Kitabı oku: «Trouble in Paradise: Uncovering the Dark Secrets of Britain’s Most Remote Island»

CHAPTER 1 A surreal little universe in the middle of nowhere

Balancing on the deck of the Braveheart, I glanced down at the longboat rolling alongside us in the vigorous swell. Between the two vessels lay churning ocean, and a gap that narrowed and yawned alarmingly. ‘Jump,’ urged a voice behind me. Heart pounding, I leapt. A pair of muscular arms caught me and propelled me onto a wooden bench.

It was September 2004, and for the next six weeks, along with other journalists, I would be living on a lump of volcanic rock in the middle of the South Pacific. Our group had been travelling for eight days and was still some way off, separated by seas whipping themselves into furious peaks. But we could see our destination ahead of us: Pitcairn Island, the legendary home of Fletcher Christian and the Bounty mutineers.

One of Fletcher’s heirs was slouched in the back of the longboat: Randy Christian, black-bearded and massively built. Limbs that looked like gigantic steel girders sprouted from his black shorts and singlet.

When you first clap eyes on a person charged with serious crimes, they are generally seated in the dock of a court, flanked by prison guards. Randy was skippering the boat that was conveying us to shore so we could report on his trial for five rapes and seven indecent assaults. Next to him stood Jay Warren, another big man, with a dark moustache and Polynesian features. Jay, too, would soon be facing justice, for allegedly molesting a 12-year-old girl.

Looking back, it was a fitting introduction to the surreal little universe in which we were about to be immersed: a place where the sexual abuse of children is shrugged off, and not even a legal drama generating international headlines can disrupt the rhythms of daily existence. Randy and Jay, expert at picking their way through Pitcairn’s spiked collar of rocks, were in charge of the longboats, and the locals saw no irony in them coming out to fetch us. As for us, we had blithely placed our lives in the hands of men who surely did not wish us well.

Pitcairn is a crumb of land, roughly 2 miles square, and probably the most inaccessible spot on Earth. Before leaving my home in Sydney, I had found it on the map, with some difficulty: a pinprick in a vast expanse of blue, 3300 miles from New Zealand and 3600 miles from Chile. In an era when you can fly from Australia to London in a day, the journey to Pitcairn is a powerful reminder of the size of the planet. The island is one of the few places in the world without an airstrip. Too remote to be reached by helicopter, it does not even have a scheduled shipping service. Most visitors charter a yacht out of Tahiti, or hitch a lift on a trans-Pacific container ship, which takes more than a week to get there from Auckland or Panama.

As the island does not have a safe harbour, ships must heave to a mile or so offshore, where the community-owned longboats collect passengers and goods. If the seas are rough, which they often are, the captain may decide to press on without stopping. Then it can be months before another vessel passes.

Travelling in an official British party, I had taken a slightly different route, flying from Auckland to Tahiti, then waiting three days for the once-weekly connection to Mangareva, a beautiful island in the outermost reaches of French Polynesia and the nearest inhabited land to Pitcairn. The four-hour flight was broken by a refuelling stop in Hao, the atoll where the French agents who blew up the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior were briefly imprisoned. A few days later, in Mangareva’s tiny, threadbare port of Rikitea, our party boarded the Braveheart, a 110-foot former scientific research vessel, for the final leg of our odyssey: a 30-hour ocean voyage. As well as the six-person media pool, there were two British diplomats, two English police officers, and an Australian Seventh-day Adventist pastor and his wife.

Some 300 miles of open sea lie between Mangareva and Pitcairn; having been warned that the passage could be extremely choppy, I was armed with seasickness tablets, including ‘Paihia bombs’, a New Zealand remedy. What I was not prepared for was quite how lonely it would feel in that distant corner of the world’s largest ocean. We saw no other ships, just flying fish, and seabirds skimming the waves, and fields of whitecaps stretching to infinity in every direction. Only an occasional dusting of coral atolls relieved the sensation of dizzying emptiness.

On our second day, at about midday, a grey smudge appeared on the horizon: Pitcairn. The sight of it made my flesh tingle. It was quiet on deck. For the next five hours we watched as the island’s distinctive silhouette emerged and the smudge turned into a solid chunk of rock.

This was exactly what Fletcher Christian would have seen from the Bounty as he combed the South Pacific for a bolthole from the British Navy in 1790. Pitcairn proved to be ideal, and the sailors settled on the island with their Polynesian ‘wives’ and companions. Two centuries later, their descendants lived on there—just 47 of them, mostly related and sharing four surnames. And now the heirs of the famous mutineers were famous for quite different reasons.

Thirteen men had been charged as a result of a police investigation into child sexual abuse, and seven of them lived on Pitcairn, where they accounted for nearly half the adult males. Those men had insisted on their right to be tried at home; however, the last major court case on the island had been in 1898, when Harry Christian was convicted of murdering his wife and child. The island had no legal infrastructure, only a local court that had not been used for years, even for minor offences. On top of that, it had little accommodation and very few amenities.

All the key players—including judges, lawyers and court officials—were having to be shipped in, along with supplies to feed them for six weeks. British officials had chartered the Braveheart to carry everyone, together with their luggage, and a dozen crates of legal documents and evidence. With the trials due to start in four days, my group was on the boat’s final run.

