Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha

by Harvey Rachlin

  Christian appeared to have been the leader and sole cause of the mutiny in that ship. A venerable old man named John Adams, is the only surviving Englishman of those who last quitted Otaheite in her, and whose exemplary conduct, and fatherly care of the whole lot of the little colony, could not but command admiration. The pious manner in which all those born on the island have been reared, the correct sense of religion which has been instilled into their young minds by this old man, has given him the pre-eminence over the whole of them, to whom they look up as the father of one and the whole family.

  … The island must undoubtedly be that called Pitcairn, although erroneously laid down in the charts. We had the altitude of the meridian sun close to it, which gave us 25° 4' S. latitude, and 130° 25' W. longitude, by the chronometers of the Briton and Tagus.

  … I cannot, however, refrain from offering my opinion, that it is well worthy the attention of our laudable religious societies, particularly that for propagating the Christian religion, the whole of the inhabitants speaking the Otaheitan tongue as well as the English …

  Pitcairn Island, 1825. During this year the last of only a handful of major ships that would visit Pitcairn in John Adams’s lifetime came upon it. Other smaller vessels may have happened upon the island. One that did was a whaling vessel, from which a man named John Buffet was so taken with the inhabitants of Pitcairn that he decided to remain as a teacher and integrate himself with the community as a full-fledged member. But now the Blossom, a warship exploring Pitcairn’s neighborhood in the South Pacific, sighted the island and ran in for a visit. Before the Blossom could venture close in, a boat carrying John Adams and some of the island’s youths came out to greet her. Adams was in his early sixties now and portly. His youthful brown hair had disappeared on top and was white on the sides.

  Probably for most of his adult life, John Adams had worn his hair long in the back. At the time of the Bounty mutiny in 1789, seamen commonly plaited the back of their long hair into pigtails; it was not their custom to wear wigs. Short hair became fashionable some time after the mutiny, but in his isolation in the South Pacific, Adams would not have been aware of this.

  The last surviving mutineer on Pitcairn related the Bounty affair to Captain F. W. Beechy and his crew, although his story was laced with inaccuracies. A party from the Blossom was taken in pairs by the young natives to the island because of the difficult landing conditions. They were led to the village on the island, which was in an elevated area hidden under trees.

  The Blossom landing party was made to feel they were welcome and honored guests on Pitcairn. They were given comfortable sleeping accommodations, and their rests were smooth save for certain interruptions. As John Barrow noted, “After the lights [torches made of doodoe nuts strung upon the fibers of a palm leaf] were put out, the evening hymn was chanted by the whole family in the middle of the room. At early dawn they were also awaked by their morning hymn and the family devotion; after which the islanders all set out to their several occupations.”

  There was a sense of unaffectedness and purity on Pitcairn that outsiders from the civilized world would have some difficulty getting accustomed to. But in this regard, if modesty proved to be an obstacle it was only temporary, as one Blossom guest reported:

  On looking around the apartment, though it contained several beds, we found no partition, curtain, or screen; they had not yet been considered necessary. So far, indeed, from concealment being thought of, when we were about to get up, the women, anxious to show their attention, assembled to wish us good morning, and to inquire in what way they could best contribute to our comforts. Many persons would have felt awkward at rising and dressing before so many pretty black-eyed damsels, assembled in the centre of a spacious room; but by a little habit we overcame this embarrassment.

  With the proper opportunity now presenting itself, Adams, who performed wedding ceremonies for the young people of the island as well as christenings, now importuned Captain Beechy to perform a wedding ceremony for him and his wife. Indeed, a marriage ceremony took place with Beechy officiating.

  Sir John Barrow, who was born of poor parents and rose to secretary of the Admiralty, was moved by the moral and righteous path Adams had taken:

  If the sincere repentance of Adams, and his most successful exertions to train up the rising generation in piety and virtue, can be considered as expiating in some degree his former offences, this survivor is fully entitled to every indulgence that frail humanity so often requires, and which indeed has been extended to him by all the officers of the navy who have visited the island. They have all strongly felt that the merits and redeeming qualities of the latter years of his life have so far atoned for his former guilt, that he ought not to be molested, but rather encouraged, in his meritorious efforts, if not for his own sake, at least for that of the innocent young people dependent on him.

  Still it ought never to be forgotten that he was one of the first and most daring in the atrocious act of mutiny and piracy, and that, had he remained in Otaheite, and been taken home in the Pandora, nothing could have saved him from an ignominious death.

  Barrow also noted the moral and legal dilemma that those officers who visited Pitcairn must have weighed in their minds on learning the identity and crime of John Adams. Of Sir Thomas Staines, who visited the island in 1814, Barrow wrote that the British naval commander “had to struggle, on this trying occasion, between duty and feeling. It was his imperative duty to have seized and brought him a prisoner to England, where he must have been tried, and would no doubt have been convicted, though he might, and probably would, from length of time and circumstances in his favour, have received the king’s pardon. Perhaps, however, on the whole, it was fortunate, that in balancing, as it is known this gallant officer did, between the sense of duty and the sense of feeling, the latter prevailed, and justice yielded to mercy.”

