Pitcairn Island: Final Home of the Bounty's Mutinous Crew Today
August 24, 2014
A little note of interest. After the famed 'Muntiny on the Bounty' occurred, the island was left on it's own. After years of seclusion, the islanders found a Bible and they tried to follow the rules of the Bible - including the Saturday Sabbath! They had no "education" of the Christian Sunday! They only had the Bible to guide them...
Each year, on January 23, the inhabitants of Pitcairn, Britain’s smallest colony, burn a model of His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty. The ceremony, accompanied by cheering and singing, commemorates the sinking by fire of the ship in 1790.
Her demise, off the tiny bay that now carries her name, was, deliberate or not, a moment of no return for Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian and the eight seamen who had followed him to that lonely volcanic outcrop, lost in the South Pacific vastness.
Lost, quite literally. Originally sighted by HMS Swallow a few years earlier, in 1767, the island was promptly named after the young officer who spotted it, charted on a map and forgotten.
It was Christian, examining the charts kept by William Bligh, the captain he overthrew, who realised that Pitcairn had been incorrectly positioned 188 miles west of its true location. A perfect place to hide from a vengeful Royal Navy.
The Bounty mutineers were not alone. Twelve Tahitian women and six Tahitian men accompanied them, together with one child.
They were the vital ingredient in Christian’s plan to recreate the sexually-liberated ‘paradise’ he had enjoyed when the Bounty was moored for six months at Tahiti, and which he had refused to surrender, even to the extent of setting Bligh and 18 loyal crewmen adrift in an open boat.
Pitcairn was Christian’s social experiment. The Tahitian women would provide pleasure and offspring for the Englishmen, while the Tahitian men, effectively slaves, supplied the labour. The result was resentment, jealousy, revolt and murder.
When two Royal Navy men o’war finally arrived at Pitcairn in 1814 only one man, John Adams, was left alive, the rest of the male population having perished in an orgy of self-destruction by the year 1800.
Christian himself, probably mentally unstable, and hardly the hero portrayed in successive films by Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson, was said to have been shot in the back by a Tahitian man during an uprising, uttering the final words: ‘Oh dear.’
Two centuries on and Fletcher Christian’s grand experiment could be nearing its end. Pitcairn, Britain’s last possession in the Pacific, is dying — slowly but surely.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2731382/The-paradise-island-thats-dying-shame-How-sex-scandals-poisonous-legacy-destroying-remote-British-isle-founded-Bounty-mutineers.html#ixzz3B7mPGevu
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