End of a legend as Pitcairn Island meets the modern law

By JAN CORBETT and TONY STICKLEY

By the time the mutinous crew of HMAV Bounty dropped anchor off Pitcairn Island in January 1790, they needed more than somewhere to rest from the rigours of careening around the Pacific for months on end. They needed somewhere to hide from British law.

Led by the highly romanticised Fletcher Christian, they had, after all, set their deeply misunderstood captain, William Bligh, and his men adrift in a longboat. They had seized their king's ship. There would have been a noose for each of them waiting back in England.

Rising 347m out of the ocean, the craggy volcanic rock with no landing beaches and distant from the major shipping routes of the day was the perfect bolthole. Pitcairn Island, discovered by European sailors 23 years earlier and at some time inhabited by Polynesians, would be their new home.

To further conceal their presence they burned the ship in what is now known as Bounty Bay - providing the final scene in the five movies that have been made about the Bounty, always starring Hollywood's leading men of the day, Wilton Power, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson.

By the time the British Navy rediscovered them 24 years later, it was considered too cruel and impractical to take the only surviving mutineer, John Adams (if that was indeed his name), back to England to face trial.

Ever since, history and Hollywood have conspired to nurture the Bounty legend. And Pitcairn has been painted for us as a South Seas Garden of Eden, where the descendants of rogues and rebels miraculously turned into pious and peaceful members of an island commune.

Now, more than 200 years after a mutiny that launched that mystique, British law is finally poised to catch up with the descendants of the Bounty crew, about 45 of whom still live on the island. The rest are on Norfolk, in Australia or here in New Zealand. The allegations against them now have nothing to do with mutiny. Rather, they centre on rape and sexual abuse.

Pitcairn may be the last and most distant outpost of the British empire but New Zealand, 5300km west, is its nearest populous neighbour. The British High Commissioner in Wellington, Martin Williams, is also Pitcairn's governor. And the island is administered from a small office in Auckland's Reserve Bank building in Customs St, where the administrator is a former Pitcairn resident, Leon Salt, who, typically of Pitcairners, refuses to talk to the press.

At the same time as threatening to withdraw subsidies to the island, the British Government has been shoring up Pitcairn's legal structures in preparation for dealing with allegations of endemic sexual abuse. Over the past two years it has been quietly appointing members of Auckland's legal fraternity to key roles.

Among them are district court judges Charles Blackie, Russell Johnson and Jane Lovell-Smith, who have been designated Supreme Court judges for Pitcairn and who, under Pitcairn law, will sit without a jury, though they might use assessors, drawn by lot from the island's electoral roll.

High-profile defence lawyer Kevin Ryan QC and Auckland barrister Gray Cameron have been made Pitcairn magistrates, with the job of deciding whether a case should be committed to the Supreme Court.

And Auckland's Crown Solicitor, Simon Moore, has been made its first public prosecutor, with the job of deciding whether to lay charges, putting him in the unenviable position of being the man who might bring the Bounty legend to a sordid end.

Within the next few weeks he and his deputy, Christine Gordon, must decide whether to lay charges against as many as 20 Pitcairn men who live or have lived there at some time.

Either way, the allegations could see Pitcairn Island relegated from its fanciful position as an island paradise founded on contempt for mindless British authority, to a vestige of male chauvinism and brutality.

But if Moore feels the weight of history and the fantasies of Arcadia seekers weighing upon him, he isn't saying. The only comment the 47-year-old will make is that he only has a vague recollection of ever seeing a Bounty movie.

For Detective Superintendent Dennis McGookin, who has led the investigation from Kent, this is the second time he has been asked to delve into rape allegations on Pitcairn. An allegation in 1996, involving sex with a minor, was dropped when the police learned the two had been in an ongoing, consensual relationship.

Even so, McGookin caused a storm at the time when he was quoted in a newspaper article, alleging Pitcairn had descended into a state of drunken lawlessness where gun laws were frequently breached. He warned that if their behaviour did not improve, they risked forced evacuation.

The comments drew an angry response from the then governor Christopher Shute, who said policemen from Britain were unnecessarily alarmed by the Pitcairn habit of shooting breadfruit out of the trees as the easiest way to harvest them.

Three years later another rape allegation surfaced on the island. By all accounts the islanders dealt with it themselves and expelled the culprit, who is believed to now be living in Auckland. But the Kent police were also involved, and what they learned in that investigation has led to this situation of having to decide whether to prosecute 20 or so descendants of history's most famous mutiny.

