The defence for the accused was that the age of consent in Polynesia was lower than in Britain and that Pitcairners had renounced British citizenship when they burned the Bounty, an act they ritually celebrated by setting fire to an effigy of it every January. From then on, they said, Pitcairners ceased to be under British protection or accountable to British law. It was claimed that Britain had never taken formal possession of Pitcairn or officially informed the islanders that British legislation such as the Sexual Offences Act of 1956 was applicable to them. Pitcairn had no trained police, lawyers or appeal structure. Its own ordinances were to do with property and land use. And now Pitcairn crime was to be tried by New Zealand lawyers, under English law. Bewilderment was real. The alleged offences went back so far, the defendants were accused of breaking laws they said they didn’t know existed. ‘No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence at the time it was committed’ was a clause of the Human Rights Act of 1998 according to British law. Did that statute apply to Pitcairn? From the girls’ point of view sex was violent and unwanted and they had no knowledge of their rights.
There had been previous convictions on the island in the 1970s for ‘carnal knowledge of minors’, rape and the abuse of girls. Men had served three-month terms in the old prison, which now housed farm machinery, and had then gone free. No reform of the sexual culture of the island followed those sentences. A couple of wardens had been sent from New Zealand to guard the prisoners, give them meals and release them to work the longboats.
Rosie blamed the bringing in of illicit alcohol by outsiders and the demise of religion, which she thought had led to a culture of wrongdoing by most of the men of a certain age. Hank didn’t want to talk about any of it. He disliked the divisiveness of it all.
The defence lawyers had encouraged the men to plead not guilty and to expect to be freed on legal technicalities and receive compensation. A bill passed by the British parliament in 2002 allowed the trials to take place in New Zealand, which would have been more expedient and less costly. But two years later the accused won a legal right to be tried on Pitcairn. So a prison had to be built, in case charges were upheld, and satellite communication links were installed. Three judges, prosecution and defence lawyers, court staff and journalists were to travel to the island, doubling the number of people there. Witnesses abroad would give evidence by video.
Rosie didn’t see how there could be a good outcome for the islanders. If the defence won on the grounds that Pitcairners weren’t answerable to British law, where would their subsidy and support then come from? They lacked the expertise or resources for self-government. They made no real money from selling stamps and coins, T-shirts, macramé baskets, fish and dried bananas. And if they weren’t answerable to British law, was Pitcairn a zone of immunity from any crime? What code should they live by when instinct and ancestral law had got them into this trouble? If the accused men pleaded guilty, they’d serve some kind of sentence, it would all be over and wouldn’t attract the curiosity of the wider world. Pitcairn society wouldn’t be so damaged. Again she talked of the need for restorative justice to heal wounds, teach new attitudes and help victims and offenders create a safe community. But the United Kingdom and New Zealand governments thought that without a full police process it would seem as if the offences were being overlooked. Abuse was endemic. The crimes were grave and violent and the victims were children.
It seemed a beleaguered place. It rained and rained. Many times, because of cyclones, storms and the howling wind, the longboats couldn’t brave the sea or reach the shore. The previous year four government officials had tried to visit to assess the needs of the islanders. They travelled via Mangareva in Graham Wragg’s catamaran. For four nights the sea was too rough to approach the makeshift jetty and they rode the waves. A longboat then went out for them. They transferred to it, but after an hour’s respite the wind again picked up, the waves raged, the boat couldn’t safely approach the shore and they spent a night in the open boat in torrential rain. At daylight it went to the lee of the island, to the rocks at west harbour where there was no jetty or mooring place. The officials waded ashore exhausted, bedraggled and freezing, their clothes and belongings soaked, then clambered half a mile along the rocks and got on the back of muddy quad bikes in pouring rain.
Rosie thought the experience might help focus their minds to the fact that if Pitcairners were to survive with any quality of life they must have a proper jetty and investment in their island.
