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Coconut Chaos
Pitcairn, Mutiny and a Seduction at Sea
Diana Souhami
CONTENTS
I. ROSIE’S BLOUSE
II. TAURANGA TO BOUNTY BAY
III. ON PITCAIRN
IV. LEAVING PITCAIRN
V. OTHER ISLANDS
AFTERWORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
To the real Lady Myre
wherever she
now is
THE SWALLOWS ARE BACK – fewer than last year, fewer last year than the year before, four weeks of flying from Namibia, through the Congo rainforest, across the Sahara Desert, Morocco, eastern Spain and western France to here, their summer home.
The barn door is open. They nest in the same crumbling corners, use the same old nail as a joist, appraise the stream from an overhead phone wire. They wheel and feed. I wonder at their journey without maps, their composite soul, their timing. Year on year they return in this last week of April when the verges shimmer with bluebells.
I view them from my window. I too have returned. In this tumbledown mill cottage I try to make sense, from maps, of the journeys ships and boats have made. The voyage of the Bounty from Spithead to Tahiti on what might have been an unremarkable commercial venture. Its meandering from Tofua to Pitcairn Island after Fletcher Christian mutinied and hijacked it. William Bligh’s extraordinary 3600 mile journey, cast adrift by Christian in an open boat with eighteen men, across the Pacific to Timor in ferocious seas. The wreck on the Great Barrier Reef of the Pandora, sent to capture Christian and the other mutineers. My own voyage from Tauranga to Pitcairn in a cargo ship, the Tundra Princess, and then from Pitcairn to Mangareva in a small catamaran with a lone yachts man and Lady Myre.
I spin the globe and search these place names: specks of human reference of no concern to swallows. I view the coded world, see swathes of ocean, shapes of continents, islands. My journey has receded to fragments and shards of memory. I settle to the virtual reality of a computer screen, to pencilled notes and digital images. Only at uncertain times does a lament from mother or a faraway call from Lady Myre define my isolation, or a dream of true storm threaten my comfort.
I
ROSIE’S BLOUSE
Time is what stops everything from happening at once
1
On Monday 27 April 1789 Fletcher Christian, master’s mate on the Bounty, held dawn watch from four to eight. A serene view of the sun rising over the Pacific Ocean belied the trouble that would change his life that day. The ship, like a floating garden, was sailing from Tahiti to the West Indies with a cargo of over a thousand breadfruit plants. Some were more than seven feet high. Sunlight illuminated a coral reef, atolls and white beaches. Christian took a green coconut from the heap piled on the quarterdeck, cracked it open and drank its watery milk. He thought this an act of ‘no consequence’, as insignificant as the flutter of a butterfly’s wings.
Had he not taken that coconut I would not have trudged round Harrods on a June day 215 years later, looking for a blouse for his great-great-great-granddaughter Rosie. I was to stay with Rosie and her husband Hank on Pitcairn Island, if a ship would take me there. By email I’d asked if she’d like me to bring anything from London. ‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘Just concentrate on getting here.’ Then she described, if I happened to chance on it, a top to go with her pants, as she called them, a top that was dark, silky, size sixteen, wouldn’t crease or show the dirt, pull-on not buttoned, low cut, nipped in below the bust, wide over the waist and hips …
The escalators heaved. I looked at garments made in Taiwan and China. I considered tops by Paul and Joe, and Sonia Rykiel’s pearl-encrusted jackets. Seeking the Way Out I passed hats that looked like hothouse plants. In Bridal Wear a cordoned-off bottle-blonded Sloane, swathed in cream silk, rehearsed her once-in-a-lifetime day.
I found Rosie’s blouse in Fenwicks, made in Paris by Gerard Darel, £129, crushed silk, silver with charcoal blodges, size eighteen, loose sleeves, a low V-neck … Aviva, the ample Israeli assistant, said these were American sizes and came up small. She had this blouse herself: it washed well, needed no ironing, was a wonderful gift and truly flattering.
2
The day before the mutiny, the Bounty anchored to get supplies at Nomuka Island in the Tongan archipelago 1300 miles west of Tahiti. William Bligh bartered for coconuts – he settled at a price of twenty for a nail. He told Christian to take a boat and muskets, supervise casking water from the river and be watchful. The Nomukans were impoverished and hostile, they had sores on their bodies and suspicion in their eyes.
At the river’s edge Christian was stoned and the boat’s anchor stolen. He retreated to the ship. Bligh called him a coward and taunted him that he was armed and the islanders naked. Against the return of the anchor he took two chiefs hostage and held them on the Bounty until sunset. They beat themselves with their fists and wept with fear, but the anchor was gone, nothing was gained, and Christian above everyone was humiliated.
Bligh was rated as lieutenant of the Bounty, the smallness of the ship precluded a higher rank, but he acted as its captain and purser. He kept tight control of all supplies. The following morning when he went to the quarterdeck he thought his coconut pile was smaller. The master John Fryer said it looked that way only because men had walked over it in the night. Bligh didn’t believe him. Enraged he summoned Christian, again berated him, said, ‘Damn your blood, you’ve stolen