Just imagine living on Pitcairn Island knowing some of your number are under investigation for rape and that others among you have made the allegation. How much more oppressive it must make their isolation.

If even a few men are removed from the island to face trial, commerce on the island could suffer, unless, like their Tahitian forebears, the women take over. Already the lack of manpower in the island has the council considering whether women should be allowed to man the longboats.

Although the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 put the island on the direct shipping route from Europe, ships are intermittent and not all carry passengers or are prepared to anchor offshore for the longboats to motor out and take people off board.

Even then visitors have to apply to the Island Council for a Licence to Land, providing two character references. Those allowed on shore find, rather than an island paradise, ordinary people carving out the semblance of an ordinary life, in arduous circumstances.

Back in 1886 the island was converted to Seventh Day Adventist faith. And although there is still a church, a pastor and an alcohol ban on the island, only eight regularly attend church now.

There is a government-owned lodge that accommodates up to eight people, but visitors must provide their own food. More commonly, people accepted onto the island stay with a local family whose surname is likely to be Christian, Young or Warren - direct descendants of the mutineers or early whalers. Visitors report no evidence of obvious signs of inbreeding - perhaps the original gene pool was large enough and has been boosted enough since. But if there was any doubt of their English-sailor heritage, they need only listen to them speak a blend of Tahitian and 18th-century working-class English - they say musket for gun, tardy for late and yonder for far away - which is now officially recognised as an official language called Pitkern.

There is electricity, produced by an oil-run generator, in homes between 9 am and noon (1 pm on Fridays) and 4 pm and 10 pm. It runs the freezers and the video players. Without a television signal, the islanders' main exposure to life in the developed world comes courtesy of videotapes of American soap operas and light entertainment series.

Otherwise their time is spent making honey, growing food, fishing and carving and weaving souvenirs that they hawk to passengers and crew on the passing ships that drop anchor - people anxious to buy a piece of the legend.

There is one telephone and fax line to the island, but at $15 a minute calls are expensive. There is an e-mail address but the administrator's office here in Auckland keeps it a closely guarded secret. It costs them $7.50 a minute to stay on-line and, says Leon Salt, "if the e-mail address was public knowledge they'd be online all day."

Because the the world is fascinated with Pitcairn, the island is besieged with applicants wanting admittance to an island fantasy. But Pitcairners themselves are less enamoured of the lifestyle. More people leave the island than choose to remain. A population of 200 in 1936 has steadily declined to around 44 now.

The arrival of members of the Kent constabulary to investigate rape allegations in such a small community cannot have gone unnoticed. "They worked out why they were there," says McGookin, "they weren't daft."

And although telephone contact is rare, they are in touch with the world by ham radio.

Otherwise their lives are made accessible by the numerous books written about them and enthusiasts who have created websites detailing the life and times of Pitcairn Island. There are photographs showing how most of them look quaintly British working class - pink knitted cardies included - while others show more of their Tahitian heritage. And, of course, there are links to stories from British newspapers on the rape allegations.

One of those websites is run by the Pitcairn Islands Study Centre, based at a Seventh Day Adventist College in California's Napa Valley. Its director, Herbert Ford, who is in weekly radio contact with the island, says the allegations have had "little adverse affect" on the people there. He says the investigation was conducted quietly, and if anything alarming was learned about sex with young girls, the islanders have not been told.

"Of course," Ford continues, "the islanders have heard of the press reports - much of it pure speculation I believe - and these have brought dismay. But that is not far different from the Pitcairners' views of the press throughout the years ... they have pretty much given up on the press ever getting it right about them."

One of the more recent authors about life on Pitcairn, British travel writer Dea Birkett, is also one of the more derided by Pitcairners and their defenders. Although her lively account of her four months there, Serpent in Paradise, makes no reference to sexual abuse, she records this comment from a local girl: "People on Pitcairn are only interested in three f's - fishing, food, and ... " you know the rest.

And in another passage Birkett makes an observation that has an even greater resonance in light of the rape allegations laid after she published her book.

"In other places the problems were faceless. Drug addiction, child abuse, violent crime were all statistics, committed by people without known names. They weren't people we knew. All transgressions remained unattributable. But nothing was anonymous on Pitcairn. If one person got drunk, [the alcohol ban is often flouted], we all knew who they were ... One incident could assume the importance of a social trend. And it was our neighbours, our own family, who were the perpetrators."

Can the impersonal British justice system therefore be imposed on this intensely personal society?

