper boiler, which in turn heats cold water pipes leading to a storage tank. But in order for this to happen, a fire has to be built. And firewood has to be chopped.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Ewart Barnsley, the TVNZ journalist, was an early riser with a practical disposition. Shortly after dawn, he had chopped wood and lit the fire. From then on, he made that his daily chore.

We were discovering some of the other quirks of Pitcairn life. The ‘duncan’, for instance, which is an outside pit toilet. Ours was situated about 30 feet from the Lodge. The island does not have a sewerage system, and its only source of water, for drinking and washing, is rain.

Then there were the land crabs that lurked around, some the size of a dinner plate, turning a night-time trip to the duncan into a hair-raising ordeal. These fearsome-looking creatures usually tucked their soft bodies inside a coconut shell for protection, but we heard tales of crabs seen wearing a sweetcorn tin, a plastic doll’s head, and a Pond’s Cold Cream jar.

Should any of us encounter a particularly aggressive crab, or one of Pitcairn’s formidable spiders, help was close by, and it had an English accent. Three British diplomats—among 29 outsiders who had recently descended on the island, nearly doubling its population—were installed next door to us in the Government Hostel, another pre-fabricated dwelling for visitors. For the trials, just one new house had been put up, called McCoy’s after one of the mutineers, and it had been assigned to the prosecution team of three lawyers and two police officers. They found themselves living next door to Steve Christian, the Pitcairn mayor, who was facing court on six counts of rape and four of indecent assault. And the defence lawyers? They were sleeping in cells in the new jail.

At the Lodge, our other next-door neighbour was Len Brown, the oldest of the seven defendants. Len, who was charged with two rapes, was 78 and quite deaf, but still cut a physically imposing figure. Soon after we arrived, we saw him sitting in his garden, working on a carved replica of the Bounty—one of the wooden souvenirs that the islanders sell to tourists. For reasons unclear, a rusting cannon from the real ship stood on Len’s front lawn.

The mutiny on the Bounty is one of the most notorious events in British maritime history. Yet it was only one of a series of rebellions against the British Navy in the late 18th century. One uprising in 1797 involved dozens of ships and a blockade of London. Another led to the murder at sea of a captain and eight of his officers.

That few people are familiar with these incidents, while nearly everyone knows about the drama on board the Bounty, can be explained in one word: Hollywood. The mutiny inspired five films between 1916 and 1984, three of them made by American studios, with Fletcher Christian played by matinée idols such as Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson. Studio bosses loved the story, with its exotic South Seas setting, scenes of swashbuckling adventure and cast of semi-naked Polynesian maidens, and so did generations of cinemagoers, who warmed to Christian and sided with him against the apparently cruel and sadistic Captain William Bligh. The mutineers’ descendants mostly shared that view of Bligh as the villain and Christian as the dashing young hero; to this day, they will not hear a word against their infamous ancestor.

The historical background is more complex than Hollywood has allowed. And it all began with breadfruit, a large, globe-shaped fruit.

Breadfruit trees had been discovered in Tahiti in 1769 by Sir Joseph Banks, the English naturalist, who urged King George III to introduce them to the West Indies as a cheap food source for slaves on the sugar plantations. The King appointed Bligh, a Royal Navy lieutenant, to lead an expedition, and in December 1787 a 220-ton former merchant ship, His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty, set sail from Portsmouth with 46 officers and men. Among them was Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate and, effectively, Bligh’s chief officer.

Bligh was an ambitious 33-year-old, and an outstanding navigator who had accompanied Captain James Cook on his final voyage. Christian was 23, equally ambitious, and from a genteel—albeit no longer wealthy—family with strong links to the Isle of Man. He had sailed twice previously under Bligh, who regarded him as a friend and protégé.

The plan was to head to Tahiti via South America, collect some breadfruit saplings and transport them to the Caribbean. However, the Bounty ran into atrocious weather at Cape Horn, after which Bligh elected to go east, taking the longer route. The ship reached Tahiti’s Matavai Bay in October 1788.

