1792
18
June. Survivors from the Pandora arrive at Spithead.
12
September. Court martial of the ten crewmen who stayed with Fletcher Christian on the Bounty.
29
October. Thomas Ellison, Thomas Burkett and John Millward are hung at Spithead.
1793
27
January. Bligh arrives at the West Indies with the breadfruit.
3
September. The Providence arrives back in Britain.
20
September. Christian and four other mutineers murdered on Pitcairn.
4
October. All the remaining Polynesian men murdered on Pitcairn.
Often I’d chat with Rosie in her kitchen. We’d cut bananas lengthwise, she’d put them in a drying machine, then we’d pack them in little polythene packets. The process was sticky, and a cloud of fruit flies hovered. She’d talk of the Resurrection and the prospect of the arrival of the Messiah. She said when He came the good would have eternal life and sinners would be damned. Only if they repented, admitted their sins and clung to the cross could they be saved.
Sixteen public toilets had been erected on the island, all in places of natural beauty. They were white, cupboard-like structures, with flushes, water tanks and taps. One afternoon as I passed one of them Lady Myre dashed out, her turquoise shorts round her knees. She was batting at herself and quacking. Her lips had gone blue and I feared she was going to die. Wasps swirled round her. She’d opened the cover of a hymnal, which she supposed had been left for its paper, and there was a nest of them in it. One stung her on her hand, another on her bottom. In my body belt I had antihistamine cream and I tended to her as best I could.
‘You’re my saviour,’ she grizzled. ‘I want to go home.’
Her mishaps were frequent. On the day she dug for hours in Bang Iron Valley with a garden trowel, hoping to find the Bounty’s gold ducats, she lost the Cartier watch Sir Roland had given her on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. We searched among ferns and gunnera, twisted branches and tangled weeds, but couldn’t find it. When we picnicked at St Paul’s Point her panama hat blew over the cliff and floated on the waves like a signal of distress. When she fished in Bounty Bay she fell into the sea. She dangled a baited hook at the end of a piece of wire in the water and within seconds snared a large nanwee. Inspired by such quick success, she again straggled the wire in the bay. Jackie the frigate bird flew off with the caught fish. Lady Myre turned and exclaimed, the wire caught round a bollard and tightened and she didn’t let go of it. I wondered at her smile as she clambered to the shore.
Her searches for her husband and passage off the island were always unrewarding. Replies from shipping companies and the Pitcairn Commissioner’s Office in Auckland were consistent. No ships were scheduled to stop at Pitcairn. If anything came up she’d be notified. Disappointment made her wilt. At a time of intense depression she wore the same outfit for an entire day. Her horror of cockroaches meant she seldom used the bathroom. She abluted with Wet Ones, colognes and lotions. Each night she slept under my mosquito net and I in her room with her luggage. Often she’d wake me to say someone was watching her through the window or that a creature was rustling under the bed or to ask if she could come in with me for a cuddle.
Rosie cracked coconuts in half with one blow from her machete, grated the flesh and mixed it with green bananas. She chopped sweet potato and butternut squash and stewed leftover roast lamb and wild beans.
Over the intercom came a public announcement from the shop: bread, ham, bacon, frozen pastry and chicken pieces had been priced and entered into the day books. Each household had a book in which all purchases were recorded. No individual was allowed more than six of anything. Every few months the books were collected for auditing. I remarked that I thought Adventism forbade the eating of pig. Rosie spoke of the decline of standards: smoking, drinking, trading on the Sabbath. ‘But we still look out for each other,’ she said again. They exchanged oranges for coconuts, pawpaws for vegetables, fish for bread and cake, they saved each other’s lives and the lives of strangers. They interdepended.
She rued the suspicion and animosity that publicity for the trials aroused, the division between families, the depression of mothers at the violation of their daughters. She longed for it all to be finished and for the spotlight of interest to be turned elsewhere. The crimes of which the island’s men were now accused had happened twenty years previously. She favoured a truth-and-reconciliation process, a learning of respect for women. She said you couldn’t be a girl on Pitcairn and not have sex. It seemed it all went back to Fletcher Christian and those barefoot pirates with cutlasses and tattoos.
Rosie was wistful about joining her daughters in New Zealand and seeing her grandchildren. But Hank loved his island, its traditions and memories, where the sun rose, the church, the longboats and the cliffs. For him it was where God lived and spoke.
She talked of the island’s more recent history – how in 1856, when there was a population of 194, it was overcrowded, so the British government sent a transport ship and moved them all to Norfolk Island, an abandoned penal colony ten times the size of Pitcairn, 3500 miles west, and close to
