I meet a Seventh Day Adventist missionary, and a descendant of a
mutineer of the Bounty—They tell me the story of Pitcairn island—An
epic of isolation.
MAPUHI, though a zealous Mormon, was not illiberal in his posture toward
other faiths. In his long years he had entertained a number of them as
ways to salvation before the apostles of Salt Lake sent their
evangelists to Takaroa. A day or two after landing he brought to Nohea’s
hut two aliens, whom, he said, I should know, because their language was
my own. He introduced them as Jabez Leek, _mahana maa mitinare_, a
“Saturday missionary,” and Mayhew December Christian, his assistant.
They had come to the atoll to dive in living waters for souls. A few
words and they were revealed as exceptional men, from far-away places.
The Reverend Jabez Leek was my countryman, as were the opposing elders I
had met here and at Kaukura. He said, with our half-defiant local pride,
that he came from the home of “postum and grape nuts.” A divine of the
Seventh Day Adventist persuasion, he cheerfully associated diet and
religion, as do most sects, the Jews with kosher foods and no pork; the
Catholics with abstinence from meat on certain days, and Mormons from
alcohol, coffee, and tea; and Protestants with the partaking of the
Lord’s Supper.
“I am hoping to win for the true Christ a few souls for saving from the
lake of fire in that final day,” said the Reverend Mr. Leek, with the
accent of sincerity. There are few hypocrites among missionaries. They
believe in their remedies.
Mapuhi, when Mr. Leek’s declaration was interpreted to him by Mayhew
December Christian, was stirred. He said so, and the most interesting
subject in the world to elderly people the world over—the state of man
after death—was discussed eagerly, though with the reserve of
proselytizing disputants. They agreed that in Mormonism and Seventh Day
Adventism they had in common the personal reign of Christ on earth and
prophecy. Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, the pastor from Battle
Creek, Michigan, compared with the God-inspired Ellen G. White, who, he
said, had led humanity back to the infallibility and perfection of the
Bible as the sole rule of life and faith. They both believed in a
Supreme God, and that only in the last century, two thousand years after
his son had been here in person, God had raised up men and women to
conduct sinners to paradise. It had been a revolutionary century in
revealed religion. The Battle Creek preacher began to tell of the
apocalyptic Mrs. White and her prophetic announcements, and Mapuhi was
beginning to prick up his big brown ears when he was called away. The
Mormon elders needed him in a conference. The slow, interpreted speech
of the minister flowed into rapid English as he directed his words to me
and Mr. Christian. The latter was evidently of mixed blood, with
Anglo-Saxon features, light-brown hair, dark-blue eyes, but a dark skin
and the voluptuous mouth of these seas. His voice, too, had a unique
timbre, and his English was slightly confused by Polynesian arrangement
of sentences.
“God has set his seal upon rebellion for his own purposes,” continued
Leek. “The conflict with Satan is fiercer every year, but the Lord
listens to those who supplicate him. He is proof of his mercy.”
He put his hand on the shoulder of Mayhew December Christian.
“The first white settlers in the South Seas were rebels. They were
traitors to their king, murderers, and revolters against religion,
morals, and society. They were in the hands of Satan, and some of them
must perish in the lake of fire after the final judgment. But Christian
here is a true sample of the strange way God works out his plans. He is
a great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny of the
British ship _Bounty_, and he is a Seventh Day Adventist and a
missionary of our denomination.”
The mutiny of the _Bounty_! A phrase projects a hazy page of history or
raises the curtain upon an almost-forgotten episode. Fletcher Christian!
There was a name. They frightened children with it while he was still
alive, and it became a synonym for insubordination at sea. A thousand
sailors in two generations were spread-eagled or hailed to the mast and
given the cat while the offended officer shouted, “You’d be a damned
Christian, would you? I’ll take the Christian out o’ you!” He and his
desperate gang had committed the most romantically infamous crime of
their time, and their story had been for a hundred years singular in the
manifold annals of violent deeds in the tropics. Their rebellion and its
outcome was written scarlet in the records of admiralty, and for long
was a mysterious study for psychologists, a dreadful illustration to the
godly of sin’s certain punishment, and the most fascinating of
temptations to seamen and adventurers.
