The Ghosts of Pitcairn: From, Med to Mum. Ii

I

HAVING repaired a broken bobstay and replenished our water, we left Manga Reva late in the afternoon, after a three days’ sojourn. I shall long remember that departure — the peace, the beauty of it. The great lagoon was a mirror for clouds, and the small islands scattered over it were places of pure enchantment in the mellow golden light. Stevenson said that one’s first South Sea island landfall touches a virginity of sense. So it does, and, fortunately, the tenth, the fiftieth, the one-hundred-and-fiftieth. The purity of perception is not lost by repetition of the experience. There is a magic about these islands that is timedefying, that loses nothing of its efficacy however intimate and long-continued one’s association with them may be. Landfalls and departures, by day or by night — each one seems to be the first and the most memorable. I recall, in this connection, Conrad’s Heyst, and his occasional quiet remark, apropos of nothing: ‘I am enchanted with these islands.’ And his were the islands of the western Pacific, small continents, some of them, steaming in moist heat, under a cruel sun, their lowlands clothed with all-but-impenetrable jungle, their lofty mountains concealed in mist, the rivers infested with alligators, and the air loud of an evening with the humming of the wings of myriads of insects unfriendly to man. What would have been the strength of the enchantment had he known the islands of Polynesia: Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora, the Marquesas, the Australs, the Gambiers! Or the Tuamotus, that vast Cloud of Islands, scattered over

‘The Dangerous Archipelago,’ these last are often called, and so they are, all, atolls and high islands alike — dangerous indeed to the man who enters the circle of their enchantment, hoping to escape again.

Ever since boyhood, the very name ‘island’ has had a deep fascination for me. An inland birth was, doubtless, partly responsible for that. Islands were far to seek on the prairies of Iowa, and yet they could be found, of a sort. A mud bar, three feet by four, in the sluggish midstream of a prairie slough, was enough; and if, at the season of the spring rains, I found one larger, with an old tree, its roots undermined by the current, leaning across it, I asked nothing better than to spend the rest of the day there, with an ancient, leaky, flatbottomed skiff anchored to the roots of the lone tree. Try as I would, though, I could not imagine the sea — any sea. The fact that the earth’s surface was three-fourths water was not a fact to me. Neither the evidence furnished by maps nor the assurance of my elders convinced me; or, if I believed, it was only with the surface of my mind. Within was a solid core of doubt.

Until one wintry afternoon — it must have been somewhere around my tenth or eleventh year. A memorable day, which stands out with the entrancing clearness of objects in pictures viewed through the old stereopticon glasses our parents used to keep with the knickknacks on the parlor table. I remember the very weather of it, and the light dry snow that was falling, filling the wagon tracks in the frozen mud, sifting lightly along the board sidewalks, piling in little drifts against the fronts of houses, adding little by little to the grayness of a gray world. I was on my way to Mrs. Sigafoos’s store.

She kept a little stationery and notions shop on the one business street of Prairie Hills, not far from the railway station, and there she sat by the window, day after day, a shawl pinned over her shoulders, talking to herself, keeping her rocker going when there was nothing to be seen out of doors, stopping it abruptly and peering over her spectacles when someone passed. On winter afternoons she had few of these pleasant distractions. The street was often empty for an hour at a time.

Her shop had a little back room, concealed by a flowered calico curtain, where she kept her surplus stock of ‘notions,’ and delightful notions they were to a small boy: boxes of marbles, and valentines, and firecrackers left over from last Fourth of July; chocolate creams, cone-shaped, and with a flavor that has since been lost by makers of confectionery — at least I have never been able to find it again; colored crayons, card games, tracing slates with pictures to go with them — the place was heaven to a ten-year-old, and I had the run of it, being Mrs. Sigafoos’s newspaper-delivery boy, upon the understanding that I would put everything back just as I found it. And back everything went, except an occasional misplaced chocolate cream.

