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Trouble in Paradise: Uncovering the Dark Secrets of Britain’s Most Remote Island
Kathy Marks


A shocking exposé of the terrible secrets at the heart of the Pitcairn Island community – a tale of systematic child abuse and rape which stretches back over 40 years.Pitcairn Island – home to the descendants of the mutineers of the Bounty – has long been thought of as a tropical paradise. Wild and remote, it is Britain’s most isolated outpost and a fantasy destination for many.But in 1999, British police, alerted by unsettling reports of a rape, descended on the island. Their investigation developed into a major enquiry which revealed that Pitcairn was the site of widespread and horrific sexual abuse instigated by the island men on girls as young as twelve. Scarcely a man on the island was untainted by the allegations, and almost none of the women had escaped, though most residents feigned ignorance, even when their own daughters were abused. Abusers included the magistrates and police officers as well as brothers and uncles. Few of the victims were able to leave the island; those who did never went back.Kathy Marks was one of only six journalists permitted to live on the island while she reported on the ensuing trial and witnessed Pitcairn's domestic workings first-hand. In this riveting account she documents a society gone badly astray, leaving lives shattered, codes broken and a paradise truly lost.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.












TROUBLE IN

PARADISE

Uncovering the Dark Secrets of Britain’s Most Remote Island

KATHY MARKS










Dedication (#ulink_130b08f1-8ce6-5c81-b361-50e56311f563)


For my parents




Contents


Cover (#u3a20c739-326a-5ab1-b98a-842e96318529)

Title Page (#u69837693-6ca7-5636-b0f6-23daf54060e6)

Dedication (#u427ad3b6-3bf9-586e-8cdf-9f21569c215f)

Cast of characters (#u547d270a-d2b0-5505-a482-8d252e9f4e3e)

Christian clan (#uc0b01e6f-f065-54ea-90bb-68eedbc81fa7)

Brown family (#u5541bc39-1857-5725-9a6d-5bf718d146e1)

Warren clan (#u2d8a14d4-2efb-5f33-8a82-1a8999078cf5)

Young family (#u422477ba-a9cc-52f0-a327-bdd5fb53e99a)

Prologue (#u11b6531e-7e5c-502f-8371-1e8f51c47164)

Part 1—On the island (#u0072da78-0ef1-5bce-adb1-f07615251003)

1 A surreal little universe in the middle of nowhere (#u9665b0e5-d560-514b-b1a3-62f2c2892586)

2 Mutiny, murder and myth-making (#udcae2359-1653-500f-8d7a-da174e89ef02)

3 Opening a right can of worms (#u7d6b6f79-080f-59ad-8719-6208ab92ef89)

4 No amnesty (#u9788e452-5232-52c1-85a0-e745c6fb8074)

5 The fiefdom and its leader (#u4d787215-e2f5-5a5f-89f8-9e3cd91a69eb)

6 The propaganda campaign starts (#u9da6d095-833e-5a96-9d7c-7ae3136ee03e)

7 Key witnesses evaporate (#litres_trial_promo)

8 The trials begin (#litres_trial_promo)

9 Let’s make-believe (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Judgement day (#litres_trial_promo)

11 ‘You can’t blame men for being men’ (#litres_trial_promo)

Part 2—Viewing Pitcairn from a distance (#litres_trial_promo)

12 How the myth was forged (#litres_trial_promo)

13 Politics, poison and power plays (#litres_trial_promo)

14 Britain’s ‘ineffective long-range benevolence’ (#litres_trial_promo)

15 ‘I just did my job and minded my own business’ (#litres_trial_promo)

16 Interdependence + silence = collusion (#litres_trial_promo)

17 Making legal history (#litres_trial_promo)

18 The final trials (#litres_trial_promo)

19 Reaping a sad legacy since Bounty times (#litres_trial_promo)

20 Lord of the Flies? (#litres_trial_promo)

21 The last throw of the dice (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue—Isobel’s story (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Cast of characters (#ulink_9ad4b325-162f-5a3d-8606-02a806c96a76)


Historical figures

Edward Christian (Fletcher’s brother)

Edward Young (mutineer)

Fletcher Christian (mutineer)

Harry Christian (hanged in 1898 for murder of wife and baby)

John Adams (mutineer and community leader)

Maimiti (Fletcher Christian’s Tahitian ‘wife’)

Matthew Quintal (mutineer)

Peter Heywood (mutineer court-martialled then pardoned)

William Bligh (captain of Bounty)

William McCoy (mutineer)

Media

Claire Harvey (The Australian; The Times)

Ewart Barnsley (Television New Zealand)

Kathy Marks (The Independent; New Zealand Herald)

Neil Tweedie (The Daily Telegraph; Press Association)

Sue Ingram (Radio New Zealand)

Zane Willis (TVNZ)

Officials and diplomats

Baroness Patricia Scotland (Former Overseas Territories Minister)

George Fergusson (Governor at time of writing)

Grant Pritchard (former Governor’s Representative)

Harry Maude (British colonial official in 1940s)

Jenny Lock (former Governor’s Representative)

Karen Wolstenholme (former Deputy Governor)

Leon Salt (former Commissioner)

Leslie Jaques (Commissioner at time of writing)

Martin Williams (former Governor)

Matthew Forbes (former Deputy Governor)

Richard Fell (former Governor)

Police and legal personnel

Adrian Cook QC (defence)

Allan Roberts (defence)

Charles Blackie (Chief Justice)

Charles Cato (defence)

Christine Gordon (prosecution)

Christopher Harder (former barrister)

Dennis McGookin (Kent Police)

Fletcher Pilditch (prosecution)

Gail Cox (Kent Police)

Graham Ford (court registrar)

Grant Illingworth QC (defence)

Gray Cameron (magistrate)

Jane Lovell-Smith (judge)

Karen Vaughan (New Zealand Police)

Kieran Raftery (prosecution)

Lord Hoffman (Privy Council)

Max Davidson (Kent Police)

Paul Dacre (defence)

Peter George (Kent Police)

Robert Vinson (Kent Police)

Russell Johnson (judge)

Simon Moore (prosecution)

Simon Mount (prosecution)

Vinny Reid (British Military Police)

Teachers and Church figures

Albert and Jane Moverley (teachers)

Albert Reeves (teacher; charged with indecent assault and rape)

Allen Cox (teacher)

Barrie Baronian (teacher)

Hannah Carnihan (teacher’s daughter)

Lyle Burgoyne (lay pastor and nurse)

Neville Tosen (pastor)

Pippa Foley (teacher)

Ray Coombe (pastor)

Rick Ferret (pastor)

Roy Sanders (teacher)

Sheils Carnihan (teacher)

Tony Washington (teacher)

Victims (pseudonyms)

Belinda

Carla

Caroline

Catherine

Charlotte

Elizabeth

Fiona

Gillian

Isobel

Janet

Jeanie

Jennifer

Judith

Karen

Linda

Marion

Susan

Suzie

Various

Bill and Catherine Haigh (communications expert and his wife)

Caroline Alexander (historian)

Dea Birkett (author of Serpent in Paradise)

Herb Ford (California-based director of Pitcairn Islands Study Center)

Maurice Allward (friend of Pitcairn Island)

Maurice Bligh (descendant of William Bligh)

Nigel Jolly (skipper of the Braveheart)

Ricky Quinn (step-grandson of Terry Young)




Christian clan (#ulink_035af436-9b8f-54e4-965d-24a3b824a11a)










Brown family (#ulink_052e4194-79d3-53c3-92db-3ad9f75b95aa)










Warren clan (#ulink_d1495ae3-0f0a-559c-8aa3-80de546e5e9c)










Young family (#ulink_848f3e0e-145d-5810-993d-00a84d1bea7a)










Prologue (#ulink_89c20174-4c3b-5597-a81f-4f8027d569f5)


Pitcairn Island, a British outpost floating in a remote corner of the South Pacific, was until recently considered a tropical paradise. Seldom visited, it is a place of extreme isolation, with no airstrip and limited sea access. The rocky outcrop is inhabited by about 50 people, most of them descended from Fletcher Christian and his fellow Bounty mutineers.

The sailors fled to the island to evade British law, but for the next two centuries Pitcairn was, to all appearances, trouble-free—stabilised by religion, with negligible crime, and largely capable of running its own affairs. Just before the dawn of the new millennium, that perception was turned on its head.

In December 1999 several Pitcairn girls claimed that they had been sexually assaulted by a visiting New Zealander. By chance, a British policewoman was on the island, and one of the girls confided that she had also been raped by two local men in the past. An investigation into those allegations developed into a major inquiry that saw British detectives criss-cross the globe, interviewing dozens of Pitcairn women. Their conclusion was that nearly every girl growing up on the island in the last 40 years had been abused, and nearly every man had been an offender.

I first read about the investigation—codenamed, quite coincidentally, Operation Unique—in 2000, when snippets surfaced in the British and New Zealand media. At that time I was a relative newcomer to Sydney, where I am based as Asia – Pacific Correspondent for The Independent. The story had immediate appeal, combining Pitcairn’s mutinous history with a glimpse of life darkly played out on a far-flung island—an island that also happened to be a British colony, one of the final vestiges of Empire.

What struck me, even at that early stage, was that sexual abuse seemed to have been part of the fabric of life on Pitcairn. I tried to visualise what childhood must have been like for the victims, living there with no means of escape from their alleged assailants.

At the same time, certain Pitcairners—including women on the island—were loudly denying that children had ever been mistreated. They claimed that Pitcairn was a laid-back Polynesian society where girls matured early and were willing sexual partners. Britain, they claimed, was trying to cripple the community and force it to close, thus ridding itself of a costly burden. Who was telling the truth, I wondered: the women describing their experiences of abuse, or those portraying the affair as a British conspiracy?

For Britain, the case raised embarrassing questions about its supervision of the colony, now known as an Overseas Territory. Confronted with such serious allegations, however, the government had no choice but to act robustly. Judges and lawyers were appointed, and in 2003, after a series of legal and logistical hurdles had been surmounted, 13 men were charged with 96 offences dating back to the 1960s.

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?



Part 1 On the island (#ulink_9686b8b9-6557-52af-b60d-631d4688195c)




CHAPTER 1 A surreal little universe in the middle of nowhere (#ulink_15bdd3f5-85c4-5823-94bd-70f3ec0447f1)


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 top of that, it had little accommodation and very few amenities.

All the key players—including judges, lawyers and court officials—were having to be shipped in, along with supplies to feed them for six weeks. British officials had chartered the Braveheart to carry everyone, together with their luggage, and a dozen crates of legal documents and evidence. With the trials due to start in four days, my group was on the boat’s final run.

After dropping anchor, we waited for the longboat, the only vessel which—unless conditions are exceptionally calm—can execute the tricky landing at Bounty Bay. The loaf-shaped island stretched out before us, silent and aloof, its shores hammered by the relentless waves. Bounty Bay, a small, rock-strewn cove, was a mere chink in an armour of tall cliffs that enclosed Pitcairn almost completely. The island was surprisingly green, with thick vegetation and ochre-red rock exposed by gashes in the escarpments.

The Braveheart hovered. Ten minutes passed. Then another ten. We chatted and joked, affecting a nonchalance that none of us felt. We scanned the scene ahead. The smile on the face of Matthew Forbes, the British diplomat with day-to-day responsibility for the territory, looked strained. Surely the islanders wouldn’t refuse to bring the boat out?

I knew that many of the locals were deeply resentful about the trials, and the consequent influx of strangers to the island. The Pitcairners were protective of their privacy and turned down most requests to visit; if the British diplomats and police officers on the Braveheart were undesirable guests, the media representatives were perhaps even less welcome. Touchy about the way they had been depicted by writers and film-makers, the islanders had more or less banned journalists since the publication in 1997 of a travel memoir, Serpent in Paradise, a closely observed study of Pitcairn life, which they detested, along with its English author, Dea Birkett.

I had been given a flavour of what lay in store for us after emailing Mike ‘Cookie’ Warren, one of the more outspoken islanders, while we were en route. I asked Cookie how the community felt about the impending trials, and expressed the hope that we journalists would be able to present a balanced picture. Cookie replied, ‘Let me begin by asking you why you are coming here when you don’t have permission from the islanders? Let me suggest that you are no different to any other reporter and journalist I know. That is, most are out to print what sells and to make money. I couldn’t care less whether what you report is balanced or not. We have already been humiliated and the presence of the press pool will only serve to reinforce that fact further.’

He added, ‘A family in trouble best deals with its troubles and problems privately and discreetly. How would you like it if your family disputes were aired on television for the whole world to see? Would you call this justice?’

The stand-off, if that was what it was, ended abruptly. A boat materialised in the distance, slicing through the waves at a hectic pace, and a few minutes later drew up beside us with a flourish. A fearsome-looking figure was planted on the prow: hulking and shaven-headed, with a bandana, a shark’s tooth necklace and several dozen earrings and studs. It looked like a pirate; it was, in fact, Pawl Warren, whom we would come to know as one of the nicest men on the island.

Randy and Jay, the two defendants, watched impassively as others helped us aboard, stowing our baggage beneath a tarpaulin. There was an awkward silence as we sat down. What does one say in that situation? ‘Hello Jay, hello Randy, hope your trial goes well’? Among the boat’s other occupants I recognised Tom Christian, tall and rangy, in a battered Panama hat: he had been Pitcairn’s radio operator for decades.

The longboat bounced off across the breakers. No one spoke to us; most of the islanders kept their gazes firmly averted. I felt ill at ease, and I sensed that my colleagues—all seasoned operators, some with experience in war zones—did too. Soon we were approaching Bounty Bay, where we shot in through a narrow entrance after veering sharp left to dodge some nasty-looking rocks.

Our reception party was modest and consisted mainly of outsiders. A handful of Pitcairners, including Tom Christian’s wife, Betty, were waiting on the concrete jetty; one or two others stood at the far end, well away from the boat, and they left after photographing our arrival. We clambered ashore and milled around uncertainly, amid the bustle of greetings and boxes being unloaded. Jay and Randy, still at work, winched the longboat up a slipway and into the boatshed, which was crowned by a big sign stating ‘Welcome to Pitcairn Island’. Another sign pointed to the ‘last resting place of H.M.S Bounty’—the spot where the skeleton of the ship, which the mutineers scuttled and burnt, lies submerged in shallow water. Long-beaked frigate birds flapped overhead, swooping down to seize fish guts from the outstretched hand of an islander who was cleaning her catch.

Snatches of the locals’ curiously cadenced language drifted over to us. Pitkern reflects their mixed roots, combining the sailors’ 18th-century English with some Tahitian words. Others around us were speaking English, but with the characteristic drawl of England’s West Country. The origins of that accent are something of a mystery.

A couple of us briefly interviewed Tom, who declared, ‘I can’t wait to get this whole mess behind us.’

Then it was time to move, and that meant up.