Early European visitors had called the island an earthly paradise, and after nearly a year at sea the Englishmen could only agree. Tahiti’s white beaches were caressed by warm breezes; its trees hung heavy with fruit and its lagoons teemed with fish. The native men treated the sailors as ‘blood brothers’, while the beautiful, uninhibited women showered them with attention. Six months later, when it was time to depart, no one except the puritanical Bligh was keen to resume the rigours of shipboard life.

Bligh was convinced that it was Tahiti’s charms, so reluctantly relinquished, that triggered the events of 28 April 1789. Most historians now agree that, far from being a brutal despot, Bligh was an enlightened captain who kept his crew healthy and flogged only sparingly. But he was also prone to fly into rages. After the Bounty left Tahiti, he humiliated the thin-skinned, volatile Christian, branding him a coward and accusing him of stealing coconuts from a stash on deck. Their relationship had broken down—although probably not as a result of a gay liaison gone sour, as some have speculated.

Three weeks out of Matavai Bay, as the Bounty approached the Friendly Islands (now called Tonga), five men burst into Bligh’s cabin at dawn. With Christian pointing a bayonet at his chest, Bligh was made to climb into the ship’s launch, along with 18 loyal officers and men. He appealed to Christian, reminding him, ‘You have danced my children upon your knee.’ The latter, reportedly in a delirious state, replied, ‘That, Captain Bligh, that is the thing … I am in hell … I am in hell.’

Bligh and his followers were set adrift with no charts and only meagre supplies. In a remarkable feat of navigation, Bligh guided the launch across 3618 miles of open sea, landing on the island of Timor 48 days later. Amazingly, only one life had been lost: that of a quartermaster, killed not at sea but in a skirmish with Tongans. In Batavia (now Jakarta), Bligh found a berth on a Dutch East Indiaman, and in March 1790 he arrived back in England, where he recounted his tale to an astonished nation.

The mutineers, meanwhile, were searching for a refuge. They could not go home to England, and an attempt to settle on Tubuai, 400 miles south of Tahiti, was abandoned after clashes with the locals. The men split into two factions. Sixteen of them decided to chance their luck on Tahiti; the other nine, led by Christian, would continue their quest. The Bounty dropped the first group at Tahiti, but picked up some new passengers: 12 Polynesian women, six Polynesian men and a baby accompanied Christian’s band on their journey.

Two months later, while flicking through a book in Bligh’s library, Christian noticed a reference to ‘Pitcairn’s Island’. The island sounded promising, but it had been incorrectly charted, and another two months passed before he finally sighted it in January 1790. Christian led a party ashore, and when he returned he was smiling for the first time in weeks. Pitcairn was not only off the map, but it was also unpopulated, and it was a natural fortress—thickly forested, with towering cliffs and no safe anchorage. Yet it had fertile soil, fruit trees and (unlike now) a water source. The mutineers ran the Bounty aground and prepared to establish a new community far from civilisation.

The sailors divided the cultivable land into nine plots, one for each of them. The proud Polynesian men, who had been their friends and equals on Tahiti, received nothing; instead they were to be their servants. The Englishmen also took one ‘wife’ apiece, with the other three women shared among the six Tahitians. These actions created a deadly stew of sexual jealousy and racial resentment, which boiled over two years later.

After the wives of John Williams and John Adams died, the pair commandeered two of the Polynesians’ women. Enraged, the native men hatched a plot to murder the mutineers. But the latter were tipped off, and it was two Tahitians who were killed, one of them by his former wife.

In 1793 violence flared again. The four remaining Polynesian men stole some muskets, and within the space of one day murdered five Englishmen, including Fletcher Christian. Only John Adams, William McCoy, Matthew Quintal and Edward Young survived. Tit-for-tat killings followed, by the end of which all the Tahitian men were dead.

