Glynn Christian digs up new material on Bounty mutiny

Press, 10 March 1982, Page 21

Glynn Christian digs up new material on Bounty mutiny

From

KEN COATES,

in London

An energetic New Zealander, Glynn Christian, direct descendant of the man who challenged Captain Bligh in the famous mutiny on H.M.S. Bounty, has begun a world-wide battle against indifference to save his ancestral home, Pitcairn Island, from extinction.

The jet age, with drastically fewer ships calling, means the tiny, lonely island of 61 inhabitants, half way between New Zealand and South America, is even more cut off from the world than 100 years ago. Auckland-born Glynn, aged 40, broadcaster and author and very much one of the family, has turned up at a crucial time in the history of the island. And with more than a dash of the drive and fighting spirit which drove his forebear to seize the Bounty, sail to remote Pitcairn and settle there, the chances are he will succeed. A television cook on the 8.8.C.'s “Pebble Mill at One” programme which is beamed live tb an audience of 3,000,000, and food and cookery man on London Broadcasting Company Radio, he can campaign as a nationally known figure in Britain. But action is urgently needed as the island community is slowly choking to death on its isolation and lack of regular contact with a fast-changing world. In the 1960 s Glynn Christian taught himself how to cook whep, as a writer of TV commercials, he flatted in Wellington with a young man who insisted that turns be taken preparing meals. In 1965, he landed a.plum job for a young Kiwi newly arrived in London determined to see the world — he was hired to write travel brochures for a package tour company in the days when you could go to Spain for a week for £29.

In between his trips abroad and widening his knowledge of food, he began delving into his family's history. The Christians, for generations landowners on the

Isle of Man and in Cumberland, trace themselves back to 1380. Fletcher Christian was a boyhood friend of William Wordsworth. More than 2500 books and articles, as well as films, have been produced about the Bounty mutiny, but no research had been done into what sort of man the leader, Fletcher Christian, was. Glynn discovered 500 leather-bound pages about his family including copies of documents going back 600 years, all put together on the Isle of Many by the last Miss Christian in the early 1900 s. The find that Glynn is really excited about is a biography of Fletcher by his brother Charles, which was discovered under a grand piano.

“It throws light on Fletcher’s whole attitude to the mutiny in 1790 for his brother, a ship’s surgeon, was with him the night before he sailed. “I also found out that Charles also led a mutiny, on another ship. There is also truly breathtaking stuff about- Captain Bligh, the most dreadful bully, but like all bullies, also a coward.

“Fletcher Christian already knew Bligh, who was friendly with Fletcher’s aunt on the Isle of Man.”

Flynn says he will reveal all in his book, “Fragile Paradise,” to be published by Hamish Hamilton in midyear.

He will say that Captain Bligh, although a man with a temper and a vicious tongue, was not given to great cruelty. “If he was as tough as Charles Loughton made out in the film in which he took the captain’s role, there would have been discipline and no mutiny. “I will tell the story in a balanced way and describe what it was really like, covering such aspects as the

sex-life of the Tahitian women, which is always glossed over.” It was the six men and 12 women picked up at Tahiti who complicated life and brought tragedy for the British mutineers on Pitcairn. When the next ship called, 19 years later, only one Briton, eight Tahitian women and 26 children remained. All the other men had murdered each other fighting over the women. It was apparently Fletcher Christian who triggered off the bloodbath by allowing one of the Britons, whose wife fell over a cliff, to seize another Tahitian woman. This was too much for the Tahitian men, who understandably revolted. They were denied land and were being treated as slaves anyway. Mystery has always surrounded the precise fate of Fletcher Christian, and it has been made even more confused by seven different versions of his death given by the sole mutineer who survived, John Adams. Then there were the rumours that he was seen back in England, and speculation as to whether he really was the “Ancient Mariner” of Coleridge’s poem, as the poet was a friend of Wordsworth. In a bid to solve the mystery, Glynn Christian hired a sailing ship for £25,060 and set off from California for Pitcairn. (He says he is still paying back the loan he raised, but the voyage gave him valuable experience of what the Bounty crew must have felt.) He spent 16 days on the island in August, 1980. and two days before he sailed away, he found the place where Fletcher Christian was shot. “It is certain he was shot on Pitcairn, but as to whether he survived and returned to England ... read the book.” That visit among the 61 gentle, courteous and warm islanders changed Glynn Christian, he says. And it

gave him a new sense of purpose.

“They were the most wonderfully friendly and caring people I have ever met,” he recalls. “At first we suspected their sincerity, but found they were a Christian community in the very best sense.”

They do not allow smoking or drinking and most attend church regularly as Seventh Day Adventists. “If that is what Christianity means in their attitudes to each other, let’s have more of it I say,” says Glynn. As a Christian, the New Zealander was admitted to the islanders’ council meetings and given information that the normally shy and retiring people would heye kept to themselves.