Pitcairn, the tip of an extinct volcano, has little flat land. Overshadowing The Landing, as it is known, is a 300-foot cliff, at the top of which Adamstown, the one settlement, crouches on a slender plateau. It is reached via a steeply winding track, aptly called the Hill of Difficulty, which in 2004 was still ferociously rutted and suitable only for quad bikes, the sole vehicles used on the unsealed roads. A dozen quad bikes were parked near the jetty, like a herd of exotic animals congregating around a waterhole. I climbed onto the back of one driven by the island’s New Zealand doctor.

I took the doctor for an islander and he did not enlighten me, apparently enjoying a little game of who’s who. As I tried to draw him into conversation, we passed a pink bulldozer on a hairpin bend; inside it was a dark-haired man with a moustache and swarthy features, who was busily repairing a stretch of road. I did not realise then, but it was Steve Christian—Randy’s father, mayor of Pitcairn, and the principal defendant in the child abuse trials. Steve had not been on the longboat, nor at The Landing. But there he was, watching events from on high and asserting himself as a person of importance as he carried out vital maintenance work completely unconnected with our arrival.

The quad bike laboured uphill, with spectacular views of the bay unfolding beneath us. At the top, the ground suddenly levelled out, and we forked right along the ‘main road’, a dusty red trail that snakes through the village, fringed by a dense tangle of bush—hibiscus, frangipani, banana and coconut palms, pandanus trees, bamboo and towering banyans. Turning down a side lane, we headed back towards the ocean, and after passing a cemetery stopped outside the Government Lodge, the rather grandly named dwelling allocated to the media.

The Lodge, generally occupied by official visitors, was a pre-fabricated four-bedroom house, rather basic, with spartan furnishings. It reminded me of my student days 20 years earlier, and the comparison was fitting, for we six adults, aged from late 20s to late 50s, were about to revert to precisely that kind of communal set-up. I agreed to share a room with Claire Harvey, a reporter with The Australian newspaper. Ewart Barnsley, the Television New Zealand (TVNZ) correspondent, took up residence with his cameraman, Zane Willis. Neil Tweedie, of Britain’s Daily Telegraph, was to have his own room, as would Sue Ingram from Radio New Zealand.

The Lodge was not only our new home, but a workspace. Media interest in the forthcoming trials was intense; TVNZ’s footage would be broadcast around the world, and our syndicated press stories and photographs would be published widely. I was acutely aware that we were all filing for different time zones, and mostly for more than one outlet—in my case, newspapers in the UK and New Zealand. Television, radio and print each had its own demands. I wondered how we would fare, all cooped up together and confronting Pitcairn’s peculiar logistical challenges.

Laptops were quickly arranged on the dining-room table and hooked up to the relatively new internet system. Zane and Ewart set up an editing suite in their bedroom. Satellite phones were lined up on a grassy bank behind the house, antennae pointing optimistically skywards: the island had no landline telephones and mobiles had not functioned since we had left Tahiti. Satphones would be our only means of speaking to anyone in the outside world.

We had brought with us every conceivable piece of technical equipment, as there was no question of getting anything repaired or replaced on Pitcairn. For the other necessities of life, only limited items would be available in the local shop. Packing for the trip had involved trying to envisage every eventuality—and we had only been allowed 20 kilograms of luggage.

After briefly settling in, Claire and I set off to explore. A back lane wound up past the Mission House, usually inhabited by the resident Seventh-day Adventist pastor but temporarily assigned to the three trial judges from New Zealand. The islanders were all Adventists, having converted en masse in the late 19th century. Beyond the Mission House, past a tall mango tree, stood Pitcairn’s newest building: a large, L-shaped prison, elevated on stilts above a dirt yard, with six double cells fronted by a wide wooden deck. The prison, which looked quite attractive, had been built by men who were at risk of becoming its first inmates—no one had wanted to miss out on the work, even in the circumstances.

The lane spat us out in the village, Adamstown, which appeared to be deserted. Scattered along the main road were houses of weatherboard and corrugated iron, somewhat ramshackle-looking; other homes, all single-storey, were found off a jumble of tracks that meandered further up the hillside. Although there was, notwithstanding the steep terrain, quite a bit of space on which to build, people seemed to be living almost on top of each other.

Above the main road was the square, the heart of the community, where a few mainly timber buildings clustered around a patch of roughly laid concrete. The brick Adventist church faced the public hall, with its graceful white verandah; between them were squeezed the pint-sized library and post office. A bench ran along the fourth side.

In front of the hall, which was also the courthouse, was an imposing sight: the Bounty’s anchor, mounted on a plinth. Outside the hall, among several notices pinned up on a board, was one that warned the islanders about ‘personal incidents that could be sensationalised in the media’. It was signed by Steve Christian. Another reminded the locals that ‘malicious gossip’ was an offence.

As we wandered back to the Lodge, I was struck by the stillness in the lanes and a heaviness in the air. Dusk was falling, but it was still humid, and everything around us seemed exaggerated: the spring flowers were too vivid, as if daubed from a child’s palette, the bees buzzing around them were a little too loud. Perhaps I was affected by thoughts of why we had come here. But I smelt a definite whiff of menace.

My other lasting impression was the sheer ordinariness of the place. While the island had a kind of wild beauty, Adamstown looked like a run-down rural village in England or New Zealand. And it was tiny. Already I felt hemmed in, and unsettled by the omnipresent ocean, an immense blue blanket swaddling and smothering us, a wall separating Pitcairn from the world. The sense of isolation was overpowering.

Back home, we were greeted by the aroma of something burning. Baking was one of the new skills we would have to learn, for bread, like so many everyday commodities, could not be bought. A colleague had gamely put a loaf in the oven, but then forgotten about it, distracted by deadlines.

At 10 p.m. the living room went dark, prompting a chorus of groans and curses. Public electricity, supplied by a diesel generator, was rationed to ten hours a day. Most homes had a back-up system, with a bank of 12-volt batteries providing a few hours of extra power. However, in our ignorance we had already drained our batteries, and had to carry on working by candlelight.

Hours later, after everyone else had gone to bed, I paced up and down outside the house, trying to send my first day’s copy via satellite phone. The temperature had dropped, and I was surrounded by a darkness more complete than I had ever experienced. With no moon or stars, and no artificial light for hundreds of miles, I would not have found our back door again without a torch.

As I waved my phone around like a conductor’s baton, searching for a signal, I reflected on the weeks that lay ahead of me. Pitcairn would be no run-of-the-mill assignment, that was clear. And it was clear, too, that the story was about more than just the child abuse trials. It was about a strange little community, marching to its own tune in the middle of nowhere—and at the core of which we were now ensconced, rather uneasily.




CHAPTER 2 Mutiny, murder and myth-making (#ulink_3c8ea2e3-a3e9-5d5a-a66c-2dbc7fc92410)


The next morning I got up and took a hot shower. Only later did I realise that, on Pitcairn, hot water does not simply arrive through the tap. A wood fire in a little shed near the house heats a copper boiler, which in turn heats cold water pipes leading to a storage tank. But in order for this to happen, a fire has to be built. And firewood has to be chopped.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Ewart Barnsley, the TVNZ journalist, was an early riser with a practical disposition. Shortly after dawn, he had chopped wood and lit the fire. From then on, he made that his daily chore.

We were discovering some of the other quirks of Pitcairn life. The ‘duncan’, for instance, which is an outside pit toilet. Ours was situated about 30 feet from the Lodge. The island does not have a sewerage system, and its only source of water, for drinking and washing, is rain.

Then there were the land crabs that lurked around, some the size of a dinner plate, turning a night-time trip to the duncan into a hair-raising ordeal. These fearsome-looking creatures usually tucked their soft bodies inside a coconut shell for protection, but we heard tales of crabs seen wearing a sweetcorn tin, a plastic doll’s head, and a Pond’s Cold Cream jar.

Should any of us encounter a particularly aggressive crab, or one of Pitcairn’s formidable spiders, help was close by, and it had an English accent. Three British diplomats—among 29 outsiders who had recently descended on the island, nearly doubling its population—were installed next door to us in the Government Hostel, another pre-fabricated dwelling for visitors. For the trials, just one new house had been put up, called McCoy’s after one of the mutineers, and it had been assigned to the prosecution team of three lawyers and two police officers. They found themselves living next door to Steve Christian, the Pitcairn mayor, who was facing court on six counts of rape and four of indecent assault. And the defence lawyers? They were sleeping in cells in the new jail.

At the Lodge, our other next-door neighbour was Len Brown, the oldest of the seven defendants. Len, who was charged with two rapes, was 78 and quite deaf, but still cut a physically imposing figure. Soon after we arrived, we saw him sitting in his garden, working on a carved replica of the Bounty—one of the wooden souvenirs that the islanders sell to tourists. For reasons unclear, a rusting cannon from the real ship stood on Len’s front lawn.

The mutiny on the Bounty is one of the most notorious events in British maritime history. Yet it was only one of a series of rebellions against the British Navy in the late 18th century. One uprising in 1797 involved dozens of ships and a blockade of London. Another led to the murder at sea of a captain and eight of his officers.

That few people are familiar with these incidents, while nearly everyone knows about the drama on board the Bounty, can be explained in one word: Hollywood. The mutiny inspired five films between 1916 and 1984, three of them made by American studios, with Fletcher Christian played by matinée idols such as Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson. Studio bosses loved the story, with its exotic South Seas setting, scenes of swashbuckling adventure and cast of semi-naked Polynesian maidens, and so did generations of cinemagoers, who warmed to Christian and sided with him against the apparently cruel and sadistic Captain William Bligh. The mutineers’ descendants mostly shared that view of Bligh as the villain and Christian as the dashing young hero; to this day, they will not hear a word against their infamous ancestor.

The historical background is more complex than Hollywood has allowed. And it all began with breadfruit, a large, globe-shaped fruit.

Breadfruit trees had been discovered in Tahiti in 1769 by Sir Joseph Banks, the English naturalist, who urged King George III to introduce them to the West Indies as a cheap food source for slaves on the sugar plantations. The King appointed Bligh, a Royal Navy lieutenant, to lead an expedition, and in December 1787 a 220-ton former merchant ship, His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty, set sail from Portsmouth with 46 officers and men. Among them was Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate and, effectively, Bligh’s chief officer.

Bligh was an ambitious 33-year-old, and an outstanding navigator who had accompanied Captain James Cook on his final voyage. Christian was 23, equally ambitious, and from a genteel—albeit no longer wealthy—family with strong links to the Isle of Man. He had sailed twice previously under Bligh, who regarded him as a friend and protégé.

The plan was to head to Tahiti via South America, collect some breadfruit saplings and transport them to the Caribbean. However, the Bounty ran into atrocious weather at Cape Horn, after which Bligh elected to go east, taking the longer route. The ship reached Tahiti’s Matavai Bay in October 1788.

Early European visitors had called the island an earthly paradise, and after nearly a year at sea the Englishmen could only agree. Tahiti’s white beaches were caressed by warm breezes; its trees hung heavy with fruit and its lagoons teemed with fish. The native men treated the sailors as ‘blood brothers’, while the beautiful, uninhibited women showered them with attention. Six months later, when it was time to depart, no one except the puritanical Bligh was keen to resume the rigours of shipboard life.

Bligh was convinced that it was Tahiti’s charms, so reluctantly relinquished, that triggered the events of 28 April 1789. Most historians now agree that, far from being a brutal despot, Bligh was an enlightened captain who kept his crew healthy and flogged only sparingly. But he was also prone to fly into rages. After the Bounty left Tahiti, he humiliated the thin-skinned, volatile Christian, branding him a coward and accusing him of stealing coconuts from a stash on deck. Their relationship had broken down—although probably not as a result of a gay liaison gone sour, as some have speculated.

Three weeks out of Matavai Bay, as the Bounty approached the Friendly Islands (now called Tonga), five men burst into Bligh’s cabin at dawn. With Christian pointing a bayonet at his chest, Bligh was made to climb into the ship’s launch, along with 18 loyal officers and men. He appealed to Christian, reminding him, ‘You have danced my children upon your knee.’ The latter, reportedly in a delirious state, replied, ‘That, Captain Bligh, that is the thing … I am in hell … I am in hell.’

Bligh and his followers were set adrift with no charts and only meagre supplies. In a remarkable feat of navigation, Bligh guided the launch across 3618 miles of open sea, landing on the island of Timor 48 days later. Amazingly, only one life had been lost: that of a quartermaster, killed not at sea but in a skirmish with Tongans. In Batavia (now Jakarta), Bligh found a berth on a Dutch East Indiaman, and in March 1790 he arrived back in England, where he recounted his tale to an astonished nation.

The mutineers, meanwhile, were searching for a refuge. They could not go home to England, and an attempt to settle on Tubuai, 400 miles south of Tahiti, was abandoned after clashes with the locals. The men split into two factions. Sixteen of them decided to chance their luck on Tahiti; the other nine, led by Christian, would continue their quest. The Bounty dropped the first group at Tahiti, but picked up some new passengers: 12 Polynesian women, six Polynesian men and a baby accompanied Christian’s band on their journey.

Two months later, while flicking through a book in Bligh’s library, Christian noticed a reference to ‘Pitcairn’s Island’. The island sounded promising, but it had been incorrectly charted, and another two months passed before he finally sighted it in January 1790. Christian led a party ashore, and when he returned he was smiling for the first time in weeks. Pitcairn was not only off the map, but it was also unpopulated, and it was a natural fortress—thickly forested, with towering cliffs and no safe anchorage. Yet it had fertile soil, fruit trees and (unlike now) a water source. The mutineers ran the Bounty aground and prepared to establish a new community far from civilisation.

The sailors divided the cultivable land into nine plots, one for each of them. The proud Polynesian men, who had been their friends and equals on Tahiti, received nothing; instead they were to be their servants. The Englishmen also took one ‘wife’ apiece, with the other three women shared among the six Tahitians. These actions created a deadly stew of sexual jealousy and racial resentment, which boiled over two years later.

After the wives of John Williams and John Adams died, the pair commandeered two of the Polynesians’ women. Enraged, the native men hatched a plot to murder the mutineers. But the latter were tipped off, and it was two Tahitians who were killed, one of them by his former wife.

In 1793 violence flared again. The four remaining Polynesian men stole some muskets, and within the space of one day murdered five Englishmen, including Fletcher Christian. Only John Adams, William McCoy, Matthew Quintal and Edward Young survived. Tit-for-tat killings followed, by the end of which all the Tahitian men were dead.

Calm then descended on the community—until 1798, when McCoy built a still and began producing a powerful spirit from the roots of the ti-plant. The men, and some of the women, spent their days in a drunken stupor, and it was in such a state that McCoy threw himself off a cliff. Quintal grew increasingly wild, and tried to snatch Young’s and Adams’ wives; the pair decided that they had no option but to kill him. They hacked Quintal to death with a hatchet. At last the cycle of bloodshed was over.