Calm then descended on the community—until 1798, when McCoy built a still and began producing a powerful spirit from the roots of the ti-plant. The men, and some of the women, spent their days in a drunken stupor, and it was in such a state that McCoy threw himself off a cliff. Quintal grew increasingly wild, and tried to snatch Young’s and Adams’ wives; the pair decided that they had no option but to kill him. They hacked Quintal to death with a hatchet. At last the cycle of bloodshed was over.

In 1800 Young died from an asthma attack. It was ten years since the mutineers had first spied Pitcairn. Of the 15 men who had settled there, only Adams was left.

Carved into a cliff high above Adamstown is Christian’s Cave, reached by a vertiginously sheer trail trampled by the wild goats that roam the island’s ridges and escarpments. It was to this windblown spot, a dark slash in the volcanic rock face, that Christian would retreat, so it is said, to scan the Pacific Ocean for British naval ships—and to reflect, perhaps, on the reckless act that had exiled him for eternity.

Once the Bounty was stripped and burnt to the waterline, the mutiny stopped being Christian’s story. He was no longer a leader, and little is known about his life on Pitcairn, apart from the fact that his Tahitian wife—called Maimiti, or sometimes Mauatua—bore him two sons and a daughter. There is still debate about whether he really died there, or somehow managed to return to England—stoked by a ‘sighting’ of him in Plymouth, and the failure ever to locate his burial site.

The only mutineer with a preserved grave is John Adams, and it is he, not Christian, who was the father of the Pitcairn community, who set it on the course it was to follow for the next 200 years.

Adams, an ambiguous figure, signed up for the Bounty as Alexander Smith, reverting to his real name on the island. Rough and ready, like the average working-class salt, he played a prominent role in the seizing of the Bounty and subsequent racial warfare. Then, after the killings, he underwent a miraculous conversion—at least, that was his account, and there was no one left alive to challenge it.

Adams claimed that Edward Young taught him to read, using a Bible retrieved from the Bounty, and that he was so affected by the Bible’s teachings that he repented of his misdeeds and embraced Christianity. After Young’s death he was left alone with nine women and the 24 children born to the mutineers during those violent early years; strangely, no children were fathered by the Polynesian men. And, according to Adams, all of them led lives of spotless integrity under his patriarchal guidance.

The outside world, meanwhile, was gripped by the mystery of the mutineers’ whereabouts. The men on Tahiti had been quickly tracked down and shipped home, then court-martialled, after which three of them were hanged. Fletcher Christian and his followers, though, seemed to have vanished.

The little society headed by Adams lived in complete isolation until 1808, when an American whaler, the Topaz, stumbled across it; the Topaz’s captain, Mayhew Folger, was astounded to be greeted by three dark-skinned young men in a canoe, all of whom spoke perfect English. Adams related his tale of sin and redemption to Folger who, after just a few hours on shore, left convinced that Pitcairn was ‘the world’s most pious and perfect community’. He informed the Admiralty about his incredible discovery, but the news was received with indifference; Britain was at war with France, and the mutiny was no longer of much interest in naval circles.

To each visitor after Folger, Adams gave a slightly different version of events, and few visitors interviewed the women, who were the only other witnesses. It was the start of the myth-making that was to obscure the reality of Pitcairn for the next two centuries.

By 1814 Adams was out of danger, following another chance visit, this time by two British naval captains. Enchanted by the new colony, they advised the Admiralty that it would be ‘an act of great cruelty and inhumanity’ to repatriate Adams and put him on trial.

Pitcairn’s period of seclusion was over. A stream of ships called, mainly British men-of-war, but also whalers and merchant vessels. All of them found a peaceful, devout society whose young people were healthy, modest and well educated. The legend of an island populated by reformed sinners, the offspring of murderers and mutineers, spread across the English-speaking world.

To outsiders, the idea of a Western-style community flourishing in such a faraway spot was compelling. Missionary groups dispatched crateloads of Bibles; other well-wishers, including Queen Victoria, sent gifts such as flour, guns, fishing hooks, crockery and an organ. Pitcairn was many things to many people. It was a religious fable. It was a fairy tale. It was the fulfilment of a Utopian dream.