The _Bounty_ had gone to Tahiti from England to transport
breadfruit-trees to the West Indies. George III was on the throne of
maritime England, and between the equator and the polar circle his flag
flew almost undisputed. Captain Cook had carried home knowledge of the
marvelous fruit in Tahiti, “about the size and shape of a child’s head,
and with a taste between the crumb of wheaten bread and Jerusalem
artichoke.” The West Indies had only the scarcely wholesome roots of the
manioc and cassava as the main food of the African slaves, and their
owners believed that if the breadfruit were plentiful there, the negroes
would be able to work harder. Lieutenant Bligh, Cook’s sailing-master,
was despatched with forty-four men in the two-hundred-ton _Bounty_ to
secure the trees in the Society Islands, and fetch them to St. Vincent
and Jamaica. When they at last reached maturity there, the slaves
refused to eat them, and another dream of perfection went by the board.
Bligh was a hell-roarer of the quarter-deck, of the stripe less common
to-day than then, only because of such mutinies as it prompted. Crowded
in a leaky ship, with moldy and scanty provisions, half around Cape
Horn, and all around Cape of Good Hope, after twenty-seven thousand
miles of sailing, and a year and two months of harsh discipline and
depressing lack of decent food or sufficient water, the green and lovely
shores of Tahiti were a haven to the weary tars. They were greeted as
heaven-sent, and for six months they ate the fruits of the Isle of
Venus, swam in its clear streams, and were made love to by its
passionate and free-giving women in its groves. When, with a thousand
breadfruit shoots aboard, Bligh ordered up-anchor and away, the contrast
between the sweets of the present and the prospect of another year of
Bligh’s tyranny, with a certainty of poverty in England or hardship at
sea, turned the scale against the commander. An attempt to wreck the
ship by cutting its cable failed, but the second night of the homeward
voyage Fletcher Christian, master’s mate, who had made three voyages
under Bligh, being in charge of the deck, led a mutiny. Bligh was seized
in his bunk, bound, and, with eighteen of the crew who were not in the
plot, and a small amount of food and water, set adrift in a small boat.
Bligh’s party reached Malaysia after overcoming overwhelming dangers and
sufferings, and most of them went from there in a merchant’s ship to
London, where Bligh’s account of the mutiny, and his and his loyal men’s
wanderings, “filled all England with the deepest sympathy, as well as
horror of the crime by which they had been plunged into so dreadful a
situation.” The frigate _Pandora_, with twenty-four guns and 166
fighting men, blessed by bishops, and with a special word from the king,
but just temporarily recovered from his recurrent insanity, sailed
speedily to “apprehend the mutineers.”
Those hearties had meanwhile arranged their own fates. The _Bounty_ was
now a democracy with Christian as president, and the vote, after an
experiment in another islet, was to go back to the fair ones in the
groves of Tahiti. There sixteen of the twenty-five aboard, determined to
become landsmen, and, with the joyous shouts and hula harmonies of their
native friends, transferred their share of the plunder on the ship to
the shore, and went to dancing among the breadfruits. Christian was
shrewder. He knew well the long arm of the British monarchy, and warned
his shipmates their haven would be but for a little while. They were
capering to the pipes of Pan and would not listen, and so with nine
Englishmen, six Tahitian men, ten Tahitian belles, and a girl of
fifteen, the _Bounty_ weighed and steered a course unknown to those who
stayed.
These latter weltered in an Elysium of freedom from humiliations,
discipline, work, and unrequited cravings for mates, and in a perfection
of warmth, delicious viands, exaltation of rank, and amorous damsels.
Chiefs adopted them, maidens caressed them, the tender zephyrs healed
their vapors, and they were happy; until the _Pandora_ arrived, snared
them, and took them in chains to England, where they were tried and
three hanged in chains at Spithead. The _Pandora_ reported that no trace
could be found of the _Bounty_, and the most that could be done was to
anathematize Christian and the mutineers, and to make the path of the
ordinary seaman more thorny, as a deterrent to others.
For twenty-four years England heard nothing of the further movements of
the pirates. The new generation forgot them, but Christian’s name
lingered as a threat and a curse. The ship and crew disappeared as
completely as though at the bottom of the sea; and when their refuge
finally was disclosed, horrifying and also wonderfully poignant chapters
were added to the log of the _Bounty_, and one of the most curious and
affecting conditions of humanity brought to light. The bare outline of
all this is in every Pacific chronography, but one must have heard its
obscure intricacies from a scion of a participant to appreciate fully
their lights and shadows. Mayhew December Christian told me these, and
the Reverend Jabez Leek commented and pointed the moral.
