Trouble in Paradise: Uncovering the Dark Secrets of Britain’s Most Remote Island

Steve himself walks with a limp, the legacy of a teenage accident that has required two hip replacements. Nevertheless, he is physically equal to Pitcairn’s tough environment. He is said to be good company, and an entertaining host. He has something else, too—an ‘X-factor’, one outsider calls it, saying, ‘You can feel it as soon as he walks in. He carries himself like a leader.’

The Adventist Church filmed a series of documentaries about Pitcairn; watching them while on the island, I was struck by the way that Steve dominated nearly every scene—leading a group of young men off on motorbikes to hunt wild goats; debating the design of a new longboat with New Zealand engineers; driving around in a Mini Moke, the island’s one car; and giving the signal for Christmas presents to be distributed in the square. Steve even built the Pitcairners’ coffins.

To his fellow islanders, he was the linchpin of the community. Nothing happened without Steve’s say-so, and if he was away temporarily, on Norfolk Island, for instance, the others would still consult him. ‘Steve liked to be boss,’ says Tony Washington, a New Zealander who taught on Pitcairn in the early 1990s. ‘He had more say than Jay [Warren], although Jay was magistrate. When we went on a trip to Henderson [a neighbouring island], it was Steve who decided when we should come back.’

Neville Tosen describes him as ‘the evil genius who ruled Pitcairn’. He adds, ‘And yet I came to recognise him as a person of ability. He was smart. He understood the island and the way things were done. He could think his way through problems and come up with a solution. He was the brains of the place.’

Others say that Steve surrounded himself with yes-men and treated Pitcairn as his personal fiefdom. He would turn up late to communal dinners, knowing that no one else would start eating without him. ‘Pitcairn was an oligarchy,’ says Leslie Jaques, who has succeeded Leon Salt as Commissioner. ‘Steve ruled, and everyone else did what they were told. The way the community was run was medieval.’

There was an in-crowd, but not everyone in it was equally favoured. The island’s pecking order was quite intricate, it seems, and was reflected in the jobs that people did, and even by their positions in the longboat. As one British official observes, ‘It was almost like an Indian caste system. You had your place in society, and you never moved from it.’

For six decades the mainstay of the Pitcairn economy was stamps. First issued in 1940, they became the cream of many a collection, coveted because of the island’s colourful history and exotic location. So popular were they, in fact, that within a few years the community was able to build a new school and, for the first time, hire a professional teacher from New Zealand.

The proceeds from stamps went into a Pitcairn Fund that until a few years ago met the island’s running costs, as well as subsidising freight charges and the price of diesel fuel and building materials. The fund—latterly bolstered by sales of coins, phonecards and the .pn internet domain suffix—enabled the islanders to travel to New Zealand for further education and health care, and be paid salaries for carrying out ‘government jobs’. Capital items, such as longboats, tractors and generators, have always been provided by Britain, which is also responsible for maintaining the infrastructure.

As stamp collecting and letter writing fell out of fashion, the fund dwindled. Thanks to British subsidies, Pitcairn has nonetheless continued to enjoy full employment, in a manner reminiscent of a Cold War-era Communist state. The government jobs, equivalent to a public service bureaucracy, include deputy postmaster, trainee tractor driver, second assistant forester and keeper of John Adams’ grave. While there may be a whiff of absurdity about some of the jobs, who gets what is a serious matter, for the small stipends—NZ$500 (£200) a month for the island’s engineer, for instance—can go a long way on Pitcairn. And, until recently, who got what depended on your connections.

When Steve Christian’s daughter, Tania, arrived for an extended visit, she was promptly given two positions: museum keeper and librarian. Simon Young, the English newcomer, who had a horticulture degree and wanted to work in biosecurity, was made garbage collector. That had been the job of Hendrik Roos, the German settler. His wife, Nicola Ludwig, had been gardener of the cemetery.

Steve was not only mayor; he was chief supervising engineer—probably the most significant post on Pitcairn. (Randy was his deputy.) He was also the island’s dentist, having completed a course in New Zealand that qualified him to perform extractions. He was the radiographer. He was the number one tractor driver. He was the explosives supervisor, and a heavy machinery operator. He was a longboat coxswain. Steve had eight paid jobs.

