I thought of Joseph Hodges, the armourer’s mate on the Pandora, who risked his life to unchain prisoners as the ship went down.
After his ordeal Dr Scantlebury became withdrawn. He slept in the clinic and didn’t go home to the house assigned to him. He said there was something wrong with its plumbing. At dawn one wet morning the front door was open and Lady Myre was not in the house. I found her halfway down the Hill of Difficulty, her cyclamen shorts, blue blouson top, pouch bag, face and hands sticky with mud. She seemed to have lost something and was prodding around in thick tyre marks that veered into the ditch.
A woeful saga followed. She’d been bitten to death, not had a wink of sleep and there was no word from Sir Roland. On her way to the jetty in search of a ship she’d met Smiley on his quad bike and he’d said he’d teach her to drive, so she could at least tour the island. She’d accelerated instead of braking, veered off the road, hit her head on a tree and dislodged a gold filling from one of her molars. It was twenty-four-carat. She might have swallowed it but perhaps it was in the mud. Smiley was sweet but she only wanted to be with me.
I made a desultory show of looking for the filling, wiped her hands and knees with half a packet of Wet Ones and walked with her to the health centre. Steve the mayor, engineer, cat castrator, rescuer of Dr Scantlebury and accused rapist, was also the island’s dentist.
We waited until the current locum, Les, arrived. He wore shorts, his feet were bare, and he was soon going home to South Island on the Braveheart. The dental drill had been donated to the island in 1954. It looked industrial.
Lady Myre refused to open her mouth to have her cavity inspected. She said her pieces of luggage were numbered, the inventory was in her bumbag and in case seven was an emergency dental kit of analgesics and temporary fillings. It would suffice until she reached Tahiti, Panama, Christchurch – anywhere.
I wondered why she’d have a dental kit but no mosquito net. Les weighed us both, perhaps because he’d no other help to offer. He didn’t know when the drill had last been used. Most of the islanders had false teeth.
Lady Myre and I walked back through groves of banana palms and citrus trees. We explored the neglected remains of Thursday October Christian’s house, looked at the Bounty cannon and anchor, and the grave of Alexander Smith/John Adams. Such were the museum pieces of the island’s murderous past. ‘Why are you here?’ Lady Myre asked and I embarked on my usual spiel about the narrative consequences of random happenings. She began to cry and said she’d never felt more lonely. I told her to come along because there might be enough hot water for a shower, and that Sir Roland might have sent a message. But there wasn’t, and he hadn’t.
32
On a rock at St Paul, high above the crash of the waves, I pondered the history of Pitcairn. I was unconvinced that all the supposed murders had happened, or that within three years only four out of the fifteen men who reached Pitcairn were still alive. The account of this carnage came from three sources: a lost notebook written by Edward Young and quoted from by F.W.Beechey in Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait published in 1831; from Teehuteatuaonoa – Jenny – who after thirty-one years on Pitcairn returned to Tahiti on an American ship, the Sultan, and told her story to a Captain Dillon who spoke Tahitian and published it in 1829 in the United Service Journal and Naval and Military Magazine; and from the self-named fantasist John Adams, who gave his version to Captain Folger, who chanced on Pitcairn in an American whaling ship the Topaz in 1808. Folger stayed about five or six hours on the island. Adams by then was the sole survivor of the mutineers and he was keen to assert his own innocence of murder and worse.
All three accounts blamed the Polynesian men for most of the killings. But the Polynesians were outnumbered by the mutineers and had no guns or ammunition. And there was a lack of forensic evidence: no bones or skulls, no burial places, no telling possessions, none of Bligh’s maps or charts, or the gold ducats or Spanish dollars given him by the Admiralty. There was the cannon and the anchor and the ship’s Bible, but all the useful things had gone. It was possible that an account of events was fabricated for those who remained on Pitcairn to relay.
In my Moleskine notebook I added to my chronology of significant dates:
1789
28
May. Christian in the Bounty anchors at Tubuai in the Austral Islands. Bligh, in the open boat, sights the Great Barrier Reef.
6
June. The Bounty returns to Tahiti to abduct women and get provisions.
15
June. Bligh’s boat arrives at Coupang in the Dutch East Indies.
16
June. The Bounty again leaves Tahiti for Tubuai.
June-September. Christian starts building Fort George. There are battles with the islanders.
12
September. The Bounty leaves Tubuai for ever.
22
September. The Bounty arrives at Tahiti. Fifteen of the crew opt to stay there.
23
September. The Bounty leaves Tahiti for the last time with nine mutineers and eighteen abducted Tahitian girls and young men. September-December. Christian searches for an uninhabited island to colonise.
1790
15
January. Fletcher Christian arrives at Pitcairn Island in the Bounty.
23
January. The Bounty is burned.
14
March. Bligh reaches Portsmouth after his ordeal in an open boat.
22
October. Bligh court-martialled for the loss of the Bounty but acquitted of wrongdoing.
November. The Pandora leaves Britain captained by Edward Edwards to round up all the mutineers.
1791
23
March. The Pandora reaches Tahiti. The Bounty crew there are rounded up and put in irons.
8
May. The Pandora leaves Tahiti.
3
August. Bligh leaves England in the Providence on a second