In 1800 Young died from an asthma attack. It was ten years since the mutineers had first spied Pitcairn. Of the 15 men who had settled there, only Adams was left.



Carved into a cliff high above Adamstown is Christian’s Cave, reached by a vertiginously sheer trail trampled by the wild goats that roam the island’s ridges and escarpments. It was to this windblown spot, a dark slash in the volcanic rock face, that Christian would retreat, so it is said, to scan the Pacific Ocean for British naval ships—and to reflect, perhaps, on the reckless act that had exiled him for eternity.

Once the Bounty was stripped and burnt to the waterline, the mutiny stopped being Christian’s story. He was no longer a leader, and little is known about his life on Pitcairn, apart from the fact that his Tahitian wife—called Maimiti, or sometimes Mauatua—bore him two sons and a daughter. There is still debate about whether he really died there, or somehow managed to return to England—stoked by a ‘sighting’ of him in Plymouth, and the failure ever to locate his burial site.

The only mutineer with a preserved grave is John Adams, and it is he, not Christian, who was the father of the Pitcairn community, who set it on the course it was to follow for the next 200 years.

Adams, an ambiguous figure, signed up for the Bounty as Alexander Smith, reverting to his real name on the island. Rough and ready, like the average working-class salt, he played a prominent role in the seizing of the Bounty and subsequent racial warfare. Then, after the killings, he underwent a miraculous conversion—at least, that was his account, and there was no one left alive to challenge it.

Adams claimed that Edward Young taught him to read, using a Bible retrieved from the Bounty, and that he was so affected by the Bible’s teachings that he repented of his misdeeds and embraced Christianity. After Young’s death he was left alone with nine women and the 24 children born to the mutineers during those violent early years; strangely, no children were fathered by the Polynesian men. And, according to Adams, all of them led lives of spotless integrity under his patriarchal guidance.

The outside world, meanwhile, was gripped by the mystery of the mutineers’ whereabouts. The men on Tahiti had been quickly tracked down and shipped home, then court-martialled, after which three of them were hanged. Fletcher Christian and his followers, though, seemed to have vanished.

The little society headed by Adams lived in complete isolation until 1808, when an American whaler, the Topaz, stumbled across it; the Topaz’s captain, Mayhew Folger, was astounded to be greeted by three dark-skinned young men in a canoe, all of whom spoke perfect English. Adams related his tale of sin and redemption to Folger who, after just a few hours on shore, left convinced that Pitcairn was ‘the world’s most pious and perfect community’. He informed the Admiralty about his incredible discovery, but the news was received with indifference; Britain was at war with France, and the mutiny was no longer of much interest in naval circles.

To each visitor after Folger, Adams gave a slightly different version of events, and few visitors interviewed the women, who were the only other witnesses. It was the start of the myth-making that was to obscure the reality of Pitcairn for the next two centuries.

By 1814 Adams was out of danger, following another chance visit, this time by two British naval captains. Enchanted by the new colony, they advised the Admiralty that it would be ‘an act of great cruelty and inhumanity’ to repatriate Adams and put him on trial.

Pitcairn’s period of seclusion was over. A stream of ships called, mainly British men-of-war, but also whalers and merchant vessels. All of them found a peaceful, devout society whose young people were healthy, modest and well educated. The legend of an island populated by reformed sinners, the offspring of murderers and mutineers, spread across the English-speaking world.

To outsiders, the idea of a Western-style community flourishing in such a faraway spot was compelling. Missionary groups dispatched crateloads of Bibles; other well-wishers, including Queen Victoria, sent gifts such as flour, guns, fishing hooks, crockery and an organ. Pitcairn was many things to many people. It was a religious fable. It was a fairy tale. It was the fulfilment of a Utopian dream.

The island’s fame grew in the late 19th century, after the locals rescued foreign sailors from a series of shipwrecks. Then in 1914 the opening of the Panama Canal put Pitcairn on the main shipping route to Australia and New Zealand. Liners packed with European emigrants would pause halfway across the Pacific so that their passengers could glimpse the island, and even meet its inhabitants, for—then as now—the islanders would board the ships to sell their souvenirs.

Jet travel destroyed the glamour of the ocean voyage, but while the rest of the world shrank, Pitcairn remained tantalisingly inaccessible, thus retaining much of its original allure. Children still scoured atlases for it; adults projected their escapist fantasies onto it; armchair travellers daydreamed about stepping ashore. The islanders, meanwhile, cultivated their own mystique, nurturing the romantic aura that drew tourists—and their American dollars—to their door.



The day after we arrived on Pitcairn, Olive Christian, Steve’s wife, invited members of the media to Big Fence, her sprawling home overlooking the Pacific. Like the rest of my colleagues, I had absolutely no idea what to expect.

When we got there in the early afternoon, 15 women—almost the entire adult female population—were assembled on sofas and plastic chairs arranged around the edge of the living room. The room, which had a lino floor, was as big as a barn; the walls were decorated with family photographs and a large mural of fish and dolphins. Through the front window we could see tall Norfolk pines clinging to slopes that tumbled steeply to the ocean.

The women represented all four of Pitcairn’s main clans: the Christians and Youngs, still carrying mutineers’ surnames, and the Browns and Warrens, descendants of 19th-century sailor settlers. The other English lines—Adams, Quintal and McCoy—had died out, although not in New Zealand or on Norfolk Island, 1200 miles east of Australia, where most people with Pitcairn roots now live.

At the time of the Big Fence gathering, the names of the seven Pitcairn-based defendants were still suppressed by a court order. However, we were privy to this poorly kept secret. Every woman in the room was related to one or more of the men—as a wife, mother, sister, cousin, aunt or stepmother-in-law.

Looking around, I saw that, with a few exceptions, the women were solidly built. While some were dark-haired, with striking Polynesian features, others, with their fair skin and European looks, would not have stood out in an English village. All of them were casually dressed, many in shorts and singlets: practical choices, given the heat and ubiquitous Pitcairn dust.

We had been summoned to Big Fence, it turned out, to be told that their menfolk were not ‘perverts’ or ‘hardened criminals’: they were decent, hard-working family types. No islander would tolerate children being interfered with, and no one on Pitcairn had ever been raped. The ‘victims’ were girls who had known exactly what they were doing. It was they who had thrown themselves at the men.

As I digested this notion, which was being put forward with some passion, I noticed that a handful of people were dominating proceedings. These particular women were speaking over the top of each other, impatient to get their point across. Others said little, and looked ill at ease. Steve Christian’s mother, Dobrey, sat quietly, weaving a basket from pandanus leaves.

The talkative ones explained that under-age sex was the norm on Pitcairn. Darralyn Griffiths, the daughter of Jay Warren, one of the defendants, told us in a matter-of-fact way that she had lost her virginity at 13, ‘and I felt shit hot about it too, I felt like a big lady’. She was partly boasting, partly censorious of her younger self, it seemed to me. Others clamoured to make similar admissions. ‘I had it at 12, and I was shit hot too,’ said Jay’s sister, Meralda, a woman in her 40s. Darralyn’s mother, Carol, 54 years old, agreed that 13 was ‘the normal age’, adding, ‘I used to be a wild thing when I was young and single.’ Olive Christian described her youth, with evident nostalgia, as a time when ‘we all thought sex was like food on the table’.

The British police had misunderstood Pitcairn, they claimed: it was a South Pacific island where, to young people, sex was as natural as the ocean breeze. Olive said, ‘It’s been this way for generations, and we’ve seen nothing wrong in it. Everyone has sex young. That’s our lifestyle.’ Darralyn echoed her. ‘It was just the way it was. No one thought it was bad.’

We must have looked surprised. They were surprised we were surprised. Well, at what age did we start having sex, they demanded. It was clear, in this company and at this particular juncture, that the question could not be avoided. Some of our responses met with howls of derision. The women of Pitcairn did not believe that anyone could have lost their virginity at 18; the idea of being that old was simply preposterous.

The serious point of this was to persuade us that the criminal case was based on a misconception—and, furthermore, that it was all part of an elaborate plot. Britain was determined to ‘close the island down’, they said, because it had become a financial burden—a ‘thorn in the arse’, as Tania Christian, Steve and Olive’s daughter, put it. What better way to achieve that than to jail the men who were the very backbone of the community?

Why, though, we wondered aloud, would the women who had spoken to police have fabricated their accounts—accounts that, despite them growing up on the island in different eras and now living thousands of miles apart, were remarkably alike? At this point the Pitcairners produced their trump card: Carol Warren’s daughters, Darralyn and Charlene.

Charlene, 25 years old, with long, curly hair and a diffident manner, spoke up first, egged on by her mother. Charlene revealed that she had been one of the women who made a statement in 2000, alleging sexual abuse by Pitcairn men. But, she added, as others sitting around her clucked approvingly, she had only done so because she had been blinded by greed. She explained, ‘The detectives … dragged me to the police station. I didn’t know what I had done. I was ignorant. I was offered good money for each person I could name. They said I would get something like NZ$4000 (£1,500) for every guy. After I had added it up in my head, I was, like, “Whoa!” I just blurted everything out to them.’

Then it was her sister’s turn. Darralyn was 27; well built, with a fair complexion, she resembled Charlene physically, but was more self-assured. Darralyn told us that she had also made a statement—but, she said, only after being browbeaten by police. She claimed that detectives had asked her to ‘make up a false allegation against a guy here, because they didn’t have enough evidence to put him under’.

A New Zealand detective and child abuse specialist, Karen Vaughan, who had joined the British inquiry team, told Darralyn’s partner, Turi Griffiths, that if they had a baby daughter and brought her to the island, she would get raped too, Darralyn alleged. ‘I was shit scared. They told me if I tell the truth, everything will be fine. They said they’d heard from other people about my past. They asked me disgusting personal questions.’

Both sisters were living in New Zealand at the time of the investigation, and both told police that they were prepared to go to court. But ‘after I really thought about it, it was half and half … I wanted it just as bad as them. It was very much a mutual thing,’ said Charlene, referring to the men whom she had named as abusers. That re-evaluation took place after Charlene returned to Pitcairn. Darralyn changed her mind shortly before she, too, went home.

By now my head was spinning. We had had middle-aged matrons bragging about their sexual exploits. We had had Charlene and Darralyn outing themselves as victims, but not really victims. Now their mother, Carol, was declaring that no Pitcairn girl had ever been abused—and, almost in the same breath, telling us that she had had an unpleasant experience as a child. ‘It didn’t affect me,’ she said. ‘I was probably luckier than some I’ve read about. It was tried but nothing happened. I was ten at the time. But even at ten I knew it was wrong, it’s a bad thing. I screamed like hell.’

When she heard that Darralyn had spoken to police, Carol said, ‘I thought, what on earth is that girl thinking about? The silly idiot … Well, if that’s what she’s gone and done, I’ll have to stand by her.’ She went on, ‘I told the cops, not one of these girls went into this with their eyes shut. They knew exactly what they were doing. They weren’t forced by anyone. The women here are loose, and it’s not the men’s fault. What are they supposed to do?’

Carol then hinted at ‘some really bad stuff that I know about that’s happened on the island that’s a heck of a lot worse [than under-age sex] … That’s sick sex I’m talking about, between adults’. She was referring to adultery, it transpired, and as she uttered the word, Carol growled like an alley cat. ‘Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but to me that’s taboo,’ she said. ‘Some people don’t care. They don’t have morals.’

Like the others, Carol had a way of looking at you without meeting your eye. It was disconcerting. The women, with their permanently distant expressions, all seemed to be wearing masks. The outspoken ones laughed a lot, particularly at coarse jokes. They came across as both manipulative and naïve. They were not the type to be easily intimidated. They were feisty and opinionated: people who would be able to look after themselves.

But when conversation moved to the prospect of their male relatives being jailed, the women suddenly appeared vulnerable. ‘I wouldn’t want to be without the men,’ Meralda said softly. Carol interjected, ‘We’re lost as hell without them.’ Olive reckoned that, without the men, ‘you might as well pick Pitcairn up and throw it away, because no one is going to survive … We can’t look after ourselves.’ With the population already at crisis point, they claimed, if even a couple of men were locked up, there would be too few to crew the longboats and maintain the roads. Meralda questioned why Britain had singled out the able-bodied men. Olive said, ‘There’s no one who can replace them. They can’t bring outsiders in to run the boats. They’ve no idea what to do.’

Of all those present, Olive stood to lose most. Among the seven defendants on the island, she counted her husband (Steve), her son (Randy), father (Len) and younger brother (Dave). The six men facing court in New Zealand included her other brother, Kay, and her two other sons, Trent and Shawn. Like certain women in the room, Olive also had connections with some of the alleged victims. She lamented, ‘We live as one big family on this island, and nothing will ever be the same … Right now, with all this going on, maybe they should have hanged Fletcher Christian.’

We had been at Big Fence for several hours, and no one was showing any sign of moving. The women, it seemed, were willing to stay for as long as it took to win us over. When we got our cameras out, they smiled, repeatedly. We could take as many pictures as we wanted.

We had not, though, been offered so much as a glass of water. It was a hot afternoon, and my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth. After a few more photographs, the six of us left. We would never set foot inside Steve Christian’s house again. And some of those women would never again speak to us, or even acknowledge our existence.



The next day, two of those who had remained in the background invited us to talk to them privately. They did not wish their names to be used, and we met them on neutral ground; even so, the other islanders knew within hours that the interview had taken place.

The two were anxious to dispel the impression that Pitcairn was a hotbed of under-age sex. That had not been their experience when they were growing up, they claimed. I asked why they had kept quiet at Big Fence. ‘There’s no point in one little voice speaking up,’ one woman replied. She told us that the Pitcairners usually avoided confrontation. ‘If you’re opposed to something, you tend to defer. We all have to get along together. We’re a community. None of us can survive here on our own.’

The pair were already unpopular because they had not condemned the prosecution outright. One observed, ‘If you try to give a balanced view, you’re regarded as disloyal.’ The other had been called a ‘Pommy supporter’ and ‘puppet of the Governor’ while going about her business in the Adamstown square.

The women believed that the sexual abuse had to be stopped. ‘If it’s as bad as it’s been made out to be, then it needed to be addressed,’ said one. She added, ‘But I’m not condemning the guys. I don’t personally want to see them jailed. I feel very sorry for the guys. Yet we’re hurting for the girls. It’s a double-edged sword. We’re all related. We’re related to the victims. We’re related to the offenders. And whatever decision is made, it’s going to hurt everybody. The ripples are so widespread.’

One woman alluded to victims within her own family, and said that she admired the courage of those giving evidence. However, she went on, ‘I don’t know who’s done what to whom, and I don’t really want to know, because then I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. You go to bed at night, you can’t sleep for thinking about it. No one wants to take that on board.’

This off-the-record conversation, I remember, left me feeling like Alice in Wonderland. The women at Big Fence had promised us the real story. The two dissidents had given us another perspective. But theirs, too, was clouded by ambiguity.