Giving advice on whether or not to prosecute is hardly a new experience for Simon Moore who ran the high profile prosecutions against this country's worst serial rapists Joe Thompson and Malcolm Rewa.

But like everything associated with Pitcairn Island, the difficulties are basic, such as whether to hold a trial here or there. A trial here might require changes to our own legislation. A trial there would mean the prosecutors and judges living at the mercy of families of the accused. Would they even be granted Licence to Land? And who would steer the long boat?

At the Pitcairn Island Study Centre, Herbert Ford, for one, thinks "if a crime has been committed on Pitcairn, it should be tried there." He cites the precedent set in 1897 when the Crown dispatched HMS Royalist to the island with a judge on board, to try Harry Albert Christian for murder. Found guilty, he was taken to Suva and hanged.

In deciding whether to follow that precedent, Moore will have to apply British prosecution guidelines, which are broadly similar to New Zealand's.

But he also has to apply Pitcairn Island law - basically English legislation codified to suit the farflung islands and bound together as a 500-page volume, titled Pitcairn Island Ordinances.

That's an awful lot of law for a clutch of people whose courthouse is used for little more than storing life-jackets.

While the ordinances set out in great detail how court cases should proceed, their tenor suggests their authors barely contemplated anything of any seriousness at all happening on the island, and certainly not multiple defendants. This is surprising, given it is a community founded on mutiny, and where in its first decade most of the men were murdered or killed in self-defence.

Pitcairn law also calls for any magistrate to lay the charges on the island - which could mean a long and arduous sea voyage followed by a sprint up and down the rope-ladder to the longboats, for 70-year-old Kevin Ryan.

And then there are the wider issues.

The prosecution guidelines cite two important factors for prosecutors to consider - evidential sufficiency and public interest.

Unless the 20 or so complainants refuse to testify, it seems that the first requirement may be satisfied.

However, what may be causing some concern, not to say angst, is the public interest issue.

The guidelines say that such factors leading to a decision to prosecute or not will "vary infinitely from case to case." But never would the complete extinction of a community and a unique way of life have been such a consideration.

Which is why observers have suggested that the allegations could be faced and the island way of life preserved, with a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

But Moore will not say if he has suggested such a commission to the British Foreign Office or whether he supports such a move.

Under the terms of such a commission, men who had been involved in sexual abuse would be required to confess and apologise for their past misdeeds and promise not to do it again. Anyone refusing to admit their guilt, or anyone who did it again, would face certain prosecution.

The less thinkable route is passing off the alleged sexual abuse as what you would expect from a small group of people isolated on an island for two centuries.

When a story on this case headlined "That's what girls are for" was published in London's Times newspaper in May, it was accompanied with opinions from three anthropologists disputing the idea that women are routinely treated as chattels in small tribal societies. One suggested "it could be that Pitcairn has more in common with modern, dysfunctional families."

Another, Dr Lissant Bolton of the British Museum, said that, "What happens in small communities is that certain ways of behaving become normal. What becomes acceptable has much to do with the leaders of the community. With a claim such as the one about Pitcairn, it could be that people want to justify their behaviour by laying claim to prior practice - and that depends on how they interpreted the past. Maybe on Pitcairn there has always been loose sexual practice."

Certainly the revisionist historians have come to the view that the mutiny on the Bounty was less about escaping from the tyrannical Captain Bligh, and more about succumbing to the allure of Tahiti, particularly its women.

Auckland-based Glynn Christian, author of a book on his famous ancestor, has no doubt that not all the Tahitian women taken aboard the Bounty were there willingly and history records that from time to time they attempted to escape from Pitcairn and return home.

Christian, who has never lived in Pitcairn but visited during the research for his book, says that while what is being alleged in terms of rape and sex with underage girls is "horrible by any standards," he thinks it unreasonable to judge Pitcairners as if they were living in Auckland.

But if sex with girls from the time they turn 10 is part of the island culture, why are there now complaints? One theory is that increased travel and exposure to western mores through the videos of television shows sent to the island, have led girls to realise what has allegedly been done to them is wrong.

But a New Zealander who taught school on Pitcairn says the men must also know it is wrong. She says if it is occurring, it is not overt on the island and must therefore be covered up, suggesting they might indeed feel guilty.

That British law is finally flexing its legal might against them this time, will not add to the romance of Pitcairn Island. Trial for sexual abuse can only sully it. But what could be far worse for an island that trades on its mystique, is for the rest of world to discover the depths of its ordinariness.