I must not forget the music box. It played three tunes — I can hear them at this moment , and the taste and smell and dyed-in-the-wool color of boyhood thoughts and feelings come back with them. What a pity that music boxes ever went out of fashion! Their modesty, their lack of vulgar self-assertiveness, which should have been considered points in their favor, seem to have been the very qualities which led to their banishment.

I must have played Mrs. Sigafoos’s music box as long on that afternoon as on former occasions before turning to the shelf of books. These were, chiefly, padded-leather editions of the poets: Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell, for school-graduation gifts. There were, also, several copies of Will Carleton’s Farm Ballads, illustrated. I wonder whether anyone beside myself remembers them? The same flavor of life permeates the Farm Ballads that one tastes in reading Edward Eggleston’s Roxy, or The Hoosier Schoolmaster. I could taste it then, without knowing that it was a flavor peculiar to a certain section of the United States and only for the period of two or three decades. Edward Eggleston, Will Carleton, and Mark Twain have preserved it for us, and it is well that they did; otherwise it would be as lost to the world as the flavor of Mrs. Sigafoos’s chocolate creams.

There was yet another book on the shelf: Typee, by Herman Melville. It was a strange companion for the Farm Ballads, and I have often wondered, since, how it came to be there. On this memorable afternoon I was moved to take it down and open it.

Six months at sea! Yes, Reader, as I live, six months out of sight of land; cruising after the sperm whale beneath the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific — the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else!

Who does not recall some day of boyhood, such as this one of mine, preserved forever between the covers of a book? Typee has my day safely captured. There was a quality approaching the ideal in my experience. It was my first authentic entrance, in literature, to the world of islands, and what better vantage point or vantage time could I have had for viewing them than that offered by Mrs. Sigafoos’s little shop in a farming town on the prairies, on a winter afternoon? I was soon convinced of the reality of the sea — emotionally, I mean. Yes, even of Melville’s six months of sea. Indeed, that opening paragraph spread it out before me as something unquestionable, like the sea of land rolling away to the horizons that bounded Prairie Hills. But as I followed Melville over it to Nuku Hiva and sojourned with him in Typee Valley, I little realized that the first gossamer-like thread of Chance was being woven which was to unite with that one spun in Paris, in 1916, and draw me aboard the Pro Patria, in 1933, bound hand and foot, as passive, almost, as the MED to MUM volume in my suitcase.

II

The Pro Patria was nothing like as long as I have been here in crossing the Manga Reva lagoon. In fact, in less than an hour she was well beyond the southwest pass and had settled quietly down to her sea-shouldering work. We were at the austral extremity of the tropics, in latitude 23:30, and the season of the equinoctial gales was at hand. This may have had something to do with the wall of slate-colored sky and sea that we saw ahead before night fell. It seemed to be solid, stationary, waiting for rather than approaching us, as though it were an outer rampart to Pitcairn Island, gathered from the gloom of Fletcher Christian’s thoughts as he had entered that loneliest expanse of the Pacific, or from his need for concealment.

Gloomy enough his thoughts must have been as he neared his refuge. He did not know that it would prove to be a refuge. Pitcairn might be an inhabited island where the disastrous Tubuai experience would be repeated. There had been ample time, during the long voyage from Tahiti, for all the uncertainties of their situation to be brought home to him, as well as an appalling sense of his responsibility in the affair of the mutiny. No doubt he cared little what might happen to Bligh; he had suffered too much at his hands to be concerned about his fate. But that of the eighteen loyal men who had been cast adrift with Bligh was another matter. Christian must have considered every man of them as good as dead. They were in a small open boat, thousands of leagues from the nearest European settlement, on an ocean all but unknown, and without means of defense against the savage inhabitants of the islands scattered over it. What chance had they between the probability of death by thirst or starvation and that of death at the hands of the savages on the first island where they might venture to land? And it was he, Fletcher Christian, who had doomed them.