Walking home, as we passed little groups of people chatting in the road, I was struck by a sense of life unfolding in parallel universes. On the surface, the island seemed innocuous, even banal. Then every so often you glimpsed something hard-edged and sinister. Which was the real Pitcairn?




CHAPTER 3 Opening a right can of worms (#ulink_972839b8-3611-5b31-bd88-a34d95301732)


While exploring my surroundings in those early days before the trials began, I poked my head into the public hall, which doubled as Pitcairn’s courthouse. A familiar figure gazed back at me: Queen Elizabeth II, in a hat and pearls, clasping a bunch of flowers. There were, in all, three photographs of the Queen at the front of the hall, as well as one of the Duke of Edinburgh and one of the royal couple. On the same wall hung a Union Jack, together with a Pitcairn flag and a British coat of arms.

It was an overt display of patriotism of a kind rarely seen nowadays, and it was in striking contrast to the anti-British sentiments expressed at Big Fence, where most of the women seemed to agree with Tania Christian, Steve’s daughter, when she declared that ‘Britain can go to hell as far as I care.’

The reality was that, until Operation Unique started, barely a subversive murmur was heard around Adamstown. Pitcairn was Britain’s last remaining territory in the South Pacific, and its inhabitants were—as visitors often remarked—among Her Majesty’s most loyal subjects. Until not so long ago, ‘God Save the Queen’ was sung at public meetings, school concerts, even the twice-weekly film shows, while the British flag was flown on the slightest pretext. A number of islanders were MBEs, and several, including Steve Christian, Jay Warren and Brian Young, one of the ‘off-island’ accused, had been invited to Buckingham Palace.

Pitcairn’s origins were emphatically anti-British, of course; in Fletcher Christian’s day, there were few acts more heinous than mutiny. So it was an ironic twist when, a couple of decades later, the British Navy became the islanders’ guardian and lifeline. The captains of British warships that patrolled the South Seas in the 19th century, keeping an eye on that corner of Empire, felt responsible for the minuscule territory. They developed a sentimental attachment to the place and stopped there regularly, delivering gifts and supplies. They also found themselves settling disputes and dispensing justice in the fledgling community.

Russell Elliott, the commander of HMS Fly, who visited in 1838 after a difficult decade for the islanders, is recalled with particular fondness. Following John Adams’ death in 1829, the Pitcairners had emigrated to Tahiti, where many of them died of unfamiliar diseases. The rest, after limping home, spent five years under the despotic rule of an English adventurer, Joshua Hill, who convinced them that he had been sent out from Britain to govern them. When Hill left, they were then terrorised by American whalers, who threatened to rape the women and taunted the locals for having ‘no laws, no authority, no country’. Demoralised, the islanders begged Elliott to place them under the protection of the British flag, and he agreed, drawing up a legal code and constitution that gave women the vote for possibly the first time anywhere.

Pitcairn was now British, although for the next 60 years its only connection with the mother country was to be the visiting navy ships. In 1856, concerned about overpopulation, the islanders decamped again, this time to the former British penal colony of Norfolk Island; however, a few families returned, and the population—the origin of the modern community—climbed back to pre-Norfolk levels. Then in 1898 Pitcairn was taken under the wing of the Western Pacific High Commission, based in Fiji, which oversaw British colonies in the region. The WPHC did not trouble itself greatly with its newest acquisition: during a half-century of administrative control, only one High Commissioner visited—Sir Cecil Rodwell, who turned up unannounced in 1929.

In the meantime, the warships stopped calling, although the vacuum was partly filled, following the opening of the Panama Canal, by passenger liners. The captains and pursers of the merchant fleet took over the Royal Navy’s paternal role, ordering provisions for the islanders, carrying goods and passengers for free, and donating items from their own stores.

With the liners came emigration, and intermarriage with New Zealanders. While strong ties were forged between Pitcairn and New Zealand, the relationship with Britain remained fundamental, and one of the colony’s proudest hours came in 1971, when the Duke of Edinburgh and Lord Mountbatten arrived on the Royal Yacht Britannia and were transported to shore in a longboat flying the Union Jack from its midships. Official visits, to the disappointment of the locals, continued to be fleeting and infrequent, though.

There were, obviously, practical obstacles hindering more effective colonial scrutiny. Pitcairn, 3350 miles from Fiji, was hard to get to and even harder to get away from. In order to visit for 11 days in 1944, Harry Maude, a Fiji-based British official, had to be away from home for nearly six months. Communications were also primitive. Until 1985 the only way to contact the island was to send a radio telegram by Morse code.

But logistics were not the only issue. Pitcairn was tiny and remote, with no resources worth exploiting, and—unlike, say, the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic—it was of no strategic importance. When responsibility for the island was transferred from Fiji to New Zealand in 1970, the British Foreign Office reassured the High Commissioner to Wellington, who would now be supervising the colony, that ‘the duties of the Governor of Pitcairn are not onerous’.



If recent governors heard that statement, they would sigh. In the past, their role as the Queen’s representative on Pitcairn was mainly ceremonial, although they did have the power to pass laws and override the local council. But since allegations of widespread sexual offending came to light, the island has taken up an inordinate amount of their time.

While the scandal broke in 2000, the first hint of it actually came in 1996, with an incident that not only foreshadowed what was to follow, but set off a chain of events that led inexorably to Operation Unique, and the women of Pitcairn breaking their silence. An 11-year-old Australian girl living on the island with her family—let us call her Caroline


(#ulink_71baedb1-88e9-5477-921d-d9fcb31f1e80)—accused Shawn Christian, Steve’s youngest son, of rape. Her father reported it to the Foreign Office, and Kent Police, based in southeast England, offered to investigate.

Dennis McGookin, a freshly promoted detective superintendent and genial ex-rugby player, was given the case. Accompanied by Peter George, an astute detective sergeant, he flew to Auckland in September 1996, where the pair met Leon Salt, the Pitcairn Commissioner, and the British official in charge of servicing the practical needs of the remote territory. (Among other things, the Commissioner organises the delivery of supplies.) The three men travelled to Pitcairn on a container ship, the America Star; arriving in a big swell, they descended the ship’s wildly swinging Jacob’s ladder into the waiting longboat.

Despite Pitcairn having been a British possession for 160 years, McGookin and George were the first British police to set foot there. They were nervous about their reception; yet the islanders, including 20-year-old Shawn, could not have been friendlier. Shawn readily admitted to having sex with Caroline, saying that it had been consensual. He showed them love letters from her, and even escorted them to the sites of their encounters, which included the church.

Caroline’s family had already left the island. She had been questioned by police in New Zealand, and was said to be very tall for her age, physically mature and ‘quite streetwise’. She had made the rape allegation after her parents caught her coming home late. Despite her age, the detectives decided just to caution Shawn for under-age sex.

The inquiry was over in a day, but the Englishmen had to wait to be picked up by a chartered yacht from Tahiti. They resolved to spend their time addressing the issue of law enforcement.

Pitcairn had never had independent policing. The island, theoretically, policed itself. The Wellington-based British Governor appointed a police officer, and the locals elected a magistrate, who was the political leader as well as handling court cases. Until Dennis McGookin and Peter George appeared, the only law was another islander.

The police officer in 1996 was Meralda Warren, a sparky, extrovert woman in her mid-30s. (Meralda was one of the vocal participants at the Big Fence meeting.) While she was bright, Meralda had no qualifications for the position, nor had she received any training. ‘Everyone on the island had a job, and that just happened to be hers,’ says McGookin. Meralda was also related to nearly everyone in the community. If a crime was committed, she might have to arrest her father, or her brother, or one of her many cousins.

History indicated, though, that she was unlikely to find herself in that delicate situation. Her predecessor, Ron Christian, who had been the police officer for five years, had never made a single arrest. Neither had the two previous incumbents, of seven and 21 years’ service respectively. No one had been arrested since the 1950s. The Pitcairners, it seemed, were extraordinarily law-abiding. All Meralda did was issue driving licences and stamp visitors’ passports. To be fair, that was all her predecessors had done.

The magistrate in 1996 was Meralda’s elder brother, Jay, later to go on trial himself. Jay, who was on the longboat when we arrived, had occupied the post for six years. Like Meralda, he had no qualifications or training, and was related to nearly everyone on the island. That could have been tricky, but fortunately for Jay, not a single court case had taken place during his time in office. And previous magistrates had been similarly blessed. The Adamstown court had not sat for nearly three decades.

Not that the locals would have feared the prospect of jail. The size of a garden shed and riddled with termites, the prison—a white wooden building—had never held a criminal. Lifejackets and building materials were stored in its three cells.

The British detectives were unimpressed with Meralda and Jay. According to Peter George, whom I interviewed in the Kent Police canteen in Maidstone in 2005, ‘It was glaringly obvious, bluntly speaking, that their standard of policing was not really adequate.’

When the police left Pitcairn at the end of their ten-day stay, the islanders, including Shawn Christian, waved them off at the jetty. Soon afterwards, the Governor, Robert Alston, wrote a letter to the Chief Constable of Kent Police, David Phillips. Thanks to McGookin and George, he said, the matter—which ‘had the potential to turn into a long, drawn-out and complicated legal case’—had been satisfactorily resolved. Alston added that the visit had ‘had a salutary effect on the islanders and one which will remain with them for a long time’. As a token of gratitude, he sent Phillips a Pitcairn coat of arms, to be displayed at Kent Police headquarters.



Dennis McGookin was not so convinced about the salutary effect. Back in London, he informed the Foreign Office that the island needed to be properly policed. Britain was not prepared to fund a full-time police officer for a community of a few dozen people. Instead, it decided to recruit a community constable to travel to Pitcairn periodically and train the local officer.

In 1997 Gail Cox, who had been with Kent Police for 17 years, was selected for the job. Cox was easygoing and gregarious; she had worked in the traffic section, in schools liaison and on general patrol duties. The Daily Telegraph newspaper, which interviewed her before she left, reported that she was ‘a practised hand at dealing with pub brawls and squabbles between neighbours’, and ‘highly regarded for her ability to defuse situations before they turn nasty’. Cox told the paper that ‘if the line needs to be drawn, it will be drawn, and I am not frightened to draw it’. Those words were to prove prophetic.

Leon Salt, the Auckland-based Commissioner, accompanied Gail Cox to the island and introduced her to the locals. ‘I put on this jokey persona, and they seemed to like that,’ she told me when I met her in Auckland in 2006. ‘They were very accepting of me. I became part of the community.’

Cox spent 12 weeks on Pitcairn, and established a good rapport with the islanders—perhaps too good. ‘A lot of people are romanced by the place, and I fell for it,’ she says. ‘I saw the community through rose-coloured glasses. I thought it was this really idyllic place, and everybody was really nice.’

The Englishwoman was not scheduled to go back to the island until 1999. Between her visits, Pitcairn underwent some changes. A new Deputy Governor, Karen Wolstenholme, was appointed. Wolstenholme took more interest in the place than some previous incumbents, and visited soon after taking up her post. Another fresh face was Sheils Carnihan, a forthright Scot brought up in New Zealand, who started teaching at the school in early 1998.

Carnihan and her husband, Daniel, had been attracted by the idea of living in such an isolated spot. But they found life on the island numbingly ordinary. ‘All the stuff we were told about it being such a wonderful, caring place turned out to be rubbish,’ she told me in 2005. ‘There’s no real community spirit. And it’s not exotic: it’s like any small town. The only difference is you can’t escape.’

From the start, the teacher had a nagging sense that something was ‘not quite right’ with the children. Six- to eight-year-olds in her class talked about boyfriends and girlfriends in a way that seemed, to her, precocious. When Carnihan’s own family got to Adamstown, a boy slightly younger than her 11-year-old daughter, Hannah, told the girl, ‘You’re mine.’ Another boy said the same thing to Carnihan’s other daughter, nine-year-old Adie.

About halfway through her two-year posting, she overheard a snippet of conversation between two schoolgirls, aged 11 and 13, who were sitting on a verandah outside the classroom. ‘You’ll be 12 next week, you know you’ll be old enough for it?’ the older pupil asked her friend.

From what she had seen and heard, Sheils Carnihan already suspected that girls on Pitcairn were considered ‘fair game’ once they turned 12. This little exchange seemed to confirm that. ‘I was appalled,’ she says. ‘The older girl knew her friend would be expected to have sex. She was making sure she understood what her birthday meant.’

Carnihan was particularly worried about two 13-year-old girls, Belinda and Karen, who seemed extremely troubled. They would ‘talk about sexual things and then giggle and be secretive, or make quite blunt sexual comments’, she says. Soon after the teacher’s family arrived, Belinda jumped onto Daniel’s knee and snuggled up to him in a suggestive fashion.

Once Carnihan had occasion to reprimand Karen for bullying, and the girl’s emotional reaction startled her. ‘She was really angry with me, she was crying and told me that I didn’t understand. She said I didn’t know what it was like to be made to be friends with someone or else they would beat me up.’ Perturbed by these incidents, she confided in Meralda Warren, the police officer, and in the Seventh-day Adventist pastor, John Chan, the only other outsider. Meralda, she says, dismissed her concerns, while Chan’s response was that ‘the morals [on Pitcairn] are quite loose, but you don’t do anything about these things’.

During Sheils Carnihan’s stay, Chan, an Australian, was succeeded by a South African-born pastor, Neville Tosen. Before long, Tosen came to share her unease. ‘But we didn’t know what to do about it,’ she says. ‘We didn’t have any evidence. It was just a gut feeling. And we didn’t feel we could ask the girls yet.’

Even as Carnihan agonised about what to do, her own daughters were forming friendships that would be crucial to this case. Hannah and Adie got to know Belinda and Karen, as well as other girls, and went on camping trips with them around the island. During those trips, the adolescents shared their secrets.

Just as for the Carnihans, Pitcairn was not what Neville Tosen had expected. Brought up on tales of a beacon of faith in the Pacific, he had been looking forward to ministering to a community of committed Adventists. However, when he arrived in late 1998 with his wife, Rhonda, he discovered that only a few people went to church—and they were not exactly glowing advertisements for the religion they professed to practise. Tosen was dismayed to learn that adultery was rife, and that churchgoers were also involved in dubious financial dealings. He delivered a few blunt sermons, ‘and we weren’t too popular as a result’, he says. ‘No one had ever told Church members to pull their socks up before. It caused quite a stir. But nothing changed.’

One islander warned him, ‘There’s more to come.’ And Tosen feared that he knew what the man meant. ‘I’ve been a teacher most of my life, and we immediately picked up mood swings,’ he says. ‘One day a certain student will be friendly to you, the next day totally withdrawn. It took me three months. I said, “Wait a minute, these kids are being abused.” When I tried to talk about it, everyone just clammed up, including the kids themselves.’

