Few islands have captured the British imagination as powerfully as Pitcairn. It is the beautiful but desolate rock in the Pacific where the mutineers of HMS Bounty hid and their descendants have been torn apart by infighting, tragedies and crime for hundreds of years.
But these days islanders tend to have more mundane preoccupations: Wi-Fi, for example. Of all the developments in Elon Musk’s career, saving Pitcairn may be the most surprising. Yorkshire-born mayor Simon Young, who became the first non-Pitcairner local to be elected in 2022, says Musk is thanks to Starlink, the satellite internet service that provides high-speed connections to even the most remote places. Pitcairn residents are enjoying renewed optimism about the future.
“This has been a game changer in terms of communications,” says Young, 59, speaking via Zoom from his office in Pitcairn, which took 13 days to arrive from the UK. “We join the rest of the world.”
It makes a welcome change from all the bad news. Starlink means one can move to Pitcairn and work remotely, watch Netflix and stay in touch with relatives on the other side of the world. The results were seen immediately.
“Over the last month, we have received five applications to the council from people considering settling,” adds Young, a permanent resident since 1999. “This is unprecedented.”
Five applications may not seem like a mass exodus, but it is a significant percentage considering the total population is only 40; This is the equivalent of five million people applying to join the UK in a single month. “Our demographics are aging,” says Young: More than a third of the population is over 65. “Repopulation growth is at the top of our strategic goal list. To encourage this, we have changed legislation and made land more usable.”
This internet-driven increase in immigration isn’t the only good news. Young also focused on making Pitcairn a haven for scientific research. Besides the inhabited Pitcairn, there are three neighboring uninhabited islands with plenty of ocean around them: Henderson, Ducie and Oeno. In 2015, the British government voted to establish a marine reserve around them; at the time it was the largest in the world (still the third largest) at 324,000 square miles. Young followed this up by establishing a science center that he hoped would encourage regular research trips.
“This is absolutely pristine water because we have never had commercial fishing and we have no tourism-related developments,” he says. The progress was detailed in a recently published article. New Scientist magazine, “How the infamous Pitcairn Island became a model for ocean conservation.” It was titled.
Every step in the right direction is welcomed. Young is understandably keen to paint an optimistic picture, but the only British Overseas Territory in the Pacific is used to being in the news for the wrong reasons. For years, the population seemed doomed to eventually collapse and disappear under the weight of demographic change and its tragic past.
While Polynesians lived on the islands for hundreds of years until the 16th century, Pitcairn remained uninhabited until 1790, with the arrival of arrivals determining its modern history. Nine of the mutineers aboard HMS Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian, went ashore at Pitcairn with 17 native Tahitians, sinking their ship in their wake. It is understandable why they are interested in this topic; Rising steeply from the sea, Pitcairn looks as much like a castle as it does a shelter. Subsisting on farming and fishing, the rebels successfully hid from expeditions sent to bring them to justice for nearly 20 years. Dramatizations of the story, in which Christian is depicted as a hero and played by Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and Mel Gibson, have done little to illustrate the harsh reality of the Rebellion or the years that followed in which the Pitcairners found themselves. he died quickly from disease, murder, and alcoholism.
Their existence was not documented until 1808; By then only one of the rebels, John Adams, was still alive and living with nine women and 19 children. As Pitcairn became a regular stop for whaling ships and was assimilated into the British Empire, its population increased, reaching 233 in 1937. A large portion of the population is still descended from the original rebels.
But Pitcairn has long been plagued by stories of pedophilia and incest. Three cases of underage sexual intercourse were reported in the 1950s. In the late 1990s a police officer from Kent uncovered further allegations of abuse. This annu horribilis came in 2004, when seven men, a third of the island’s male population, faced 55 charges of child sexual abuse. All but one of Fletcher’s descendants, including then-mayor Steve Christian, were convicted and imprisoned. The prison had to be specially built. The impression, supported by other reports, was that it was an island with its own moral code and customs, supposedly related to its Polynesian ancestors, where women over the age of 12 were considered fair game for sex.
Young says the island is moving even if the press isn’t.
“Twenty years ago it was a different story, very fragmented, certainly as you would expect,” he says. “But we changed the legislation, we have an external police officer, we received special training. It took a long time to get over this, but we came out stronger. The problem has been solved, it is now considered historical. “We learned from this, we did not sweep it under the carpet, we moved on.”
The abuse cases were not the end of Pitcairn’s problems. It was an unexpected victim of Brexit, when EU infrastructure funding dried up. The pandemic meant that occasional visiting cruise ships no longer came. Almost everything has to be imported, meaning it will never be economically self-sufficient and will depend on British government handouts: around £5 million a year, or around £125,000 per person, at last count.
“The bottom line is that we will never be self-sufficient unless we become Guyana and find oil off the coast,” Young says. “It looks awful when you look at the population size, but there is no other way to meet the needs of the British Overseas Territories.” Two-thirds of the money, he says, went to Pitcairn’s private supply ship, the Silver Supporter, which transported people and supplies from the French Polynesian island of Mangareva. Pitcairn remains surprisingly remote. The sailing from Mangareva, 300 miles northwest of Pitcairn, takes 32 hours. Mangareva is a four-hour flight from Tahiti and a five-hour flight from Auckland, especially since it’s nowhere near London.
Young hopes the remoteness, transformed by a few modern conveniences, will attract newcomers to Pitcairn as it once did him. Pickering grew up in North Yorkshire. After 10 years in the air force he went traveling and visited Pitcairn in 1992; Like many visitors, he was fascinated by the history of the Bounty. He found something more seductive; A place where humpback whales swim, birds sing in the pine trees, and a small, quirky community gets by in difficult conditions, riding up and down dusty roads on quad bikes and helping each other out. Young moved in permanently with his American wife, Shirley, in 1999, and they became the first people without Pitcairn connections to be naturalized. Convincing him to come was “not difficult at all” as he is a “natural traveller”.
“What attracted me was the historical interest and the fact that it was so isolated,” Young says. “There was a small community of survivors clinging to the rock. This conjures up romantic images.
“Pickering is equally beautiful and the people in both are adaptable and resilient. I miss the beauty of the seasons we take for granted in the UK: ice beneath your feet, falling autumn leaves, spring. I also miss the British sense of humour, and my mother.” Even his sister never visited him here.
Still, he says he wouldn’t trade it for anything: “What I love about Pitcairn is the lifestyle. You have to admit that this is extraordinarily isolated: there are limitations if there is a serious medical emergency and things like that.
“But there are a lot of qualities that have perhaps been lost in the outside world, where you come together for each other when you need it,” he adds. In a world of eight billion people, he hopes there are a handful of people who find this life appealing to him.
Because satellite internet or not, Pitcairn is unlikely to be like the rest of the world in the near future. People there like it too. What was the first thing Young watched after Starlink was founded? Escape to the countryCertainly.