“My great grandfatheh want go farthes’ from Engalan’,” said Mayhew, “and
he look on chart of _Bounty_ an’ fin’ small islan’ not printed but jus’
point of pencil made by cap’in where English ship some years before
find. It was call’ Pitcairn for midshipman who firs’ see it from mas.’
He steer there an’ in twenty-three day _Bounty_ arrive. That where I was
born.”
Not by any spelling or clipping of letters could I convey the speech and
accent of the islander, English, Tahitian, and American,—Middle
Western,—combined into a peculiar _patois_, soft at times, and strident
at others, with admixture of Tahitian words. He went on to tell how his
ancestor and his companions looked with hope at the land which must give
them safety or death. They reached the shore through a rocky inlet and
rough breakers, and, on finding stone images, hatchets, and traces of
heathen temples, were cast down by fear of savages. But as days passed,
and they gradually wandered over the entire island without trace of any
present inhabitants, they felt secure. Its smallness in that vast and
then trackless waste of waters below the line reassured them of its
insignificance to mariners or rulers, it being only five miles long by
two wide, and with no harbor or protected bay. Rugged in outline, and
uninviting from the deck, with peaks and precipices sheer and
sterile-looking, the mutineers were gladdened to walk through forests of
beautiful and useful trees, with fruit and grasses for making native
clothes; and about its borders to be able to catch an abundance of fish
and crustaceans.
They drove and warped the ship into the inlet against the cliff, and
fastened it by a cable to a mighty tree, and in a few weeks removed
everything useful to the upland where they pitched their first camp.
Christian, with the determination and foresight that saved his group
from the ignominious end of those who would not abjure the ease of
Tahiti, insisted on burning the _Bounty_, to remove all indication of
their origin to visitors, and, doubtless, to make impossible belated
efforts to desert their sanctuary. They lived in tents made of the
canvas until they built houses from the ship’s planks, and these among
the spreading trees so that they were completely unseen from the sea.
They had ample provisions from the stores until they could raise a crop
of vegetables, and the plants they brought might supplement those
indigenous. The island was covered with luxurious growths, there was
water, and they extracted salt from pools among the rocks. They parceled
out all the land among the Englishmen, and each with his Tahitian wife
set up his own home. The Tahitian men helped different ones in their
building and cultivation, and in peace and comparative plenty they began
one of the most startling experiments of mankind.
Nine Englishmen, mostly rude sailors, with ten Tahitian women and a
girl, and six Tahitian men,—unevenly divided as to sex, whites and
Polynesians unable to converse except meagerly, with totally different
inheritance and habits,—were there as the experimenters, with no
restraint upon passions or covetings except the feeble check of mutual
interests. A hamlet in the ripest civilization has difficulty to govern
by these. Compromise through a supposed expression of the will of the
majority in elections has become an accepted solvent, but in reality the
determined and organized minority wins usually. On Pitcairn, as in Eden,
a woman caused the failure. After two years of associated achievement,
the wife of Williams, a mutineer, having fallen to death from a cliff
while gathering sea-birds’ eggs, that subject of King George demanded
and was awarded the wife of a Tahitian comrade. The committee of the
whole, Anglo-Saxon whole, in contemplation of their own naked souls,
could not deny Williams. The woman left the hut of her husband and
shared the couch of the victor in the award. There was no appeal, for
the supreme court, as in America, was final, no matter what the congress
of the people wished. The lady was complacent, but the cuckolded
Tahitian got together his color majority and protested. He was told to
nurse his wrath in hell, and the court administered summary sentences to
all who disputed its power or equity. Timiti had murmured, but, as mere
treason was too sublimated a charge, they brought another against him,
and the tribunal was assembled, with the entire citizenry as witnesses
and auditors. Christian walked up and down in the house as evidence was
offered, and once, as he turned, Timiti, sure of the court’s finding,
flew out of the door. He escaped to the other shore of the island, but
after weeks was decoyed by false promises and murdered as his deceivers
combed his tangled hair, a sign of friendship.