He and Carnihan agreed to keep a careful eye on the situation; meanwhile, Tosen examined the birth records that were kept in the island secretary’s office. They revealed a pattern: most Pitcairn women had their first child between 12 and 15. The pastor, who spoke to me at his home in Queensland in 2005, raised the subject at a meeting of the island council. One councillor, Tom Christian, who had four daughters, replied, ‘The age of consent has always been 12, and it’s never hurt them.’ Neville Tosen, who had worked all over the Pacific, says, ‘I remember getting quite hot and saying that even the Kanakas of Western Guinea had 16 as an age of consent. Tom got very angry. He called me a racist, and accused me of interfering in island politics.’

Tosen went on, ‘Steve [Christian] also spoke up, saying it was their Tahitian culture and sometimes the girls couldn’t even wait until they were 12. Everyone else at the meeting was very quiet, including Jay, who was mayor then. The only person who supported me was Brenda [Steve’s sister]. She said, “Any man that does that to a 12-year-old deserves to be knackered.”’



When Gail Cox returned to Pitcairn in October 1999 to conduct her second block of training, she found a community at war with itself. Things were very different from her first visit, and she was different, too. Dennis McGookin, her boss, had instructed her to be a police officer, not the islanders’ friend.

The first problem she had to deal with was theft, particularly of government property, which she discovered was widespread and had been going on for years. Diesel fuel was siphoned off into quad bike tanks; timber, roofing iron and fuse boxes vanished as soon as they were unloaded at the wharf; cement for the slipway ended up as a swimming pool in someone’s garden. Electrical equipment and a computer had been stolen. People jokingly referred to one Adamstown home, which was built entirely from pilfered materials, as ‘Government House’. ‘They don’t see it as stealing,’ one outsider told me later. ‘In their minds, everything that arrives on the island is Pitcairn property.’

British officials ordered the policewoman to crack down. She questioned all of the islanders, and nearly everyone, even the elderly folk, owned up to something. One man confessed to stealing NZ$20,000 (£7,500) from the co-operative store. At the suggestion of diplomats in Wellington, Cox offered the locals an amnesty, which they accepted. ‘But they weren’t happy with me challenging them like that,’ she says.

Six weeks or so after Gail Cox returned, Sheils Carnihan’s two-year posting was up. Two days before the family left, 13-year-old Hannah spoke to her mother, disclosing the explosive information that Belinda and Karen, her friends on the island, had confided months earlier. Both girls, allegedly, had been sexually assaulted by Randy Christian, the burly 25-year-old who was Steve’s middle son. Carnihan straight away told Gail Cox, who notified British diplomats in Wellington as well as the Commissioner, Leon Salt.

According to Hannah, Belinda, in particular, was ‘dying to tell’ her mother about Randy, but could not summon up the courage. She even begged her friends to speak to her mother on her behalf, and wrote her a letter, which she then burnt. Belinda was anxious about damaging the friendship between her family and Randy’s, and was sure her mother would not believe her. Hannah told Sheils, ‘She wanted to write to her mum saying what had happened, and that she wanted it to stop. I mean, if her mum knew, maybe it would.’ To which Neville Tosen comments, ‘How the mother didn’t already know about it—I’ve never answered that question. Because from my rather limited access to the girl, I was aware that she’d been interfered with.’

Gail Cox was supposed to leave in late November, on the same ship as the Carnihans, but agreed to stay on longer to deal with the fallout from the thieving revelations. By chance, then, she was still on Pitcairn when Ricky Quinn, a visitor from New Zealand, turned up.

The step-grandson of Vula Young, one of Pitcairn’s matriarchs, Quinn struck Pitcairn like a tropical storm. A good-looking 23-year-old, he had past convictions for possession of LSD, morphine and heroin, which, to the local teenagers, gave him an exciting aura of danger. Quinn had brought with him a stash of marijuana, and he slotted straight in with the minority of islanders who formed the ‘drinking crowd’.

A visiting policewoman on the alert; a handsome newcomer with drugs in his pocket; young girls tired of being preyed upon and itching to talk. All the elements were in place. Now all that was needed was the spark.

The drinkers got together most Friday nights. Two weeks before Christmas, Pawl Warren had a party. Most of the young people on the island attended. They stole some alcohol from their parents, and also some Valium tablets.

Gail Cox was still awake at 1.10 a.m. when Dave Brown, one of the partygoers, knocked on her door. ‘There’s trouble at Pawl’s house,’ Dave announced. At Pawl’s, Cox found several frightened and sobbing youngsters, who admitted that they had been drinking. The police officer went on to Belinda’s house, where Belinda and Karen had taken refuge; once inside, she got the feeling that Belinda wanted to tell her something. But when Cox tried to speak to her, the teenager’s mother stood up and blocked out her husband, who was lying behind her. ‘Not now,’ she mouthed.

Belinda’s mother took Cox aside and told her what the two 15-year-olds, both very distressed, had confided in her. They had been sexually assaulted by Ricky Quinn—and also, in the past, as Hannah had signalled, by Randy Christian. (A third girl, 12-year-old Francesca, had accused Quinn of similar behaviour.)

At 3 a.m. Gail Cox telephoned Dennis McGookin. It was Saturday daytime in England, and he was on his way to watch his favourite rugby team, Gillingham. Cox explained that she needed a specially trained officer to take a complaint from a child. ‘I knew that wasn’t practicable,’ he told me over a pub lunch in Kent in 2005. ‘I told her to take down a detailed statement, making sure an adult was present, and then fax that over to me.’

Cox also emailed Leon Salt to inform him about the weekend’s events, including the allegations against Randy. As I later found out, Salt’s response was swift. ‘If we dig into this, we’ll open a right can of worms, and we’ll have every man on Pitcairn locked up for life,’ he warned her.

* (#ulink_4e0e1744-ba5a-5173-9bfd-722b5a54c5f4)The names of all victims in this book have been changed.




CHAPTER 4 No amnesty (#ulink_aa51f399-f800-5c7a-9f7d-b0b3a051dcf3)


The morning after Pawl Warren’s party, Gail Cox had an uproar on her hands. Ricky Quinn had admitted to assaulting Belinda and having under-age sex with Karen, and the Pitcairn community was furious with him. Cox had to intervene to prevent Karen’s father from attacking him, and Quinn was so afraid for his safety that Cox installed him in the schoolhouse.

The islanders appeared disgusted by the New Zealander’s behaviour. Yet within a few days, public opinion had swung in his favour. Brenda Christian, Steve’s sister, told Cox that some of the locals were saying ‘the girls had asked for it’. Olive Christian’s sister, Yvonne Brown, who was visiting Pitcairn, claimed that Quinn was being ‘treated disgracefully’.

Now the community turned against Gail Cox. Only Brenda Christian and her husband, Mike Lupton-Christian, supported her. The others—as well as resenting an outsider ‘interfering’ in their business—regarded Ricky Quinn as an extremely hard worker and therefore ‘above the law’. Moreover, news had spread that the girls were accusing local men of similar offences—and who knew where that would lead? It was the start of the community resistance that was to characterise the sexual abuse case for years to come.

Despite opposition, Cox was determined to prosecute Quinn, and she scheduled a trial for ten days after the party. In the interim, she found herself undermined by the locals. On one occasion she agreed that Quinn could go home with Meralda Warren, the island police officer, and work with her on her wooden carvings. She was incensed to learn that he had spent several hours with Meralda’s brother, Jay, the magistrate who would be deciding Quinn’s fate, and had also gone fishing with another Pitcairner.

Jay, meanwhile, telephoned Quinn’s father, Richard, in New Zealand and, according to Richard, informed him that he was ‘looking after Ricky’. It subsequently emerged that Jay was hoping to buy a cheap motorbike that Quinn planned to import.

At his trial, Quinn surprised Gail Cox by denying the indecent assault against Belinda that he had earlier admitted. She discovered afterwards that he had acted on advice from Meralda, who knew that Cox was unwilling to call Belinda as a witness. Forced to drop the charge, the policewoman was livid: Meralda had betrayed her confidence and ‘perverted the course of justice’, she says. (Meralda denies it.) The complaint by Francesca had been dropped, at her parents’ request. Quinn pleaded guilty to ‘unlawful carnal knowledge’ in respect of Karen, and was sentenced by Jay to 100 days in prison. As pre-arranged between Cox and British officials, the Governor, Martin Williams, then ordered him to be deported and remitted his sentence. In essence, he was let off.

A few days later, just before Christmas, the young New Zealander left on a ship, carrying two letters addressed to his parents—one from Meralda, the other from Yvonne Brown. Meralda apologised to Richard and Diane Quinn ‘for this whole mess’, saying their son had been ‘a great asset to our island’, and it was ‘our loss that he is leaving’. Yvonne wrote, ‘We have a British policewoman here and boy is she a “pig” … the policewoman blew everything out of proportion.’

Commissioner Leon Salt wrote to Meralda and Jay, admonishing them for unprofessional conduct. He asked Jay, ‘If it is so difficult bringing a case against an outsider, how on earth could a case be brought against a local?’ Of Meralda he inquired, ‘How can we have any confidence that the law is being upheld on Pitcairn?’

With Ricky Quinn gone, Gail Cox was finally able to address the other matter that had arisen from Pawl Warren’s party: the allegations against Randy Christian. And there was a second man in the picture. Belinda had approached Cox three days after the party to divulge that Randy’s younger brother, Shawn, had also raped her. The Englishwoman urged her to let her mother know. Belinda said, ‘Thank you for believing me.’

Cox informed Salt about the development relating to Shawn, and Salt phoned Randy and Shawn’s father, Steve. ‘Tell the boys to get a lawyer,’ he told him.

Belinda’s friend, Karen, had already left Pitcairn for New Zealand, where she would be finishing her schooling, as many local teenagers did at 15. Before departing, she had spoken to Gail Cox informally about one relatively minor assault by Randy. Cox had the strong sense that she had more to tell; however, that was all Karen would say—and she was desperate to get off the island.

Belinda had plenty to say, but she found it difficult to say it. It took her four hours to describe the first time she was raped, at the age of ten, and seven hours to recount all the incidents involving Randy and Shawn—including one where they allegedly raped her in tandem. That was the episode that was hardest to talk about. ‘She was so halting, it was painful,’ Cox told me much later in an Auckland café, speaking for the first and only time about her role in the case.

Never before in her career had the Kent constable interviewed a rape victim. Her investigative experience was limited to traffic accidents. But she was compassionate and sensible. She took an ‘old-fashioned statement’, making sure to record every detail. Then she asked Belinda and her mother to read the statement through and sign it. ‘Those boys should hang for what they’ve done to my daughter,’ her mother declared.

Belinda’s father, though, feared for his family. ‘I don’t like this,’ he told Cox.

She replied, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’ll be trouble.’

He was correct. Belinda’s allegations against Steve Christian’s sons would blow the island community apart.

Cox sent the statement to Dennis McGookin in England in January 2000. Her work was over, but it would be another three weeks before she could get off the island. She was almost friendless in a hostile community—a fact that had become plain on New Year’s Eve, when she stayed in, but someone, apparently assuming she would ring the bell in the square at midnight, had rigged up a surprise for her. One of the locals, Dennis Christian, took her place, and a load of fish oil and guts fell on his head.

Soon after midnight, as the fireworks went off, Cox heard an intruder trying to get in through her office window. They did not succeed, for she had taken to locking her doors and windows, after a document had disappeared. That person, presumably, had expected her to be in the square.

The community made it almost impossible for her to do her job. Jay refused to hold a council meeting to discuss policing, saying he was too busy. Meralda sabotaged her plans to stage a mock court case, as a training exercise. With black humour, Gail Cox told Leon Salt that she would ‘need to wear a stab-proof vest’ for the rest of her stay.

The night before she left, Cox went to see the pastor, Neville Tosen, and his wife, Rhonda. ‘She put her head down and cried,’ Tosen told me later, ‘and said she was sorry she’d ever come to this such and such island, and she was never coming back.’

Cox says that, after that second visit, ‘I felt dead inside … emotionally numb. I really loved that community and I cared about them. I felt so disappointed, so deeply betrayed.’

Two months later, in April, Belinda followed her off the island. Since making her statement, Belinda’s situation had been uncomfortable, to say the least; now police learnt that Randy Christian, who had been living on and off on Norfolk Island, was intending to return. There were fears that she might not be safe once he was back, so Leon Salt made clandestine arrangements to book her on a ship to New Zealand. Belinda’s father was bitterly opposed to the events she had set in train. As he said goodbye to her at the jetty, he told her, ‘It’ll be your fault if the islanders are arrested and the island breaks apart. If you go ahead with this, you’ll never be able to come back to Pitcairn and you’ll be out of this family.’

In Auckland, Belinda was re-interviewed on video by Karen Vaughan, the Wellington detective with child abuse expertise. The British Governor, Martin Williams, told the Foreign Office that she and her mother were adamant that they wanted charges brought. However, he forecast, ‘Their determination could waver, as the family of the alleged perpetrators is very high in Pitcairn’s informal pecking order.’



In Wellington and London, British officials were finally giving Pitcairn their undivided attention. Although they only had Belinda’s and Karen’s allegations so far, they seemed to recognise straight away that these hinted at a wider problem.

Martin Williams wrote to his superiors at the Foreign Office in London, ‘I have no doubt that these are not unique cases. It is far more likely that they are a continuation of a pattern that has been going on for 200 years … If we now launch charges against the two suspects, this may well kindle feuds and resentments about similar cases which have occurred over the years … about which … nothing has ever been done.’

It was clear that, notwithstanding this apparent inaction in the past, something had to be done now. A prosecution, however, would entail massive expense, and the logistics were almost unthinkable. As for a court case, with all the attendant publicity, it would be highly divisive, and potentially devastating, for the community.

Nevertheless, the allegations had to be investigated, and Kent Police agreed to take on the new inquiry. It would be funded by the Foreign Office, with detectives reporting to a Pitcairn Public Prosecutor, soon to be appointed. By April 2000 Peter George, who had worked on the 1996 Shawn Christian case, and Robert Vinson, a high-flying detective inspector in his 30s, were in Australia. Operation Unique was under way.

In Newcastle, 100 miles north of Sydney, the pair interviewed Shawn Christian, who was living there with his Australian partner; three days later, they flew to Norfolk Island to question his brother, Randy. Both men denied raping Belinda, but each of them admitted to having under-age sex with another woman, Catherine, who had moved to Auckland—and so began a domino effect.

In New Zealand, on their way home, George and Vinson decided to call on Catherine. They knocked on her door at about 8 p.m. What Catherine had to say took them aback. As Robert Vinson recalls it, she told them, ‘I can’t help you with what you’re investigating, but I was raped myself when I was ten, by [Belinda’s] father.’