The island’s fame grew in the late 19th century, after the locals rescued foreign sailors from a series of shipwrecks. Then in 1914 the opening of the Panama Canal put Pitcairn on the main shipping route to Australia and New Zealand. Liners packed with European emigrants would pause halfway across the Pacific so that their passengers could glimpse the island, and even meet its inhabitants, for—then as now—the islanders would board the ships to sell their souvenirs.

Jet travel destroyed the glamour of the ocean voyage, but while the rest of the world shrank, Pitcairn remained tantalisingly inaccessible, thus retaining much of its original allure. Children still scoured atlases for it; adults projected their escapist fantasies onto it; armchair travellers daydreamed about stepping ashore. The islanders, meanwhile, cultivated their own mystique, nurturing the romantic aura that drew tourists—and their American dollars—to their door.

The day after we arrived on Pitcairn, Olive Christian, Steve’s wife, invited members of the media to Big Fence, her sprawling home overlooking the Pacific. Like the rest of my colleagues, I had absolutely no idea what to expect.

When we got there in the early afternoon, 15 women—almost the entire adult female population—were assembled on sofas and plastic chairs arranged around the edge of the living room. The room, which had a lino floor, was as big as a barn; the walls were decorated with family photographs and a large mural of fish and dolphins. Through the front window we could see tall Norfolk pines clinging to slopes that tumbled steeply to the ocean.

The women represented all four of Pitcairn’s main clans: the Christians and Youngs, still carrying mutineers’ surnames, and the Browns and Warrens, descendants of 19th-century sailor settlers. The other English lines—Adams, Quintal and McCoy—had died out, although not in New Zealand or on Norfolk Island, 1200 miles east of Australia, where most people with Pitcairn roots now live.

At the time of the Big Fence gathering, the names of the seven Pitcairn-based defendants were still suppressed by a court order. However, we were privy to this poorly kept secret. Every woman in the room was related to one or more of the men—as a wife, mother, sister, cousin, aunt or stepmother-in-law.

Looking around, I saw that, with a few exceptions, the women were solidly built. While some were dark-haired, with striking Polynesian features, others, with their fair skin and European looks, would not have stood out in an English village. All of them were casually dressed, many in shorts and singlets: practical choices, given the heat and ubiquitous Pitcairn dust.

We had been summoned to Big Fence, it turned out, to be told that their menfolk were not ‘perverts’ or ‘hardened criminals’: they were decent, hard-working family types. No islander would tolerate children being interfered with, and no one on Pitcairn had ever been raped. The ‘victims’ were girls who had known exactly what they were doing. It was they who had thrown themselves at the men.

As I digested this notion, which was being put forward with some passion, I noticed that a handful of people were dominating proceedings. These particular women were speaking over the top of each other, impatient to get their point across. Others said little, and looked ill at ease. Steve Christian’s mother, Dobrey, sat quietly, weaving a basket from pandanus leaves.

The talkative ones explained that under-age sex was the norm on Pitcairn. Darralyn Griffiths, the daughter of Jay Warren, one of the defendants, told us in a matter-of-fact way that she had lost her virginity at 13, ‘and I felt shit hot about it too, I felt like a big lady’. She was partly boasting, partly censorious of her younger self, it seemed to me. Others clamoured to make similar admissions. ‘I had it at 12, and I was shit hot too,’ said Jay’s sister, Meralda, a woman in her 40s. Darralyn’s mother, Carol, 54 years old, agreed that 13 was ‘the normal age’, adding, ‘I used to be a wild thing when I was young and single.’ Olive Christian described her youth, with evident nostalgia, as a time when ‘we all thought sex was like food on the table’.

The British police had misunderstood Pitcairn, they claimed: it was a South Pacific island where, to young people, sex was as natural as the ocean breeze. Olive said, ‘It’s been this way for generations, and we’ve seen nothing wrong in it. Everyone has sex young. That’s our lifestyle.’ Darralyn echoed her. ‘It was just the way it was. No one thought it was bad.’