As he tried to drive this bitter realization from his mind by considering the situation of those with him on the Bounty, what did he see? They too were doomed. Pitcairn, he knew, was a tiny island. Granted that they succeeded in establishing themselves, there every man of them must live until his last day. Once the ship was destroyed, as she must be, their seagirt refuge would be a prison as well. Endurable, even pleasant, the prison might prove at first, and there would be work and to spare in the beginning to occupy their thoughts. But what after a year, five years, ten years? They were an illassorted company: nine white men, six native men, twelve native women. As for the whites, it might have been expected that the hardest characters would follow him, and the Tubuai experience had taught him how difficult it would be to govern them. Of the nine whites, there was but one to whom he could look for companionship and support: Midshipman Young.

And what of the barriers to understanding between English seamen and Polynesians? Even with the language difficulty overcome, there would still remain the gulf due to different customs, different methods of thought. How was that to be bridged ? And what disasters might occur in the process?

And above all hung the hornets’ nest of sex. Fifteen men and twelve women cut off for life on an island of two square miles. How long would the three men unprovided for rest in that condition?

I doubt whether the history of colonization has a stranger situation to show, or one more spiked over with dangers. Christian must have been fully aware of them. It speaks well for his firmness of character that he did not slip overboard some dark night and thus free himself from both memories and responsibilities.

III

We sighted Pitcairn shortly before dawn, on our third day from Manga Reva and our twenty-third from Tahiti. We saw it first by the dim light of the waning moon filtered through heavy masses of low-hanging cloud, A rock indeed it looked, and, at the same time, the mere wraith of an island that vanished almost at once. We again caught sight of it at about five miles’ distance, with the canopy of cloud hanging just over the high western ridge. Dawn was only a tentative withdrawal of the deeper shades of gray, but the light was of a more revealing quality than that of bright sunshine. While waiting for it to increase, we lay in the lee of the land, within a quarter of a mile of the shore. Above us was the long ridge connecting the two highest peaks, and from there the land fell away in steep ravines and gullies to the rock-bound shore.

This was the uninhabited, northwestern side of the island, as lonely in appearance, as unchanged by the hand of man, as it was when the Bounty’s people first saw it. Slender cascades, the result of recent heavy rains, streamed down the rocky walls, arching away from them in places as they fell into the sea. Small as the island is, the aspect from that side has in it a quality of savage grandeur heightened by one’s sense of its remoteness and of the loneliness of the lives of those who live there. The thousand-foot peak where the two main ridges unite appears to be much higher, viewed from the deck of a small schooner close inshore; and the green thickets in the ravines and on the lower slopes of the mountains add to the solemnity of the bare precipices that hang above them. I had long had an ideal conception of what Pitcairn should be in view of its tragic history; but neither this conception nor any imagined island that I have met with in literature can be compared, as a setting for tragic events, with this huge rock, streaming with rain, as though it had but recently risen from the depths of Father Neptune’s loneliest ocean.

Presently the engines were started and we proceeded to the northern coast, skirting Young’s Rock, all but hidden in the surf beating over it. Everywhere were the same high cliffs, foamfringed at their bases, but they were less lofty and precipitous after we had skirted the Goat-House peak. The main valley now came into view, with the houses of Adamstown scattered along the seaward slopes. We saw groups of tiny figures gathered in the open spaces above the steep foreshore, gazing out at us, and others running toward the landing place in Bounty Bay.

A longboat put out through the surf — one of the splendid seagoing boats the Pitcairners themselves build for their voyages to Oeno or to Henderson Island, both uninhabited, and also for boarding passing vessels. They have half a dozen such craft, open boats, peaked at the ends, thirty-seven feet long, and with a beam of seven, eight, or nine feet. The one coming off to us rowed twelve oars, and I counted thirty-six men in her. A fine sight it was to see the precision of their rowing despite the heavy seas that all but hid them at moments. They came alongside with the speed and skill of oarsmen in a man-of-war’s boat, and they boarded us like a swarm of pirates. Pirate-like they looked, with their brown, lean, weather-beaten faces, in their miscellaneous costumes, most of them articles of clothing bartered for with the seamen of passing vessels. Some were bareheaded and all barefooted. Their speech still has in it something of the quaint Biblical flavor first acquired by their forefathers at John Adams’s knee; but when talking among themselves they speak a jargon in which scarcely a word is, at first, distinguishable by a stranger. The inflection of their voices, too, is one peculiar to themselves; it reminded me a little of the singsong speech of the Swedes.

