Pitcairn—two square miles of loneliness

Press, 16 July 1977, Page 16

Pitcairn—two square miles of loneliness

By

CHARLTON CLARK,

a New Zealander who recently

visited Pitcairn Island on board an American yacht.

Pitcairn Island, the South Pacific hide-out of nine of the famous Bounty mutineers, remains as isolated from the rest of the world in the 1970 s as it has ever been. A freighter captain who recently stopped at the island, once a favourite with whalers, immigrant ships, and British warships as well as freighters, summed up the present situation when he told the islanders: "We can’t stop for more than half an hour, because if we do we’ll miss the tide in the Thames Estuary’’ — nearly 10,000 miles away. With no airport, and no room for one on the rugged, barely one-mile-long island, ships are the Pitcairners’ only source of direct contact with the outside world, apart from radio. The Government radio connection with Fiji uses only Morse code. The island’s radio operator, Mr Tom Christian, is the only islander who has the regular comfort of an outside voice, as he has a ham transceiver installed at his home.

The ever-increasing tightness of shipping schedules means that, in the estimate of one Pitcairner. Mr Roy Clark, only one ship stops of about 14 seen by the islanders. The island lies close to the shipping lanes between Panama and Australia and New Zealand, and there is little doubt that many more ships pass nearbv but are not seen bv the islanders. "We used to have 50 ships a year stopping here,” Mr Clark said. But that was in a more casual age. Now the time may be approaching when the only ships with time to stop are those carrying mail or supplies for Pitcairn, or those which answer calls for urgent medical assistance, perhaps to take a sick or injured Pitcairner to hospital in New' Zealand.

The Pitcairners expect four supply ships a year, •wo each from Britain and New Zealand. Even these must sometimes pass by if the weather is so bad that it would be dangerous to launch the island’s longboats through the surf to bring them alongside the ships.

The island’s present schoolmaster and Government officer, Mr Tom Whiu, of Whangarei. said he had seen the Pitcairners visibly hurt and insulted when ships sailed close by

the island without stopping. This was especially true when they had rushed out towards the ships in longboats, in the hope of trading their stamps, curios, basketry and fruit. German and Scandinavian

ships were the most popular in recent years, as their captains seemed more willing to stop, the crews were friendly, and trading was good. The islanders appreciated. too. the onportunity to send mail to friends and relatives overseas.

The 60-odd islanders rely heavily on shipping for their well-being. and for the very survival of their community.

Their nearest neighbours are on Mangareva Island, in French Polynesia, nearly 300 miles away; and Mangareva in turn is many hundreds of miles from its seat of Government and source of supplies. Tahiti. Although they are British citizens and their island is a British protectorate. Pitcairners are much more closely linked with New Zealand in practical terms.

Most of their supplies come from New' Zealand, and New Zealand currency is the legal tender on Pitcairn.

The British High Commissioner to New Zealand is the Governor of Pitcairn Island, and his representative on the island, the schoolmaster, is usually a New’ Zealander. Older children who want higher education than is available on the island go to school in New Zealand; injured and sick Pitcairners are hospitalised in New Zealand; and those who leave the island are more likely to settle in New Zealand than in any other country.

The New Zealand Government imposes no immigration restrictions on Pitcairners, and quite a number of them are known to live in Whangarei, Auckland, New Plymouth, and Wellington.

The High Commission collects mail for Pitcairn, handles Pitcairners’ orders for provisions, and arranges for ships on the New Zealand-Panama run

to take supplies, which may include anything from sewing needles to freezers. The attractions of life in New Zealand and elsewhere have largely been responsible for the drain

of the island’s population from a peak of about 250, 40 years ago, to about 60 now.

