Trouble in Paradise: Uncovering the Dark Secrets of Britain’s Most Remote Island. Kathy Marks
witnesses. It was the start of the myth-making that was to obscure the reality of Pitcairn for the next two centuries.
By 1814 Adams was out of danger, following another chance visit, this time by two British naval captains. Enchanted by the new colony, they advised the Admiralty that it would be ‘an act of great cruelty and inhumanity’ to repatriate Adams and put him on trial.
Pitcairn’s period of seclusion was over. A stream of ships called, mainly British men-of-war, but also whalers and merchant vessels. All of them found a peaceful, devout society whose young people were healthy, modest and well educated. The legend of an island populated by reformed sinners, the offspring of murderers and mutineers, spread across the English-speaking world.
To outsiders, the idea of a Western-style community flourishing in such a faraway spot was compelling. Missionary groups dispatched crateloads of Bibles; other well-wishers, including Queen Victoria, sent gifts such as flour, guns, fishing hooks, crockery and an organ. Pitcairn was many things to many people. It was a religious fable. It was a fairy tale. It was the fulfilment of a Utopian dream.
The island’s fame grew in the late 19th century, after the locals rescued foreign sailors from a series of shipwrecks. Then in 1914 the opening of the Panama Canal put Pitcairn on the main shipping route to Australia and New Zealand. Liners packed with European emigrants would pause halfway across the Pacific so that their passengers could glimpse the island, and even meet its inhabitants, for—then as now—the islanders would board the ships to sell their souvenirs.
Jet travel destroyed the glamour of the ocean voyage, but while the rest of the world shrank, Pitcairn remained tantalisingly inaccessible, thus retaining much of its original allure. Children still scoured atlases for it; adults projected their escapist fantasies onto it; armchair travellers daydreamed about stepping ashore. The islanders, meanwhile, cultivated their own mystique, nurturing the romantic aura that drew tourists—and their American dollars—to their door.
The day after we arrived on Pitcairn, Olive Christian, Steve’s wife, invited members of the media to Big Fence, her sprawling home overlooking the Pacific. Like the rest of my colleagues, I had absolutely no idea what to expect.
When we got there in the early afternoon, 15 women—almost the entire adult female population—were assembled on sofas and plastic chairs arranged around the edge of the living room. The room, which had a lino floor, was as big as a barn; the walls were decorated with family photographs and a large mural of fish and dolphins. Through the front window we could see tall Norfolk pines clinging to slopes that tumbled steeply to the ocean.
The women represented all four of Pitcairn’s main clans: the Christians and Youngs, still carrying mutineers’ surnames, and the Browns and Warrens, descendants of 19th-century sailor settlers. The other English lines—Adams, Quintal and McCoy—had died out, although not in New Zealand or on Norfolk Island, 1200 miles east of Australia, where most people with Pitcairn roots now live.
At the time of the Big Fence gathering, the names of the seven Pitcairn-based defendants were still suppressed by a court order. However, we were privy to this poorly kept secret. Every woman in the room was related to one or more of the men—as a wife, mother, sister, cousin, aunt or stepmother-in-law.
Looking around, I saw that, with a few exceptions, the women were solidly built. While some were dark-haired, with striking Polynesian features, others, with their fair skin and European looks, would not have stood out in an English village. All of them were casually dressed, many in shorts and singlets: practical choices, given the heat and ubiquitous Pitcairn dust.
We had been summoned to Big Fence, it turned out, to be told that their menfolk were not ‘perverts’ or ‘hardened criminals’: they were decent, hard-working family types. No islander would tolerate children being interfered with, and no one on Pitcairn had ever been raped. The ‘victims’ were girls who had known exactly what they were doing. It was they who had thrown themselves at the men.
As I digested this notion, which was being put forward with some passion, I noticed that a handful of people were dominating proceedings. These particular women were speaking over the top of each other, impatient to get their point across. Others said little, and looked ill at ease. Steve Christian’s mother, Dobrey, sat quietly, weaving a basket from pandanus leaves.
The talkative ones explained that under-age sex was the norm on Pitcairn. Darralyn Griffiths, the daughter of Jay Warren, one of the defendants, told us in a matter-of-fact way that she had lost her virginity at 13, ‘and I felt shit hot about it too, I felt like a big lady’. She was partly boasting, partly censorious of her younger self, it seemed to me. Others clamoured to make similar admissions. ‘I had it at 12, and I was shit hot too,’ said Jay’s sister, Meralda, a woman in her 40s. Darralyn’s mother, Carol, 54 years old, agreed that 13 was ‘the normal age’, adding, ‘I used to be a wild thing when I was young and single.’ Olive Christian described her youth, with evident nostalgia, as a time when ‘we all thought sex was like food on the table’.
The British police had misunderstood Pitcairn, they claimed: it was a South Pacific island where, to young people, sex was as natural as the ocean breeze. Olive said, ‘It’s been this way for generations, and we’ve seen nothing wrong in it. Everyone has sex young. That’s our lifestyle.’ Darralyn echoed her. ‘It was just the way it was. No one thought it was bad.’
We must have looked surprised. They were surprised we were surprised. Well, at what age did we start having sex, they demanded. It was clear, in this company and at this particular juncture, that the question could not be avoided. Some of our responses met with howls of derision. The women of Pitcairn did not believe that anyone could have lost their virginity at 18; the idea of being that old was simply preposterous.
The serious point of this was to persuade us that the criminal case was based on a misconception—and, furthermore, that it was all part of an elaborate plot. Britain was determined to ‘close the island down’, they said, because it had become a financial burden—a ‘thorn in the arse’, as Tania Christian, Steve and Olive’s daughter, put it. What better way to achieve that than to jail the men who were the very backbone of the community?
Why, though, we wondered aloud, would the women who had spoken to police have fabricated their accounts—accounts that, despite them growing up on the island in different eras and now living thousands of miles apart, were remarkably alike? At this point the Pitcairners produced their trump card: Carol Warren’s daughters, Darralyn and Charlene.
Charlene, 25 years old, with long, curly hair and a diffident manner, spoke up first, egged on by her mother. Charlene revealed that she had been one of the women who made a statement in 2000, alleging sexual abuse by Pitcairn men. But, she added, as others sitting around her clucked approvingly, she had only done so because she had been blinded by greed. She explained, ‘The detectives … dragged me to the police station. I didn’t know what I had done. I was ignorant. I was offered good money for each person I could name. They said I would get something like NZ$4000 (£1,500) for every guy. After I had added it up in my head, I was, like, “Whoa!” I just blurted everything out to them.’
Then it was her sister’s turn. Darralyn was 27; well built, with a fair complexion, she resembled Charlene physically, but was more self-assured. Darralyn told us that she had also made a statement—but, she said, only after being browbeaten by police. She claimed that detectives had asked her to ‘make up a false allegation against a guy here, because they didn’t have enough evidence to put him under’.
A New Zealand detective and child abuse specialist, Karen Vaughan, who had joined the British inquiry team, told Darralyn’s partner, Turi Griffiths, that if they had a baby daughter and brought her to the island, she would get raped too, Darralyn alleged. ‘I was shit scared. They told me if I tell the truth, everything will be fine. They said they’d heard from other people about my past. They asked me disgusting personal questions.’
Both sisters were living in New Zealand at the time of the investigation, and both told police that they were prepared to go to court. But ‘after I really thought about it, it was half and half … I wanted it just as bad as them. It was very much a mutual thing,’ said Charlene,