There was no doubt of the heartiness of their welcome. Their faces beamed and they shook our hands till our arms ached. Whatever may be said of the back blocks and backwaters of the world, one finds among the people inhabiting them genuine hospitality, unfeigned warmth and kindness of heart. In their lonely lives they have time to cultivate the old simple virtues. Every time I meet such people I become increasingly convinced that mankind should breed less prolifically and gather in less antlike heaps. Human sympathy is, certainly, warmer, and the milk of human kindness richer, when the calls upon both are kept within reasonable bounds.

I made no attempt to sort out the Christians and Youngs and McCoys I met in that boatload of men, nor the urgent invitations to stop ashore at one house and another. It seemed best to leave the matter of lodging to chance; therefore, grabbing up my toilet articles and a spare shirt, I waited my opportunity to drop into the boat among the others.

IV

The landing in Bounty Bay has been notorious among visitors to Pitcairn since Captain Folger’s day. The slight indentation might better be called a cove; it is, in fact, little more than an open roadstead exposed to northerly and easterly weather. The foreshore is strewn with great boulders, but midway in the cove is a strip of beach where a landing can be made. There was a heavy easterly swell running, and a surf on shore that any but Pitcairners would have considered dangerous. They made nothing of it, and we swept behind the rocks and slid up the beach as gently as though we had been in a landlocked harbor.

Many a time had I imagined myself on that tiny beach, a viewless spectator of the Bounty’s arrival. I had gone with Christian on his first tour of exploration, returned with him to the vessel, and had listened to the conference then held when the decision was made to remain on Pitcairn. I had watched the busy scenes that followed: the carrying ashore of supplies, the making of the trail up the steep slope to the level land two or three hundred feet above, the partial dismantling of the ship and the burning of the hulk, on January 23, 1790.

The cove has altered little in all these years. There is, of course, a better accommodation for boats under the steep foreshore, and the trail to the settlement has been widened a little. Otherwise, the sketch made by Captain Beechey, in 1825, shows the place as it is to-day. A little to the left, as one faces the land, is the lofty crag, Ship-Landing Point, under which the Bounty was beached and burned, and I was told that one of her anchors might still be seen there in calm weather.

Scarcely had we set foot on shore when the rain set in again, a blinding downpour that drenched us through in thirty seconds. We had our work cut out for us in mounting the trail. It was liquid mud of red volcanic soil — the greasiest of all the greasy kinds of mud.

When we had reached the comparatively level ground above, I found that arrangements for my accommodation had already been made. I was to stop at Uncle Ben Young’s house. Andrew Young, his grandson, took me there.

No arrangement could have been more to my wishes. Uncle Ben Young is one of the patriarchs of Pitcairn, and of the fourth generation from Midshipman Ned Young. He is in his eightythird year and as spry as a cricket. Many a man thirty years his junior might envy Uncle Ben Young his rugged health, and his hearty laugh has in it the tonic virtue of the sea winds that sweep the island. He and his family made me feel at once that I was one of them, that their home was mine as well.

While I talked with them and dried my clothes in the ‘out-back’ kitchen, Parkins Christian came in. He is a man in his early forties, I should say, the island magistrate, and head of the board of six governors. Fletcher Christian might well have been proud of this representative of his line, with his stalwart frame, his quiet, dignified bearing. He stands out among the Pitcairners; in the midst of a crowd of them the eye turns toward him at once.

