Undercurrent: Pitcairn Island

Mel’s habit of minimally researching her destination to preserve some surprises backfired this time.  She forgot that surprises can be both good and bad. Jerry’s crew originally selected Pitcairn Island as a port of call given its famous remoteness and their exposure to the romanticized history of the mutiny on the Bounty.  After their autopilot failed and the crew learned that beam reaching down Pitcairn way was a better angle to hand-steer, Pitcairn morphed into a necessary rest stop. Stealing a few moments in between hand-steering shifts and sleeping during their ten days of obligatory rudder micro-management, Mel used their Starlink to put together the story of Pitcairn Island.  What her research revealed prompted her to have mixed emotions rather than unencumbered joy when she first set foot on land after 26 days offshore.

She will start with the positives. Pitcairn is stunning. As the photos below hopefully show, it has quite the dramatic geography. As the volcanic land juts out of the sea, it takes on a variety of hues, including black, grey, beige, and brown. On top of this rugged rock grows a wild assortment of greenery, surprisingly including both tropical palms and flowers but also evergreen Norfolk pine and shrubbery. All of this is encircled by a seascape so complex that the islanders were inspired to name every nook and cranny, including several nods to the poor souls who fell off the island at the more treacherous spots.

A visit to Pitcairn provides one with one of the best perks of traveling: experiencing up close a different way humans can get along in the world. Our many unique experiences began when we were picked up in a modern version of the historical longboat, used by the Pitcairnians since the 1800’s to get supplies on and off the island through the rough and jumbled seas of their Landing. Unfortunately, the seas were too rough for us to take our own dinghy ashore, where it would have been spared being bashed to pieces on the rocks by being lifted up to rest on land by a crane.

Once landed and checked in, we were each assigned a tour guide on a quad bike, an ATV capable of going up and down the narrow, rubble-y roads winding along the edge of the steep hills without killing us, a conclusion Mel reached only after she survived the journey.

During this tour, Mel was struck by the fact that the island’s population owed their existence to a single edible plant: the breadfruit.  For a ship filled with rascals who were much “tatowed” (see below), the Bounty was on a presumably peaceful science mission, complete with two botanists, to gather these plants to feed the slaves toiling in the Caribbean. Jerry’s crew was thrilled to be fed this breadfruit with historical lineage in the home/restaurant of the tireless Darralyn, who was also a nurse and the island provisioner.  This meal solved the mystery of why it was thought that a fruit was hearty enough to sustain people: breadfruit is nutritionally beefy and tastes like potato.  A vitamin-C- packed, complete-protein-filled, high-fiber potato. It makes good chips!

Pitcairn smartly offers many souvenirs to commemorate the considerable effort it takes visitors to get to such an unusual and secluded place, which is over 3000 miles from both New Zealand and South America.  Pitcairn even peddles its own dirt, which it delivers in buckets to the occasional 3000-passenger cruise ship that rarely wanders by, allowing people a photo-op and passport stamp to memorialize their proximity to a speck of an island not capable of supporting the entire throng of visitors going ashore. While we were thankfully able to acquire Pitcairn’s valuable soil in our shoes the natural way, Mel noticed that their ATV tour did not include the much-anticipated gift shop.

During lunch, we solved the mystery of how one shops in Pitcairn:

Darralyn: “Here is our online store. Which T-shirts do you want?”

Mel: “These.”

Darralyn: “That one is Carol’s design and the other one is Dennis’s.”

Mel: “Okay. How do we get them?”

Darralyn: “Carol’s house is up the way and Dennis’s is around the corner.  Just head on over there.”

Moments later we found ourselves being escorted through Carol’s long, narrow, patchwork-constructed house to dig through bins full of shirts in her attic, leaving 30 minutes later laden with bags and bags of breadfruit chips and enough T-shirts to clothe our entire extended families.

In addition to stamps and dirt, Pitcairn is also known for its honey, but we did not get a chance to buy any.  That night the weather decided to demonstrate the reason for its reputation by sending large waves and conflicting winds through both Pitcairn anchorages, making us feel as if we were underway on a rough passage despite being anchored.  We took the hint and began a stressful downwind hand-steer to the Gambiers.