Catherine gave detectives a lengthy statement, listing a number of Pitcairn men who she said had assaulted her during her childhood. She added that this was ‘a common thing on Pitcairn’, remarking, ‘You won’t get a girl reaching the age of 12 that’s still a virgin.’ Although the islanders all knew it went on, she said, it was seen as ‘part of life’, and no one complained about it.

According to Peter George, by now a detective inspector, that statement ‘changed the whole course of it’. Back in the UK, he and Vinson told senior officials that a broader inquiry was needed. The reaction was lukewarm. In Wellington, the worry of Karen Wolstenholme, the Deputy Governor, was that a prosecution might fail and the island would become ungovernable. Britain was also apprehensive about likely criticism of its supervision of the territory. Wolstenholme warned in a memo, ‘Pitcairn has a great deal of followers internationally and however the investigation proceeds I think we can expect negative publicity and condemnation for our actions.’

Ultimately, the Foreign Office had no choice: Catherine’s allegations were too serious to disregard. The parameters of the wider inquiry were set. George and Vinson would trace every woman who had grown up on Pitcairn since 1980. Leon Salt, the Commissioner, gave them names and addresses. There were 20 women in all.

Salt, although helpful, was gravely concerned. In his view, the criminal behaviour was ‘a cultural issue’, he told Wolstenholme, probably involving ‘most males on the island’ and ‘going back many generations’. If the men were brought to trial, he prophesied, ‘the inevitable outcome will be the collapse of the community … and its abandonment of the island’. Families, he said, ‘would have great difficulty co-existing … Healing differences between families would be impossible.’

The Governor’s legal adviser proposed a radical solution: a general amnesty, conditional on offenders admitting their guilt. Karen Wolstenholme was among those who welcomed the idea, describing the situation as ‘partly of our own making’. She commented that it was ‘not altogether surprising if the community does not see the laws as applicable to them’. However, a decision was about to be taken over diplomats’ and lawyers’ heads.

Baroness Patricia Scotland, the British minister responsible for the Overseas Territories, had been following developments in the Pitcairn case closely. In May 2000 Governor Williams met with Scotland in London. He reported back that she wished the legal process to take its course, ‘no matter the cost or the implications for Pitcairn’s future’. ‘No question of an amnesty,’ Williams’ hurriedly faxed note to Wolstenholme concluded, with those words underlined.



In August 2000 Peter George and Robert Vinson, the detectives assigned to Operation Unique, returned to the Antipodes to start tracing the 20 women on their list: most of them lived in Australia or New Zealand, with a few in Britain and the United States. Accompanied by two New Zealand detectives, Karen Vaughan, the sharp-witted willowy blonde with child abuse expertise, and Paula Feast, police worked at a hectic pace—flying into a city, hiring a car and often just turning up on people’s doorsteps. Yet ‘every door we knocked on,’ George told me, ‘we got the same response … Every Pitcairn girl, and I mean every single one, a 100 per cent hit, had been a victim of sexual abuse to varying degrees.’ Vinson remembers, ‘We got disclosure after disclosure. It was staggering. It was like opening the floodgates for some of these women.’

The victims, by then in their late teens to late 40s, described incidents covering the whole gamut of abuse, from relatively minor assaults to violent rape. Some recalled blighted childhoods during which they were targeted by half a dozen or more Pitcairn men. The majority named more than one offender. In numerous instances, the abuse had started when they were three to five years old.

Most had kept their experiences to themselves, confiding in no one, not even their husbands. Now their husbands were hearing for the first time about the horrors of growing up as a girl on Pitcairn. Reliving it all was traumatic for the women, some of whom went into long-term counselling after telling their stories. Relationships and families were placed under enormous strain.

The first group of women told detectives about older victims, including friends and relatives, who had also been abused. Abandoning their 20-year time limit, police interviewed those women too, drawing a new line at 1960; before then, the relevant sexual offences law did not apply on the island.

By the end of the investigation, 31 victims—including two men—had spoken to police, naming 30 offenders, 27 of them native Pitcairners. Nearly every island male from the past three generations had been implicated; almost a third of those named were dead. Among the outsiders alleged to have taken part was a New Zealand teacher posted to Pitcairn in the 1960s, Albert Reeves.

Nearly a dozen women had made accusations against brothers, uncles or first cousins. But incest was not the only reason why Operation Unique at an early stage became, in Robert Vinson’s words, ‘very messy’. With every victim who was tracked down, the connections between those involved grew ever more excruciatingly tangled.

Belinda and Karen had been the first to disclose abuse. Next police spoke to Catherine, who claimed that Belinda’s father had raped her. Detectives then questioned a woman called Gillian, who—as well as recounting her own experiences—suggested that they contact two sisters, Geraldine and Rita. The pair told police that they had been raped as little girls. Their assailant, they said, was Gillian’s father.

Gillian’s uncle was allegedly an offender also, and so was her grandfather. Her first cousin was a victim. So was a relation of Geraldine’s and Rita’s. Their brother was said to be an abuser.

As the layers of secrecy that had enclosed Pitcairn for decades were peeled away, a picture emerged of almost systematic abuse. Many families allegedly contained both offenders and victims. How would those families cope with the fallout?



News travels fast along Pitcairn’s ‘coconut grapevine’. Just from the engine noise, the islanders can identify the driver of any quad bike that passes their house. They claim to know what everyone else is up to, at any hour of the day or night. ‘The jungle drum of Pitcairn is unbelievable,’ says Mary Maple, a former teacher on the island.

The grapevine extends across New Zealand, Australia and Norfolk Island, and during 2000 it buzzed with stories of English police questioning Pitcairn women. So when Peter George and Robert Vinson arrived at Pitcairn aboard a 48-foot yacht in September, no one was in any doubt as to why they had come.

After interviewing the island women, detectives were questioning the men. They had already spoken to suspects in New Zealand and Australia. Now it was the turn of those who lived on Pitcairn. Vinson and George set up video-recording equipment at the Lodge, where they were staying, and invited the men in one by one. While they were questioning Dave Brown, Len’s son and Olive’s brother, the power went off. Dave obligingly helped them to start up the generator, enabling them to resume his interview.

Despite the circumstances of their visit, the two Englishmen were received hospitably. ‘We were greeted with open arms, even by the accused,’ says Peter George, who recalls people ‘bringing us fish and freshly baked cakes … It was surreal.’

Beneath the surface, though, the community was in turmoil. When police began to ask questions, ‘everyone got the fright of their lives’, says Neville Tosen, the pastor. ‘Some of the men were quite clear that they were going to go to jail. They started cutting firewood for their mothers and wives, laying in stocks for a long period. They thought they were going to be taken off the island.’

Terry Young, who had promised his father, Sam, on his deathbed that he would look after his mother, Vula, was especially anxious. So was Dave. ‘I’m in trouble, no question,’ Dave told several people. ‘I’m going to jail … They’re going to lock me up and throw away the key.’ Even men who were not under scrutiny were alarmed. One older islander told an outsider, ‘They [the police] are going back 20 years. If they went back further, there’d be others.’

Elderly women who depended on their sons saw their whole future at risk, says Neville Tosen. ‘One mother was telling her son to come clean. Another was beside herself with worry. She said, “The police have come, and they’re going to take my boy away and hang him.”’

While Tosen had long had his suspicions, he was appalled to find out the scale of the alleged abuse. Above all, he was at a loss to comprehend how the older women, the mothers and grandmothers, could have allowed it to happen. It seemed obvious to him that they must have known. He and Rhonda spoke to the matriarchs. ‘We said to them, “Where were you when this was going on? You’re the elders of the island, surely you must be unhappy?” And they replied that nothing had changed. One of the grandmothers said, “We all went through it, it’s part of life on Pitcairn.” She said she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.’

The couple were feeling increasingly isolated. The communal satellite phone never seemed to be working when Tosen tried to reach Adventist regional headquarters. ‘We couldn’t get a message out of Pitcairn,’ he says. ‘We couldn’t even contact our kids. I also wrote letters to the Church administration, saying I was concerned about things on the island. They never arrived.’

Accompanying police on their visit was Eva Learner, an English social worker, who was sent out to support the locals and assess the impact of the investigation. In a report to the Foreign Office, Learner said that the men were ‘in [a] distinct state of shock and fear … very weepy … depressed and withdrawn’. Within the wider community, she encountered ‘general disbelief … about the nature and extent of the alleged abuse’: the islanders could not grasp ‘why the matters being investigated were of concern … or how they might be damaging to young women and children’. Mothers, Learner wrote, ‘professed difficulty in understanding that this had happened to their daughters’.

When the police departed, the locals thanked them. ‘They thought we were going to go away and never come back,’ says Peter George. Six months later, in March 2001, some of the team returned for more interviews; in October that year they visited yet again. By then, according to Karen Vaughan, who went on the two latter occasions, ‘it was clear they wished we’d go away … They thought we’d go there once and then realise how difficult, logistically, it was to pursue. The men just thought they could get away with it.’

By mid-2001 police had finished their inquiries and built up an extensive file of evidence. But Leon Salt was deeply sceptical, and predicted that they would get no further. Salt, who had opposed a prosecution from the outset, told detectives, ‘The women may speak to you, they may give you statements, but you’ll never get them to go to court and give evidence. You’ll never get the Pitcairners to testify against each other.’

Now that I was on the island, with the trials starting shortly, I was about to find out whether or not he was right.




CHAPTER 5 The fiefdom and its leader (#ulink_886df091-e6b7-54c3-8cdd-20d4ab079d74)


It was Tuesday morning, which meant that Pitcairn’s one shop, situated on the main road, a couple of banana groves down from the square, was open for business. But you had to be quick, for it would be closed by 9 a.m.—and if you missed it, you had to wait until Thursday, when it opened for another solitary hour of trading.

The small shop was crowded, although probably no more than a dozen people were browsing the dusty shelves, stacked with tins of lambs’ tongues and condensed milk. Olive Christian, a grandson on her hip, was inspecting bottles of bleach, while her mother-in-law, Dobrey, chatted animatedly in Pitkern to another elderly islander. Olive’s son, Randy, and several other men who were about to go on trial stood around, laughing loudly at some private joke. They were mostly barefoot, and carried fishing knives in their belts. As Claire and I roamed the aisles, a figure in a baggy grey T-shirt leant over a freezer of meat. ‘We don’t like reporters here,’ said Dave Brown, with a half-smile.

Short and stocky, with a bushy moustache, Dave was charged with 16 offences, including indecent assault and gross indecency with a child. But, like the other defendants, he was free on bail, and for now he was just gassing with his mates.

Behind the till, entering purchases in tattered account books labelled simply ‘Dobrey’ or ‘Olive’, was Darralyn Griffiths, née Warren. Darralyn had withdrawn from the case, claiming that she had been coerced into giving a statement; it was common knowledge, however, that she and Dave had had an ‘affair’ that began when he was 34 and she was 13. It had prompted many a sly wink at the time, although not from Dave’s wife, Lea, or Darralyn’s mother, Carol, whose main objection had been that Dave was married.

Also open that morning, again for the blink of an eye, was the minuscule post office, presided over by Dennis Christian. Dennis, the postmaster, was charged with three sexual assaults. Considerably more forthcoming than Dave, he explained to us politely that Pitcairn’s once booming stamp business was in decline. ‘Hardly anyone mails any more,’ he said. ‘Everyone jumps on the internet nowadays.’

The library, too, had unlocked its door for an hour, revealing a closet-sized space and shelves piled haphazardly with Bounty-related books, airport novels and travel guides. All could be borrowed indefinitely, without risk of a fine. Next door, the island secretary, Betty Christian, was sweeping out her office, which had another picture of the Queen on the wall. Outside, a few of the older women were swapping gossip on the wooden bench, which was known as the ‘bus shelter’.

I had now met, or at least laid eyes on, all seven of the Pitcairn-based defendants: Randy Christian and Jay Warren on the longboat; Steve Christian in the pink bulldozer; Dave Brown at the shop; Dennis Christian at the post office; and Len Brown, our next-door neighbour, in his garden. The seventh man was Terry Young, who lived near the store with his mother, Vula. I had passed him in the main road, a large, lumbering figure. Terry was charged with one rape and seven indecent assaults.

Within two or three days of landing, we knew who was who among the 40 or so Pitcairn residents. (Half a dozen were away.) And they, of course, knew who we were: six despised reporters tramping around their island. We could not have avoided the locals if we had tried. Every time we stepped out, we bumped into them; often as we walked along the dirt tracks, they would overtake us on the quad bikes that they hopped on even for short trips. I was never sure whether to wave: it seemed rude not to, but sometimes the only response was an icy stare.

Not everyone was unfriendly. Outside the medical centre, I met a chatty, baby-faced Englishman: Mike Lupton-Christian, who is married to Brenda Christian, Steve’s sister. Mike and Brenda had met in England, and had moved to the island in 1999 with her son from a previous marriage, Andrew. Mike, who had added Brenda’s surname to his, appeared to be well suited to Pitcairn life. A former manager of retail and leisure services for the British military, he had a practical nature and was not afraid to get his hands dirty. But his attempts to muck in had so far been frustrated.

Mike, who was qualified to drive heavy machinery, was keen to use Pitcairn’s big red tractor. He needed a local licence, but when he applied to the council’s internal committee, chaired by Randy Christian, nothing happened. He made inquiries. Still nothing happened. ‘They kept saying things like “After the next ship’s been”,’ said Mike.

Vaine Peu, an amiable Cook Islander and the partner of Charlene Warren, told a similar story; Turi Griffiths, Darralyn’s husband, also from the Cooks, could not get a licence either. As for Simon Young, an Englishman who had settled on Pitcairn with his American – Filipina wife, Shirley, he had managed to secure a licence—but only for an old blue tractor, and only for collecting rubbish, which was his job. Mike, Vaine, Turi and Simon had one thing in common: they were all outsiders. Meanwhile, two local teenagers were being trained to drive the big red tractor.

Those who could not drive the tractor, which was used in countless chores, most notably to plough the islanders’ gardens, were dependent on those who could. And those who could were men who had been born on Pitcairn and spent their lives there: the ‘Big Fence gang’, as they were called.

If the big red tractor was a symbol of power from which outsiders were excluded, it was eclipsed by the longboat—Pitcairn’s umbilical cord, and the sole preserve of Steve Christian and his followers.

Such is the aura surrounding the longboat that it was an anticlimax to discover that it is just a large open boat with an outboard engine and an aluminium hull. The boat’s mystique dates from the days when it was made of wood, powered by oars, and hauled up the slipway by hand. But while less muscle may be required now, its significance has not diminished: without it, Pitcairn could not function. The boat—or boats, for there are two of them—collect people and supplies from the ships in all weather. Cargo, including fuel drums and timber, is lowered in a net; for those standing underneath, it can be dangerous work. The heavily laden vessel is then guided back into shallow, surf-lashed Bounty Bay, and it is their skill in accomplishing that task in the wildest conditions that gives Pitcairn’s men their intrepid reputation.