Presently the rain slackened to a drizzle, but the island was completely hidden under a white fog. I had to make the most of my time, for I knew that we were to have but two days here; so, refusing all offers of companionship, I set out alone to explore the island. Interested though I was in present-day Pitcairn, it was not that I had come, primarily, to see, but the Pitcairn of 1790-1808. I wanted none but ghosts for my companions on this first excursion.

V

I set out along the trail leading up the side of a narrow valley to the ridge connecting the Goat-House peak with the one to the south ’ard — the ridge I had first seen from the schooner. This, I imagine, was the first path marked out by the mutineers, after the one from the cove, for it goes past Brown’s Well, a small spring-fed stream which has rarely failed in its supply since Bounty days. After a short climb I came out on a kind of plateau jutting out from the higher land beyond. Crossing that and mounting again, I was soon at the summit of the western ridge, no more than arms’ breadth wide at that point, and falling steeply to the ravines on the western side.

I could see nothing save the narrow vantage ground under my feet; the entire island was hidden under billowing clouds of mist, of that deep grayness which shows what layers beyond layers of it lie between earth and sun. I perched on a rock that seemed buttressed on nothing but mist, and gave myself up to reflections as gloomy as the day.

Is it possible, I thought, that I am not to see this island I have wandered over so often in fancy, which I have come so far to see avec mes propres yeux? The wind blew ‘shrill, chill, with flakes of foam,’ billowing the heavy clouds of mist but not dispersing them. It was such a mist as concealed the dolorous Land of Lyonnesse on the day when King Arthur lay deeply smitten through the helm, and Sir Bedivere stood on the beach, with Excalibur in his hand, listening to

the water lapping on the crag, And the long ripple washing in the reeds.

And here, as there, did the mists seem to be filled with ghostly presences, passing and repassing, with ghostly voices. As ghostly as they, in the mists, I waited and listened; yes, and saw the better for it across the years, to a day of bright sunshine in January 1790. Of a sudden there came into view from below me Smith, Mills, Martin, and McCoy. They were well blown after their stiff climb through the thickets, and flung themselves down on the ridge to rest. No sound was heard at first save their labored breathing and the thunder of the surf far below. Mills was the first to speak.

‘ And this is what Christian’s brought us to!’ he said. ‘There’s what we can see from here and no more.’

‘There’s room enough,’ said McCoy.

‘Room! You’re easy pleased,’ Martin put in, gloomily. ‘A bloody rock, I call it!’

‘Aye, Marty, Tahiti’s the place,’ Smith said, scornfully. ‘Ye’d have us all go back there to be took by the first ship that comes from England. You ’re pcrishin’ to be choked off at a rope’s end. None o’ that for me!’

McCoy nodded. ‘It’s no such a grand place for size, this Pitcairn’s Island. But Christian’s right: it’s safe. We’ll never be found.’

‘And here we’ll bide to our last day!’ said Mills. ‘Have ’ee thought o’ that, shipmates?’ He smote his horny palms together. ‘God’s curse on the pack of us! What fools we’ve been to break up the ship!’

McCoy sat up abruptly. ‘Hearken to me, John! Ye and Marty had your chance to stay at Tahiti, but I mind me weel ye was all for comin’ awa’ wi’ the rest of us to a safer place. And now we’ve found it ye’ll nae ha’e it. And what would ye ha’ done with the ship? Hoist her three hunnerd feet up the rocks? Where could we keep her?’

‘It’s as Christian says,’ Smith added. ‘We’re not free to go where we like.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ said Mills. ‘If he’d minded his own bloody business . . .’

‘Aye,’ said Martin, ‘we’d a been home by now, or near it. We’ve a deal to be thankful for to Mister Fletcher Christian!’

‘I’d like weel to hear ye tell him that!’ said McCoy. ‘Ye’ll be sayin’ next he drove us into the mutiny. There was no man more willin’ than yersel’, Isaac Martin, to seize the ship.’

‘That’s plain truth,’ said Smith.

‘ Give Christian his due. We was none of us drove into it.’

