Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  With a motive I didn’t understand she then teased me with direct questions, wanting me to be embarrassed. What did I think about love? Was there a man in my life? Did I have a significant other? I said I still hadn’t found the love I was looking for. She asked if I thought I’d find it on this journey. Captain Dutt laughed. Soni said she thought it wrong that two lone women were going to Pitcairn Island without the protection of a husband or a brother, and Da Silva agreed.

  In the afternoon Soni showed me her embroidered fabrics and devotional paintings of her guru, husband and Krishna, her shrine of holy relics, her photographs of the voyage. I thought again of the women abducted on the Bounty, how they must have yearned for home, without even a snapshot to console them.

  22

  For months Christian circled the Society, Cook and Friendly Islands. He hoped to find the lost isles of Solomon as a place to hide. He had a ship, crew, maps, charts, women and supplies, but no freedom to stop at any inhabited island.

  Near Raratonga he bartered a piece of iron for a pig brought out to the ship by a man in a canoe. The man returned to his tribe to tell of the sight he’d seen: white-faced men and strange animals on a floating island that arrived from nowhere and where fresh water flowed and sugar cane grew. Other tribesmen went to the ship to barter coconuts and bananas. A boy stole a box of oranges. Another touched the pearl buttons on Christian’s jacket. On impulse Christian took off the jacket and gave it to him. The boy stood on the gunwale and displayed his prize. A mutineer shot him dead. The boy’s friends hauled his body from the sea then raced to the shore, shouting with shock and fear.

  Bligh’s command of the Bounty had been tight and focused. Now the ship was lawless. It buffeted where the wind took it. Its crew were unpredictable. Its boatmen explored whatever islands came into view. At Vatoa they caught birds and fish and picked up coconuts from the beach but when they saw people, pariahs as they were, they retreated to the ship and sailed on with the wind.

  The Polynesians on board knew that Bounty was a misnomer, Christian a liar, and that they’d not meet again with Captain Cook or Bligh. The six young Polynesian men were called blacks by the mutineers and not given equal shares of food or comfort. No reckoning was made of the resentment this caused. Their expertise was needed for navigation and the lore of the islands. Two of them, Titahiti and Oheu, were from Tubuai, brothers of Chief Taroatehoa who’d ruled the district where Christian tried to build Fort George. Of the other four, Tararo was from the island of Raitea, two hundred miles north-west of Tahiti, and Teimua, Manarii and Niau were from Tahiti.

  The twelve young women trapped on this voyage to isolation were in their early teens. One had a baby girl. They’d been taken for sex, to cook, serve and produce children in Christian’s secret society. He called his woman Isabella. Her Polynesian name was Mauatua and she was the daughter of a Tahitian chief, from the raatira – the landed gentry. So was the woman/girl claimed by Edward Young. He called her Susannah though her given name was Teraura. She was thirteen when she was taken from home. She had dark curly hair and was still growing. Bligh described Young as from a good family. Young’s uncle, Sir George Young, had recommended his nephew to Bligh to sail with the Bounty.

  The most vocal of the women, Teehuteatuaonoa, was called Jenny by the mutineers. Her ambition was to get home to Tahiti. She achieved this thirty-one years later in 1811. Her version of events was transcribed by a Captain Dillon and published in 1829. She was paired up with ‘reckless Jack’, a workhouse boy from Hackney, who’d run off to sea. He’d deserted from another ship to join the Bounty under the alias of Alexander Smith. On Pitcairn Island he again changed his name – to John Adams.

  The rest of the women were shared among the mutineers and the Polynesian men with the rule that the mutineers’ desires took precedence. The two most feared men in the group, William McCoy and Matthew Quintal, both volunteers with the Bounty, were sexually violent when drunk.

  23

  In my cabin I read the account of Pitcairn that inspired Christian to go there. He’d found it in Bligh’s copy of Hawksworth’s Voyages and it was by an Englishman Captain Philip Carteret. ‘It appeared like a great rock rising out of the sea. It was not more than five miles in circumference and seemed to be uninhabited.’

  ‘Uninhabited’ was the word Christian needed to see: no prior possession, no fights for displacement, no massacre like on Tubuai.

  ‘It was however covered with trees and we saw a small stream of fresh water running down one side of it.’