Nola Young came to collect Lady Myre and me at ten in the morning for Culture Day at the school. It was to be about the virtues of the indigenous manioc root. She was a small, preoccupied woman and she carried a basket of dark-brown crinkly roots. The lanes were slippery from the rain. As we walked, she told us the day would come when no one would visit the island and no one would leave it. The good would then be saved and the evil damned. ‘Then you’ll be among the good people,’ I said, encouragingly. She replied that she doubted there were any righteous people on the island.
The schoolhouse was well equipped with maps, computers, globes and books. It had five interconnecting rooms, which seemed a lot for the four pupils: Raymond, Ariel, Pania and Mason. Their ages ranged from four to fourteen. Mary and the two social workers were waiting for us. The child-sized chairs were arranged in a circle. Lady Myre took off her Wellingtons and asked Raymond, aged four, if he’d like to see her toenails. He ran away and hid and had to be retrieved. Ariel, the other small boy, reprimanded me sharply when I inadvertently used the boys’ toilet.
I struggled to understand the sense of Culture Day. Nola boiled up fat in a tin on a precarious burner. We were all given knives and we peeled the roots and cut them into chips.
‘How do you spell manioc?’ I asked, as the event was meant to be educational.
‘I don’t know,’ Nola replied.
‘Is it an indigenous plant?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said again.
‘Where does it grow?’
‘Here, there and all around.’
‘Can you mash it as well as make it into chips?’
‘I suppose so, if you feel like it.’
Thus manioc. When the fat was hot, she put in the chips and they sizzled as chips do. Mary proposed that while they fried, we play games. The first was Throw the Ball. Whoever threw it must ask a question of the person chosen to catch it. She handed Lady Myre a pink fluffy ball. Lady Myre threw to Pania.
‘What’s your favourite colour?’ she asked.
‘Purple at the moment,’ Pania replied then threw the ball to me.
‘What’s your earliest memory?’
‘Being pushed in a pram,’ I said. ‘Facing the street and wondering where my mother and brothers had gone.’
I asked Nola the same question. Visiting her mother’s grave when she was three, she said, and began to cry. She restrained her tears and threw the ball to Lady Myre.
‘What’s your first memory?’ she asked.
Lady Myre became discursive about a mouse on a mantelpiece and a nanny who sat on an open box of dates. ‘Whoops,’ she cried as she tired of the game and threw the ball in the air. It landed in the bubbling fat. The children perked up. The two youngest became unruly, dashed off, and were again retrieved. One of the social workers fished the ball out of the pan. It was no longer pink and fried fluff mixed with the chips.
Mary produced a sparkling wand and progressed to the Truth Game. She explained the rules. Whoever held the wand would be questioned. Their replies must be truthful, the wand would know if lies were told. I remembered a similar game one New Year’s Eve with questions of a sexual sort: When did you last masturbate? Where’s the strangest place you’ve had sex?… I was handed the wand. A social worker, Barbara, a tall woman with hair too long for her age, had rehearsed her questions. Had I written a book called Selkirk’s Island?… Would I tell them about this book and show them this island o
n the wall map?
The intention of Culture Day was plain. I used the wand as a pointer to show the children where Juan Fernandez was on the map of the world and its position in relation to their own island. I explained how a Scottish mariner called Alexander Selkirk came to be marooned there more than two hundred years ago, after a row with the captain of his ship, how he was alone for four years before a ship of rescue came, how at first he was depressed, but then he worked to survive, how a writer called Daniel Defoe then wrote a book called Robinson Crusoe inspired by Selkirk’s experiences …
The children were perhaps more interested in Juan Fernandez than in the bubbling chips. I put the truth wand down and asked the smallest boy, the four-year-old, what ten things he’d take with him if such a marooning happened to him. He said he’d take his toys and his teddy bear, but then he became coolly practical. He was an island boy, a survivor. He’d take a tent, a cooking pot, a sleeping bag, a knife, wire and hooks for fishing, matches, boots, a hammer, his cat called JJ to catch the rats. The other children took up the theme, the wand forgotten. Raymond said he’d take a gun, various tools for boatbuilding, and his guitar. Pania said she couldn’t survive without her collection of rock music.
