‘She is a descendant of Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, the leader of the mutineers of the Bounty, who disappeared somewhere about the year 1788, and formed that very interesting community at Pitcairn Island. They were not discovered until September 1808, when Captain Folger, of the American ship Topaz, seeing smoke rising from an island, from which a canoe was approaching, was hailed by the occupants in good Saxon English. “Won’t you heave us a rope, now?” was the request from the frail bark, and, a rope being thrown out, a fine young man sprang actively on deck. “I’m Thursday October Christian,” he said modestly, “son of Fletcher [301] ]Christian, and the first man born on the island.” H.M.S. the Briton and the Tagus—the former commanded by Sir T. Staines—were in search of an American ship which had seized some English whalers, when they suddenly came in sight of an uncharted island. It was Pitcairn, but should have been two hundred miles distant—being placed on the chart by Captain Carteret (who discovered it in 1767) three degrees out of its true longitude.’
‘It seems almost incredible,’ said Mr. Banneret, ‘that a canoe carried on a man’s shoulders should be safely handled amidst such terrific surges, but I recollect seeing Australian aboriginals at Two-fold Bay carrying their bark canoes on their heads to the water, and fishing successfully when it was by no means smooth. English-speaking strangers proved themselves to be unsurpassed boatmen—to be recognised in the aftertime as such amongst the best whalemen in the world. Twenty years had elapsed since Fletcher Christian and his mutineer associates, with their Tahitian wives, had left Mataavai Bay. During the whole of that time the actors in the tragedy had disappeared from mortal ken as completely as if they had been sunk “deeper than plummet lies,” with their broken-up and abandoned vessel the Bounty.’
In 1808 Captain Mayhew Folger first came upon the little community of Pitcairn Island; in 1814 the Anglo-Tahitians had increased to the number of forty. Nothing was done by the British Government until 1825, when Captain Beechey, in the Blossom, on a voyage of discovery, [302] ]paid a visit to Pitcairn Island. A boat under sail was observed coming towards the ship. The crew consisted of old Adams and ten young men of the island. The young men were tall, robust, and healthy, with good-natured countenances, and a simplicity of manner combined with a fear of doing something that might be wrong, which prevented the possibility of giving offence. None of them had shoes or stockings. Adams, in his sixty-fifth year, was dressed in a sailor’s shirt and trousers, and wore a low-crowned hat. He still retained his sailor manners, doffing his hat whenever he was addressed by the officers.
Sir Thomas Staines’s letter, written on 18th October 1814, stated that every individual on the island (forty in number) spoke excellent English. They proved to be the descendants of the deluded crew of the Bounty. The venerable old man, John Adams, was the only surviving Englishman of those who last quitted Tahiti in her. The pious manner in which all those born on the island had been reared, and the correct sense of religion which had been instilled into their young minds by the old man, had given him the pre-eminence over the whole of them. And to him they looked up as the Patriarch of their tribe.
. . . . . . . . .
The great day, the great race was over. The Australian family had enjoyed their modest triumph in seeing the good horse from a sister colony win the blue ribbon of the great cross-country contest, coming in victorious over hedge and ditch, [303] ]brook and rail, with the best blood of England eight lengths behind. That was an honour which could never be taken away from them. In years to come any of them would be able to say, ‘I saw Moifaa sweep over the four miles and a half of a stiff course (as English people reckon) with as much ease as if it had been a hurdle race. And until we see an imported horse from England win a steeplechase at Flemington, we shall be entitled to hold that the horses bred south of the line possess unequalled speed, stoutness, and jumping ability.’
From the far ocean-surrounded islands of the south land, where still linger the traces of the moa, and the apteryx perplexes the tourist, to the torrid levels of the West Australian fields, where the miner’s harvest is weighed and reckoned in ounces of fine gold, the love of athletic sports, which the British emigrants carried with them, has caused their representative champions to be respected from India to the Pole.
After this equine battle of Waterloo it was, of course, natural for the victorious Austro-Britons to fall back upon their base in London—the Hotel Cecil, where they and the Allied Forces might arrange for future operations during the spring and summer campaigns.
The Bannerets were not, as may be imagined, without acquaintances, and, indeed, friends of long standing in high places. Cadets of noble houses had visited Australia in the early ’fifties (1852 to 1856), when the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo, Eaglehawk and Maryborough, were at [304] ]their marvellous height of productiveness; where, also, the purchase of a few shares overnight might result in a fortune before breakfast for the investor. Besides such glimpses into Aladdin’s cave, there was the entirely new spectacle of goldfields, where the precious metal might be seen in the matrix, and the operations for its extraction by chance workers of every degree of age, nationality, or occupation witnessed. It was a fascinating and novel experience to watch the process in shallow ground, hardly less primitive than the ordinary digging of potatoes: to mark the runaway sailors, farm hands, shepherds, or stock-riders, joking the while, as they occasionally threw up a ten- or twenty-ounce ‘nugget’ of almost pure gold, worth £4 per ounce, or a lump of the gold-studded quartz, to the tourist bystander peering down the edge of the shaft, with the touching confidence that it would be punctiliously returned, after being wondered at, and perhaps weighed, by the obliged stranger. Such things sound improbable, but are, nevertheless, strictly, rigidly true, as can be avouched by any miner of the period. The neighbouring squatters, in a general way men of birth and breeding, had been pleased to welcome these agreeable strangers to their homes, where, the daughters of the land being often handsome and attractive, the stranger guest had no particular objection to prolonging his stay when his hosts and other neighbouring magnates were so anxious to secure his society.
Lord Salisbury was known to have lived in a [305] ]tent, with a friend or two, more Australico, and personally, as ‘Mr. Cecil,’ studied the humours of a ‘rush’ near Bendigo. As he did not stay long or, presumably, make a fortune, he probably consoled himself with the reflection that he had gained the rare experience of a personal examination of a vast colonial industry at first hand, which would be valuable in forming political opinion as to the treatment of British colonies, under new and original conditions. In the light of his Lordship’s ministerial responsibilities in later life, perhaps it was well for him that he should be in a position to observe the process of formation of a British state, with municipal, mercantile, civil, and military functions, of a character befitting the Empire, evolved from the heterogeneous components of a goldfields population. How doubtful, how improbable, that order, achievement, high attainment, should ever have been so produced, contemporary journalists and visitors have left on record. For the proof, respice finem, behold the tree-shaded street, broad, straight, tram-pervaded, at Ballarat; the lake where formerly the wild duck swam amid the reedy marsh; the steamers thereon which equalise the traffic; the gardens where the weary tourist may rest, or read, upon a bench prepared by the municipalities, while he gazes around on the wide transformed landscape. Naval officers, cadets of great houses, budding field-marshals, had all been temporarily adopted at Arnold Banneret’s paternal home. The middies were now, some of them, admirals; the Honourable Mr. Sedley and Mr. Villiers were now barons [306] ]and earls, having ‘come into their kingdoms,’ so to speak.