Carol told Sue Ingram, the Radio New Zealand reporter, ‘We’ve had it really good for a long time, and I don’t think a lot of our people in New Zealand could live like we do. We do live quite extravagantly. I have everything they have, plus.’
Pitcairn has been fairly prosperous for decades. Roy Sanders, the teacher in the 1950s, was taken aback to find children with gold watches and expensive fountain pens. A British official in that era reported that the islanders were reticent about their earnings; however, he added, ‘Judging from the manner in which some of them journey up and down to New Zealand—even to England—they cannot be too badly off.’
Not everyone benefits equally from the spoils of the island. Take the share-out, which is one of Pitcairn’s more charming traditions. Based on an old naval custom, it takes place in the square and is used to distribute the catch from a communal fishing trip or goods donated by a ship. The fish (or flour, or clothing, or whatever) is divided into piles equivalent to the number of households. Everybody turns their back, except for one person, who points to a pile; another person, facing away, calls out the name of a family. The process is repeated until every family has been allocated a ration—with everyone, in theory, receiving equal.
Mike Lupton-Christian told us that the share-out had become a joke, with Steve Christian and Dave Brown often siphoning off the prime items beforehand: bottles of beer, for instance, or the best cuts of meat. As Mike put it, ‘The stuff is shared out equally, only Steve’s family gets a bigger share.’ It was the same when a ship wanted to buy a consignment of fish or produce. ‘The order only goes to those in the know,’ he said.
As for the general dishonesty that Gail Cox, the Kent constable, had tried to address, Mike’s belief was that ‘everyone in the community had something on everyone else … Nobody was prepared to shop anyone else … It was a bit like the sexual abuse thing.’
The ‘sexual abuse thing’ was now plunging the island into its worst crisis since the mutineers’ day. Pitcairn’s leading men stood accused of paedophilia, a crime so abhorrent that it sometimes causes vigilante-style reprisals. Not only had they preyed on children, it was alleged, they had done so within their own small, introverted community, targeting girls who lived a few doors away—the daughters of cousins and neighbours, or, in some cases, family members.
If a prosecution was launched, though, the island’s name would be blackened, and relationships in this most interdependent of societies ruined. The community was already in a precarious state, thanks to the fragile economy and falling population. Could it survive this latest and most devastating blow? And how would fans of the legendary Bounty island react?
CHAPTER 6 The propaganda campaign starts
By mid-2001 Pitcairn was making international headlines, although the scale and true nature of the problem uncovered by English police were not yet known. ‘“Mutiny on the Bounty” island faces first trial in history,’ proclaimed The Independent in London, trumpeting a story written by one of my colleagues. ‘End of a legend as Pitcairn Island meets the modern law,’ announced the New Zealand Herald.
None of the stories running then quoted anyone on Pitcairn. The islanders, not slow to use the media in the past, refrained from making any public comment—at least for the time being. Others spoke up on their behalf, however, and chief among them was Dr Herbert Ford, an ordained Seventh-day Adventist minister and director of the Pitcairn Islands Study Center, located on the campus of Pacific Union College, California.
‘Herb’ Ford had worked in public relations and as a journalism professor at the college, which was funded and administered by the Adventist Church. He had a lifelong fascination with Pitcairn: he had met Tom and Betty Christian in California in the 1960s and visited the island briefly in 1992; he had also raised money for it, securing donations from, among others, Robert Redford and Jordan’s late King Hussein. After he retired, the college gave him some office space for a study centre, and when the child abuse story broke, Ford made himself available to media worldwide. He spoke well and could spin a good quote. He also communicated with the island weekly by ham radio, which qualified him to pronounce on the community’s ‘mood’.
In 2001 he told me, referring to the investigation, that ‘the sum of it all is pure speculation, and whether you want to call it rape, I don’t know’. He added, ‘There’s been an awful lot of Polynesian blood put into the island. The girls resorted to sexual activity at a very early age, and that was carried on by the women into Pitcairn.’ Ford claimed that Gail Cox, the English constable, had ‘ingratiated herself’ with the locals, ‘wheedling’ information out of the girls during informal ‘kitchen table’ chats, and precipitating a ‘sweep’ by police of Pitcairn women. In his view, it would not be surprising if the inhabitants of a remote tropical island were ‘out of harmony with the laws of downtown London’.
Also quoted in those early days was Glynn Christian, a former television chef and author of a biography of Fletcher Christian, Fragile Paradise. Accessible and articulate, Glynn was a seventh-generation descendant of Fletcher, and had grown up in New Zealand. In a telephone interview, he spoke of the ‘goodness and niceness’ of the Pitcairners, whom he met in 1980 while conducting research on the island, and, in a remarkable observation, said that ‘to be there makes you think there’s no such thing as original sin’. Glynn ascribed the current crisis to British neglect, which he claimed had left the Pitcairners in a social timewarp. In his opinion, the Pitcairn men had known no better. ‘It’s not wilful badness,’ he said. ‘You can’t punish a child for doing something wrong if he’s not been told that it’s wrong.’
Once the British Foreign Office had resolved to act on the child abuse allegations, it set about addressing a problem identified by its advisers many years earlier: Pitcairn’s lack of a legal infrastructure, which, given recent developments, needed to be rectified swiftly. A series of appointments were made, among the most important of which was the naming of Simon Moore as Pitcairn Public Prosecutor. Moore was already Crown Solicitor for Auckland, the chief prosecuting counsel in New Zealand’s largest and most crime-ridden city; now he was to take on a similar job for an island of a few dozen people.
Christine Gordon, a senior colleague, was appointed Deputy Public Prosecutor. The pair regarded themselves as a formidable team. Moore, an effervescent character with a mane of golden-brown hair, rode with the Auckland hunt and belonged to that city’s exclusive Northern Club. He was a master of courtroom theatrics. Gordon, a petite blonde with a ferocious grasp of detail, smiled sweetly while asking the killer questions.
Having prosecuted a previous case of child abuse in a closed community, Gordon correctly predicted that the allegations would proliferate. By mid-2001 the two lawyers had enough evidence to charge 13 men; Moore, though, paused to consider another factor—the public interest. How would a prosecution affect the tiny, isolated society? Would it really collapse if men were put in jail? He and Gordon realised that they could not answer these questions while sitting in an office block in central Auckland. They would have to make the journey to Pitcairn, to see for themselves how the community operated.
In October 2001, accompanied by Karen Vaughan, the Wellington-based detective, the prosecutors travelled to Pitcairn on a container ship, the Argentine Star. The Deputy Governor, Karen Wolstenholme, was already on the island, as were several new resident outsiders, British authorities having belatedly acknowledged the need for some external supervision. Two New Zealand social workers were watching over the half-dozen children, while two British Ministry of Defence police officers—known as MDPs and licensed to carry firearms—were monitoring the suspects and keeping communal tensions in check. The two pairs, sent out on rotating three-month tours of duty, were resented by the majority of islanders, who grumbled that