  Water meant life: meat, vegetables, fruit, wood for houses, furniture, fences, boats, the opportunity to cultivate the seeds and plants he’d brought on the Bounty.

  ‘I would have landed upon it but the surf broke upon it with great violence, and rendered this impossible. I got soundings on the west side of it, at somewhat less than a mile from the shore, in twenty-five fathoms, with a bottom of coral and sand. It is probable that in fine summer weather landing there may be practicable.’

  This told Christian that were he to approach the island around December or January, unloading might be possible. And after that – no hostile ship could easily seek him out.

  ‘We saw a great number of sea birds hovering about it at somewhat less than a mile from the shore and the sea seemed to have fish.’

  So there’d be a larder: fish, eggs, clams, oysters. All the necessary food for survival, and delicacies too.

  ‘It lies in latitude 20°2’ south and longitude 133°21’ west. It is so high that we saw it at the distance of more than fifteen leagues and it having been discovered by a young gentleman, son to Major Pitcairn of the marines, we called it Pitcairn Island.’

  Christian knew these readings were wrong on every chart and that such an error might mean safety for him. Bligh had told him how he and Cook searched for the island in the Resolution in 1776, then gave up and sought respite in Tahiti because many of the crew had scurvy. The Polynesians with Christian on the Bounty calculated it lay 180 sea miles southeast from where Carteret had said.

  Christian sighted Pitcairn Island on the evening of 15 January 1790, four months after leaving Tahiti. He saw this great rock rising from the sea, with clouds trapped above its mountain peaks. He and a well-armed crew took a boat to the shore. For two days he explored. He found all he’d hoped for. No people, no hospitable bay for a ship of retribution to anchor, a rugged coast, inland forests of coconut palms, breadfruit, miro and hibiscus trees, nesting birds, freshwater springs and flat land for building. The bays were full of fish, and oysters clung to the rocks.

  He returned to the Bounty ‘with a joyful expression such as we had not seen on him for a long time past’. He’d found what he was looking for, what he thought would save him, an island to colonise, a world to control, as far away from Bligh and the gallows as the earth could provide.

  24

  The sky was dark and starless on the night the Tundra Princess approached Pitcairn. Again there was driving rain and waves twenty-six feet high. The ship sounded its horn each minute, an eerie bellow. On the bridgehead Captain Dutt said that unless there was improvement soon, he wouldn’t stop. His scalp jiggled, his eyes looked anxious. He faxed his company. They again warned him not to anchor, for the ship might swing. Again he said his priority was his ten-million-dollar cargo of kiwi fruit.

  The island appeared as a bright speck on the radar screen. Lady Myre asked questions about how radar worked. Captain Dutt’s answers were terse. A fax came from Pitcairn’s mayor, Steve Christian, telling him not to try to approach until dawn. He should then go to the lee of the island, where the sea was calmer, and drift until the longboats came to unload supplies and collect Lady Myre and me. It would be three miles back to Adamstown, the only settlement, but the swell was too great to attempt to unload near Bounty Bay.

  Dutt told Lady Myre and me to pack our bags, leave them in our cabins, then come to the bridge at dawn. He reduced the ship’s speed to fifteen knots. ‘Why do you want to go to this benighted
place?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand it. Don’t you have family? It’s not necessary.’ I thought of the migration of swallows, the restless travel of people, the transport of kiwi fruit, the feeding of Tahitian breadfruit to West Indian slaves. I wondered what was necessary.

  For our last supper we had mutton and cabbage. The talk was of the war in Iraq, how wrong it was, how unsafe it made us feel. ‘It should not have happened,’ Da Silva said, and Harminder, Jaswinder and Captain Dutt agreed. Lady Myre said we had to fight to preserve civilisation, but no one took any notice of her. She and Soni and Da Silva then took photographs of us all with their digital cameras, and we exchanged email addresses and invitations to our homes. Soni gave Lady Myre an assortment of glittering stars and spots to stick round her nose and eyes, and me a necklace of wooden beads. Lady Myre then went to the lounge to watch a video of The Sound of Music with Da Silva. I returned to my cabin to pack and prepare to land.

  At six in the morning, the Tundra Princess idled three miles offshore from Pitcairn in a turbulent sea. The clouds were black and there was driving rain. Wrapped in waterproofs, Lady Myre and I stood in a haze of wet, with our wallets, passports, tickets and liquor licences concealed in our bum bags. Pandal had put our luggage – my rucksack, her fourteen motley cases and boxes – in thick blue polythene bags.