[Illustration:
Photo from Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
The church on Pitcairn Island
]
The remaining Tahitian males formed a committee of vigilance, and voted
to rid the island of the entire supreme court. Its members were saved
from immediate assassination by their wives, who, in the way of women on
continent and islet, loved them because they were the fathers of their
children. Moreover, since Cook claimed as paramour in Hawaii the
Princess Lelemahoalani, dark women have been fired by ambition for
social and environmental climbing on a white family tree. The wives of
the English in Pitcairn were able to inform their husbands through the
gossip of the wives of the Tahitians, who also sided with the whites.
One carried her adherence far enough to murder her spouse while he
slept. Life was made fearful for these wives, and once they constructed
a raft and were beyond the breakers to sail to Tahiti or oblivion, when
the Englishmen’s women’s wailing and pleading induced them to return.
For months more it was touch and go as to survival. Murder stalked
hourly, and the oppression of the whites became that of masters towards
slaves. Then the Tahitians crept into their huts and secured the
firearms, and with these hunted down the Europeans. They killed first
John Williams, the successful litigant, and then Fletcher Christian, the
chief justice, and, quickly, John Mills, Isaac Martin, and William
Brown. William McCoy, John Quintal, and John Adams were fleet enough to
reach the woods, and Edward Young, midshipman of the _Bounty_, beloved
of all the women, was secreted by them. John Adams when hunger-pressed
showed himself, and was shot and badly wounded. He ran to the bluff
above the sea, and was about to hurl himself to destruction when induced
to refrain by his pursuers, whose hearts failed them. Adams, Young,
McCoy, and Quintal, but a quartet of the nine mutineers, remained, and
five of the six Tahitian men. The latter had cut down the four to a
minority of the male populace, and were delighted to swear eternal
amity. Adams recovered, and, at a midnight session, the whites released
themselves from their oaths and decreed the wiping out of every male but
themselves. They swore as allies the widows of the other sailors, and,
as fast as dark opportunity offered, the decree was executed. They were,
shortly, the only men.
[Illustration:
Photo from Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
The shores of Pitcairn Island
]
Now was a second chance for peace and success. The experiment of putting
together without higher authority a band of white men with women and
slaves as spoils had miscarried. The inferior tribesmen were finished,
but there were four of the higher race, and eleven native women, still
subjects for further probation. One would say for certain that on that
lonely speck of land, having glutted any blood lust, and with twelve of
their number already dead, these four men of the same race, religion,
and profession would get along somehow. It was not to be.
“McCoy,” said Mayhew December Christian, “liked to drink liquor. Before
he was a seaman he worked in a distillery in England, and on Pitcairn he
distilled _ti_ leaves in his tea-kettle. They all had drunk his alcohol,
and it had been a factor in the quarrels. He got worse as he became
older, and he and Quintal kept up a continuous spree until the devil
gripped McCoy for his own, and McCoy tied a rock around his waist and
leaped into the sea. Three whites were left, and Quintal had learned
nothing from the past. He drank the _ti_ liquor, and when his wife came
from fishing with too few fish he bit off her ear. When she fell from
the cliff and was drowned, Quintal, with all the other women to choose
from, demanded the wife of one of his two shipmates. He made terrible
threats against both of them, and they knew he meant what he said.”
In the first case since its institution the court of Pitcairn divided.
Adams and Young, taunted by the continuing insults of Quintal to their
matrimonial integrity, and faced with the probability of extinction
unless they acted vigorously, seceded from the minority. They deluded
Quintal into a momentary incautiousness when the recurrent insistence of
his demand was being quarreled over in the presence of the entire
community, and butchered him with a hatchet.
“I heard the daughter of John Mills, an old woman, relate the incident,”
said Mayhew. “They were gathered together, children and all, in Adams’s
house, when he and Young jumped upon Quintal and chopped him to pieces.
The blood was everywhere, she said, and we grew up with a song about it.
My mother used to croon it to me on her lap.”
Young, midshipman, of gentle breeding, and a serious man at his
lightest, faded away, and in his last, melancholy days, uttered the name
of God. Convinced that Adams would not strike him down, he gave way to a
conviction of sin, the remembrance of his childhood at home. He died
begging for mercy, which Adams assured him would be granted to a
contrite heart. They laid him in a grave upon the land he had
cultivated, and over him was said the first word of funeral sermon
pronounced in Pitcairn. John Adams, the preacher, of the fifteen males
who had sailed in the _Bounty_ from Tahiti, was sole survivor. Fourteen
had perished, thirteen violently, in the search for happiness and
freedom from restraint. Man had almost annihilated his brother.
