I’m on Pitcairn Island with the descendents of mutineers

Dea Birkett is a travel writer who developed an interest in Pitcairn Island – a British Overseas Territory. The island is located in the South Pacific Ocean and sustains a population of under one hundred people, the majority of whom are descended from the mutineers from the Bounty and the Polynesian people who joined them when they fled Tahiti at the end of the eighteenth century. She managed to get permission to land, which is not easy, and Serpent in Paradise is her story of the months that she lived on the island as a guest of the local people. I remember picking this book up in a charity shop because I was interested in the island having recently read a very good account of the mutiny – see here for my review.

The author obscured her reason for coming to the island as so many applications were refused. It transpired that the inhabitants were tired of being regarded as some sort of idealised paradise or social experiment and tried to exclude writers as they had had some past poor experiences with what had been written about the island. It seems that they were right to be suspicious of such visitors as this book and a number of newspaper articles were written by Dea as a result of her visit and she is personally critical of a lot of the people she met there – this actually made me feel uncomfortable in places because I wondered if the islanders had had any right of reply to the text.

The author talks about how the island works and how the families interact with one another. Religion is a big part of the life of most islanders who are mostly Christian Scientists but so too is subsistence forming, fishing and selling items to passing ships. The islanders have electricity and modern conveniences and often barter for food and other items with passing ships. They make crafts and souvenirs and sell these to the passengers and crew of cruise liners. Some inhabitants have official roles such as Postmaster and receive a civil service salary. They work together to sustain the infrastructure of the island. The life they live is precarious and the island has lost much of its population in the recent past. The future may be in doubt too as fewer ships are prepared to stop and receive visitors.

The author is unhappy on the island, mainly because the inhabitants are wary around her and seem to hide their true feelings. They fear that she is a writer, which she is, and they don’t enjoy the feeling of being judged. The author also breaks a social and religious taboo when she sleeps with a local man. She feels trapped by the small size of the island and the lack of communication with the outside world.

This is an interesting account of a unique way of life in an unusual place. The author looks at the myths that the outside world have created about the mutineers but also at the stories that the islanders tell about their ancestors. I found the book unsatisfying because of the subterfuge that the author used to come to the island and the fact that she didn’t, by the standards of the inhabitants, behave very well when she was there.

The author’s visit took place in the late 1990s and that is when the book that I acquired was published. I was aware that there had been issues on Pitcairn more recently and so I looked into it. In the early part of this century an enquiry found that the men of the island were habitually sexually abusing young women and girls. There was a trial and a number of men were convicted – most of the names of these men are the same as the names of the men that the author met on her visit. There is no inkling of this abuse in the narrative and the author almost certainly didn’t know that it was happening but it might explain some of the secrecy and suspicion which she found so difficult to understand and accept.

I will pass my copy of this book, which is a hardback edition, on to another reader because I don’t normally keep travel books.