The longboat slows down as it approaches the cove and pauses, with its motor idling. The engineer turns round to face the open sea; when he spots a suitable wave, he opens the engine up at full throttle. The boat is swept forward and surfs into the bay through a slender, rock-studded channel, skidding to a halt by the jetty—which, for passengers, is like landing at the bottom of a helter-skelter. There is little room for error, though, and islanders have been killed or seriously injured on occasions when the swell has seized the boat and dashed it against rocks.

For the local boys, joining the crew is a rite of passage, and they long to be skipper or coxswain, just like other boys dream of driving a train. The coxswain has the most kudos of anyone on the island. In an exceptionally macho society, he is the most macho figure of all.

Steve has been a coxswain since the age of 17. Randy—the only one of Steve’s sons living on the island, and thus seen as the heir apparent to his political power—is a coxswain. So is Dave Brown. So is Jay Warren. Those men were always at the back of the boat, in charge of the tiller or engine. Len Brown, who in his day headed one of Pitcairn’s leading families, was among the island’s most capable engineers and coxswains.

Vaine Peu, Simon Young and Mike Lupton-Christian had all asked to be trained for the key roles. But the locals were unenthusiastic, for according to them, you had to have grown up on Pitcairn. So ‘the boys’, as they were known, continued to control the longboat—and, with it, the community’s access to resources, its economy, its very survival.



As of 2004, Steve and Randy occupied the highest-ranking official positions on Pitcairn. As mayor, Steve was the community leader and chairman of the local council, which administers the island day to day. (The Governor wields overall authority.) Randy was chairman of the influential internal committee, which, among other things, allocated jobs. The pair also headed the unofficial hierarchy, for the real power base on the island was not the public hall, where the council met monthly, but Big Fence, Steve’s family home, where important decisions were made by his ‘inner circle’, and the same men gathered on Friday nights for rowdy drinking sessions.

Only native-born Pitcairners were part of the gang. Outsiders, particularly men, were regarded with hostility and suspicion. Steve and his mates, it is said, saw them as a threat to their jobs, and to the cosy way they ran the place for their own benefit. ‘They hate outsiders with a vengeance,’ a former Pitcairn teacher told me. ‘It’s their rock, and they don’t want anyone else on it.’

At the same time, Pitcairn is desperate for new blood. From a high of 227 in 1937, the population has dropped to around 50. Yet as much as newcomers are needed, they are feared and disliked, and also looked down on, because they lack the Bounty lineage. The locals ridicule them for breaking invisible protocols, and say of them in Pitkern that they ‘cah wipe’—do everything wrong.

According to Mike Lupton-Christian, as an outsider, ‘you’re actually treated quite badly … They don’t like people coming in with new ideas or doing anything better than them. You become very unpopular if you disagree with them.’ Mike’s house, built high on a hillside overlooking the Pacific, is derisively called ‘Pommy Ridge’ by other islanders.

In the past, some newcomers have turned up starry-eyed and then left, unable to deal with the hardships of Pitcairn life. But outsiders are expected to fail. Nola Warren, one of the matriarchs, says, ‘People from outside can’t live here. They’ll never settle down. They wouldn’t be able to cope.’

Some are not given much of a chance. Nicola Ludwig and Hendrik Roos, from the German city of Leipzig, were ideal immigrants: young, strong and fit, with small children. They loved the outdoors, and were eager to adopt a self-sufficient lifestyle. Nicola, whose family is now in New Zealand, told me recently, ‘We went to Pitcairn for an adventure and to get away from the outside world. We were absolutely naïve about the place. We thought it was this little community full of greenies, where everyone is nice to each other.’ Although Hendrik pitched in, particularly on the boats, the Pitcairn men ostracised him and subjected him to anti-German insults. Eighteen months after the family arrived, a container ship offered them a free passage to Auckland. They packed up and left.

Some islanders are treated as outsiders, too. Brenda Christian—small, but very strong and fit—is always in the thick of it with the men, flitting around the boats and shouldering heavy loads. Yet Brenda is not considered a true Pitcairner. She left the island at the age of 18 and did not return until 30 years later.

Like Brenda, Pawl Warren has an obvious rapport with island life. Shaven-headed Pawl, who gave us a fright when we first saw him on the longboat, left Pitcairn as a baby and grew up in New Zealand. In 1993, inspired by the Hollywood films about the mutiny, he moved back with his wife, Lorraine, and three children. Pawl describes the island as ‘a magical place’, but adds, ‘It’s not been easy to fit in here, because the hierarchy was already established.’

Even locals who have not lived away may experience similar problems. Tom and Betty Christian—elders of the Church, well travelled, well read and relatively affluent—are envied and distrusted by many of their fellow islanders. The couple, who have pioneered most of Pitcairn’s commercial ventures and undertaken overseas trips sponsored by the Adventist Church, find themselves increasingly isolated in their own community.

In the early 1990s, in an effort to boost the population, British administrators introduced a scheme to attract young Norfolk Islanders. A few people took up the offer of work and cheap housing; none of them ended up staying for long. Even Randy Christian’s wife, Nadine, who has married into the island’s most powerful family, confides, ‘The Pitcairners have their own way of doing things. I’ve had to try and do stuff the Pitcairn way, but it’s very difficult.’

I asked Matthew Forbes, Karen Wolstenholme’s successor as Deputy Governor, who, in his opinion, had been the last outsider to settle successfully on the island. After a long pause, Forbes suggested Samuel Warren, an American whaler who arrived in 1864.



Nadine, Steve Christian’s daughter-in-law, had been one of the talkative women at the Big Fence meeting; for the time being, she and other female relatives were as close as we would get to Steve. However, we soon came to know his voice well, thanks to the VHF radio system that is Pitcairn’s domestic telephone network. Every house and public building has a VHF unit. If you want to speak to someone, you holler out their name three times on the main frequency, Channel 16. (Only a first name is needed.) When they respond, the two of you switch to another channel—and everyone else adjusts their sets, in order to eavesdrop.

The radio in our living room crackled into life dozens of times a day, as the islanders got in touch with each other to chat or make plans. Steve’s rich tones rang out frequently. He might have been about to go on trial, but he was, unmistakably, still in charge. It was he who made public announcements, informing people when the next ship would be calling, or telling them not to worry if they saw smoke rising—‘We’re just burning rubbish.’

While Steve was elected mayor in 1999, unofficially he had been a leader since his teens. Good-looking, self-confident and powerfully built, he had always stood out: cleverer than his peers, a bit more articulate, and possessing a certain raw charm. His late father, Ivan, had been magistrate for eight years, and his mother, Dobrey, remains a formidable woman. Despite a strict upbringing, Steve was described as a tearaway by a Royal Air Force team stationed on Pitcairn in the 1970s, when he was in his early 20s. In a report to British authorities, the team also tipped him as a ‘future strongman’, and said that he would be a ‘severe loss’ if he decided to emigrate. Steve never did leave, except for limited periods, and that has been a source of strength.

In his youth, Steve had the pick of the local girls, and he eventually married Olive Brown, Len’s eldest daughter, although—much to people’s amusement—he reportedly also had affairs with her two younger sisters; he was referred to as ‘the man with three wives’. The birth of three sons, Trent, Randy and Shawn, consolidated his status. In addition, Steve has a multitude of talents. It is said of him that he can fix anything, and that he is a person who gets things done. A few years ago, when the islanders were heading home in a gale and rough seas, a rope got caught in the longboat’s propeller. Steve dived overboard, cut the rope and was back in the boat before some of its occupants had realised anything was amiss.

On another occasion, when a woman was seriously ill, her husband contacted a specialist in California via ham radio. (Until recently, the only health professional on Pitcairn was a nurse.) The doctor proffered a long-distance diagnosis, and Steve, on his instructions, fashioned two surgical instruments which the nurse then used to perform an emergency procedure. The woman believes that Steve saved her life. ‘It was a miracle, and he was part of that miracle,’ she says.

Steve himself walks with a limp, the legacy of a teenage accident that has required two hip replacements. Nevertheless, he is physically equal to Pitcairn’s tough environment. He is said to be good company, and an entertaining host. He has something else, too—an ‘X-factor’, one outsider calls it, saying, ‘You can feel it as soon as he walks in. He carries himself like a leader.’

The Adventist Church filmed a series of documentaries about Pitcairn; watching them while on the island, I was struck by the way that Steve dominated nearly every scene—leading a group of young men off on motorbikes to hunt wild goats; debating the design of a new longboat with New Zealand engineers; driving around in a Mini Moke, the island’s one car; and giving the signal for Christmas presents to be distributed in the square. Steve even built the Pitcairners’ coffins.

To his fellow islanders, he was the linchpin of the community. Nothing happened without Steve’s say-so, and if he was away temporarily, on Norfolk Island, for instance, the others would still consult him. ‘Steve liked to be boss,’ says Tony Washington, a New Zealander who taught on Pitcairn in the early 1990s. ‘He had more say than Jay [Warren], although Jay was magistrate. When we went on a trip to Henderson [a neighbouring island], it was Steve who decided when we should come back.’

Neville Tosen describes him as ‘the evil genius who ruled Pitcairn’. He adds, ‘And yet I came to recognise him as a person of ability. He was smart. He understood the island and the way things were done. He could think his way through problems and come up with a solution. He was the brains of the place.’

Others say that Steve surrounded himself with yes-men and treated Pitcairn as his personal fiefdom. He would turn up late to communal dinners, knowing that no one else would start eating without him. ‘Pitcairn was an oligarchy,’ says Leslie Jaques, who has succeeded Leon Salt as Commissioner. ‘Steve ruled, and everyone else did what they were told. The way the community was run was medieval.’

There was an in-crowd, but not everyone in it was equally favoured. The island’s pecking order was quite intricate, it seems, and was reflected in the jobs that people did, and even by their positions in the longboat. As one British official observes, ‘It was almost like an Indian caste system. You had your place in society, and you never moved from it.’



For six decades the mainstay of the Pitcairn economy was stamps. First issued in 1940, they became the cream of many a collection, coveted because of the island’s colourful history and exotic location. So popular were they, in fact, that within a few years the community was able to build a new school and, for the first time, hire a professional teacher from New Zealand.

The proceeds from stamps went into a Pitcairn Fund that until a few years ago met the island’s running costs, as well as subsidising freight charges and the price of diesel fuel and building materials. The fund—latterly bolstered by sales of coins, phonecards and the .pn internet domain suffix—enabled the islanders to travel to New Zealand for further education and health care, and be paid salaries for carrying out ‘government jobs’. Capital items, such as longboats, tractors and generators, have always been provided by Britain, which is also responsible for maintaining the infrastructure.

As stamp collecting and letter writing fell out of fashion, the fund dwindled. Thanks to British subsidies, Pitcairn has nonetheless continued to enjoy full employment, in a manner reminiscent of a Cold War-era Communist state. The government jobs, equivalent to a public service bureaucracy, include deputy postmaster, trainee tractor driver, second assistant forester and keeper of John Adams’ grave. While there may be a whiff of absurdity about some of the jobs, who gets what is a serious matter, for the small stipends—NZ$500 (£200) a month for the island’s engineer, for instance—can go a long way on Pitcairn. And, until recently, who got what depended on your connections.

When Steve Christian’s daughter, Tania, arrived for an extended visit, she was promptly given two positions: museum keeper and librarian. Simon Young, the English newcomer, who had a horticulture degree and wanted to work in biosecurity, was made garbage collector. That had been the job of Hendrik Roos, the German settler. His wife, Nicola Ludwig, had been gardener of the cemetery.

Steve was not only mayor; he was chief supervising engineer—probably the most significant post on Pitcairn. (Randy was his deputy.) He was also the island’s dentist, having completed a course in New Zealand that qualified him to perform extractions. He was the radiographer. He was the number one tractor driver. He was the explosives supervisor, and a heavy machinery operator. He was a longboat coxswain. Steve had eight paid jobs.

The Christian clan has traditionally been the aristocracy on Pitcairn, but not all Christians are equal, and in Steve’s day his branch has been pre-eminent. The Warren clan also plays a prominent role in island affairs, securing some of the best jobs for family members. Despite lacking Steve’s force of personality and charisma, Jay is regarded as his main rival for power.

The mayor—or magistrate, as the office was formerly called—has always been a man. Betty Christian once nominated a woman. ‘Everyone laughed. They thought it was the biggest joke they’d ever heard,’ she says. Many women thought so too. When an outsider asked one older islander, Nola Warren, why a woman could not be in charge, she replied, ‘Because it’s never been, and it just can’t be.’

One of Pitcairn’s attractions is that people do not pay tax. Instead, they carry out ‘public work’: painting buildings, repairing the slipway, clearing the roads of undergrowth. They can go fishing if the weather is good, or tend their gardens and orchards. The islanders grow, among other things, mangoes, pineapples, passionfruit, strawberries, avocadoes, watermelons, pumpkins, peppers and sweet potatoes. Everything thrives in the volcanic soil and semi-tropical climate.

The locals trade their produce with the crews of passing ships, swapping fruit and fish for items such as timber, frozen chickens and cans of Coke. Their most valuable commodity, however, is the wooden carvings to which they devote most of their free time. The carvings are sold to passengers on the cruise ships that visit Pitcairn during summer, and also through the islanders’ websites. A Bounty replica can fetch US$120. Not long ago, on a cruise ship, a Pitcairn family made US$10,000 in one day.

Souvenirs account for three-quarters of the Pitcairners’ earnings. Most homes have a workshop equipped with power tools, and the carvings—while no longer produced by hand—are still made from the richly veined miro wood harvested locally or on Henderson Island, 15 hours away by longboat. (Henderson is one of three other islands, all uninhabited, in the Pitcairn group; the other two are Oeno and Ducie.)



Most of the Big Fence crowd are drinkers. For a long time Pitcairn was a dry island—in theory, at least. Alcohol is banned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1997 the locals voted to legalise its importation, but a licence is still required and drinking in public remains outlawed; in the outside world, Pitcairn retains its teetotal image. You cannot buy alcohol on the island, any more than you can buy cigarettes or ice cream or a carton of milk.

Seventh-day Adventism replaced John Adams’ idiosyncratic brand of Anglicanism in 1876, after the American-based Church posted a box of literature to Pitcairn, then dispatched a missionary to argue its cause. The islanders were baptised in a rock pool, and since pork was now a forbidden food, they killed all their pigs—pushed them off a cliff, so the story goes.

Adventism, an evangelical Christian denomination, has 14 million members worldwide. Followers believe that Saturday is the Sabbath, and that the Second Coming of Christ is imminent; they are expected to dress modestly, and avoid shellfish as well as pork; tobacco is another prohibited substance. Dancing, gambling and the theatre are frowned on, along with works of fiction and music other than hymns.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has been a generous benefactor to Pitcairn, raising funds for the community and sending out teachers and pastors. It is not clear, though, how deeply the faith implanted itself, or to what degree the islanders ever observed its precepts. Certainly, they called themselves Adventists, and until a few years ago the pews were always crowded on Saturdays. But going to church was, like elsewhere, the done thing, and on Pitcairn the church was also very much a social focus.