John Adams had a dream in which it was pointed out to him that upon his
head was not merely the blood of the many who had been murdered, but
that the bodies and souls of the innocents remaining were in his care.
“Thou art thy brother’s keeper,” said the scroll in his vision. He
counted his human kind. The feud had swallowed fourteen strong and
wilful men, but nature, as it had allowed their crops to grow and their
trees to become fruitful, had preserved eight of the women, and their
fertility had given twenty-three children to the mutineers. Christian
had fathered three, McCoy three, Quintal the bold, five, Young six,
Mills two, and Adams four. Adams drew about him these thirty-one beings,
and commenced a new regimen. He forswore the democracy of Pitcairn, and
in the sweat of his soul dedicated the island to the God of the Bible
and prayer-book that had molded on a shelf until then. In tears and with
vows he gathered his flock about him and daily and nightly expounded to
them verses and read them prayers. He did not lose sight of the material
needs in his flinging himself on the compassion of heaven, but gave
every one a task and saw that it was done. He taught the children
English from these, the only books saved, and it was not the least of
his accomplishments that he was able to make his language theirs, for
their mothers knew nothing of it. The thirty-two became one family, the
eight widows looking upon him as their father, as did the little ones.
Morning and evening, and all Sunday, a stream of prayers for their
welfare and salvation was directed by him toward the seat of the
Almighty, and the theocracy of Pitcairn waxed fat and sweet. With one
head, and many hands, yearly increasing as the children grew, they
perfected their fields and bowers, their fewer houses and their gear,
and, born into the environment, the adolescents became marvelously
adapted to its necessities. When the scene was unveiled to the outer
world, it would have needed a Rousseau to describe its felicity.
Captain Mayhew Folger, a sealer from Boston, commanding the _Topaz_,
lifted the curtain twenty years after the mutiny and ten years after
Adams had become its sole survivor. He sailed to Pitcairn to look for
seals, and offshore was hailed in English by three youths in a boat who
offered him cocoanuts, and told him an Englishman was there. He landed,
and was received with warm hospitality. He put down Adams’s statement in
the _Topaz’s_ log, with the comment that whatever his crimes in the
past, he was now “a worthy man, and might be useful to navigators who
traverse this immense ocean.” He also recorded that Adams gave him hogs,
cocoanuts, and plantains.
England did not gain a clue to the “mystery of the _Bounty_” through the
_Topaz_ log. Captain Folger tarried a day at Pitcairn, and his ship was
confiscated at Valparaiso shortly afterwards by the Spanish governor of
Chile. Young America and England were not close friends, and their
navies and merchant marines were at odds. Six years elapsed before even
the British admiralty knew the facts. They were gained on an expedition
of immense interest to Americans. Captain Porter, of the Yankee navy,
had been not long before in the Marquesas Islands, to which he had taken
prize ships captured in the war between Great Britain and the United
States, and where he had flown the American flag in token of possession,
and killed many helpless natives to indicate his power. The British
captured Porter in the _Essex_, undid at Nuku-Hiva what he had done, and
did it over in the name of King George. Bound from the Marquesas to
Chile, Captain Staines of the _Briton_ unexpectedly sighted Pitcairn and
was confounded at the signs of human life in huts and laid-out fields,
but more so when Thursday October Christian and George Young shouted
from a small boat to “throw them a rope.” Invited aboard the _Briton_
and put at table, they asked a blessing in English, and said they had
been taught by John Adams of the _Bounty_ to reverence God in every act.
The _Briton_ commander, amazed at this apparition of civilization from
the ghostly past, put ashore a party, and investigated the colony of
forty-eight. The stupified Pitcairn folk were afraid that Adams would be
taken prisoner, and he doubtless would have been except for the
pleadings of the young, and especially of Adams’s “beautiful grown
daughter.” The captain stayed a few hours and reported to the admiralty
in England the answer to the _Bounty_ riddle, and that never in his
lifetime had he seen such a model settlement or such virtuous and happy
people. England was at war with Napoleon, and left Adams to time. Ten
years later came a British whaler, and Adams confessed himself old to
its captain. He begged for a helper in governing his commonwealth, and
especially in teaching them. The captain assembled the crew and asked
for a volunteer. John Buffet, twenty-six, cabinet-maker, twice
shipwrecked, and a lover of his fellow, stepped out and was accepted. He
knew that it meant years of isolation from Europe, but that was what he
had craved in his rovings. When his ship was ready to sail, Johnny
Evans, nineteen, Buffett’s chum, was missing. He had hidden in a hollow
stump. The community was obliged to receive him. And so two white men,
fresh from Europe, became members of a family of several score
half-breeds who, in an idyllic simplicity and a gentle savagery, had
lived for years undisturbed by a foreign or dissentient element, and who
in their common affection and openness of heart were remindful of the
Christians of the catacombs. The second period of Pitcairn was ended.
