Pitcairn Island and the 'Bounty' Mutineers.
This is the first book to tell the whole extraordinary story of the mutiny on HMS 'Bounty', and the settlement of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island.
In the autumn of 1789 Fletcher Christian and eight fellow mutineers sailed from Tahiti in HMS 'Bounty', having cast adrift Captain Bligh and his men. They were accompanied by six Polynesian men and twelve Tahitian women, and were searching for an island to settle - one remote enough to avoid the long arm of British justice. They finally decided on Pitcairn Island, a tiny speck of land in the middle of the ocean, halfway between South America and Australia. They landed, burned the ship to avoid detection and disappeared off the face of the known world for nearly twenty years.
When the settlement was discovered by a passing ship almost twenty years later, only one man was left alive: John Adams, the women and new generations of children lived together in an idyllic community. It emerged that terrible things had happened on Pitcairn, and that two-thirds of the men had been slaughtered within four years of landing on the island. But the stories told by the survivors were strangely contradictory. What really went on during those hidden years? Who killed whom, and why? And how had a community with such bloody beginnings evolved into such a peaceful place?
Historian Trevor Lummis brilliantly pieces together the full course of these mysterious events, uncovering a rich narrative of clashes between European and Polynesian cultures, in which the women played a major part. The result is a fascinating blend of eighteenth-century seafaring, Pacific island paradises, murder, conflict and renaissance.
