Outcast Earth Enews: Mutiny and Murder on Pitcairn Island

Pitcairn Island In February 1808, Captain Mayhew Folger of the American sealing vessel Topaz spotted a dot of land on the ocean horizon in a place where no land should be. As his ship pulled closer, he was astounded to see a thickly forested island ringed by thousand-foot cliffs loom before him. There was no harbor in which the Topaz could drop anchor – sailors called such islands "iron bound" – so the ship sailed slowly around its perimeter. At daybreak, Folger spotted smoke rising from the treetops and a canoe with three dark-skinned men paddling out to meet them. The men appeared to be Polynesians, with dark skin, wavy black hair and dressed in simple loincloths. They also spoke perfect English.

"Where are you from?" one of the men called up to the Topaz’s crew. He was a handsome youth of about seventeen years.

Doubtful that simple islanders would have heard of the United States, Folger responded that they were Englishmen. The youth’s face brightened and he replied, "Did you know my father, Fletcher Christian? He was an Englishman too. He sailed with Captain Bligh."

At once Captain Folger knew whom the English-speaking Polynesian was… the son of the famous mutineer of the HMS Bounty. Nearly two decades earlier, Fletcher Christian had made international news when he and his crewmembers arrested the Bounty’s captain, William Bligh, and cast him adrift at sea. Depending on whose account you believed, Christian was either an abused first mate who defeated a malicious and incompetent commander; or a disgraceful hedonist who succumbed to the guile of Tahitian women and lifestyle [For more information, see Tahiti: Isle of Volcanoes and Lagoons.] Whichever the case, the British had been keen to find Christian and his co-conspirators and bring them to justice. Christian had evaded the British by sailing the stolen Bounty into the Pacific, never to be seen again and presumed by many to be lost.

In reality, Christian and his compatriots (who included other mutineers and a handful of Tahitian men, women and children) had made a long and frustrating voyage to Pitcairn Island. The island had been previously discovered and labeled as uninhabited. Because it was an "iron bound" island and had been incorrectly plotted on navigational charts of the time, the mutineers had escaped discovery by their countrymen. Unfortunately, misfortune still found them.

By the time the Topaz rediscovered Pitcairn Island, only one of the original mutineers was alive. His name was Alexander Smith. This was an alias he adopted before sailing on the Bounty in order to avoid detection as a deserter from another ship. (His real name was John Adams.) Smith told the Americans that Christian had died of natural causes years earlier. In fact, what really happened to Christian seems doubtful even to this day. Six years later, Smith told visiting British sailors that Christian and the other mutineers had been felled by the Tahitian natives who had come with them – apparently as part of an ongoing state of "warfare" that existed between the Englishmen and the Polynesians after they settled on Pitcairn. In turn, the Englishmen’s wives killed the Tahitian men, which left Smith alone on the island with nothing but women and children as company. According to Smith, Christian was just one of several of the refugees who sunk quickly into madness upon landing on Pitcairn. It was an unfortunate fact that the people who had so earnestly sought freedom and paradise had thinned themselves to almost nothing through murder and suicide.

But was Fletcher Christian really dead in 1808? At about the same time that the Topaz was sailing toward the island, a former officer from the Bounty claimed to have met Christian in the street in Plymouth, England! Additional rumors circulated for years that Christian would creep back to England to visit loved ones, including famous poet and his childhood friend, William Wordsworth. There is no marked grave for Fletcher Christian on Pitcairn Island and stories vary as to whether he was buried on the island or at sea.

THE BONES OF HENDERSON ISLAND:
On November 20, 1820, the American whaling vessel Essex was savagely and deliberately attacked… by a sperm whale. Aside from the obvious and macabre irony of this story, the misfortune of the Essex also became the basis for Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick. Two days after the whale attack, the ship sunk and the twenty crewmen set out for the Galapagos Islands in their lifeboats. Unfavorable winds drove the castaways south where they suffered horrible hardships in the open sea for thirty days. Finally, they washed ashore on an uninhibited island surrounded by a formidable coral reef. The seamen were fortunate to find a fresh water spring and plenty of birdlife for food, but alas the supply of both on the small island was not enough to sustain the entire crew of the Essex. Soon after, most of the company of the Essex took back to the sea, leaving behind three crewmen.

During the next two months, the three remaining Americans thoroughly explored the island. At some point, they stumbled upon several caves not far from the north beach. When they ventured inside, they were astounded to find a number of human skeletons lying neatly on the ground. The remains were arranged side by side and were unclothed. The castaways assumed that they had been other stranded sailors, but how had they come to meet their end in the cave on a forgotten island? Did they all simply lie down next to each other and die?

Soon after, the Essex’s survivors were rescued from the island by a passing ship, to whose compliment they told their unusual story. The mysterious bones went undisturbed for another thirty years until a group of men from Pitcairn Island landed on the northern beach of what was now known as Henderson Island. They too found the bones in the cave, and like the men from the Essex chose to leave them in peace. A century passed, and then one more group of Pitcairner visitors arrived, including Chief Magistrate Warren Christian (a relation of Fletcher Christian). This group gathered hair samples from the remains that were eventually returned to various laboratories around the world for analysis. Modern science did little to solve the identity of the remains… or for that matter even a proper racial identification. Did the bones belong to stranded Europeans or to early Polynesians?

Finally, almost two hundred years after they were first stumbled upon, the bones were identified as being prehistoric and could not have been of European origin. It is not know if the Polynesians lived on the island, but the arrangement of the bones would seem to indicate that they were ritualistically interred.

Henderson Island bones WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OTHER ESSEX SAILORS?
The sailors who stayed on Henderson Island ultimately faired much better than their shipmates, being rescued in only two months by a passing ship. The other men from the Essex continued to flounder in the open ocean, many perishing in the hot tropical sun or due to lack of drinking water and food. The situation in the lifeboats eventually became so desperate that the Essex’s captain, George Pollard, Jr., decided that one of the men in his boat must be killed in order to provide food for the others. The survivors decided to draw lots to see who would sacrifice himself. The "winner" was the ironically named Owen Coffin, Captain Pollard’s nephew and the ship’s cabin boy. Despite Pollard’s attempts to exchange places with Coffin, the teenager insisted on fulfilling his obligation. Ultimately, his 15-year old friend Charles Ramsdale shot him to death.

"He was soon dispatched," Pollard recalled, "and nothing of him left."

When Coffin’s flesh and soft tissues had been fully consumed, Ramsdale and Pollard resorted to sucking the morrow from his bones. The American whaler Dauphin rescued the two sailors-cum- cannibals on February 23, 1821. Despite this horrifying experience, Pollard chose to return to the whaler’s life a year later. After being shipwrecked a second time, he wisely listened to what Fate must have been telling him all along and never again returned to the sea. [For additional information about cannabalism in the South Pacific, see the enewsletter article Who Ate Jean-Francois?]

[This information was originally transmitted as an enewsletter in March 2005.]

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