Few\ if any, of the young people who go to school in New Zealand return to live on the island. The employment and leisure activities available in New Zealand prove stronger attractions than the rather limited way of life on the island. The drain of young people has been especially serious. There were only 17 able-bodied men of working age left on Pitcairn when w’e were there, and only seven of those could be called young men. Two of those seven were hoping to emigrate to New Zealand. But although Pitcairn needs its men for the often very heavy and sometimes dangerous every-day w’ork on the island, Pitcairners themselves appear unworried about their future. They seem to prefer living from day to day, with a simple take-life-as-it-comes philosophy. possibly born of their Seventh Day Adventist faith.

“We are a dying community, there is no doubt about that,” Mr Clark said. However, I was told there had been no serious talk about leaving the island. The islanders believe that the British Government would prefer them to make the first move in that direction, if they ever want to be resettled. Evidence for this was t’-at while we were there, Pitcairners w’ere working on a new wharf and longboat launching facilities in Bounty Bay. The work was financed by the Government, which supplied three soldiers of the Royal Engineers to supervise the work.

The Government pays wages to the islanders for such public work. While some young people choose to stay on

the island, and children are still being born there, the question of resettlement seems unlikely to arise. Two evacuations last century, to Tahiti and Norfolk Island, were short-lived. Diseases to

which the Pitcairners had no immunity drove them back to Pitcairn in the former case, and homesickness for Pitcairn persuaded some who went to Norfolk to go back. The island’s isolation is occasionally relieved by visitors, ranging from Realty and Government officials to authors, scientists, anthropologists, entomologists, journalists, sociologists, historians, and yachtsmen. Visitors are a luxury at Pitcairn, and all are accorded the legendary Pitcairn hospitality. “I have seen some really rough, hard-case characters visit here,” said Mr Whiu. “But they are all the same to these folk. They never lock their homes, and they treat everyone the same, no matter how disreputable they appear to be.”

However, one or two visitors have apparently jeopardised the hospitality shown to them by prying a little too closely into the close family structure of Pitcairn society, and the marriages between relatives that have been necessary in a community with only five family names.

A mutineer named Brown went to Pitcairn, but the present Brown family there is descended from folk who settled on the island in the latter half ot last century. The new settlers this century can be counted on the fingers of one hand. None, apart from Mr Clark and his father, who moved there from the United States in 1909, has stuck it out. A New Zealand woman who lives there with her Pitcairn husband said she would prefer to return to New Zealand. Yachtsmen are probably the most common visitors, yet sometimes a year can pass without a single yacht cal. ng. Pitcairn Island is hundreds of miles from the usual yacht cruising routes through the Pacific Islands, and many yachtsmen are dissuaded from sailing to Pitcairn by tales of the poor anchorages there. Indeed, our own anchor line snapped under the strain imposed by a heavy swell, even while in the lee of the island duri-™ reasi - u '” weather.

Pitcairners underst tnuably regard such matters as nobody’s business but their own, and, for the record, doctors have established that they have suffered no ill effects. A high incidence of obesity, in fact, is the only visible serious health problem on the island, and this is attributable to a high intake of carbohydrates.

Only two of the Pitcairn surnames, Christian and Young, date back to the mutiny and the mutineers Fietcher Christian and Edward Young. Another mutineer’s surname, McCoy, died out at Pitcairn about 12 years ago, but others, like Quintal, live on at Norfolk Island.

But we arrived in the midst of a rare busy spell with visitors. A New Zealand yacht from the Bay of Islands stayed a week there and left only a week before we arrived.

Another yacht, with two people aboard, arrived from Panama while we were there. The skipper of this yacht had lost a previous yacht in 1975 on the rocks of Bounty Bay, t ten an anchor line snapped and another dragged during a stormy night. A supply ship from Britain, the first for three months, arrived virtually side by side with us. unloaded three tons of supplies, and took away the Royal Engineers and a New Zealand broadcaster, Mr Jack Dobson, who had spe,.t three months gathering material for radio programmes.

Later during our voyage to Panama, we were in contact with two British and American sailing ships which were planning visits to Pitcairn on their way across the Pacific Ocean. So 1977 may go down at Pitcairn Island as one year when the loneliness was relieved a little more often than usual.