  Captain Dutt looked through binoculars at the island’s gloom. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the look of those rocks.’ He repeated that he could not linger and that it would not be possible to unload supplies. ‘They’re coming,’ he said and handed me the binoculars. He made it sound interplanetary. I saw a longboat filled with people, most of them in yellow oilskins. The boat rose to the crest of each wave, then plunged from view. Lady Myre looked too. ‘Whoosh!’ she said, and then again, ‘Whoosh! Is it coming to collect us? What a heck of a lark.’ She faltered and gave her wide, toothy smile. ‘But how do we get into it?’ she asked. ‘How do we get off this ship and into that bucketing tub?’

  ‘Do exactly as you’re told,’ Dutt replied. ‘I’ll give you gloves so the rope doesn’t burn your hands.’

  ‘Rope?’ she said. ‘What do you mean, rope?’

  ‘The rope of the ladder,’ Dutt said.

  ‘But you will put the gangway down for us so that we can alight from the ship to the boat.’

  ‘You would end up in the sea,’ he said.

  Her smile switched off. ‘I am Lady Myre,’ she said, the fright of it all reminding her of her class. ‘I am not a chimpanzee.’

  ‘I am concerned for you,’ said Captain Dutt. ‘This is folly. Why do you want to go to this terrible place? You should come with us to Panama. This is not a civilised place to leave a lady such as yourself. Your husband would be most disconcerted. He should not allow it.’

  Perhaps aware that he had crossed a cultural barrier of opinion, his scalp jiggled and he said no more. Other officers, in uniform, assembled to wish us luck and say goodbye. Another longboat came into view, it roller-coasted with each wave. The men in both boats stood tall, spray burst over them, they disappeared then appeared again. As they manoeuvred alongside the ship, the boats looked like specks against this huge vessel of 17,000 tons. I thought of the nineteen men, cast adrift from the Bounty in a cutter. Ropes were thrown and caught and the Jacob’s ladder lowered. Several Pitcairners effortlessly climbed up it. I observed how strong they were, how physical. I did not see how I or Lady Myre could find our descent easy.

  Steve Christian was first on deck. Barefoot and wearing shorts, with a knife at his belt and a T-shirt with a Pitcairn logo, he was drenched with seawater and rain. He walked with a limp. One of his legs, broken when he was a boy, was shorter than the other. He was thick-built, dark-haired, dark-skinned. I thought of Bligh’s description of Fletcher Christian: ‘5 feet 9 inches high, blackish or very dark complexion, dark brown hair, strong made’.

  He took no notice of Lady Myre or me. He asked Captain Dutt if he had alcohol or cigarettes to sell. His voice was singsong, polite. Dutt said that he did not. I thought of the prohibitions of Adventism. Steve then asked Dutt if he’d use the ship’s cranes to unload the island’s supplies from the containers. Most of these supplies were building materials for the new prison and there was no way they could be shifted by hand. I thought how Steve was the main defendant in the sex-abuse trials and that the prison was for him. Dutt said to raise the cranes in this weather would jeopardise the stability of the ship and he wasn’t prepared to risk it.

  Bea Christian joined Steve. She was a cousin of sorts and looked like him. She too was barefoot, dressed in shorts and T-shirt and drenched with rain and spray. She too had a knife at her belt. They shook hands with Lady Myre and me and said, ‘Welcome to Pitcairn,’ but there was reserve in their eyes. I thought of the far-back mother from whom they’d once come, Mauatua, Fletcher Christian’s Isabella, lured from Tahiti, caught in his crime.

  They went to the container deck to unload what they could by hand. I waited on the bridgehead with Lady Myre. ‘Gosh,’ she said, her eyes bewildered, her smile white and wide, ‘I didn’t think it would be quite like this.’

  As the morning lightened, we more clearly saw the outline of the island and the fierceness of the sea. ‘It’s crazy,’ Da Silva said. ‘We won’t see you again. They have knives and no shoes. She is not a woman. Look at her muscles.’ But then he said, as if to belie the words he’d just spoken, ‘What an adventure. Imagine the mutineers arriving here. I wish I was going with you.’