It continued as a secluded handful of people, but new theocracies began
to govern them. God had been always their dependence and lord paramount,
but his vicegerents had guided them in tortuous paths toward his throne.
The Reverend Jabez Leek, who had often supplied links in the chain which
had led the relation of Mayhew December Christian from the mutiny to the
coming of Buffett and Evans, said this:
“I was induced to go to Pitcairn by the devotion of one of its sons to
the place of his birth,” he explained. “I met him in California. He was
a young man, and one of the few Pitcairners who had ever been to
America. He had voyaged to England as a sailor on a ship that had
touched at Pitcairn, and was trying to return home. That seemed
impossible. Twice he had shipped on vessels bound for Australia, with
promises to land him if the wind permitted, and once had sighted his
island, but his ships were driven past both times, and he had been
forced to go half-way round the world on them. He told me that he had
left home in order to earn money to start married life better. He had
engaged himself to a Pitcairn girl, and, as is the custom there, the
marriage day was put three years away. It was already two years and a
half since he had departed. He had not the means to charter a ship,—that
would have cost thousands,—and his health was fast going. Just
homesickness. It was nothing else. The doctors said there was nothing
the matter with his body, but he got weaker. There was no ship offering,
and I doubt if he could have passed muster, but daily he examined the
shipping lists, and often went to the docks and offices to get a chance.
It was he who told me about Pitcairn and its God-fearing people, and he
first introduced me to the true religion of Christ. He was a sincere
Seventh Day Adventist, and confident of the coming of Christ on earth
and of his own salvation. It was pitiful to see him fail. We lodged in
the same house, and I talked to him daily. He said that when he saw
Pitcairn receding in the distance after seven months on the
_Silverhorn_, he could not leave the rail of the ship, and remained
there when night came peering into the darkness until at dawn he had to
take up his duties. His only hope was in God, but he was destined to
wait until the first resurrection, unknowing time or space, until he
comes before the judgment of God. As the day set for his marriage came
nearer, he abandoned desire to live past it, and the only sorrow he had
was that his sweetheart could not know his inability to keep his troth.
He died the day before the three years expired, and in his last moments
advised me that God had made him the channel through which the truth of
religion might be made known to me. His death opened my eyes, and I
accepted the gospel.
“I studied for our ministry, and, with service in other fields, I was
fortunate enough to be chosen to go to Pitcairn after expressing my
earnest desire to see God’s will and power shown in such manifest ways.
Our denomination had its own missionary vessel, the _Pitcairn_, doing
the Master’s work in these seas, and I went on it. On the thirty-third
day we came to Bounty Bay and anchored, and in the boat that put off to
greet us, besides two of our own elders, was this young man,
great-grandson of the Fletcher Christian who had, we fear, died without
knowing God’s mercy. I remained on Pitcairn a long time, a fruitful,
peaceful span, for all there were devout members of our church, and God
had blessed them greatly in faith and works. They had not been without
religious trials, though, and it was only in 1886 that they received the
gift of the truth. Buffett, the young Englishman upon whom Adams put the
teaching, married Midshipman Young’s daughter, Dorothy; and Evans, John
Adams’s girl, Rachel. They were there a half dozen years when George Hun
Nobbs arrived with an American named Bunker. They came from Chile in a
yawl. Nobbs had heard there the _Bounty_ story, and was so excited over
it that he induced Bunker to start out with him for Pitcairn in a small
boat. Nobbs said he was the son of a Marquis, and soon claimed the hand
of Sarah Christian, the mutineer’s granddaughter. Bunker tried for her
sister, Peggy, and when she refused, threw himself from a cliff, as
McCoy had done long before. Nobbs built a house out of the lumber of his
boat, and, because he was the best educated man, took Buffett’s place as
schoolmaster. Buffett was angry, but the people chose Nobbs because
Buffett had fallen once into a very terrible sin. Everybody knew it, and
though he had repented bitterly, it was remembered. Then John Adams died
after forty years on Pitcairn, and thirty of contrition, and Nobbs
became pastor, too.
