Island at the edge of the world
Pitcairn’s Tahitian foremothers called it Hitiaurevareva, the island far away. It remains one of the world’s most inaccessible places. But Pitkerners relish what they have - rather than what they miss.
Lost in the blue of the Pacific, Pitcairn Island is one of the loneliest places on Earth. Visitors, imports and exports are carried in on the powerful ocean swells that pound the volcanic outcrop.
The island is more than 500 kilometres – a 32-hour ocean crossing – from the nearest airstrip. Travellers must fly from Papaeete to the 3500ft-long runway on Mou Totegegie, a coral reef in the Gambier Islands, the most remote archipelago of French Polynesia.
The 1700km flight runs only on Tuesdays, and takes almost five hours, with a stopoff on Hao, the former military base from which France ran its nuclear testing. Luggage is strictly weighed. The plane lands at 1.20pm and, shortly after, a barge makes the 9km trip across the windswept lagoon, motoring around flying fish and black pearl farms.
From there, the Silver Supporter, an orange-hulled cargo ship leased by the British Government, makes the voyage to Pitcairn. It leaves French waters and sails into Britain’s only overseas territory in the Pacific. Wellington is 5333km away, and Santiago, Chile, 5776km. Ships used to pass more frequently, on lanes that ran between New Zealand and the Panama Canal. The island’s steep contours make landing an aircraft impossible.
Fewer people now visit Pitcairn than climb Mt Everest in a year. Even getting on to the 5sq km island is an adventure. Its towering black granite cliffs and rocky coastline are continually pounded by waves. Visiting ships must moor one nautical mile out to sea and wait for the islanders to arrive in one of their aluminium-hulled longboats.
First, the cargo is unloaded. Oil drums, containers, even vehicles, are manoeuvred into the deep belly of the boat, with practised skill. There is constant movement, both vessels pitch and roll on the churning sapphire ocean. A crane swings back and forth slowly, and the islanders keep constant tension on the ropes. They are barefoot, laughing and utterly confident.
On the tiller is coxswain Jay Warren, 63, a sixth-generation descendant of the Bounty mutineers. He’s flanked by two of his grandsons, Jayden, 21, and Kimiora Warren-Peu, 18. They banter back and forth in Pitkern, a lullaby mix of old English and Tahitian.
Mayor Shawn Christian, 44, oversees the unloading, shimmying up and down the side of the ship and shouting instructions. When it’s time to alight passengers, he coaxes them down a swinging Jacob’s rope ladder. As the swell reaches its peak, he catches their fall and dumps them on the floor of the longboat. There is no safe harbour on Pitcairn. Instead the crew hold for just the right breaker, and ride it in through a narrow channel that ends behind a breakwater.
It’s wet and thrilling and terrifying in equal measure. On cargo day, almost everyone rides their quad bikes and tractors down to The Landing.
From the harbour, the Hill of Difficulty rises steeply 70 metres to Adamstown, the only settlement. It’s paved, but soon gives way to unsealed tracks, sticky with the island’s inescapable red clay mud.
It takes most of the island to restock the general store, run by Olive Christian, with tractors running back and forth most of the day. When the latest supply run arrived in June, there were just four loaves of bread left in the shop’s freezers.
The shop opens three mornings a week, for an hour. It’s stocked with everything from tinned and frozen goods, spices, to cake mix and Lindauer bubbles. There’s even a chocolate fridge. A European Union development grant is building the islanders a new shop, on a plot next door.
Simon Young, 53, editor of the island’s newspaper, the Pitcairn
Miscellany, says the shop is a focal point. ‘‘When it’s open everybody is there – there is nobody who you don’t see.’’
He moved to the island 20 years ago, with wife Shirley, 58. ‘‘I like the fact that I know everybody on the island, and interact with them, and there is no-one who surprises me. The way the community comes together in emergencies. All these things I love.’’
An alluring combination of isolation, and a tightknit community, dependent on each other, is what draws settlers to this ‘‘Paradise Lost’’.
Pitcairn is a society that has largely been left alone since it was founded in 1790 by nine British mutineers and 18 Tahitians. The island was wrongly charted when it was discovered in 1767, and Captain Cook struggled to locate it six years later. It took the HMS Bounty crew nine months of sailing across the Pacific to find the island. They remained undiscovered until 1808, by which time only one mutineer, John Adams, remained alive.
‘‘I have never experienced a sense of isolation here, ever,’’ says Heather Menzies, a descendant who moved to Pitcairn in 2005. ‘‘It is a very supportive community.’’
‘‘Everybody is so close, you are one big family,’’ Brenda Lupton-Christian says, ‘‘regardless of whether you might be a Young, Warren or Christian,’’ she adds, referring to the island’s original family names.
The square is the island’s heart. One one side is the Seventh-day Adventist Church, where Saturday services are attended by half the islanders. Next to it are the council office, the Treasury Office and the Post Office. Opposite, a walkway leads to the medical centre.
The public hall stands on the other side of the square, behind the Bounty’s Anchor. It is court house, council chambers, and social meeting place. ‘‘Birthdays are a big deal,’’ says Menzies.
‘‘Old and young will celebrate birthdays and that will often entail a public dinner, where basically the whole country gets together and celebrates.’’
The biggest celebration is Bounty Day, to mark the burning of the ship by the mutineers on January 23. ‘‘It’s a fish fry at The Landing,’’ Lupton-Christian says. ‘‘While we are out fishing, the ones who don’t go will create a model [of the ship] to burn. We finish off the night with fireworks.’’