‘You’d want to take a notebook wouldn’t you?’ Barbara said to me, ‘so that you could write about your experiences and sell the serial rights for megabucks.’ Was I going to write about Pitcairn? Wanda, the other social worker, asked. I said I didn’t know. Maybe. But I wasn’t quite sure how.
The manioc chips were drained and there was a desultory picking at them. They tasted of potato. ‘I’ve been rumbled,’ I said to Lady Myre as we walked back to Rosie’s house.
She was thrilled. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘They’re bound to get us off the island now. I knew you’d be my saviour.’
Wayne was waiting. He looked official. Was I a writer? he asked.
‘You could find out from the internet,’ I told him. He’d checked. I’d written about Selkirk’s island and sundry women of whom he hadn’t heard. ‘Are you going to write about the trials?’ he asked. ‘Are you going to sell your story to the papers?’
I said I wasn’t a journalist. I didn’t know how to talk to him about chaos theory and Christian’s coconut, and Rosie’s blouse, and Lady Myre, and my own loss of certainties. He seemed too directional.
He told me he wanted me off the island. He feared either I or Lady Myre might get shot. He’d made further enquiries about ships. The Buzzard Bay would call on 30 September, bound for Panama. Two cruise ships, the Princess and the Emerald, might be persuaded to divert on their way to Easter Island.
‘Hooray,’ Lady Myre said, then talked of Sir Roland’s connections. I said Panama wasn’t convenient and that I’d rather Auckland or Tahiti.
Such suspicion made me feel guilty. It was feared I’d quiz little children and the frail elderly for revelations of a sexual sort. ‘Perhaps there’s room in the prison for me too,’ I joked.
When he left, the atmosphere was strained. I’d been less than candid but nothing about the place invited candour. I thought again of all the things the island didn’t have: a hotel, cafe or bar, classes in anything useful, a cinema or theatre, and of how destructive and undermining for everyone these trials seemed to be.
We splashed to church in wellingtons with a change of shoes in bags. Rosie wore the Fenwicks blouse. She hoicked at it, wanting to make it respectable. I wore my better Rohan waistcoat and drawstring trousers. Lady Myre started out in white, with a silver sequined shawl.
The Bounty Bible had a notice beside it saying it must not be photographed: photos could be bought at the museum. There were a dozen varnished wooden benches, a table with a lace cloth and a vase of sparse flowers, a painting of a Pitcairn cliff face with palm trees, the pounding surf, and THE LORD IS MY ROCK AND MY SALVATION in capitals in the sky. Edward Young’s great-great-great-granddaughter sat at the simplest of electric organs, there were two speakers fixed to the wall, there was a reckoner of the day’s hymns: 127, 378, 130.
The congregation was small: all the visitors and six islanders. Hank began by thanking God for the day and for bringing Lady Myre and me safely to the island, then pondered the divine motive for making it impossible to unload the supplies. The prison’s perimeter fence was now in Antwerp and it would cost £100,000 for a ship to bring it back to Pitcairn.
We sang the first hymn, ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah’. The first verse was delivered in near unison ordinarily enough:
Guide me, o thou Great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through this barren land;
I am weak, but thou art mighty;
Hold me with thy powerful hand.
Then came the refrain and Lady Myre took off. The mood focused. Other thoughts were impossible. Had it been the Shaw Savill Line neighbouring ships might have turned course in wonder:
Bread of heaven, bread of heaven,
Feed me till I want no more;
Feed me till I want no more.
Suzanne couldn’t match her, there weren’t enough stops on her organ. Into Lady Myre’s singing went the passion of her plight and the force of her voice was extraordinary.
