Pitcairn Island

What do Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard, Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins have in common? They all portrayed Fletcher Christian or Capt. Bligh in a film depicting Mutiny on the

Bounty. The mutiny, the getaway, Bligh’s 2,000mile open-boat voyage to safety, the mission to capture the mutineers half an uncharted world away, the trial, the surprise witness, the hangings and the mystery of what happened to those who sailed the Bounty into thin air — all were real events that epitomize how truth can be stranger than fiction.

Time and imagination have allowed portals for fiction to intrude on this tale, but some things are known. Christian, some mutineers, their newfound Tahitian wives and some Tahitian men fetched up on Pitcairn Island. There, they burned the ship, like a bridge in a war. Their descendants live on the Southern Pacific island still.

We left Auckland, New Zealand, in early December and dipped down to pick up the Roaring Forties. We ran our easting down through Christmas, across the date line and smack into the new year. Albatrosses rode low over the combers as we crossed one time zone after another without bothering to change clocks. Like the

Bounty descendants on Pitcairn Island, we were very much alone. Time was irrelevant except for sight takings.

After three weeks of horizon, Pitcairn poked up. There is no harbor. You anchor in the lee, and the lee does change. Our crew was large enough that some could mind the vessel while others spent days in the hospitality of the islanders, and then we switched. I stayed with Tom Christian. You know how in some towns certain surnames seem to fill up more than their fair share of the phone book?

Pitcairn Island is about 1 mile by 2 miles, population 48 or 49. All permanent residents are related to the Bounty mutineers, and all are well aware of this fact. Their English is perfect, but they easily shift into a dialect that is more than a blend of English and Tahitian: It is an 18th-century melange of the two tongues, and therefore even stranger to our ears.

We fished off the rocks. We hiked the highlands, looking for the Galapagos tortoises rumored to be in the bush. We bathed in a wood-fired bathtub beneath breadfruit trees. I called home on the ham radio, a device the islanders were exceedingly skilled at using. One night we traded sea chanties in the schoolhouse. The anchor recovered from the Bounty, very real, was just outside the door.

There is no easy way to access Pitcairn Island. That is why Fletcher Christian went there. And if such solitude is what you want, too, there is no better place to have it.

Capt. Daniel Parrott spent 20 years voyaging worldwide aboard traditional sailing ships. In 2003 he joined the faculty of Maine Maritime Academy, where he teaches navigation, seamanship and bridge resource management.