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From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed
Free Press
February 2009
On Sale: February 3, 2009
352 pages
ISBN: 1416597441
EAN: 9781416597445
Hardcover
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Pitcairn Island -- remote and wild in the South Pacific, a
place of towering cliffs and lashing surf -- is home to
descendants of Fletcher Christian and the Mutiny on the
Bounty crew, who fled there with a group of Tahitian maidens
after deposing their captain, William Bligh, and seizing his
ship in 1789. Shrouded in myth, the island was idealized by outsiders, who
considered it a tropical Shangri-La. But as the world was to
discover two centuries after the mutiny, it was also a place
of sinister secrets. In this riveting account, Kathy Marks
tells the disturbing saga and asks profound questions about
human behavior. In 2000, police descended on the British territory -- a lump
of volcanic rock hundreds of miles from the nearest
inhabited land -- to investigate an allegation of rape of a
fifteen-year-old girl. They found themselves speaking to
dozens of women and uncovering a trail of child abuse dating
back at least three generations. Scarcely a Pitcairn man was untainted by the allegations, it
seemed, and barely a girl growing up on the island, home to
just forty-seven people, had escaped. Yet most islanders,
including the victims' mothers, feigned ignorance or claimed
it was South Pacific "culture" -- the Pitcairn "way of life." The ensuing trials would tear the close-knit, interrelated
community apart, for every family contained an offender or a
victim -- often both. The very future of the island,
dependent on its men and their prowess in the longboats,
appeared at risk. The islanders were resentful toward
British authorities, whom they regarded as colonialists, and
the newly arrived newspeople, who asked nettlesome questions
and whose daily dispatches were closely scrutinized on the
Internet. The court case commanded worldwide attention. And as a
succession of men passed through Pitcairn's makeshift
courtroom, disturbing questions surfaced. How had the abuse
remained hidden so long? Was it inevitable in such a place?
Was Pitcairn a real-life Lord of the Flies? One of only six journalists to cover the trials, Marks lived
on Pitcairn for six weeks, with the accused men as her
neighbors. She depicts, vividly, the attractions and
everyday difficulties of living on a remote tropical island.
Moreover, outside court, she had daily encounters with the
islanders, not all of them civil, and observed firsthand how
the tiny, claustrophobic community ticked: the gossip, the
feuding, the claustrophobic intimacy -- and the power
dynamics that had allowed the abuse to flourish. Marks followed the legal and human saga through to its
recent conclusion. She uncovers a society gone badly astray,
leaving lives shattered and codes broken: a paradise truly lost.
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