We must have looked surprised. They were surprised we were surprised. Well, at what age did we start having sex, they demanded. It was clear, in this company and at this particular juncture, that the question could not be avoided. Some of our responses met with howls of derision. The women of Pitcairn did not believe that anyone could have lost their virginity at 18; the idea of being that old was simply preposterous.

The serious point of this was to persuade us that the criminal case was based on a misconception—and, furthermore, that it was all part of an elaborate plot. Britain was determined to ‘close the island down’, they said, because it had become a financial burden—a ‘thorn in the arse’, as Tania Christian, Steve and Olive’s daughter, put it. What better way to achieve that than to jail the men who were the very backbone of the community?

Why, though, we wondered aloud, would the women who had spoken to police have fabricated their accounts—accounts that, despite them growing up on the island in different eras and now living thousands of miles apart, were remarkably alike? At this point the Pitcairners produced their trump card: Carol Warren’s daughters, Darralyn and Charlene.

Charlene, 25 years old, with long, curly hair and a diffident manner, spoke up first, egged on by her mother. Charlene revealed that she had been one of the women who made a statement in 2000, alleging sexual abuse by Pitcairn men. But, she added, as others sitting around her clucked approvingly, she had only done so because she had been blinded by greed. She explained, ‘The detectives … dragged me to the police station. I didn’t know what I had done. I was ignorant. I was offered good money for each person I could name. They said I would get something like NZ$4000 (£1,500) for every guy. After I had added it up in my head, I was, like, “Whoa!” I just blurted everything out to them.’

Then it was her sister’s turn. Darralyn was 27; well built, with a fair complexion, she resembled Charlene physically, but was more self-assured. Darralyn told us that she had also made a statement—but, she said, only after being browbeaten by police. She claimed that detectives had asked her to ‘make up a false allegation against a guy here, because they didn’t have enough evidence to put him under’.

A New Zealand detective and child abuse specialist, Karen Vaughan, who had joined the British inquiry team, told Darralyn’s partner, Turi Griffiths, that if they had a baby daughter and brought her to the island, she would get raped too, Darralyn alleged. ‘I was shit scared. They told me if I tell the truth, everything will be fine. They said they’d heard from other people about my past. They asked me disgusting personal questions.’

Both sisters were living in New Zealand at the time of the investigation, and both told police that they were prepared to go to court. But ‘after I really thought about it, it was half and half … I wanted it just as bad as them. It was very much a mutual thing,’ said Charlene, referring to the men whom she had named as abusers. That re-evaluation took place after Charlene returned to Pitcairn. Darralyn changed her mind shortly before she, too, went home.

By now my head was spinning. We had had middle-aged matrons bragging about their sexual exploits. We had had Charlene and Darralyn outing themselves as victims, but not really victims. Now their mother, Carol, was declaring that no Pitcairn girl had ever been abused—and, almost in the same breath, telling us that she had had an unpleasant experience as a child. ‘It didn’t affect me,’ she said. ‘I was probably luckier than some I’ve read about. It was tried but nothing happened. I was ten at the time. But even at ten I knew it was wrong, it’s a bad thing. I screamed like hell.’

When she heard that Darralyn had spoken to police, Carol said, ‘I thought, what on earth is that girl thinking about? The silly idiot … Well, if that’s what she’s gone and done, I’ll have to stand by her.’ She went on, ‘I told the cops, not one of these girls went into this with their eyes shut. They knew exactly what they were doing. They weren’t forced by anyone. The women here are loose, and it’s not the men’s fault. What are they supposed to do?’

Carol then hinted at ‘some really bad stuff that I know about that’s happened on the island that’s a heck of a lot worse [than under-age sex] … That’s sick sex I’m talking about, between adults’. She was referring to adultery, it transpired, and as she uttered the word, Carol growled like an alley cat. ‘Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but to me that’s taboo,’ she said. ‘Some people don’t care. They don’t have morals.’