Speaking of hand-steering, here are the negatives that bubble under Pitcairn’s gorgeous surface. The single day we spent exploring Pitcairn was not enough time to process this complex and unique island. Despite the natural beauty of the land and the friendliness of the people we met, a cloud will always hang over our memories of our time there. The possibility that at some point we interacted with under-punished and unapologetic child rapists will do that.

In 2004 and 2005, a total of 9 Pitcairnian men, a significant fraction of the male population of the island, were convicted of numerous counts of under-aged sex as well as rape. Details are better explained elsewhere on the internet, but Mel recommends not doing the deep dive into the events like she did unless you are prepared for some sleepless nights filled with dark thoughts about the flaws of humanity, the scary wisdom of dystopian novels like Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm, the way society defines what is right and wrong, and how “freedom” from traditional authority must mean different things for men than it does for women. Sleep is also repelled by anger that anyone gave more than two seconds of consideration of the bullshit excuse that all the child rape was a harmless local custom.

After learning all of this, and before their landfall, Mel tried to talk herself into being excited about visiting Pitcairn.  After all, the court cases went down more than 20 years ago, and what travel destination is free of similar sordid stories that are swept under the rug by marketing that we tourists are all too happy to ignore while we try to escape the realities of our own worlds? However, some further facts about Pitcairn make putting such blinders on difficult.  For one, only a tiny minority of the convicted men have issued public apologies. In addition, the community seems to have rapidly moved on, recently honoring one of the rapists by re-electing him mayor. Since there are no hotels on the island, some locals have opened up their homes for guests.  A glance at the vacancies reveals that visitors can even stay with another rapist, the mayor’s dad, if they want.

Perhaps the Pitcairnian’s own words about the crimes will help dispel this outsider’s reluctance to visit, an outsider perhaps unfairly wearing the backwards-looking “Me Too” goggles of a different time and place? A plaque commissioned by the community to acknowledge the events, not part of our tour, was placed in the graveyard in 2016:

“’To say we’re sorry does not seek punishment or blame,/ it doesn’t say they were right and we were wrong,/ just that we have learnt and understand the error of our ways.”

Soooo….this essentially reads: “Sorry/Not sorry.”  I mean, wow. Just wow.  One is left interpreting this attitude as evidence that Pitcairn is a small community under the thumb of a few powerful, unscrupulous individuals, a situation sadly not so uncommon in the world.

The end result of learning all of this was that the only way Mel was able to step foot on land and tour around with a smile on her face was to tell herself she was visiting a prison.

Having treated all kinds of folks as a physician, she knew that day-to-day interactions with criminals were likely to be pleasant, as one was unlikely in casual conversation to encounter any potentially disturbing deviant worldviews. And indeed her experience of Pitcairn’s people was a positive one, of a people proud to live in such a unique and beautiful place, a place many dream of visiting, and proud to be part of a small community with such a fascinating origin story. Perhaps not accidentally, the majority of the individuals Jerry’s crew encountered were women, gracious and curious, content to be kept busy with the large number of physical chores and logistical provisioning maneuvers required to survive in a place with limited modern conveniences.  During our pleasant interactions, Pitcairn’s shameful 21-st century history remained an undiscussed undercurrent, and frankly, it was nice to be able to ignore it for a while. You were left wanting to help them, give them books for their library, volunteer in their clinic, fix their broken solar panels.

And so it is that Pitcairn’s human landscape is just as complex and varied as its physical one. At the end of the day Mel was glad she visited such a fascinating place, a unique experience for some unanticipated reasons. She was not, however, sad to leave Pitcairn in Jerry’s wake, bound for the black pearl farms, baguettes, flowers, outrigger canoes, and relaxing drum beats of French Polynesia, where she could submerge herself in the crystalline blue waters, look at pretty corals and fish, and not think about rape anymore.

After leaving, we learned that, possibly during our time on Pitcairn, a person exposed to hantavirus on the MV Hondius cruise ship was “isolating” on the island. This brings up an interesting thought. Perhaps, at least until all the perverts die off, Pitcairn could downplay tourism and put some good back in the world by reinventing itself. It might just be the perfect global sanctuary for biocontainment, isolating dangerous contagions to protect humanity.