Hank’s sermon was about the dire consequences that awaited those who disobeyed the strictures of the Sabbath. He was a handsome man with characteristic Polynesian features, though his frame was tall and slight: olive skin, dark hair and eyes, flat nose. God had punished his daughter with appendicitis after she took a Sabbath swim at St Paul’s Point; his father had loaded his boat on a Saturday morning and the goat had three kids that died; his mother made a fish stew, so the well burst and they lost their water supply; Hank chopped wood and two days later his wife fell off a rock and broke her ankle; Barbara hung out her washing and Ray got a middle-ear infection. The list was long of God’s retribution, of the correlating of random events, of an imaginative assumption of cause and effect. Was it, I wondered, religion, chaos theory, or just bad science without requisite tests and trials? I mused on how flexible it was, the idea of what caused what.
We moved to all six verses of ‘Amazing Grace’ and again Lady Myre’s performance was extravagant:
Amazing grace how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
She departed on an unnerving descant of her own devising, and alarmingly stressed the words ‘wretch’, ‘lost’, and ‘blind’. No creature could have been more incongruous on Pitcairn Island and I wondered at the strange accident of dispersal that had landed her there.
As we walked down the lane together Rosie commented that Lady Myre had a voice in her.
‘Yes,’ I said, with ‘Bread of heaven’ resounding in my head. I sensed Rosie was longing to get out of her blouse and into normal clothes. I wanted to tell her to use it as a shoe cloth, that it didn’t matter, I’d made a mistake, not known where I was going, what to expect, or what she’d like, want or need.
She talked of the islanders’ conversion to Adventism. Of the two Seventh Day Adventist evangelists in the Napa Valley, who in 1876 read of the Bounty story and the Pitcairners. They filled a box with religious tracts and sailed from San Francisco in a schooner called St John. It was the first of six crusades. All the Pitcairners converted within days. They were baptised, they repented of all sin and agreed to live by the Ten Commandments. The pigs were shoved over the cliffs: pork was forbidden, so was shellfish, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, homosexuality, bestiality, abortion and sex outside marriage. But the big thing about Adventism was the imminent Second Coming of Christ, when the righteous dead would be resurrected to meet up with the living righteous and Him. Sinners would stay dead for another thousand years. This coming was supposed to have happened in 1884, but Rosie thought it could be any day now.
She regretted that the island had no resident pastor at this difficult time and feared there might be a move against Adventism. There was talk of a Church of England pastor bei
ng sent to Pitcairn. These were uncertain times and none of them knew what the future held. But for the present it was boring when only Hank or Michael Young preached the sermon every week. Perhaps I’d like to have a go at it. Or Lady Myre.
37
I wondered if I’d turn out to be one of those strange travellers who holed up on the island from time to time and shaped its random destiny. Like John Buffett, a twenty-six-year-old shipwright from Bristol. He arrived on a whaling ship in 1823. Within eight weeks he’d married Dorothy Young and taken over as pastor in the church and sole teacher in the school.
Five years later a pseudo-aristocratic English scoundrel called George Nobbs arrived. He forced the islanders to serve him, flogged them with a cat-o’-nine-tails, made them forfeit their land if they fornicated, fathered two illegitimate children and became alcoholic on liquor from a still he devised.
Or there was Hettie André, who in 1893 sailed from the Napa Valley, set up a Seventh Day Adventist school, taught the islanders basket-weaving and wood-carving, discouraged them from dancing and made them wear long-sleeved blouses to cover up their arms.
Unsuitable people became heroes and leaders. I’d seen in the Greenwich Maritime Museum that an amnesty had been granted to John Adams in 1825 because of all he was deemed to have contributed to the Pitcairn community. I wondered about the content of my sermon. Perhaps I might talk about my mother’s demise and the interruption of the linear narrative of my life with Verity. Or I might tell the congregation that they were living in the chaos of postmodernism and that the Jesus myth was obsolete. I’d advise them to leave the past behind, think of the island as a microcosm and try to create a place of fairness, a paradise of the world. Then I’d say, ‘Turn to hymn number 398: “Lift up your hearts, lift up your voice”.’
Coconut Chaos Page 14
