Islanders think the unthinkable

It is a remote life for residents of Pitcairn Island

By Simon Winchester on Pitcairn Island

I was not too bothered about not being able to land on Pitcairn Island.

Enormous green breakers were crashing over the tiny harbour entrance, and the islanders radioed that it would be too difficult and they would come to us instead. And so they did - all 44 of them in one tiny boat.

The harsh reality of the market place has reached Pitcairn

It occurred to me, as I watched, that one intemperately monstrous wave and an entire relic of Empire could be wiped out, in the blink of an eye.

I had been on Pitcairn a couple of times before, and there is not, in truth, a great deal to see - though the anchor from the Bounty, and Fletcher Christian's family Bible, both on casual display in the Adamstown square, are poignant reminders of the island's extraordinary history.

Otherwise the colony is just an amiable rural slum of muddy lanes and small shacks, hot and humid and surrounded by an all too visibly empty sea that stretches, limitless, on every side.

The Pitcairn story

Settled in 1790 by nine mutineers from the HMS Bounty

Community discovered by American whalers 1808

Many islanders moved to Norfolk Island in 1856

Population 44, descended from the mutineers

British governor lives in New Zealand

Four films made about the mutiny

So I did not mind about not going across. But on the other hand I had made some friends, and was eager to see them again.

And so I leaned over the taffrail to watch the little boat struggle towards us, and was happy and relieved to see familiar faces smiling up at us eagerly - the kindly, rugged, tanned faces of those Pitcairners I knew.

Except that on this occasion, once they had clambered up on board our ship, they seemed to be much less happy, less content with their lot, than I have ever known them.

It turns out they have ample reason to be, for all of a sudden, they explained, they have a new and very real fear - that their little island may shortly have to be abandoned.

Cost of living

The UK Government, with many more pressing concerns than the fate of the last remaining imperial possession in the Pacific, has evidently become bored with Pitcairn.

An edict has been issued that has brought the islanders to a stark realisation. If they want to stay where they are, if they want to continue to live the life that they and their ancestors have lived for the two centuries since the Mutiny on the Bounty first brought them here, then, put bluntly, they are going to have to pay for it.

From the beginning of last January, the last remaining British subsidies that allowed the island to keep going - help with generating electricity, and for bringing in cargo - were withdrawn.

From this winter, any islander wanting to switch on the electric light or cook dinner has to pay the full market cost.

And every time a ship stops off Adamstown to drop off beer or rice or razor blades, the islanders - and not the British taxpayer any more - have to pay the full £3,000 cost of the layover.

The harsh reality of the market place has reached Pitcairn. And very harsh it is indeed: the islanders have no work, and consequently, no income worth speaking of.

True, a few thousand pounds are generated from the sale of postage stamps.

A few of the more able men dig holes in the road. Once in a while the islanders, just one or two left behind to watch the shop, set off for a 100-mile expedition to the neighbouring Henderson Island to collect wood, from which they carve Bounty models to sell to passenger on passing cruise ships. Aside from that, there is nothing.

French saviours?

On paper it is fast starting to look as though under this new and cruel financial plan, the Pitcairn islanders may now not be able to afford to stay much longer.

Only one idea - but a heretical one - seems to commend itself as a way of saving the situation: Pitcairn might be handed over to the one last great colonising power in the Pacific Ocean, and its closest neighbour, the French.

Paris runs Polynesia, it has to be agreed, with what - nuclear testing aside, of course - seems a fair degree of skill: from Bora Bora and Tahiti, to the Marquesas and the Gambier islands, France's Pacific island possessions are by and large prosperous, the people by and large content.

And there are French-run islands not a day's sailing from Pitcairn, in the corner of what is now essentially a Gallic sea. The French admiral makes regular and tempting passes under Pitcairn's cliffs.

So why, even some of the Pitcairn islanders are beginning to wonder, do not the British ask the French if they might take the four little islands of the Pitcairn group under their protective wing?

It is of course, to many, a quite unthinkable plan. But then so, perhaps, is the abandonment of Pitcairn altogether.

And if Britain truly has lost interest in her 44 subjects, tucked away here on the far side of the world, then perhaps a change of sovereignty might not be too terrible a thing. It might guarantee survival.

It might even, considering the success of Tahiti and Bora Bora, bring Pitcairn some kind long term economic benefit - a long-awaited Bounty, one could say, for the Mutineers.