  In March of 1829, John Adams passed away. It was a custom of the times to cut off the hair of deceased loved ones for mementos, and Adams’s family severed his pigtail to save as a keepsake. On Adams’s grave the islanders placed a handmade fourteen-by-twenty-seven-inch wooden tombstone (National Maritime Museum, London). A lead sheet, attached to the board by nails and its edges bent around the wood, contained a punched inscription that read: “Sacred to the memory of Mr. John Adams who died March 5, 1829 Aged 65 years.” Adams’s death left his New World society without a leader. But having been concerned about the welfare of the islanders, he had implored them before he died to select someone to guide them.

  Indeed, Adams had expressed his concern to Captain Beechy that with the growing population on Pitcairn, the island would not be able to support its inhabitants, and the captain said he would help, although that could mean resettling the people elsewhere. Disturbed by this prospect, John Barrow wrote in his 1831 book, “It is hoped, however, that no such interference will take place; for half a century at least, there is no danger of any want of food.”

  The pigtail of the last surviving Bounty mutineer on Pitcairn Island, John Adams.

  One year after Adams’s death, in 1830, a British ship arrived with clothes, tools, and other supplies as presents from the king of England for the people of Pitcairn Island. Thursday October Christian and others rushed out in boats to greet the visitors and were invited on board HMS Seringapatam, where they received the hospitalities of the British; their only disappointment was that no clergyman was going to be dropped off permanently to lead them. On the island the British guests were treated to the full amenities of the natives; the visitors took note of the grace recited before each meal and the amens at their conclusion.

  “Captain Waldegrave, like all former visitors,” wrote Sir John Barrow, “bears testimony to the kind disposition and active benevolence of these simple islanders. The children, he says, are fond and obedient, the parents affectionate and kind towards their children. None of the party ever heard a harsh word made use of by one towards another. They never slander or speak ill of one another.�
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  But Barrow also noted his concern about the future of the New World of Pitcairn. He wrote, “It is impossible not to feel a deep interest in the welfare of this little society, and at the same time an apprehension that something may happen to disturb that harmony and destroy that simplicity of manners which hitherto characterised it.”

  By now, the children of the mutineers had not only grown into adults, but they too had children who were young men and women. This “little society” had indeed been touched from the outside, as two others, after John Buffet, decided to stay behind on the island after their vessels passed by. Barrow noted that one of them, George Hunn Nobbs, who was born in 1799 and began service in the navy in 1811, came to Pitcairn in 1828, married Fletcher Christian’s granddaughter, and introduced a legal code specifying various crimes such as adultery and their punishments.

  After Captain Beechy alerted the British government of the islanders’ risk of food shortage, attempts were made to remove the group, but for one reason or another the plans were never carried out. HMS Seringapatam had come for this purpose, but Captain Waldegrave, finding the people comfortable and happy in their surroundings and not desiring any sort of change, let them stay.

  John Barrow was so concerned about the future of the Pitcairn natives and the preservation of their innocence that he concluded his book with this thought:

  Happy, thrice happy people! May no improper intruders thrust themselves into your peaceful and contented society! May that Providence which has hitherto protected you, still continue to pour down those blessings upon you, of which you appear to be so truly sensible, and for which you are justly thankful! May it throw round the shores of your enviable little Eden, “cherubim and a flaming sword,” to guard its approachers from those who would endanger your peace; and above all, shield you from those, who would perplex and confuse your unsophisticated minds, by mysterious doctrines which they do not themselves comprehend! Be assured that, so long as you shall adhere to the line of conduct you have hitherto pursued, and be contented with your present lot, your happiness is secure; but once admit ignorant or false teachers among you, and from that period you may date the commencement of misfortunes and misery!

  Pitcairn Island, 1852. Rear Admiral Sir Fairfax Moresby, who was born just three years before the Bounty mutiny and who in 1870 would become admiral of the Royal Naval fleet, visited Pitcairn in HMS Portland, the first admiral of the Royal Navy to do so. He discovered that the island’s pastor, George Hunn Nobbs, was not officially vested, so he left on the island his ship’s chaplain, the Rev. W. H. Holman, so Nobbs could return to England to become ordained, which he was later that same year.

  Reverend Holman returned to England in 1853, nine months after his arrival on Pitcairn, and brought back with him John Adams’s pigtail and other artifacts he had purchased on Pitcairn. John Adams had never returned to England after he left in 1787 on the Bounty, spending some forty years of his life living as a fugitive in the South Pacific. But twenty-four years after his death, his pigtail found its way back to his motherland.

  The population on Pitcairn continued to increase after John Adams’s death, and in 1856, many of the islanders were evacuated to Norfolk Island. Three years later, in 1859, Pitcairn was gradually resettled, and a new stone tombstone for John Adams was erected with the same inscription as the original, except for a wistful two words tacked on at the end: “in hope.” Some of the Pitcairn colony that was evacuated died on Norfolk Island, such as George Hunn Nobbs, who passed away in 1884. In 1891 John Adams’s original wooden tombstone was displayed at the Royal Naval Exhibition in Chelsea, courtesy of Admiral Moresby’s sonin-law.