The Christian clan has traditionally been the aristocracy on Pitcairn, but not all Christians are equal, and in Steve’s day his branch has been pre-eminent. The Warren clan also plays a prominent role in island affairs, securing some of the best jobs for family members. Despite lacking Steve’s force of personality and charisma, Jay is regarded as his main rival for power.

The mayor—or magistrate, as the office was formerly called—has always been a man. Betty Christian once nominated a woman. ‘Everyone laughed. They thought it was the biggest joke they’d ever heard,’ she says. Many women thought so too. When an outsider asked one older islander, Nola Warren, why a woman could not be in charge, she replied, ‘Because it’s never been, and it just can’t be.’

One of Pitcairn’s attractions is that people do not pay tax. Instead, they carry out ‘public work’: painting buildings, repairing the slipway, clearing the roads of undergrowth. They can go fishing if the weather is good, or tend their gardens and orchards. The islanders grow, among other things, mangoes, pineapples, passionfruit, strawberries, avocadoes, watermelons, pumpkins, peppers and sweet potatoes. Everything thrives in the volcanic soil and semi-tropical climate.

The locals trade their produce with the crews of passing ships, swapping fruit and fish for items such as timber, frozen chickens and cans of Coke. Their most valuable commodity, however, is the wooden carvings to which they devote most of their free time. The carvings are sold to passengers on the cruise ships that visit Pitcairn during summer, and also through the islanders’ websites. A Bounty replica can fetch US$120. Not long ago, on a cruise ship, a Pitcairn family made US$10,000 in one day.

Souvenirs account for three-quarters of the Pitcairners’ earnings. Most homes have a workshop equipped with power tools, and the carvings—while no longer produced by hand—are still made from the richly veined miro wood harvested locally or on Henderson Island, 15 hours away by longboat. (Henderson is one of three other islands, all uninhabited, in the Pitcairn group; the other two are Oeno and Ducie.)

Most of the Big Fence crowd are drinkers. For a long time Pitcairn was a dry island—in theory, at least. Alcohol is banned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1997 the locals voted to legalise its importation, but a licence is still required and drinking in public remains outlawed; in the outside world, Pitcairn retains its teetotal image. You cannot buy alcohol on the island, any more than you can buy cigarettes or ice cream or a carton of milk.

Seventh-day Adventism replaced John Adams’ idiosyncratic brand of Anglicanism in 1876, after the American-based Church posted a box of literature to Pitcairn, then dispatched a missionary to argue its cause. The islanders were baptised in a rock pool, and since pork was now a forbidden food, they killed all their pigs—pushed them off a cliff, so the story goes.

Adventism, an evangelical Christian denomination, has 14 million members worldwide. Followers believe that Saturday is the Sabbath, and that the Second Coming of Christ is imminent; they are expected to dress modestly, and avoid shellfish as well as pork; tobacco is another prohibited substance. Dancing, gambling and the theatre are frowned on, along with works of fiction and music other than hymns.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has been a generous benefactor to Pitcairn, raising funds for the community and sending out teachers and pastors. It is not clear, though, how deeply the faith implanted itself, or to what degree the islanders ever observed its precepts. Certainly, they called themselves Adventists, and until a few years ago the pews were always crowded on Saturdays. But going to church was, like elsewhere, the done thing, and on Pitcairn the church was also very much a social focus.

Outsiders were struck by the locals’ earthy language, peppered with innuendo and swear words, and by their relaxed sexual morals. Roy Sanders, a New Zealand teacher, described a Sabbath service in the 1950s that was punctuated by heckling and jeering, and ‘intermittent spitting out of the windows’. Ted Dymond, a visiting British official, reported in the 1970s, ‘The lengthy and rambling sermon was soporific and I counted seven islanders in deep slumber.’ Some believe that Pitcairn’s history has been characterised by cycles of moral decay and religious renewal. Others are doubtful about the renewal part.

Nowadays Seventh-day Adventism is no longer a spiritual anchor. Yet Saturday is still ‘the Sabbath’, and everybody has a quiet day. Even some of the least pious islanders continue to pay a tithe, and the pastor is deferred to, outwardly at least. Council meetings, market days and communal meals begin with a prayer. ‘They all look so bloody sincere, with their heads bowed,’ remarks Bill Haigh, an Englishman who has spent long periods living on Pitcairn, modernising its communications on behalf of Britain.

