Father saw me studying the chart, and observed:
“On the approach from the southeast the island looks like a cone of rock juttin’ out of the sea. Some times mariners call it ‘Neptune’s Thimble’ because of its resemblance to a thimble in shape.”
“How did anybody get on a rock island so far away from the big island groups?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you, Joan, because I think you ought to know the whole romance of Pitcairn. Lots of folks has written about it, but none of them know all the facts like we sailormen know.”
“Have the islanders been there forever?” I wanted to know.
“Nope. You see in the year 1789 His Majesty’s Ship Bounty was sent out from England to the South Seas to gather breadfruit trees for the purpose of transplantin’ the same in the British West Indies. In command of the Bounty was a tyrannical, overbearin’ taskmaster, a regular s.o.b. His name was Lieutenant William Bligh, and the crew was afraid of him, and at the same time they hated his guts.
“For months there had been a seething undercurrent of revolt brewing in the fo’c’s’le, and it was led by the ship’s carpenter, a Mr. Christian. They laid their plans carefully for mutiny—but they bided their time until the Bounty sailed into the vicinity of Tahiti.”
“What good would it do to mutiny in the South Seas?” I asked, for I knew that escape in the islands was almost impossible for a white man fugitive on English possessions.
“Huh,” snorted Father, “those bastards were so sore on Old Man Bligh they didn’t give a damn what became of them just so as they got rid of him and his officers.” And from Father I learned how the “white native island” was founded.
When Mr. Christian learned from one of the officers that the Bounty was about two hundred miles off Tahiti he gave the signal for the mutiny. With more daring than the pirates of the Arabian Nights the crew mutinied. They bound and gagged the captain and those officers that were loyal to him, and set them adrift in the open sea in the ship’s cutter which they had provisioned and watered. Christian assumed command of the Bounty and her mutineers.