Like the others, Carol had a way of looking at you without meeting your eye. It was disconcerting. The women, with their permanently distant expressions, all seemed to be wearing masks. The outspoken ones laughed a lot, particularly at coarse jokes. They came across as both manipulative and naïve. They were not the type to be easily intimidated. They were feisty and opinionated: people who would be able to look after themselves.

But when conversation moved to the prospect of their male relatives being jailed, the women suddenly appeared vulnerable. ‘I wouldn’t want to be without the men,’ Meralda said softly. Carol interjected, ‘We’re lost as hell without them.’ Olive reckoned that, without the men, ‘you might as well pick Pitcairn up and throw it away, because no one is going to survive … We can’t look after ourselves.’ With the population already at crisis point, they claimed, if even a couple of men were locked up, there would be too few to crew the longboats and maintain the roads. Meralda questioned why Britain had singled out the able-bodied men. Olive said, ‘There’s no one who can replace them. They can’t bring outsiders in to run the boats. They’ve no idea what to do.’

Of all those present, Olive stood to lose most. Among the seven defendants on the island, she counted her husband (Steve), her son (Randy), father (Len) and younger brother (Dave). The six men facing court in New Zealand included her other brother, Kay, and her two other sons, Trent and Shawn. Like certain women in the room, Olive also had connections with some of the alleged victims. She lamented, ‘We live as one big family on this island, and nothing will ever be the same … Right now, with all this going on, maybe they should have hanged Fletcher Christian.’

We had been at Big Fence for several hours, and no one was showing any sign of moving. The women, it seemed, were willing to stay for as long as it took to win us over. When we got our cameras out, they smiled, repeatedly. We could take as many pictures as we wanted.

We had not, though, been offered so much as a glass of water. It was a hot afternoon, and my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth. After a few more photographs, the six of us left. We would never set foot inside Steve Christian’s house again. And some of those women would never again speak to us, or even acknowledge our existence.

The next day, two of those who had remained in the background invited us to talk to them privately. They did not wish their names to be used, and we met them on neutral ground; even so, the other islanders knew within hours that the interview had taken place.

The two were anxious to dispel the impression that Pitcairn was a hotbed of under-age sex. That had not been their experience when they were growing up, they claimed. I asked why they had kept quiet at Big Fence. ‘There’s no point in one little voice speaking up,’ one woman replied. She told us that the Pitcairners usually avoided confrontation. ‘If you’re opposed to something, you tend to defer. We all have to get along together. We’re a community. None of us can survive here on our own.’

The pair were already unpopular because they had not condemned the prosecution outright. One observed, ‘If you try to give a balanced view, you’re regarded as disloyal.’ The other had been called a ‘Pommy supporter’ and ‘puppet of the Governor’ while going about her business in the Adamstown square.

The women believed that the sexual abuse had to be stopped. ‘If it’s as bad as it’s been made out to be, then it needed to be addressed,’ said one. She added, ‘But I’m not condemning the guys. I don’t personally want to see them jailed. I feel very sorry for the guys. Yet we’re hurting for the girls. It’s a double-edged sword. We’re all related. We’re related to the victims. We’re related to the offenders. And whatever decision is made, it’s going to hurt everybody. The ripples are so widespread.’

One woman alluded to victims within her own family, and said that she admired the courage of those giving evidence. However, she went on, ‘I don’t know who’s done what to whom, and I don’t really want to know, because then I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. You go to bed at night, you can’t sleep for thinking about it. No one wants to take that on board.’

This off-the-record conversation, I remember, left me feeling like Alice in Wonderland. The women at Big Fence had promised us the real story. The two dissidents had given us another perspective. But theirs, too, was clouded by ambiguity.

Walking home, as we passed little groups of people chatting in the road, I was struck by a sense of life unfolding in parallel universes. On the surface, the island seemed innocuous, even banal. Then every so often you glimpsed something hard-edged and sinister. Which was the real Pitcairn?