‘Then there’s a law about drinks, sir—as I dare say you know. No strong liquor on the Island, except for physic. You see, we gave liquor a trial when our people first came here, and the man that invented it went funny, and jumped into the sea. It seemed to bring bad luck, so we gave it up.
‘Now we come to our great difficulty,’ and he proceeded to read aloud another chapter of the statutes headed, ‘Laws for Cats.’ ‘Cats, you must know, sir, are very useful in keeping down rats, but our young people will sometimes shoot them for sport, so we’ve been obliged to pass a very severe law, our severest, I may say. There’s a heavy fine for killing a cat, half of it to go to the informer. For all that, it’s no easy matter to settle these cases. Sometimes people say the cat came to kill their fowls; and what are you to do then? It is a difficult case for a magistrate. I always say this—was the cat caught killing the bird; or was it merely a suspicion? If you can’t produce your dead bird, then down with your potatoes! There’s another way; you may pay your fine in rats killed by yourself. Three hundred is the price of a cat’s life; we try to be fair all round.
‘Take fowls again; if a fowl trespasses in your garden, you may shoot it, and the owner must return you your charge of powder and shot. That’s the law as it stands in the book, but nowadays you generally send back the bird, and say no more about it. We are all neighbours, you know.
‘There’s another thing,’ continued his Excellency, pursuing his commentary on the code, ‘You mustn’t carve on trees. Who wants to carve on trees? you may say. Well, the young people, when they are a-courting. But it ruins the timber. We’ve had no end of trouble with that law. As you walk about the Island, sir, you’ll come upon true lovers’ knots, and such like, in the most out of the way places. You mustn’t be startled by ’em, and think it’s savages; it’s just sweethearts, neither more or less. Where we can’t tell which pair was walking there, I draws ’em all up in line, and asks who did it, straight out. Oh, you have to look sharp after things here, I do assure you. Our people are not so wicked, but they get careless sometimes. Who’d ever think, now, that we want a “Law for the Public Anvil”? but we do.’ And he read aloud,
‘“Any person taking the public anvil and public sledge-hammer from the blacksmith’s shop is to take it back after he has done with it; and, in case the anvil and sledge-hammer should get lost, by his neglecting to take it back, he is to get another anvil and sledge-hammer, and pay a fine of four shillings”—potatoes, you know.
‘You’ve got a good many more laws in Europe, I’ve heard say,’ he observed, as he closed his book, and restored the entire code of Pitcairn to his breast pocket.
‘You have not been misinformed,’ I replied. ‘But tell me—have you any machinery of appeal from the decisions of the Court of First Instance?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if they don’t like what I tell ’em, it goes before a jury.’
‘And if they don’t like that any better?’
‘Then we hold over till the next British man-o’-war touches, and the captain decides. We’ve got an appeal waiting now—a cat case. None of us can get to the rights of it, so we must wait: but the parties are friendly enough, meanwhile.’