Of a sudden I lost them, and my sense of the bright day when they must have had some such conversation as this. The mists of September 1933 were billowing around me again, but as I gazed anxiously overhead I saw the sun like a golden sovereign shimmering in the depths of milky water; and before I should have had time to say ‘His Majesty’s armed transport, Bounty, ’ the clouds rolled back from the ridge, and within five minutes the whole of the island lay in view beneath me.

Such a view, so suddenly revealed, was well worth thrice a voyage of twelve hundred miles. I found that I had, in fact, been sitting on the brink of a mountain wall that made a sheer drop into the valley below. The sea lay almost directly underneath, but eastward was the great bowl of the main valley, sloping down toward the north and traversed by half a dozen small valleys within a valley. This larger part of Pitcairn has more the appearance of a plateau lying at an angle, its high side extending to the southern ridge, the lower side propped up on cliffs still high above the sea. South of that main ridge are the broad slopes of the Auté Valley, so called because in the Bounty days the auté plant, from which tapa cloth was made, was cultivated there. I saw at once that the contours, as given on the only existing chart of Pitcairn, — at least, the only one I have been able to find, — are wrong. The western ridge should be much closer to the sea and t he southern one much farther from it. The Auté Valley lies above the southern cliffs, and one viewing the island from the sea would not suspect its existence.

I walked slowly along the narrow western ridge, following a path which the Bounty folk must have trod times without number. The slopes on my left hand were covered with the natural forests of the island: rata and tapou trees, some of which must be as old as the human history of the island; groves of pandanus, with their globed clusters of sweet-smelling nuts, and candlenut trees whose fruit gave John Adams light to read the Scriptures by when he was left alone with his memories of ten years of horror.

Having looked about me for half an hour from the highest peak of the island, I turned eastward, following a path that crossed the middle of the Auté Valley. Here were plantations of yams, taro, beans, and sweet potatoes, and, in small valleys, groves of guavas and bananas, and orange trees laden with fruit. The gardens were small, for no great amount of land is needed to provide food for Pitcairn’s 208 inhabitants; and the soil is so rich, Uncle Ben Young informed me, that the same crops can be planted in the same plots, year after year, without impoverishing it greatly. In all the valleys, large tracts are left for Mother Nature to plant as she will. I have never seen an island more fertile. Christian might have searched the Pacific over without finding a refuge so perfectly suited to his purposes, whether for concealment or for sustenance.

He must have had his happy moments here. There must have been days, particularly after the children began to come, which were thrown into clear relief against a succession of brooding, sombre ones. He would have learned to accept the irrevocability of his fate, and to put out of mind, for brief periods at least, his thoughts of home and friends. A man exiled for life to a lonely island, or one confined by hopeless invalidism to the small world of a single room, is not wholly to be pitied, granted that he has resources within himself. The consciousness of a shut door behind him, and the clear view he has of the material boundaries of his world to the end of his life, must bring a kind of peace denied to the rest of us. He can let fall so much that we must carry. He comes to no crossroads pointing him in every direction save that behind him. The decisions he has to make are simple and few and clearcut. It seems impossible that he should go astray in making them.

But I am presupposing that the exile is alone. Some of Christian’s problems were anything but simple ones, and there was the added difficulty that his decisions must be acceptable to fourteen other men, to say nothing of the women involved. He must have regretted bitterly the lack of an adequate number of women. Trouble was bound to flow into that vacuum. But why, I have often wondered, did he permit a needless problem, concerning a division of land, to be admitted among the authentic ones? John Adams told Captain Beechey, in 1825, that a decision was made to divide the island into nine shares, one for each of the white men. It seems likely that two or perhaps three of the native men were not of the class of Polynesian serfs — landless men; and no more gratuitous insult could have been offered them than to exclude them from proprietorship in land. They would be certain to resent it. Christian was greatly to blame if he allowed this matter of a land division to be raised. Perhaps it was brought forward and decided against his wishes. It must have been so. Both he and Young were too intelligent to have had anything to do with so needless and dangerous a proceeding.

