These latter weltered in an Elysium of freedom from humiliations, discipline, work, and unrequited cravings for mates, and in a perfection of warmth, delicious viands, exaltation of rank, and amorous damsels. Chiefs adopted them, maidens caressed them, the tender zephyrs healed their vapors, and they were happy; until the Pandora arrived, snared them, and took them in chains to England, where they were tried and three hanged in chains at Spithead. The Pandora reported that no trace could be found of the Bounty, and the most that could be done was to anathematize Christian and the mutineers, and to make the path of the ordinary seaman more thorny, as a deterrent to others.
For twenty-four years England heard nothing of the further movements of the pirates. The new generation forgot them, but Christian’s name lingered as a threat and a curse. The ship and crew disappeared as completely as though at the bottom of the sea; and when their refuge finally was disclosed, horrifying and also wonderfully poignant chapters were added to the log of the Bounty, and one of the most curious and affecting conditions of humanity brought to light. The bare outline of all this is in every Pacific chronography, but one must have heard its obscure intricacies from a scion of a participant to appreciate fully their lights and shadows. Mayhew December Christian told me these, and the Reverend Jabez Leek commented and pointed the moral.
“My great grandfatheh want go farthes’ from Engalan’,” said Mayhew, “and he look on chart of Bounty an’ fin’ small islan’ not printed but jus’ point of pencil made by cap’in where English ship some years before find. It was call’ Pitcairn for midshipman who firs’ see it from mas.’ He steer there an’ in twenty-three day Bounty arrive. That where I was born.”
Not by any spelling or clipping of letters could I convey the speech and accent of the islander, English, Tahitian, and American,—Middle Western,—combined into a peculiar patois, soft at times, and strident at others, with admixture of Tahitian words. He went on to tell how his ancestor and his companions looked with hope at the land which must give them safety or death. They reached the shore through a rocky inlet and rough breakers, and, on finding stone images, hatchets, and traces of heathen temples, were cast down by fear of savages. But as days passed, and they gradually wandered over the entire island without trace of any present inhabitants, they felt secure. Its smallness in that vast and then trackless waste of waters below the line reassured them of its insignificance to mariners or rulers, it being only five miles long by two wide, and with no harbor or protected bay. Rugged in outline, and uninviting from the deck, with peaks and precipices sheer and sterile-looking, the mutineers were gladdened to walk through forests of beautiful and useful trees, with fruit and grasses for making native clothes; and about its borders to be able to catch an abundance of fish and crustaceans.
They drove and warped the ship into the inlet against the cliff, and fastened it by a cable to a mighty tree, and in a few weeks removed everything useful to the upland where they pitched their first camp. Christian, with the determination and foresight that saved his group from the ignominious end of those who would not abjure the ease of Tahiti, insisted on burning the Bounty, to remove all indication of their origin to visitors, and, doubtless, to make impossible belated efforts to desert their sanctuary. They lived in tents made of the canvas until they built houses from the ship’s planks, and these among the spreading trees so that they were completely unseen from the sea. They had ample provisions from the stores until they could raise a crop of vegetables, and the plants they brought might supplement those indigenous. The island was covered with luxurious growths, there was water, and they extracted salt from pools among the rocks. They parceled out all the land among the Englishmen, and each with his Tahitian wife set up his own home. The Tahitian men helped different ones in their building and cultivation, and in peace and comparative plenty they began one of the most startling experiments of mankind.
Nine Englishmen, mostly rude sailors, with ten Tahitian women and a girl, and six Tahitian men,—unevenly divided as to sex, whites and Polynesians unable to converse except meagerly, with totally different inheritance and habits,—were there as the experimenters, with no restraint upon passions or covetings except the feeble check of mutual interests. A hamlet in the ripest civilization has difficulty to govern by these. Compromise through a supposed expression of the will of the majority in elections has become an accepted solvent, but in reality the determined and organized minority wins usually. On Pitcairn, as in Eden, a woman caused the failure. After two years of associated achievement, the wife of Williams, a mutineer, having fallen to death from a cliff while gathering sea-birds’ eggs, that subject of King George demanded and was awarded the wife of a Tahitian comrade. The committee of the whole, Anglo-Saxon whole, in contemplation of their own naked souls, could not deny Williams. The woman left the hut of her husband and shared the couch of the victor in the award. There was no appeal, for the supreme court, as in America, was final, no matter what the congress of the people wished. The lady was complacent, but the cuckolded Tahitian got together his color majority and protested. He was told to nurse his wrath in hell, and the court administered summary sentences to all who disputed its power or equity. Timiti had murmured, but, as mere treason was too sublimated a charge, they brought another against him, and the tribunal was assembled, with the entire citizenry as witnesses and auditors. Christian walked up and down in the house as evidence was offered, and once, as he turned, Timiti, sure of the court’s finding, flew out of the door. He escaped to the other shore of the island, but after weeks was decoyed by false promises and murdered as his deceivers combed his tangled hair, a sign of friendship.
Photo from Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
The church on Pitcairn Island
The remaining Tahitian males formed a committee of vigilance, and voted to rid the island of the entire supreme court. Its members were saved from immediate assassination by their wives, who, in the way of women on continent and islet, loved them because they were the fathers of their children. Moreover, since Cook claimed as paramour in Hawaii the Princess Lelemahoalani, dark women have been fired by ambition for social and environmental climbing on a white family tree. The wives of the English in Pitcairn were able to inform their husbands through the gossip of the wives of the Tahitians, who also sided with the whites. One carried her adherence far enough to murder her spouse while he slept. Life was made fearful for these wives, and once they constructed a raft and were beyond the breakers to sail to Tahiti or oblivion, when the Englishmen’s women’s wailing and pleading induced them to return. For months more it was touch and go as to survival. Murder stalked hourly, and the oppression of the whites became that of masters towards slaves. Then the Tahitians crept into their huts and secured the firearms, and with these hunted down the Europeans. They killed first John Williams, the successful litigant, and then Fletcher Christian, the chief justice, and, quickly, John Mills, Isaac Martin, and William Brown. William McCoy, John Quintal, and John Adams were fleet enough to reach the woods, and Edward Young, midshipman of the Bounty, beloved of all the women, was secreted by them. John Adams when hunger-pressed showed himself, and was shot and badly wounded. He ran to the bluff above the sea, and was about to hurl himself to destruction when induced to refrain by his pursuers, whose hearts failed them. Adams, Young, McCoy, and Quintal, but a quartet of the nine mutineers, remained, and five of the six Tahitian men. The latter had cut down the four to a minority of the male populace, and were delighted to swear eternal amity. Adams recovered, and, at a midnight session, the whites released themselves from their oaths and decreed the wiping out of every male but themselves. They swore as allies the widows of the other sailors, and, as fast as dark opportunity offered, the decree was executed. They were, shortly, the only men.