The island is also home to the world’s most remote pizzeria, run by Andy Christian. Open on Fridays, orders have to be phoned in by Thursday night. There’s also a speakeasy – the Whaletooth Tavern, in the home of ‘‘Pirate’’ Pawl Warren and his Kiwi partner Sue O’Keefe – where visitors are dared to neck tequila from a humpback whale’s tooth.
Over drinks, Warren shows off a collection of Bounty artefacts, and the top of his thumb, now stored in a specimen jar after being amputated in an accident. The mishap doesn’t stop him strumming on an intricately carved mandolin.
However, many of the islanders are strictly religious and don’t drink alcohol. They come together on Saturday mornings, for bible reading and an hour-long service.
A new chapter
The island has weathered dark days. Child sex abuse trials in 2004 brought shame to its shores. Today, the island is trying to write a new chapter.
‘‘There are much better stories to tell,’’ Menzies says. ‘‘We have been more proactive ourselves about that: we are telling our own stories and that is where the point of power lies.’’
The authorities are also trying to change the narrative and are investing in tourism, and more infrastructure, such as internet connectivity and a more frequent shipping service, to encourage repopulation. But the islanders also cling proudly to their traditions and history.
‘‘It’s very important that Pitcairn maintains its Bounty descendant population,’’ Menzies explains.
‘‘The children here who are eighth and ninth generation, [if] you ask them anything about their heritage and their ancestry they will be able to tell you exactly who they are.
‘‘It is a very interesting thing to see, people so solid in their sense of identity. It is rare.’’
Pitcairn Governor Laura Clarke, who is also Britain’s high commissioner to New Zealand, has twice visited the island.
‘‘It is an extraordinary thing to have an island with that heritage, with that history, with the language. It is really special. If it had a Unesco-type designation for human communities, Pitcairn would get it.
‘‘The Pitkerners have survived against the odds since 1790, and have been through ups and downs. It really captures people’s imagination.
‘‘It is in our interests to really support it, to make a go of it so it can thrive into the future.’’
Meralda Warren is a guardian of the island’s past. At home, with her 83-year-old mother Mavis, she speaks the local dialect, Pitkern, and teaches it to the island’s schoolchildren. It blends English, Tahitian and Creole, the original tongues of the mutineers. ‘‘Pitkern is my first language. If we are amongst our own we speak only Pitkern. It is always evolving.’’
The Pitkern greeting is ‘‘Whata way ye?’’ Food is whettle, good food would be ‘‘gude whettle’’.
Warren, whose family have lived in their Maimiti Haven home for 64 years, is also an artist and poet, and has written two recipe books.
‘‘There’s a traditional dish that only a few of us make now, called a pilhi, using green banana. We refer to the banana as plain. We use a special stone that has been handed down through the generations that is like a grater, called a yolau.
‘‘We also do a taytay pilhi with kumara, and one with pumpkin. It’s quite a bland dish, but it complements the fish dishes.’’
Pota is another traditional meal, made from mashed palm leaves, coconut cream and a little lime juice. Crabs and local fish, like nanwei, are abundant and the island’s trees groan with breadfruit, citrus, melons, mangos, papaya. Pretty hibiscus, lantana and frangipani blooms line the dirt tracks, laced between monkey puzzle and twisted banyan trees.
Islanders grow vegetables in the benign climate and fertile volcanic soil, but supplement their diet with frozen produce, shipped from Countdown supermarkets. Soft rainwater is the main supply, gathered in
huge tanks or bladders.
Traditional homes still heat their water in a ‘‘copper’’ – a drum with a fire fuelled with roseapple wood – but that practice is dying out with modern appliances. Islanders hoard everything useful and recycle 85 per cent of their rubbish. The rest is burned.
‘‘We have changed in our lifestyle,’’ Warren says. ‘‘We have embraced outside influence. But some of us are quite staunch in keeping some of our traditions going.’’
The island might be connected through technology, but physical distance is still a major problem. There is a resident doctor, and a well-equipped medical centre, but with no airstrip, evacuation is by sea only. In dire emergencies, islanders have made the perilous journey in their open-deck long boats to Mangareva.
‘‘Don’t get sick is the first rule,’’ Simon Young says. ‘‘Be very careful, extra cautious and don’t have an accident. You are talking days, rather than moments, to get to a hospital, and that’s not good.
‘‘You even have to go off for dental work because we don’t have a dentist. We are waiting for Star Trek for teleportation.’’
Cultural tradeoff
Most Pitkerners are happy to trade off modern luxuries and conveniences for the Arcadian lifestyle. Brenda Lupton-Christian’s first husband was in the Royal Air Force, so for years she lived in military bases around Europe. She misses only Black Magic chocolate boxes.
‘‘There you are in a confined space, here you are free,’’ she says of the island where she was born.
‘‘You don’t have retail therapy, or 24-hour service, but it is a beautiful, free place. It is the freedom of not having to lock things up. Or to go fishing. I live on the ocean, just about, because I love fishing.’’
Menzies gets her culture fix when she visits Auckland.
‘‘I’ve got grown children and grandchildren in New Zealand, and my mother is still alive so I have always made a point of being able to get home and see family.
‘‘And so then, I do the cafes, and the dinners and the art galleries and everything that I need to do to soak that up.’’
But she loves returning. ‘‘It is the smell of the island. It is nature and it just has a particular fragrance. As soon as you get on land you are smelling that feeling of being at home.
‘‘It is so beautifully quiet and, when the lights go out at 10pm, all you can hear is the sea. We can hear a whale’s tail slapping if the wind is blowing in the right direction.
‘‘And we have the most beautiful dark skies here. It is really something to come home to.’’