VI

Rain was again falling; the bit of blue sky I had seen was soon clouded over, and there was no second glimpse of the sun during the time we remained on Pitcairn. I was again wet through and returned to Uncle Ben’s house, having made the full circuit of the island.

The younger generation of Pitcairners know little or nothing of the Bounty history, and the same is true of most of the older folk. I found that I had a better knowledge of it than they themselves, so in the future I directed all my questions at Uncle Ben.

He went with me to the site of John Adams’s house, close by the great banyan tree that appears in Captain Becchey’s sketch of the place. The tree appears to be as hale now as it was then, but Adams’s house has long since disappeared. A little below it, and within full view of the Goat-House peak, is the spot where Christian lived, and it was from the rocks below that McCoy threw himself into the sea in his fit of delirium tremens. High up on the eastern face of the Goat-House peak is Christian’s cave. Its triangular-shaped opening can be plainly seen from below, but Uncle Ben told me that it would be impossible to climb to it on account of the rains. I wanted to try, nevertheless, but I still had much to see, and delayed making the attempt, hoping that the sun might come out and dry the rocks. Christian kept a supply of muskets and ammunition there. It was to be his last refuge, in case Pitcairn was discovered, and, as Captain Beechey wrote, he could have defended himself there against a thousand, as long as his ammunition held out. Then he would have had only to leap. They could never have taken him alive.

We trudged along the muddy paths of the settlement, Uncle Ben in the lead. He bubbled over with high spirits and good humor, and seemed to welcome, rather than otherwise, the steady stream of questions I fired at him over his shoulder. Of a sudden he halted and turned toward me, his head cocked up in a funny way he has.

‘You ain’t a stretcher, are you?’

‘I don’t know. What’s that?’

He went on to say that some years before a passenger on a passing vessel had spent a few hours ashore, and had asked him many questions about the Bounty folk.

‘He wanted to know this and that and the other, so I told him as much as he’d time to listen to. Well, a good while after, he sent me a story he’d printed about the Bounty, and before I’d read three pages I knew he was a fine stretcher!’

‘Uncle Ben,’ I replied, ‘the best of stretchers could n’t stretch the Bounty story half so well as it stretches itself.’

‘There! That’s what I’ve always said!’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s nothing left to stretch. It’s a better story as it stands than any of these writers could get out of their heads.’

It was late afternoon when we waded back through the mud and rain, halting for a moment at a shed used as a blacksmith shop. Here I saw one of the few relics left from the Bounty: a small vise still in daily use. I seized the iron bar, knobbed at the ends, half hoping that there might be some virtue in an object which so many Bounty hands had touched, but the only result was a clearer realization of the immortality of tools compared with the hands that make and use them. Such honest materials and workmanship had gone into the making of the Bounty’s vise that, more than likely, it will still be in use when Uncle Ben Young’s great-grandchildren are as old as he is now.

Returning to the kitchen to dry out for the third time that day, we found the women of the household busy preparing supper. Half a dozen kettles, bubbling and burrumbling, hung on a long crane above the fire, and more than half a dozen barefooted men sat on the well-worn wooden benches, looking on. I listened with interest to the speech used among themselves, and began to get the hang of it, a little, and it was always with a shock of surprise that I heard the sudden change into English when they spoke to me.

I greatly regretted the briefness of my Pitcairn sojourn, for this curious island speech, sprung from the parent stems of Biblical English and ancient Tahitian, would make a fascinating subject for study. Here is a small field for research which no one, I believe, has yet explored.

In Adamstown it is easy to imagine that one is in some settlement far back in the mountains of Virginia or Tennessee. The same primitive conditions prevail, and the same clannishness among the people, whose faces bear the same stamp placed there by isolation and a crude, hard manner of life. Pitcairners till a more generous soil, but the sea at their doors, with its dangers to be met and its hardships to be endured, offsets this advantage and gives them the sinewy bodies and the lean, weather-beaten faces of the mountaineers. Their houses, too, look lean and weather-beaten. They are mere shelters from the elements, unpainted for the most part, clapboard ed with thin planking sawn out by hand from native timber. Furniture is, most of it, handmade, and, as in Uncle Ben Young’s house, there is just what is needed and no more. Walls and floors are bare, and the latter are scrubbed to the whiteness of the deal tables.