What he saw and heard saddened the great, great, great, great-grandson of Fletcher Christian. The islanders, of mixed British and Tahitian stock, but fervently British in sentiment (pictures of the Royal family are prominent in all their homes) live in Britain’s last colony in the South Pacific.

They speak a mixture of 18th century English (in which v’s become w’s) and Tahitian, but face indifference and virtual abandonment by Britain. No-one even invited an island representative to the Royal wedding. They are governed by the United Kingdom High Commissioner in New Zealand, and administration of the island is handled from the commission’s office in Auckland.

The only contact with the governor or administration is by morse-code, if the weather is right, or mail four times a vear.

Until the mid-sixties, ships called every two or three weeks, providing transport, bringing food, medical supplies, and mail and providing opportunities to sell carvings, woven goods, stamps and produce. Today, the islanders are lucky to have three supply ships a year, all from New Zealand, north-bound. The Shipowners' Committee in London has ruled there are no longer ships suitable to call while sailing southbound.

Life has changed dramatically for the worse on this South Sea island remote from the pressures, pollution and population density of much of the world.

Children sent to Australia or New Zealand for higher education cannot return,

often for years. They cannot even speak to their parents by radio telephone. .Anyone who leaves finds it difficult to return, and dispiriting to try. It can take a year to arrange a passage. Freight rates are crippling — SNZISO for thrbe bags of chicken feed from New Zealand. “In 1980, the wooden longboats in which the islanders must sail in all weathers from treacherous Bounty. Bay to meet rare visiting supply ships, were rotting and falling to pieces,” says Glynn. New, lighter metal boats are urgently needed, and as manpower dwindles, the danger at sea increases. Irrespective of the weather, if a ship stops offshore to unload supplies, the islanders must put out to meet it. “But one mistake can mean death," says Glynn. “If it strikes now, the island might not be able to survive.” The British Government in 1976 built a new jetty but sited it in the wrong place, narrowing the entrance to the bay and causing a powerful and vicious whirlpool. Storms have dumped enormous boulders into the small safe area. x Because they are forced to buy from New Zealand, the islanders pay up to four times more for some consumer goods than they would if they bought from Britain or the United States. And New Zealand gives no sales tax concessions for the exports to Pitcairn. Tom Christian operates a ham radio on the island, and Glynn has now arranged unofficial two-way communication with Britain and Europe. “Now, if the islanders want to buy English flour, for example, they call up a ham operator in West Germany who makes the arrangements with a sympathetic Swedish ship’s captain,” Glynn explains. “The delivery is eventually made to Pitcairn quite unofficially. But without the charity of a handful of Scandinavian sea captains who risk their jobs by illicitly delivering goods, the islanders would be close to abandonment. “It is heartbreaking, even for visitors, to see British ships slow down to pass the island for a better view, but not sufficiently long enough to allow the islanders to trade, or even to drop mail.” Glynn describes how the

life of a woman on the island was saved through locating just in time an Englishspeaking ham radio operator who happened also to be a qualified surgeon and gynaecologist. He gave the necessary instructions for an operation to be performed by the pastor’s wife, a nurse, with a bent piece of soldering wire. It was only through the unofficial ham radio link that the Pitcairn people learned that the new Natonality Bill in Britain has deprived them of their British passports. It is no wonder that they feel as though Britain no longer wants to know them. Glynn Christian asserts that they are being denied the basic freedom of choice of movement. Many former islanders living in New Zealand and Australia feel trapped, he says. He believes that £2 million is urgently needed to provide up-to-date radio-tele-phone communication, a landing strip and new boats. He also wants a survey to find out whether a satellite communication station can be sited on the island. A fortnightly air service would invigorate the island community. It could lead to intermarriage with outsiders, bringing in the new blood essential for the community’s future well being. With the British Government making swingling cuts in its public spending in a home country hard hit by the. recession Glynn Christian realises it is unrealistic to call for £2 million from

Whitehall. He would be whistling in the dark. “But I have been in touch with Prince Phillip who has been to Pitcairn, and has promised to do all he can. I have also written to Mrs Thatcher, and I hope to raise considerable funds through an international charity appeal to be launched on publication of my book.” He will also appeal to all the authors and publishers who have benefited from the Bounty mutiny story, but who have shown no interest in the welfare of the mutineers’ descendants. As the islanders feel they are understood best by New Zealand, Glynn hopes that through such organisations as Volunteer Sendee Abroad, young New Zealanders will respond to a call to help build the urgently needed airstrip and perhaps stay on and run it. “If I don’t get this kind of help from New Zealand my entire wavering faith in human nature will be dashed,” he says. The islanders have appointed Glynn as their representative in Britain and he has been pressing their interests at an apathetic Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Next month,-the House of Lords will be asked to consider the uncertain future of this forgotten corner of a preoccupied Britain’s lost empire. Perhaps some-one will suggest that New Zealand should take over the responsibility.