‘Sacrificial living’, it seems, has never been embraced by local people, despite being a central plank of Adventism. Carol Warren has five freezers, and most households own at least three, among an array of white goods and electrical appliances: fridges, deep-fryers, microwaves, video cameras, stereo systems, DVD players, television sets, video recorders. The Pitcairners are defensive about their material possessions—more so, perhaps, than about any other aspect of their lives. It certainly feels odd, in such a remote, rugged spot, to find homes stuffed with the emblems of Western-style wealth. Paradoxically, the houses themselves are relatively basic, with concrete floors and unpainted walls, and the furniture is plain.

The multiple freezers and fridges, the islanders point out, are a necessity—and after opening a bag of flour infested with weevils, I could see what they meant. Moreover, the hoarding instinct is ingrained, for no one is ever quite sure when—or if—the next ship will come. The video and DVD players, too, are crucial in a place with no television, cinema or theatre, and no restaurants, pubs or cafés. Such goods are also status symbols, though, and in that respect Pitcairn is not much different from anywhere else. I suppose I had expected, rather naïvely, to find people living the simple life.

Carol told Sue Ingram, the Radio New Zealand reporter, ‘We’ve had it really good for a long time, and I don’t think a lot of our people in New Zealand could live like we do. We do live quite extravagantly. I have everything they have, plus.’

Pitcairn has been fairly prosperous for decades. Roy Sanders, the teacher in the 1950s, was taken aback to find children with gold watches and expensive fountain pens. A British official in that era reported that the islanders were reticent about their earnings; however, he added, ‘Judging from the manner in which some of them journey up and down to New Zealand—even to England—they cannot be too badly off.’

Not everyone benefits equally from the spoils of the island. Take the share-out, which is one of Pitcairn’s more charming traditions. Based on an old naval custom, it takes place in the square and is used to distribute the catch from a communal fishing trip or goods donated by a ship. The fish (or flour, or clothing, or whatever) is divided into piles equivalent to the number of households. Everybody turns their back, except for one person, who points to a pile; another person, facing away, calls out the name of a family. The process is repeated until every family has been allocated a ration—with everyone, in theory, receiving equal.

Mike Lupton-Christian told us that the share-out had become a joke, with Steve Christian and Dave Brown often siphoning off the prime items beforehand: bottles of beer, for instance, or the best cuts of meat. As Mike put it, ‘The stuff is shared out equally, only Steve’s family gets a bigger share.’ It was the same when a ship wanted to buy a consignment of fish or produce. ‘The order only goes to those in the know,’ he said.

As for the general dishonesty that Gail Cox, the Kent constable, had tried to address, Mike’s belief was that ‘everyone in the community had something on everyone else … Nobody was prepared to shop anyone else … It was a bit like the sexual abuse thing.’

The ‘sexual abuse thing’ was now plunging the island into its worst crisis since the mutineers’ day. Pitcairn’s leading men stood accused of paedophilia, a crime so abhorrent that it sometimes causes vigilante-style reprisals. Not only had they preyed on children, it was alleged, they had done so within their own small, introverted community, targeting girls who lived a few doors away—the daughters of cousins and neighbours, or, in some cases, family members.

If a prosecution was launched, though, the island’s name would be blackened, and relationships in this most interdependent of societies ruined. The community was already in a precarious state, thanks to the fragile economy and falling population. Could it survive this latest and most devastating blow? And how would fans of the legendary Bounty island react?

CHAPTER 6 The propaganda campaign starts

By mid-2001 Pitcairn was making international headlines, although the scale and true nature of the problem uncovered by English police were not yet known. ‘“Mutiny on the Bounty” island faces first trial in history,’ proclaimed The Independent in London, trumpeting a story written by one of my colleagues. ‘End of a legend as Pitcairn Island meets the modern law,’ announced the New Zealand Herald.