  ‘You must come to Panama,’ said Captain Dutt with terrible consistency. I knew little about Panama. It was not my choice of destination, least of all with Lady Myre. I’d heard it was a centre for money-laundering and cocaine shipment, and that forty per cent of its population lived in poverty, which led to opportunistic crime.

  We moved to the container deck. It was awash. Islanders struggled to lower supplies into the longboats: sodden and disintegrating cardboard boxes of onions, potatoes, meat and eggs, a bag of mail, building planks, cylinders of gas and drums of petrol. They covered this muddle of saturated goods with green tarpaulin.

  They seemed dejected, inured. Bea was the only woman among them. They spoke only occasionally in sing-song pidgin and didn’t look at Lady Myre or me. I asked a large man with a protruding lower lip, his eyes lost in fat, how we’d get into the boat.

  ‘I’ll catch you with one hand,’ he said, and laughed. ‘But when I say “Now”, let go the rope. If you don’t, you’ll be caught between the ship and the boat. There’s only a moment before the next wave.’

  Lady Myre was sober. ‘I can’t swing from that trapeze,’ she said. ‘I’m not a stunt artiste. I am –’ She slid across the deck and shrieked.

  I tried to console her. ‘Think of it as a live performance,’ I said. ‘You must get it right. Imagine the whole world’s watching you and do as you’re told.’

  I doubted she had a history of doing as she was told.

  The first boat lurched away with its sodden cargo. I said my last goodbyes to our Indian friends who seemed quiet and dignified.

  The Pitcairners exclaimed as Lady Myre’s luggage was lowered. It filled much of the second boat. She then braved the ladder, gripped it hard and froze.

  ‘Now!’ the fat man called.

  She clung on tight, a wave washed over her, he pushed the boat clear of her legs.

  ‘Now!’ he called again.

  Another wave hit her.

  ‘This is not right,’ Captain Dutt said. ‘This is very wrong.’

  ‘Now!’ the fat man called. ‘Now, now, now!’

  She spread to horizontal, her legs and arms splayed. A Pitcairn man caught and righted her. She whooped and smiled and dripped with wet. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she called up to me. ‘Like bungee jumping.’

  I made my leap of faith. The fat man caught me like a leaf. The side of the Tundra Princess looked unscalable from the boat. The sea was deafening. Steve fired the outboard motor. The prow thwacked against t
he waves, surf broke over us. ‘Yes!’ exclaimed Lady Myre at every impact. I clung to a rowlock to keep my balance and waved to the Indian crew. The ship looked like a land mass, a destination. I thought of the astonished eighteenth-century Polynesians when the Bounty appeared on the empty sea. I observed the charcoal of the sky, the roar of the sea, the taste of salt, the sharpness of the air, the size and whiteness of the ship, the still cluster of uniformed men on the deck, the widening space between the ship and the boat. The word ‘goodbye’ was in my heart. I waved and waved. I thought of Bligh in that crowded boat as he watched the Bounty sail away, of Verity blowing a kiss as I went through the departure gate, of a far-back image of an elderly man in a black coat on a forgotten jetty, waving at someone I didn’t know, who was on the same ship as I. He waved and waved. As the ship pulled away he became a speck. He ran down the jetty, took out a white handkerchief, and waved some more.

  We rounded Pitcairn to the south of the island where the sea was too wild for the Tundra Princess. The longboat cracked against waves. I shivered with cold and wiped salt water from my eyes. ‘With unremitting violence’, as Carteret said, the surf crashed against the cliff face. Frigate birds swooped low, coconut palms crested the cliff tops, clouds were trapped in the mountains. I thought of the apprehension of the women on the Bounty as they drew near to this harsh place so unlike their home.

  A cluster of people came into view on the small, roughhewn jetty at Bounty Bay. They’d been waiting since dawn, scanning the sea, knowing its power. A wave rushed the boat to the landing place. Ropes were thrown and seized. Hands hauled us to the land. Islanders anxiously enquired about the hoped-for provisions. Lady Myre and I were scrutinised. She looked dazed and was unnaturally quiet. A scattering of children stared. Someone introduced us cursorily to the group, most of whom were ‘visitors’ from New Zealand: a teacher, two social workers, two prison-builders, a locum and his wife, the governor’s representative and his wife, two policemen from Britain.