The plan was to conduct two sets of trials: the first on Pitcairn, the second in New Zealand. Preparations got under way on the island, where the accused men helped to build their own prison. The locals wanted the press excluded; as a compromise, and to prevent the place from being swamped, Britain decided to accredit just six journalists. Media organisations around the world were invited to make a pitch.
On holiday in Japan at the time, I submitted a rather hurried application, pointing out my long-standing interest in the story. I also mentioned that I would be able to file for The Independent’s sister paper, the New Zealand Herald. Shortly afterwards, I was informed that I had been chosen as a member of the media pool.
In 2004 I spent six weeks on the island, reporting on one of the most bizarre court cases imaginable. Outside court, I bumped into the main protagonists every day, which was inevitable, since I was living in the middle of their tiny community. Some of those encounters were civil; others were less so, but I was able to observe at close quarters how Pitcairn functioned: the gossip, the feuding, the claustrophobic intimacy—and the power dynamics that had allowed the abuse to flourish.
The legal saga did not end with the verdicts and sentences handed down on the island by visiting judges. It continued until late 2007, with further trials held in Auckland and the offenders appealing to every court up to the Privy Council in London. As I followed these twists and turns in both hemispheres, my mind buzzed with unanswered questions.
Why was it that many outsiders persisted in defending men who were guilty of a crime that was normally reviled: paedophilia? Why did they continue to mythologise Pitcairn, although it had failed, in such a dramatic way, to live up to its Utopian image? How far back, I asked myself, did the sexual abuse stretch—to the time of the mutineers? Why had parents not denounced the perpetrators and kept their children safe? Had anyone outside the island realised what was going on?
There were bigger questions, too. What did Pitcairn tell us about human nature and life in small, remote communities? Is this how all of us would behave if left to ourselves, with no one looking over our shoulder?
Is Pitcairn a cautionary tale—a real-life version of Lord of the Flies, that chilling story of a group of schoolboys who descend into savagery on an imaginary island?
Are there more Pitcairns out there?
CHAPTER 1 A surreal little universe in the middle of nowhere
Balancing on the deck of the Braveheart, I glanced down at the longboat rolling alongside us in the vigorous swell. Between the two vessels lay churning ocean, and a gap that narrowed and yawned alarmingly. ‘Jump,’ urged a voice behind me. Heart pounding, I leapt. A pair of muscular arms caught me and propelled me onto a wooden bench.
It was September 2004, and for the next six weeks, along with other journalists, I would be living on a lump of volcanic rock in the middle of the South Pacific. Our group had been travelling for eight days and was still some way off, separated by seas whipping themselves into furious peaks. But we could see our destination ahead of us: Pitcairn Island, the legendary home of Fletcher Christian and the Bounty mutineers.
One of Fletcher’s heirs was slouched in the back of the longboat: Randy Christian, black-bearded and massively built. Limbs that looked like gigantic steel girders sprouted from his black shorts and singlet.
When you first clap eyes on a person charged with serious crimes, they are generally seated in the dock of a court, flanked by prison guards. Randy was skippering the boat that was conveying us to shore so we could report on his trial for five rapes and seven indecent assaults. Next to him stood Jay Warren, another big man, with a dark moustache and Polynesian features. Jay, too, would soon be facing justice, for allegedly molesting a 12-year-old girl.
Looking back, it was a fitting introduction to the surreal little universe in which we were about to be immersed: a place where the sexual abuse of children is shrugged off, and not even a legal drama generating international headlines can disrupt the rhythms of daily existence. Randy and Jay, expert at picking their way through Pitcairn’s spiked collar of rocks, were in charge of the longboats, and the locals saw no irony in them coming out to fetch us. As for us, we had blithely placed our lives in the hands of men who surely did not wish us well.
Pitcairn is a crumb of land, roughly 2 miles square, and probably the most inaccessible spot on Earth. Before leaving my home in Sydney, I had found it on the map, with some difficulty: a pinprick in a vast expanse of blue, 3300 miles from New Zealand and 3600 miles from Chile. In an era when you can fly from Australia to London in a day, the journey to Pitcairn is a powerful reminder of the size of the planet. The island is one of the few places in the world without an airstrip. Too remote to be reached by helicopter, it does not even have a scheduled shipping service. Most visitors charter a yacht out of Tahiti, or hitch a lift on a trans-Pacific container ship, which takes more than a week to get there from Auckland or Panama.
As the island does not have a safe harbour, ships must heave to a mile or so offshore, where the community-owned longboats collect passengers and goods. If the seas are rough, which they often are, the captain may decide to press on without stopping. Then it can be months before another vessel passes.
Travelling in an official British party, I had taken a slightly different route, flying from Auckland to Tahiti, then waiting three days for the once-weekly connection to Mangareva, a beautiful island in the outermost reaches of French Polynesia and the nearest inhabited land to Pitcairn. The four-hour flight was broken by a refuelling stop in Hao, the atoll where the French agents who blew up the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior were briefly imprisoned. A few days later, in Mangareva’s tiny, threadbare port of Rikitea, our party boarded the Braveheart, a 110-foot former scientific research vessel, for the final leg of our odyssey: a 30-hour ocean voyage. As well as the six-person media pool, there were two British diplomats, two English police officers, and an Australian Seventh-day Adventist pastor and his wife.
Some 300 miles of open sea lie between Mangareva and Pitcairn; having been warned that the passage could be extremely choppy, I was armed with seasickness tablets, including ‘Paihia bombs’, a New Zealand remedy. What I was not prepared for was quite how lonely it would feel in that distant corner of the world’s largest ocean. We saw no other ships, just flying fish, and seabirds skimming the waves, and fields of whitecaps stretching to infinity in every direction. Only an occasional dusting of coral atolls relieved the sensation of dizzying emptiness.
On our second day, at about midday, a grey smudge appeared on the horizon: Pitcairn. The sight of it made my flesh tingle. It was quiet on deck. For the next five hours we watched as the island’s distinctive silhouette emerged and the smudge turned into a solid chunk of rock.
This was exactly what Fletcher Christian would have seen from the Bounty as he combed the South Pacific for a bolthole from the British Navy in 1790. Pitcairn proved to be ideal, and the sailors settled on the island with their Polynesian ‘wives’ and companions. Two centuries later, their descendants lived on there—just 47 of them, mostly related and sharing four surnames. And now the heirs of the famous mutineers were famous for quite different reasons.
Thirteen men had been charged as a result of a police investigation into child sexual abuse, and seven of them lived on Pitcairn, where they accounted for nearly half the adult males. Those men had insisted on their right to be tried at home; however, the last major court case on the island had been in 1898, when Harry Christian was convicted of murdering his wife and child. The island had no legal infrastructure, only a local court that had not been used for years, even for minor offences. On