Outsiders were struck by the locals’ earthy language, peppered with innuendo and swear words, and by their relaxed sexual morals. Roy Sanders, a New Zealand teacher, described a Sabbath service in the 1950s that was punctuated by heckling and jeering, and ‘intermittent spitting out of the windows’. Ted Dymond, a visiting British official, reported in the 1970s, ‘The lengthy and rambling sermon was soporific and I counted seven islanders in deep slumber.’ Some believe that Pitcairn’s history has been characterised by cycles of moral decay and religious renewal. Others are doubtful about the renewal part.

Nowadays Seventh-day Adventism is no longer a spiritual anchor. Yet Saturday is still ‘the Sabbath’, and everybody has a quiet day. Even some of the least pious islanders continue to pay a tithe, and the pastor is deferred to, outwardly at least. Council meetings, market days and communal meals begin with a prayer. ‘They all look so bloody sincere, with their heads bowed,’ remarks Bill Haigh, an Englishman who has spent long periods living on Pitcairn, modernising its communications on behalf of Britain.

‘Sacrificial living’, it seems, has never been embraced by local people, despite being a central plank of Adventism. Carol Warren has five freezers, and most households own at least three, among an array of white goods and electrical appliances: fridges, deep-fryers, microwaves, video cameras, stereo systems, DVD players, television sets, video recorders. The Pitcairners are defensive about their material possessions—more so, perhaps, than about any other aspect of their lives. It certainly feels odd, in such a remote, rugged spot, to find homes stuffed with the emblems of Western-style wealth. Paradoxically, the houses themselves are relatively basic, with concrete floors and unpainted walls, and the furniture is plain.

The multiple freezers and fridges, the islanders point out, are a necessity—and after opening a bag of flour infested with weevils, I could see what they meant. Moreover, the hoarding instinct is ingrained, for no one is ever quite sure when—or if—the next ship will come. The video and DVD players, too, are crucial in a place with no television, cinema or theatre, and no restaurants, pubs or cafés. Such goods are also status symbols, though, and in that respect Pitcairn is not much different from anywhere else. I suppose I had expected, rather naïvely, to find people living the simple life.

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 (#ulink_114fa1d5-0166-5719-babd-a210615f4b0f)


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 Pitcairn had become a police state and accused Britain of planting spies in their midst.

Standing on the deck of the Argentine Star, Christine Gordon had ‘a knot in my stomach when I saw the dot on the horizon, because we didn’t know what the situation would be there’. As it turned out, and just as Peter George and Dennis McGookin had experienced, the Pitcairners went out of their way to be friendly, even if these latest visitors found them a little overwhelming at first. Simon Moore recalls, when the longboat came out, ‘the assortment of humanity, wearing different coloured T-shirts, some carrying huge frozen fish on their shoulders, clambering aboard just like pirates and swarming around the ship in all directions’. He also observed the efficiency with which the locals stocked up on duty-free cigarettes and alcohol. ‘We’d been told they didn’t drink,’ says Moore, whom I interviewed in his oak-panelled office in 2005. ‘So I was astonished to see the quantities of booze unloaded, and boxes of eggs and frozen meat, and anything else you can imagine—wads of cardboard, mattresses, chairs—all dropped down into the longboat.’

The next morning the visitors were invited on a community fishing trip. At one point Simon Moore found himself in a small boat driven by Dave Brown, one of the alleged child abusers. Dave instructed him to lie flat, then he revved up the engine and the boat shot forward. ‘I looked up and saw that we were hurtling towards this solid rock face,’ says Moore. ‘Just as we were about to hit it, or so it seemed, the swell dropped and exposed the mouth of a cave.’ Dave deposited him on a patch of sand deep inside the cave, where the other visitors had already been dropped off. ‘I thought perfect,’ says Moore, rolling his eyes. ‘If they wanted to abandon us, this is the way to do it.’ A little later, though, they were picked up, and everyone proceeded to fish for a local species, nanwe. Despite the rough seas, the islanders hauled up hundreds of fish.

The catch was destined for a ‘fish fry’ that afternoon at The Landing, in celebration of Dave’s birthday. The fish were cleaned and the guts thrown off the end of the jetty, attracting a reef shark, which Randy Christian, another of the accused men, caught. Then, as one witness tells it, ‘Randy got a sledgehammer and hit the shark so hard that the hammer went right through its head and came out the other side. The shark was writhing in agony, the women were gagging, and Randy just stood there grinning, with the bloody sledgehammer in his hand.’

By coincidence, it was also Simon Moore’s birthday; so after regaling Dave with a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, the Pitcairners sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to their Public Prosecutor. Dave later complained to someone, ‘That prick Moore, we put on a birthday party for him the first time he came, and I thought he’d go easy on us as a result of that, the bastard.’

The fishing expedition was the first of numerous communal events, including dinners and sports days, that were staged for the visitors’ benefit during their fortnight on Pitcairn. At a tennis tournament, Karen Vaughan found herself partnering Dave in a doubles match. Simon Moore played cricket in a team skippered by Dave, and at a picnic later on chatted amicably with Randy, the rival captain. The prosecutors also attended a ‘cultural day’ at the school, where Christine Gordon was taught basket weaving, and Steve Christian, the mayor and another child abuse suspect, showed Moore how to carve a wooden dolphin.

That must have been weird, I say. Moore leans back in his hair, hands behind his head. ‘Yes. But then everything was weird on that trip. Normally we never see the people we’re prosecuting until we get into court, but here we were mixing with them quite closely.’

Some of the outsiders on the island voiced cynicism about the community activities, saying they had never seen the Pitcairn people display such unity and goodwill. Then, just before the visitors left, the islanders sang them their traditional farewell song, ‘Sweet Bye and Bye’, in the public hall. Moore says, ‘I was genuinely quite moved by it, but others, apparently, were not, because they saw it as yet another show for us.’

While they enjoyed sampling the local cuisine and learning new sports such as Pitcairn rounders, the lawyers had serious business on the island. At a public meeting soon after he arrived, Simon Moore explained the role of a public prosecutor, emphasising that his job was to serve the islanders’ interests. Privately he was optimistic that the men would plead guilty, enabling the matter to be settled with minimum damage to family relationships. The locals warmed to Moore, a man of considerable natural charm. But, according to one person present, ‘they didn’t get it … They saw him as their friend, even the suspects did. When he talked about the good of the island, they thought that meant that nothing would happen to them, whereas he was talking about the law being upheld.’

Moore had been told there was a widespread belief that the alleged crimes were minor, even though police had spelt out exactly what they were investigating. At the meeting, therefore, he took care to stress that some of the offending was exceedingly serious. ‘I could see some of the older people gasp,’ he says, ‘and I was told later that a number of islanders were quite upset.’

During their stay, he and Christine Gordon spoke to nearly every Pitcairn resident. Many expressed fears for the community’s future if men were imprisoned. But no one suggested that the allegations were untrue, and the overwhelming message the lawyers received was that prosecutions ought to go ahead. This was unexpected, since the islanders had previously resisted the notion that sexual abuse even existed, let alone needed to be tackled. Yet according to Moore, ‘The feeling was, if these are crimes elsewhere in the world, then we shouldn’t be treated differently. That came through really loud and clear. It was also said that if they would attract prison sentences elsewhere, then Pitcairn should be no exception.’

Only one person dissented, and that was Len Brown. Len was concerned because, as he saw it, women were hopeless in the longboats. In his quaintly accented English, he told Moore, ‘The island will be doomed, Si-mon.’

Never before in his long career had Moore had ‘a more profound feeling of the difficulty and significance of the decision we had to take’. It was not until February 2002 that he finally made up his mind. The prosecution would go ahead. He informed the community in a videotaped message that reached the island in May. Moore said he would not be laying charges, however, until the vexed issue of a trials venue had been resolved.

Faced with an indefinite period of limbo, the Pitcairners decided it was time to fight back.



In August 2002 the New Zealand Herald ran an article across two pages, quoting three ‘former Pitcairn Islanders’ living in Auckland. The three said that their cousins on the island were frustrated by the media coverage, which in their opinion was based exclusively on information from the British. One of the interviewees, ‘Alex’, who revealed that he had been questioned by police, suggested that Britain was trying to rid itself of its financial obligations. He also told the Herald that, on Pitcairn, teenage sex was common and even some ten-year-olds were sexually active. His companion, ‘Sarah’, said that Britain was partly to blame for this, as it had failed to provide the Pitcairners with guidance. The third interviewee, ‘Mary’, claimed the islanders could not be judged as if they lived in New Zealand. ‘Different countries have their own way of life,’ she explained.

This article, presenting the child abuse case as a David and Goliath contest, set the tone for the way it was reported until the trials two years later. Almost every news report reproduced the Pitcairners’ claims of a culture of under-age sex, and a plot by Britain to shut down the island. It was the mutineers’ descendants versus the big bad colonial power—and the fact that the alleged victims were Pitcairners too, with an equally impeccable lineage, was rarely mentioned.

From mid-2002 the islanders were able to use email, and they joined the propaganda campaign, corresponding regularly with their supporters and with journalists whom they believed to be sympathetic. They also bombarded Richard Fell, who had replaced Martin Williams as the British Governor, with angry emails.

Meanwhile, the other parties were quiet. Simon Moore was unwilling to comment until charges were laid, British officials were cautious, and police were not talking. Neither were the complainants, of course. As for those Pitcairners who, as it later turned out, were horrified by the men’s alleged behaviour, such as Pawl Warren and Brenda Christian, they were keeping their own counsel.

That left the accused men and their families in a position to monopolise the debate, and to assert, without fear of contradiction, that Britain was getting itself into a lather about youthful canoodling behind the coconut palms. The men, who had not yet been named, made public statements about the case, with few outsiders aware that they had their own agenda. ‘Alex’, for instance, was Brian Young, later to be charged with serious sexual offences. ‘Sarah’ was his Norwegian-born wife, Kari, who had lived with him for 15 years on Pitcairn.

Steve Christian did not bother with pseudonyms. Instead, he exploited his position as mayor to attack the British government and the prosecution. He did not disclose—and few people outside the island realised—that he was himself directly affected by the legal action. Another man in his situation might have stepped down. Not Steve. Already in October 2000, shortly after being interviewed by police, he had flown to London for a gathering of leaders of the British Overseas Territories. Baroness Scotland was among seven British ministers who attended the meeting, which included drinks parties and official receptions. Steve also travelled to Chicago in his official capacity, and in May 2002, soon after Simon Moore’s announcement that he planned to lay charges, gave a speech to a United Nations seminar in Fiji on decolonisation. Steve inveighed against the delays in the criminal case, calling them ‘an abuse of process’, and criticised Britain for neglecting the island and its infrastructure. ‘Must we hijack a yacht, or be invaded like the Falklands, to get attention?’ he inquired theatrically.

On his way home via New Zealand, Steve was due to see Richard Fell, a courteous, unflappable man who had become the islanders’ principal bête noire. When Fell refused to allow him to bring a lawyer, the meeting was cancelled. Steve called it ‘yet another example of the pattern of high-handed behaviour exhibited by the Governor’s office’.

He did not seem worried about the impending prosecution. ‘I think Steve thought that nothing was going to touch him,’ says one British official.



A key figure behind the scenes was Leon Salt. In theory, the Commissioner was just a British employee; in practice, he was enormously powerful. He ordered supplies for the islanders, and arranged for them to be delivered. He organised passenger berths on container ships. All mail to and from Pitcairn passed through Salt’s hands, as did email messages, via a central server in his Auckland office.

Salt—tall and rangy, with long, curly hair and a big moustache—had Pitcairn blood; he was well educated, somewhat alternative in his lifestyle. He owned a smallholding north of Auckland and had a passion for vintage cars. He was fiercely attached to the island and its inhabitants, having spent three years teaching on Pitcairn before becoming Commissioner in 1995. He knew the individuals, their relationships, their feuds and affairs. He knew precisely how the tiny, squabbling community functioned.

While some locals saw the softly spoken Salt as their champion, others claim that he favoured certain families, particularly Steve Christian’s. If Steve wanted an item loaded onto the next ship leaving Auckland, it would get on, some islanders say, at the expense of goods belonging to others. Leon Salt was good friends with Steve, who called him ‘Boss’, and with Steve on Pitcairn and Salt in Auckland, it is said, the pair ran the island between them. In 2002 they deported an English journalist, Ben Fogle, who had arrived by yacht. Salt, who was visiting, spat at Fogle’s feet and would not permit him beyond The Landing. ‘We don’t want your sort spying on us,’ he told him.

When Operation Unique started, Salt was helpful. Police worked out of his office, at his invitation, and he unearthed documents from his archives for them. He was a fund of useful information, most of which he carried in his head. When police voyaged to Pitcairn to interview suspects, the Commissioner went too, and stayed with them at the Lodge. Salt, say British officials, was level-headed about the island and ‘didn’t buy into the myth’. Almost everyone, including Simon Moore, regarded him as a thoroughly good bloke.

Those who know him say he was revolted by the child abuse allegations. But he felt it was ‘inappropriate to apply a UK solution to a Pitcairn problem’, he told the Governor. Salt wrote, ‘The UK has ignored law and order on Pitcairn for 200 years … It would seem perhaps incongruous that UK justice is to be imposed in all its might after all this time, particularly given the fact that reported serious crime has escaped investigation in the past.’

Salt supported an amnesty and, astonishing as it seems, he even told police, according to Peter George, ‘I’ll get the men to plead guilty—provided there’s an amnesty first.’

After that avenue was closed, his attitude changed. Detectives asked Salt to sign an affidavit releasing documents from his office; if the affair got to court, he would have to give evidence for the Crown. He refused, and withdrew all co-operation from the inquiry, telling prosecutors that if they proceeded as they intended, history would ‘judge them very poorly’.



The men and their families, unwilling to see the case go to trial, pressed, instead, for a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’, based on the body that probed human rights abuses in apartheid-era South Africa. The idea of transposing truth and reconciliation to Pitcairn had initially appealed to major players, including Simon Moore, but had to be abandoned once it was decreed by Baroness Scotland, Britain’s Overseas Territories Minister, that the conventional legal process had to take its course. Still, Moore remained hopeful that the healing principles it embodied could be integrated into that process.

New Zealand is a pioneer of ‘restorative justice’, which offers criminals who plead guilty the opportunity to express remorse, apologise to their victims and make reparations; when they then go before a court to be sentenced, they can expect a significantly reduced penalty. Moore believed that this approach would enable most of the Pitcairn men to avoid prison. Christine Gordon, his deputy, consulted restorative justice experts, and researched a model employed in a Canadian – Indian community where generational child sexual abuse had been exposed.




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