A new beginning

I confess I never watched any of the several movies made about the Mutiny on the Bounty. But it is a fascinating story and is the fountainhead of today’s Norfolk Island population.

In 1789, HMS Bounty was returning from Tahiti after a mission to collect breadfruit plants for transport to the West Indies. Tensions had been simmering aboard for months, worsened by the crew’s long, easy stay in Tahiti and Bligh’s increasingly harsh discipline. On 28 April a group of disaffected sailors, led by Fletcher Christian, seized the ship. They set Lieutenant William Bligh and 18 loyalists adrift in a small open boat. In fact, the only reason more of the crew did not leave with Bligh was there was no room in the boat. Christian’s mutiny was not as well supported as he was led to believe. Remarkably, Bligh navigated more than 6,000 kilometres to safety in Timor, later returning to Britain.

Meanwhile, Christian sailed back to Tahiti, where some crew chose to stay. Christian and eight other mutineers, knowing they would hang if captured, left Tahiti in September 1789 with a group of 6 Tahitian men, 12 women, and a baby, most of whom were coerced or kidnapped. They eventually settled on remote Pitcairn Island, which was misidentified on naval charts so nobody was going to find them. At first, the group tried to build a new life, but tensions quickly rose. The mutineers treated the Tahitian men as labourers and the women as property. Resentment turned to violence. By 1793, most of the original mutineers had been killed by the Tahitians, who were then killed in turn. Only one mutineer, John Adams, survived to tell the tale.

Adams was left with a group of Tahitian women and their mixed-race children, including his own. In the years that followed, Adams assumed a leadership role. He guided the small, fractured community toward a more peaceful existence, relying heavily on the Bible salvaged from the Bounty to instil a sense of order, education, and Christianity.

By the early 1800s, the population had stabilised, and a functioning, mostly harmonious society had developed. When the Topaz, an American sealing ship, stumbled upon Pitcairn in 1808, the crew found a quiet, devout community led by Adams, who openly confessed his past. Though he had been part of the mutiny, British authorities later chose not to prosecute him, largely because of the positive transformation he had brought about.

Over the next few decades, the population grew, but resources on the tiny island (4.6 sq km, 1.8 sq miles) became strained. By the 1850s, overcrowding, poor soil, and limited freshwater made life increasingly difficult. After appeals to the British government, in 1856, the entire Pitcairn community was moved to Norfolk Island.

So. The Pitcairners were mixed race, part Tahitian and part English. A few outsiders joined them before they left Pitcairn, notably John Buffet and John Evans, who would become important members of the community on Norfolk. The community developed its own language and its society was a blend of pious Christian English and Polynesian customs.

All 194 Pitcairners arrived on Norfolk on 8^th June 1856. The British government had arranged the transfer in advance, and Lieutenant Robert Stuart, the last commandant of the Second Settlement, stayed on temporarily to oversee the handover and assist with the transition.

Stuart, along with a small support staff, helped the Pitcairners settle into their new home. Each Pitcairn family received a house (typically a stone or timber building left by the penal colony), garden or farmland plots proportionate to the number of family members, and access to communal resources like pasture, wells, and public buildings. The idea was to give each family the means to be self-sufficient—growing food, raising livestock, and supporting their households without creating a class system based on land wealth. Stuart helped the settlers access tools and supplies, and provided guidance about the island’s infrastructure.

Although Stuart left a few months later, his presence ensured a smoother handover and gave the Pitcairners a point of contact as they adjusted to the much larger, colder, and more complex island compared to tiny Pitcairn. Norfolk is about 35 sq km (13.5 sq miles), about 7.5 times larger than Pitcairn.

The transition wasn’t easy. A few families went back to Pitcairn but most stayed to take advantage of what Norfolk had to offer. And every year the Norfolk Islanders celebrate Bounty Day, the anniversary of their arrival at their new home.

After the deluge on our first night on Norfolk, the rain reduced to intermittent showers, becoming rarer as the days passed. Monday 8^th June dawned sunny and bright. We were taken down to the pier at Kingston to watch the reenactment of the arrival from Pitcairn. We tourists waited around the stone buildings as the locals gathered. We were told they would be in period costume and that turned out to be long white cotton dresses for women with perhaps a shawl; men wore trousers with a white shirt and black waistcoat. There were some variations – but EVERYBODY wore a woven hat. About 2,200 people live on Norfolk – I reckon a third to a half of them turned up for the occasion. There were lots of kids, which augurs well for the future. After the reenactment of their arrival, everyone went up to the cenotaph to lay flowers, then walked to the cemetery to visit their ancestors. These people are proud of their heritage.

We tourists went to a marque for morning tea while the Islanders visited the cemetery and attended a church service. Then everyone came together for a picnic lunch.

It was a lovely way to end our visit.

This is the fourth post for this trip. If you missed anything, pick up the whole journey here.

If you’re into cozy mystery, come over to Substack and read my review of the Lady Hardcastle mysteries – move over Miss Marple.

One more thing! We flew Qantas – and there was no ‘welcome to country’ when we landed at Brisbane. Hurrah.