None of the stories running then quoted anyone on Pitcairn. The islanders, not slow to use the media in the past, refrained from making any public comment—at least for the time being. Others spoke up on their behalf, however, and chief among them was Dr Herbert Ford, an ordained Seventh-day Adventist minister and director of the Pitcairn Islands Study Center, located on the campus of Pacific Union College, California.

‘Herb’ Ford had worked in public relations and as a journalism professor at the college, which was funded and administered by the Adventist Church. He had a lifelong fascination with Pitcairn: he had met Tom and Betty Christian in California in the 1960s and visited the island briefly in 1992; he had also raised money for it, securing donations from, among others, Robert Redford and Jordan’s late King Hussein. After he retired, the college gave him some office space for a study centre, and when the child abuse story broke, Ford made himself available to media worldwide. He spoke well and could spin a good quote. He also communicated with the island weekly by ham radio, which qualified him to pronounce on the community’s ‘mood’.

In 2001 he told me, referring to the investigation, that ‘the sum of it all is pure speculation, and whether you want to call it rape, I don’t know’. He added, ‘There’s been an awful lot of Polynesian blood put into the island. The girls resorted to sexual activity at a very early age, and that was carried on by the women into Pitcairn.’ Ford claimed that Gail Cox, the English constable, had ‘ingratiated herself’ with the locals, ‘wheedling’ information out of the girls during informal ‘kitchen table’ chats, and precipitating a ‘sweep’ by police of Pitcairn women. In his view, it would not be surprising if the inhabitants of a remote tropical island were ‘out of harmony with the laws of downtown London’.

Also quoted in those early days was Glynn Christian, a former television chef and author of a biography of Fletcher Christian, Fragile Paradise. Accessible and articulate, Glynn was a seventh-generation descendant of Fletcher, and had grown up in New Zealand. In a telephone interview, he spoke of the ‘goodness and niceness’ of the Pitcairners, whom he met in 1980 while conducting research on the island, and, in a remarkable observation, said that ‘to be there makes you think there’s no such thing as original sin’. Glynn ascribed the current crisis to British neglect, which he claimed had left the Pitcairners in a social timewarp. In his opinion, the Pitcairn men had known no better. ‘It’s not wilful badness,’ he said. ‘You can’t punish a child for doing something wrong if he’s not been told that it’s wrong.’

Once the British Foreign Office had resolved to act on the child abuse allegations, it set about addressing a problem identified by its advisers many years earlier: Pitcairn’s lack of a legal infrastructure, which, given recent developments, needed to be rectified swiftly. A series of appointments were made, among the most important of which was the naming of Simon Moore as Pitcairn Public Prosecutor. Moore was already Crown Solicitor for Auckland, the chief prosecuting counsel in New Zealand’s largest and most crime-ridden city; now he was to take on a similar job for an island of a few dozen people.

Christine Gordon, a senior colleague, was appointed Deputy Public Prosecutor. The pair regarded themselves as a formidable team. Moore, an effervescent character with a mane of golden-brown hair, rode with the Auckland hunt and belonged to that city’s exclusive Northern Club. He was a master of courtroom theatrics. Gordon, a petite blonde with a ferocious grasp of detail, smiled sweetly while asking the killer questions.

Having prosecuted a previous case of child abuse in a closed community, Gordon correctly predicted that the allegations would proliferate. By mid-2001 the two lawyers had enough evidence to charge 13 men; Moore, though, paused to consider another factor—the public interest. How would a prosecution affect the tiny, isolated society? Would it really collapse if men were put in jail? He and Gordon realised that they could not answer these questions while sitting in an office block in central Auckland. They would have to make the journey to Pitcairn, to see for themselves how the community operated.

In October 2001, accompanied by Karen Vaughan, the Wellington-based detective, the prosecutors travelled to Pitcairn on a container ship, the Argentine Star. The Deputy Governor, Karen Wolstenholme, was already on the island, as were several new resident outsiders, British authorities having belatedly acknowledged the need for some external supervision. Two New Zealand social workers were watching over the half-dozen children, while two British Ministry of Defence police officers—known as MDPs and licensed to carry firearms—were monitoring the suspects and keeping communal tensions in check. The two pairs, sent out on rotating three-month tours of duty, were resented by the majority of islanders, who grumbled that Pitcairn had become a police state and accused Britain of planting spies in their midst.