When supper was ready, one of the boys went out to fetch Aunt Ann McCoy. She was a little old lady, barefoot like all of the others, but wearing a shawl and a bonnet which gave her the appearance, from the waist up, of the vicar’s wife in some English village of the sixties. She came very slowly along the path, clinging to Andrew Young’s arm, and before they had reached the door I realized that she was blind.

When grace had been said, we fell to upon rice gruel sweetened with sugar, fried chicken, boiled taro and sweet potatoes, and ‘quick-bread’ with raisins in it. It was a homely meal, but the sauce of courtesy and kind-heartedness that went with it made it seem a feast.

Some of our Tahitian sailors had come ashore for the evening, bringing their guitars and ukuleles with them.

After supper the village gathered at the schoolhouse to listen to a concert. I remained at Uncle Ben’s house, with Aunt Ann McCoy, who knew more Pitcairn history than all the rest of them together. The night was as windy and rainy as the day had been, and Pitcairn houses arc drafty ones. I had n’t been so chilly since the summer of 1922, which I spent in Iceland, but Aunt Ann McCoy seemed not to mind it. She was glad to have someone from the outside world to talk with, and her memory was a storehouse of information on Pitcairn affairs. She seemed to have remembered everything that had happened there during her lifetime, even the smallest events, and all had been packed away with such care that she could lay hand, so to speak, on any item that she wanted at the moment it was wanted.

I spoke of the family relationships and the difficulty I had in trying to untangle them.

‘They are puzzling,’ she replied, gravely. ‘It worries me to think that many of our people don’t know how they are related. It’s dangerous. I wish that someone would prepare a genealogy, going straight back to the Bounty.’

‘A Professor Shapiro did prepare one,’ I replied. ‘He was sent out by the Bishop Museum, of Honolulu, and went to Norfolk Island for his information.’

‘Oh, why could n’t he have come here! ’ she exclaimed. ‘ The work should have been done thoroughly if it was to be done at all. There is much information that he could have gotten only on Pitcairn. I might have helped him. I believe that I could trace most of the relationships all the way back.’

‘Could n’t you yourself do this work, Miss McCoy?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘I am an old woman,’ she replied; ‘the task would be too much for me, working alone. I suppose it will never be done now. There are only a few of us who know, and we shall soon be gone.’

She was about to give me an idea of how mixed some of the relationships are when we were interrupted by the return of the Youngs from the concert. Before Miss McCoy was led back to her own house, Uncle Ben brought out the Bible for evening prayers. The family gathered about the table, lighted by a kitchen lamp, and listened with grave attention while a chapter was read from the Psalms. Then all got down on their knees while Uncle Ben led them in prayer. It was like the Cotter’s Saturday Night — which is the Pitcairn cotters’ Sunday night, for they are devout Seventh-Day Adventists. That primitive faith seems to suit the Pitcairners of these days, or perhaps it is they who suit the doctrines of the sect. At any rate, it searched them out. There seems to be an affinity between such communities in the far hinterlands and waters of the earth and Seventh-Day Adventism.

I was glad indeed to crawl into bed, and grateful for the blankets laid over the snowy sheets. Thawed out once more, I lay awake for a long time, listening to the rain beating against the window and the faint thunder of the surf against the cliffs, far below. Then I had a curious experience — a psychic experience, it might be called. I shall not go into the details of it. It is enough to say that an attempt to roll back the years and to imagine myself in Fletcher Christian’s place succeeded so well that I had to get up, put on my clothes, and go out into the rain for five minutes in order to fit myself into my own skin once more.

(To be continued)