  The men and women who first settled on Pitcairn no doubt realized that in their remote paradise, they would become latter-day Adams and Eves. Unfortunately some of the roguish Englishmen could not maintain the civility necessary to achieve harmony. Incurring the wrath of the natives, they destroyed the innocence of their new world. But finally the dust of malice cleared and good prevailed. And so today, and for posterity, we have a relic of one of the original Adamses of Pitcairn Island—a plait of hair that, for all its quaintness, represents the spirit of repentance, virtue, and redemption that shaped this little Garden of Eden, settled in desperation in 1790.

  LOCATION: National Maritime Museum, London.

  Footnote

  *When the government sent the Pandora to the Pacific to capture the Bounty fugitives, it had issued descriptions of the wanted men. Adams’s description, which of course was unknown to him, read:

  Alex: Smith 22 (age) Ab. 5ft. 5 in. High. Brown Complexion. Brown Hair, Strong Made, very much pitted with the Small Pox, and very much tatowed on his Body, Legs Arms and Feet, and has a Scar on his Right Foot where he has been cut with a Wood Axe.

  THE DOUBLEDAY BALL

  DATE: 1839 (by tradition).

  WHAT IT IS: A ball associated with the alleged inventor of baseball, Abner Doubleday.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It is a small baseball stuffed with compressed fabric. Its cover is a single piece of brown leather cut into “petals,” which are sewn together around the stuffing; some of the seams are coming apart.

  America loves a good myth. Among its most venerable apocryphal stand-bys are that the young George Washington declared “I cannot tell a lie” when asked by his father if he had chopped down the cherry tree; and that Abraham Lincoln composed his famous address on the train to Gettysburg. Curiously, these nineteenth-century fabrications (which have their origins, respectively, in Mason Locke Weems’s 1800 The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington, and spurious eyewitness accounts of passengers on the same train on which the sixteenth president rode to Gettysburg) have stubbornly persisted to the present. The story of the invention of America’s national pastime, baseball, also has a fanciful provenance, crafted not to honor a real early architect of the sport but to meet the needs of a later time. But what do the Spanish-American War, a deranged wife killer, a six-year-old boy, and a ragged old ball found in an attic trunk have to do with the fabrication that the sport of baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday?

  The story of the origin of baseball has for generations been wrapped in the legend that Abner Doubleday conceived the sport in Cooperstown, New York, some eleven years prior to the midpoint of the nineteenth century. The myth received its substantiation not from any records or eyewitness accounts of the day, but in the tenuous findings of a committee formed in the first decade of the twentieth century, validated and sanctioned years later by a somewhat mysterious discovery. Consequently, people have commonly accepted the notion that while baseball evolved from previous forms of ball games, it was Abner Doubleday, the nineteenth-century West Point cadet who went on to become a general in the American Civil War, who formulated the rules by which modern-day baseball is played. The Doubleday creation myth says much about how falsehoods enter the history books and deserves examination.

  As a game played with simple equipment, essentially just a bat and ball, modern-day baseball indeed has antecedents that stretch back to some of the earliest human societies. The sport’s evolution through the centuries was influenced by many factors, including culture and social mores.

  The basic physical elements of baseball are throwing, hitting, catching, and running. These elements were constituents of some of the earliest human games. The Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, among other societies, are all known to have had stick-and-ball games; later, the Mayans, in the Western Hemisphere, also played such games.

  References to stick-and-ball games can be found in written sources of the Middle Ages, including the 1086 Domesday Book. In France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was an Easter tradition to play stick-and-ball games, but it is not clear why.

  Civil War general Abner Doubleday may have been an authoritative commander on the battlefield, but he didn't invent the baseball field.

  On the family tree of stick-and-ball games, cricket, which developed in the Middle Ages, is a near relative to b
aseball. It is a field game with eleven players on each side, using bats (with a blade), a ball, and two wickets (each formed by three stumps and two bails, or pieces of wood, across their top); runs are scored when the batter, standing at a wicket, hits the ball thrown to him by the bowler and dashes to the wicket across from him before any of the fielders spread out on the field can return the ball to the wicket. Cricket itself is a descendant of ancient games, and although a national sport of England, its origins are in dispute; some say it developed in France.

  Because under its old rules a cricket match required a great deal of time to play, in the British tradition the sport was an aristocratic pastime. Indeed, by the early 1800s, a proper cricket match could take a good three days to play.

  By the early eighteenth century another stick-and-ball game called “base-ball” was played in England, but its rules are not clear. It was undoubtedly played by children; in 1744, England’s first specialized children’s publisher, John Newberry, issued a collection of rhymed poems accompanied by woodcut illustrations about children’s games, including base-ball, entitled A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. The first of two publications of the book in America occurred in 1762, when Hugh Gaine, a New York printer, published the book with the title A Little Pretty Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly. Under a woodcut picturing young players wearing hats, standing at posts spaced apart in the form of a triangle, was a quatrain, titled “Base-Ball,” that described how the game was played:

  The Ball once struck off,