Standing on the deck of the Argentine Star, Christine Gordon had ‘a knot in my stomach when I saw the dot on the horizon, because we didn’t know what the situation would be there’. As it turned out, and just as Peter George and Dennis McGookin had experienced, the Pitcairners went out of their way to be friendly, even if these latest visitors found them a little overwhelming at first. Simon Moore recalls, when the longboat came out, ‘the assortment of humanity, wearing different coloured T-shirts, some carrying huge frozen fish on their shoulders, clambering aboard just like pirates and swarming around the ship in all directions’. He also observed the efficiency with which the locals stocked up on duty-free cigarettes and alcohol. ‘We’d been told they didn’t drink,’ says Moore, whom I interviewed in his oak-panelled office in 2005. ‘So I was astonished to see the quantities of booze unloaded, and boxes of eggs and frozen meat, and anything else you can imagine—wads of cardboard, mattresses, chairs—all dropped down into the longboat.’

The next morning the visitors were invited on a community fishing trip. At one point Simon Moore found himself in a small boat driven by Dave Brown, one of the alleged child abusers. Dave instructed him to lie flat, then he revved up the engine and the boat shot forward. ‘I looked up and saw that we were hurtling towards this solid rock face,’ says Moore. ‘Just as we were about to hit it, or so it seemed, the swell dropped and exposed the mouth of a cave.’ Dave deposited him on a patch of sand deep inside the cave, where the other visitors had already been dropped off. ‘I thought perfect,’ says Moore, rolling his eyes. ‘If they wanted to abandon us, this is the way to do it.’ A little later, though, they were picked up, and everyone proceeded to fish for a local species, nanwe. Despite the rough seas, the islanders hauled up hundreds of fish.

The catch was destined for a ‘fish fry’ that afternoon at The Landing, in celebration of Dave’s birthday. The fish were cleaned and the guts thrown off the end of the jetty, attracting a reef shark, which Randy Christian, another of the accused men, caught. Then, as one witness tells it, ‘Randy got a sledgehammer and hit the shark so hard that the hammer went right through its head and came out the other side. The shark was writhing in agony, the women were gagging, and Randy just stood there grinning, with the bloody sledgehammer in his hand.’

By coincidence, it was also Simon Moore’s birthday; so after regaling Dave with a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, the Pitcairners sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to their Public Prosecutor. Dave later complained to someone, ‘That prick Moore, we put on a birthday party for him the first time he came, and I thought he’d go easy on us as a result of that, the bastard.’

The fishing expedition was the first of numerous communal events, including dinners and sports days, that were staged for the visitors’ benefit during their fortnight on Pitcairn. At a tennis tournament, Karen Vaughan found herself partnering Dave in a doubles match. Simon Moore played cricket in a team skippered by Dave, and at a picnic later on chatted amicably with Randy, the rival captain. The prosecutors also attended a ‘cultural day’ at the school, where Christine Gordon was taught basket weaving, and Steve Christian, the mayor and another child abuse suspect, showed Moore how to carve a wooden dolphin.

That must have been weird, I say. Moore leans back in his hair, hands behind his head. ‘Yes. But then everything was weird on that trip. Normally we never see the people we’re prosecuting until we get into court, but here we were mixing with them quite closely.’

Some of the outsiders on the island voiced cynicism about the community activities, saying they had never seen the Pitcairn people display such unity and goodwill. Then, just before the visitors left, the islanders sang them their traditional farewell song, ‘Sweet Bye and Bye’, in the public hall. Moore says, ‘I was genuinely quite moved by it, but others, apparently, were not, because they saw it as yet another show for us.’

While they enjoyed sampling the local cuisine and learning new sports such as Pitcairn rounders, the lawyers had serious business on the island. At a public meeting soon after he arrived, Simon Moore explained the role of a public prosecutor, emphasising that his job was to serve the islanders’ interests. Privately he was optimistic that the men would plead guilty, enabling the matter to be settled with minimum damage to family relationships. The locals warmed to Moore, a man of considerable natural charm. But, according to one person present, ‘they didn’t get it … They saw him as their friend, even the suspects did. When he talked about the good of the island, they thought that meant that nothing would happen to them, whereas he was talking about the law being upheld.’