Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

Photo from Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
The shores of Pitcairn Island

Now was a second chance for peace and success. The experiment of putting together without higher authority a band of white men with women and slaves as spoils had miscarried. The inferior tribesmen were finished, but there were four of the higher race, and eleven native women, still subjects for further probation. One would say for certain that on that lonely speck of land, having glutted any blood lust, and with twelve of their number already dead, these four men of the same race, religion, and profession would get along somehow. It was not to be.

“McCoy,” said Mayhew December Christian, “liked to drink liquor. Before he was a seaman he worked in a distillery in England, and on Pitcairn he distilled ti leaves in his tea-kettle. They all had drunk his alcohol, and it had been a factor in the quarrels. He got worse as he became older, and he and Quintal kept up a continuous spree until the devil gripped McCoy for his own, and McCoy tied a rock around his waist and leaped into the sea. Three whites were left, and Quintal had learned nothing from the past. He drank the ti liquor, and when his wife came from fishing with too few fish he bit off her ear. When she fell from the cliff and was drowned, Quintal, with all the other women to choose from, demanded the wife of one of his two shipmates. He made terrible threats against both of them, and they knew he meant what he said.”

In the first case since its institution the court of Pitcairn divided. Adams and Young, taunted by the continuing insults of Quintal to their matrimonial integrity, and faced with the probability of extinction unless they acted vigorously, seceded from the minority. They deluded Quintal into a momentary incautiousness when the recurrent insistence of his demand was being quarreled over in the presence of the entire community, and butchered him with a hatchet.

“I heard the daughter of John Mills, an old woman, relate the incident,” said Mayhew. “They were gathered together, children and all, in Adams’s house, when he and Young jumped upon Quintal and chopped him to pieces. The blood was everywhere, she said, and we grew up with a song about it. My mother used to croon it to me on her lap.”

Young, midshipman, of gentle breeding, and a serious man at his lightest, faded away, and in his last, melancholy days, uttered the name of God. Convinced that Adams would not strike him down, he gave way to a conviction of sin, the remembrance of his childhood at home. He died begging for mercy, which Adams assured him would be granted to a contrite heart. They laid him in a grave upon the land he had cultivated, and over him was said the first word of funeral sermon pronounced in Pitcairn. John Adams, the preacher, of the fifteen males who had sailed in the Bounty from Tahiti, was sole survivor. Fourteen had perished, thirteen violently, in the search for happiness and freedom from restraint. Man had almost annihilated his brother.

John Adams had a dream in which it was pointed out to him that upon his head was not merely the blood of the many who had been murdered, but that the bodies and souls of the innocents remaining were in his care.

“Thou art thy brother’s keeper,” said the scroll in his vision. He counted his human kind. The feud had swallowed fourteen strong and wilful men, but nature, as it had allowed their crops to grow and their trees to become fruitful, had preserved eight of the women, and their fertility had given twenty-three children to the mutineers. Christian had fathered three, McCoy three, Quintal the bold, five, Young six, Mills two, and Adams four. Adams drew about him these thirty-one beings, and commenced a new regimen. He forswore the democracy of Pitcairn, and in the sweat of his soul dedicated the island to the God of the Bible and prayer-book that had molded on a shelf until then. In tears and with vows he gathered his flock about him and daily and nightly expounded to them verses and read them prayers. He did not lose sight of the material needs in his flinging himself on the compassion of heaven, but gave every one a task and saw that it was done. He taught the children English from these, the only books saved, and it was not the least of his accomplishments that he was able to make his language theirs, for their mothers knew nothing of it. The thirty-two became one family, the eight widows looking upon him as their father, as did the little ones. Morning and evening, and all Sunday, a stream of prayers for their welfare and salvation was directed by him toward the seat of the Almighty, and the theocracy of Pitcairn waxed fat and sweet. With one head, and many hands, yearly increasing as the children grew, they perfected their fields and bowers, their fewer houses and their gear, and, born into the environment, the adolescents became marvelously adapted to its necessities. When the scene was unveiled to the outer world, it would have needed a Rousseau to describe its felicity.

Captain Mayhew Folger, a sealer from Boston, commanding the Topaz, lifted the curtain twenty years after the mutiny and ten years after Adams had become its sole survivor. He sailed to Pitcairn to look for seals, and offshore was hailed in English by three youths in a boat who offered him cocoanuts, and told him an Englishman was there. He landed, and was received with warm hospitality. He put down Adams’s statement in the Topaz’s log, with the comment that whatever his crimes in the past, he was now “a worthy man, and might be useful to navigators who traverse this immense ocean.” He also recorded that Adams gave him hogs, cocoanuts, and plantains.

England did not gain a clue to the “mystery of the Bounty” through the Topaz log. Captain Folger tarried a day at Pitcairn, and his ship was confiscated at Valparaiso shortly afterwards by the Spanish governor of Chile. Young America and England were not close friends, and their navies and merchant marines were at odds. Six years elapsed before even the British admiralty knew the facts. They were gained on an expedition of immense interest to Americans. Captain Porter, of the Yankee navy, had been not long before in the Marquesas Islands, to which he had taken prize ships captured in the war between Great Britain and the United States, and where he had flown the American flag in token of possession, and killed many helpless natives to indicate his power. The British captured Porter in the Essex, undid at Nuku-Hiva what he had done, and did it over in the name of King George. Bound from the Marquesas to Chile, Captain Staines of the Briton unexpectedly sighted Pitcairn and was confounded at the signs of human life in huts and laid-out fields, but more so when Thursday October Christian and George Young shouted from a small boat to “throw them a rope.” Invited aboard the Briton and put at table, they asked a blessing in English, and said they had been taught by John Adams of the Bounty to reverence God in every act. The Briton commander, amazed at this apparition of civilization from the ghostly past, put ashore a party, and investigated the colony of forty-eight. The stupified Pitcairn folk were afraid that Adams would be taken prisoner, and he doubtless would have been except for the pleadings of the young, and especially of Adams’s “beautiful grown daughter.” The captain stayed a few hours and reported to the admiralty in England the answer to the Bounty riddle, and that never in his lifetime had he seen such a model settlement or such virtuous and happy people. England was at war with Napoleon, and left Adams to time. Ten years later came a British whaler, and Adams confessed himself old to its captain. He begged for a helper in governing his commonwealth, and especially in teaching them. The captain assembled the crew and asked for a volunteer. John Buffet, twenty-six, cabinet-maker, twice shipwrecked, and a lover of his fellow, stepped out and was accepted. He knew that it meant years of isolation from Europe, but that was what he had craved in his rovings. When his ship was ready to sail, Johnny Evans, nineteen, Buffett’s chum, was missing. He had hidden in a hollow stump. The community was obliged to receive him. And so two white men, fresh from Europe, became members of a family of several score half-breeds who, in an idyllic simplicity and a gentle savagery, had lived for years undisturbed by a foreign or dissentient element, and who in their common affection and openness of heart were remindful of the Christians of the catacombs. The second period of Pitcairn was ended.