- In a special court set up in a suburb of Auckland, New
Zealand's capital, authorities are faced with a question reaching back
214 years to one of the most famous rebellions in history, the mutiny on
HMS Bounty.
-
- The Pitcairn Supreme Court, which did not exist until
it was created for this case, must decide whether Fletcher Christian and
eight other mutineers renounced their British citizenship when they sailed
the Bounty away from Tahiti and burned it on the shores of Pitcairn Island.
-
- It is more than an academic exercise. The survival of
tiny, remote Pitcairn and its community of 45 people -- many of them descended
from Christian -- may depend on it.
-
- Pitcairn is caught in a sex scandal. Since Gail Cox,
a police constable from Kent, in Britain, arrived on the island in 1999
and started interviewing women, virtually every able-bodied adult male
has been implicated in abuse of one form or another.
-
- Thirteen men have been charged -- though only seven still
live on the island -- and if found guilty, it would all but certainly doom
what is left of life on Pitcairn. A lawyer appointed to defend the men
is trying to save the community by challenging Britain's right to try them.
-
- It's a gritty story. Pitcairn may be the most isolated
community in the world. Five thousand kilometres from anywhere -- almost
smack in the middle of the Pacific, halfway between New Zealand and Peru
-- it's a rocky lump 3.2 kilometres long by 1.6 km wide, with no paved
roads, airstrip or harbour, and few other facilities to speak of.
-
- Everything has to be delivered by longboats, which set
out through the crashing surf in the tiny alcove known as Bounty Bay --
where the hijacked ship was burned in January, 1790 -- to meet passing
vessels offshore. Timing the swells, they fight their way back to a shed
at the foot of a cliff, where everything has to be offloaded by hand and
hauled up the Hill of Difficulty to the tiny settlement known as Adamstown.
-
- The mutineers arrived here along with six Polynesian
men, 12 women and a baby. They were the remnants of the crew that seized
the Bounty and set Captain William Bligh adrift in a small boat. They were
gambling that Pitcairn was tiny and isolated enough -- it was mis-marked
on charts -- to escape British retribution.
-
- They were right on that score, though the result was
hardly paradise. Christian and three of his men were murdered by Polynesians
in 1793, and by 1800 only one mutineer -- John Adams -- was left alive.
He survived until 1829, but though the British eventually discovered the
little community, they elected to leave it alone.
-
- Pitcairn struggled along for the next 200 years, farming,
fishing and trading with the occasional ship. The population peaked at
about 230, but has fallen steadily as the young moved away. When a baby
girl was born to Nadine Christian this past September, it was the first
birth in 17 years. Twice -- in 1831 and 1856 -- the entire population sailed
off to live elsewhere, but each time some grew homesick and headed back.
-
- Given the population, it can't be a shock that Pitcairners
haven't been strictly monogamous. The competition for women was behind
the violence that decimated the original Bounty crew, and the numbers haven't
improved much since. Religion found the island eons ago, and alcohol and
dancing are technically forbidden. But not everyone follows the rules,
and the island probably wouldn't have survived if they did.
-
- Still, the investigation that arose from Const. Cox's
visit has produced dozens of charges stretching back 40 years and including
allegations of rape and indecent assault against females as young as three.
-
- None of the men has been named, but their identity is
no secret. The seven still on the island pleaded not guilty in August,
at a hearing held in a little building in Adamstown, the Bounty's anchor
still resting out front. Many on the island say if the men are sent to
jail in New Zealand, there will be no one capable of operating the longboats,
and life will whither away.
-
- There is considerable anger that the British -- after
generally ignoring them for 200 years -- have suddenly decided to play
police. There have been calls for a "truth and reconciliation"
committee to sort out the situation among the islanders themselves. Herb
Ford, head of the Pitcairn Islands Study Centre in California, has urged
a system of "restorative justice," pointing to native Canadian
procedures for handling lawbreakers.
-
- Paul Dacre, assigned to defend the accused, has instead
challenged Britain's right to try them. At a pre-trial hearing in Auckland
on Friday, he argued that when Christian and his men burned the Bounty,
it was "the most decisive act any group of people could take against
the English government."
-
- Burning an armed warship was punishable by death, and
in doing so "those persons on Pitcairn island cut irrevocably, and
severed, their ties to the United Kingdom."
-
- The mutineers, he said, had established an independent
state. They formed their own laws, created their own customs, wrote their
own constitution of sorts, and governed themselves freely. Though administered
by Britain from New Zealand, the island never formally became a British
possession, he said. A passing naval vessel had a chance to claim it for
George III in 1767, but sailed past without doing so.
-
- Some -- Mr. Ford, for instance -- suggest Britain is
deliberately trying to destroy the island, and that merely bringing charges
has so devastated the little community that survival will be difficult.
-
- Britain denies it, and has suddenly become enthusiastic
about spending aid money to build it an airstrip or improve the harbour.
The islanders are wary, however, and Mr. Dacre notes that every year, on
the date of the Bounty's burning, they set fire to a replica to celebrate.
-
- "It's a symbol of the attitude of the Pitcairn community
toward the British government and particularly an indication of their independence,"
he said.
-
- <mailto:kmcparland@nationalpost.com>kmcparland@nationalpost.com
-
- http://www.nationalpost.com/utilities/story.html?id=93
C57E89-EEA6-4AC5-838D-5DE08F4563C7
|