“A tremendous change came about then. Tahiti was controlled by the
London Protestant missionaries; and they made an arrangement with the
Pitcairners to give them land, and transportation to Tahiti. Every one
was moved to Tahiti, and Pitcairn left uninhabited. In Papeete they saw
for the first time in their lives, money, immorality, saloons, vile
dances, gambling, and scarlet women. Buffett and his family returned
within a few weeks, and after fourteen had died of fever, a schooner was
chartered to take all back. It was paid for by the copper stripped from
the _Bounty_, which had been carried to Tahiti. Back in their old homes,
all was not as before. Adams had never broken the still used by McCoy
and Quintal, and it began to be more active. Nobbs and Buffett, though
good men, liked a drop of the _ti_ juice, and there was a let-down in
strict morality. Things were at a pass when Joshua Hill arrived. In
England he had learned about Pitcairn, and through Hawaii and Tahiti had
come a roundabout route. Hill pretended to have been deputized by the
British Government, and declared he was the governor and pastor, both.
He fired out Nobbs from the church and school, and made no bones of what
he thought of Buffett and Evans, the other Englishmen. Hill was past
seventy, but he had his way. Nobbs, Buffet, and Evans were supported by
Charles Christian, Fletcher’s son, but Hill ruled with an iron hand. He
had Buffett beaten with a cat-o’-nine-tails in public, and announced
that he was going to reform Pitcairn if he had to flog every person. He
quoted Jesus’s action in the temple, and when he heard that several of
the women had been talking about his own dereliction, he called
everybody in prayer to judge them. His own prayer was:
“‘O Lord, if these women die the common death of all men, thou hast not
sent me.’”
“This was going too far, and there were no amens, which made Hill
furious. I have heard this from one who was present. When he learned
about Buffett’s sin, and that it had been concealed from him, he made up
his mind to give Buffett an unforgettable lesson with a whip. Then he
put the three whites on the first vessel touching Pitcairn, and exiled
them. This was the straw that broke Hill’s rule. A schooner captain
brought back the trio, and they and others opposed Hill. An elder’s
daughter took some yams that did not belong to her, and at her trial
Hill said she should be executed for her crime. The father indignantly
opposed any severe sentence. Hill, who had felt his authority lessening,
rushed into his room and returned with a sword, and shouted out for the
father to confess his sins as he intended to kill him immediately. A
grandson of Quintal, who had bitten his wife’s ear off, leaped over a
table, and though he threw Hill down, he could not prevent Hill from
stabbing him many times. Others came to his rescue, and Hill was
disarmed. He was soon deported, as the Englishmen had written to the
British admirality in Chile about his madness, and a war vessel came to
quiet things. Nobbs took hold again, and when our missionary came, they
were ready for the real word of God. Within two weeks they all had given
up Sunday as the Sabbath and were keeping Saturday, the Seventh Day, the
Sabbath instituted at the end of creation, and the day Christ and his
apostles rigidly observed. I loved the Pitcairn brethren. When my time
came to go into other fields, I brought with me Mayhew December
Christian, who had been selected for his understanding of our beliefs
and his spiritual growth.”
The Reverend Mr. Leek stopped, and Nohea, who had awakened with a start
from a fitful slumber, said loudly, “_Amene!_”
“You should read the account of Pitcairn by Buffett’s granddaughter,”
said the minister. “Mayhew, we will sing before we go to sleep our hymn
of Pitcairn, fifth and last verses!”
The descendant of the arch-mutineer led in a mellow baritone, which Mr.
Leek supported in a firm bass:
“We own the depths of sin and shame,
Of guilt and crime from which we came;
Thy hand upheld us from despair,
Else we had sunk in darkness there.
“Thou know’st the depths from whence we sprung;
Inspire each heart, unloose each tongue,
That all our powers may join to bless
The Lord, our strength and righteousness.”
When they had said good night, I felt as sinful as Mary Magdalene; and
Nohea, though the words were Greek to him, sensed their meaning, and
before taking to his mat knelt and groaned deeply.
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