After dropping anchor, we waited for the longboat, the only vessel which—unless conditions are exceptionally calm—can execute the tricky landing at Bounty Bay. The loaf-shaped island stretched out before us, silent and aloof, its shores hammered by the relentless waves. Bounty Bay, a small, rock-strewn cove, was a mere chink in an armour of tall cliffs that enclosed Pitcairn almost completely. The island was surprisingly green, with thick vegetation and ochre-red rock exposed by gashes in the escarpments.

The Braveheart hovered. Ten minutes passed. Then another ten. We chatted and joked, affecting a nonchalance that none of us felt. We scanned the scene ahead. The smile on the face of Matthew Forbes, the British diplomat with day-to-day responsibility for the territory, looked strained. Surely the islanders wouldn’t refuse to bring the boat out?

I knew that many of the locals were deeply resentful about the trials, and the consequent influx of strangers to the island. The Pitcairners were protective of their privacy and turned down most requests to visit; if the British diplomats and police officers on the Braveheart were undesirable guests, the media representatives were perhaps even less welcome. Touchy about the way they had been depicted by writers and film-makers, the islanders had more or less banned journalists since the publication in 1997 of a travel memoir, Serpent in Paradise, a closely observed study of Pitcairn life, which they detested, along with its English author, Dea Birkett.

I had been given a flavour of what lay in store for us after emailing Mike ‘Cookie’ Warren, one of the more outspoken islanders, while we were en route. I asked Cookie how the community felt about the impending trials, and expressed the hope that we journalists would be able to present a balanced picture. Cookie replied, ‘Let me begin by asking you why you are coming here when you don’t have permission from the islanders? Let me suggest that you are no different to any other reporter and journalist I know. That is, most are out to print what sells and to make money. I couldn’t care less whether what you report is balanced or not. We have already been humiliated and the presence of the press pool will only serve to reinforce that fact further.’

He added, ‘A family in trouble best deals with its troubles and problems privately and discreetly. How would you like it if your family disputes were aired on television for the whole world to see? Would you call this justice?’

The stand-off, if that was what it was, ended abruptly. A boat materialised in the distance, slicing through the waves at a hectic pace, and a few minutes later drew up beside us with a flourish. A fearsome-looking figure was planted on the prow: hulking and shaven-headed, with a bandana, a shark’s tooth necklace and several dozen earrings and studs. It looked like a pirate; it was, in fact, Pawl Warren, whom we would come to know as one of the nicest men on the island.

Randy and Jay, the two defendants, watched impassively as others helped us aboard, stowing our baggage beneath a tarpaulin. There was an awkward silence as we sat down. What does one say in that situation? ‘Hello Jay, hello Randy, hope your trial goes well’? Among the boat’s other occupants I recognised Tom Christian, tall and rangy, in a battered Panama hat: he had been Pitcairn’s radio operator for decades.

The longboat bounced off across the breakers. No one spoke to us; most of the islanders kept their gazes firmly averted. I felt ill at ease, and I sensed that my colleagues—all seasoned operators, some with experience in war zones—did too. Soon we were approaching Bounty Bay, where we shot in through a narrow entrance after veering sharp left to dodge some nasty-looking rocks.

Our reception party was modest and consisted mainly of outsiders. A handful of Pitcairners, including Tom Christian’s wife, Betty, were waiting on the concrete jetty; one or two others stood at the far end, well away from the boat, and they left after photographing our arrival. We clambered ashore and milled around uncertainly, amid the bustle of greetings and boxes being unloaded. Jay and Randy, still at work, winched the longboat up a slipway and into the boatshed, which was crowned by a big sign stating ‘Welcome to Pitcairn Island’. Another sign pointed to the ‘last resting place of H.M.S Bounty’—the spot where the skeleton of the ship, which the mutineers scuttled and burnt, lies submerged in shallow water. Long-beaked frigate birds flapped overhead, swooping down to seize fish guts from the outstretched hand of an islander who was cleaning her catch.

Snatches of the locals’ curiously cadenced language drifted over to us. Pitkern reflects their mixed roots, combining the sailors’ 18th-century English with some Tahitian words. Others around us were speaking English, but with the characteristic drawl of England’s West Country. The origins of that accent are something of a mystery.

A couple of us briefly interviewed Tom, who declared, ‘I can’t wait to get this whole mess behind us.’

Then it was time to move, and that meant up.

Pitcairn, the tip of an extinct volcano, has little flat land. Overshadowing The Landing, as it is known, is a 300-foot cliff, at the top of which Adamstown, the one settlement, crouches on a slender plateau. It is reached via a steeply winding track, aptly called the Hill of Difficulty, which in 2004 was still ferociously rutted and suitable only for quad bikes, the sole vehicles used on the unsealed roads. A dozen quad bikes were parked near the jetty, like a herd of exotic animals congregating around a waterhole. I climbed onto the back of one driven by the island’s New Zealand doctor.

I took the doctor for an islander and he did not enlighten me, apparently enjoying a little game of who’s who. As I tried to draw him into conversation, we passed a pink bulldozer on a hairpin bend; inside it was a dark-haired man with a moustache and swarthy features, who was busily repairing a stretch of road. I did not realise then, but it was Steve Christian—Randy’s father, mayor of Pitcairn, and the principal defendant in the child abuse trials. Steve had not been on the longboat, nor at The Landing. But there he was, watching events from on high and asserting himself as a person of importance as he carried out vital maintenance work completely unconnected with our arrival.

The quad bike laboured uphill, with spectacular views of the bay unfolding beneath us. At the top, the ground suddenly levelled out, and we forked right along the ‘main road’, a dusty red trail that snakes through the village, fringed by a dense tangle of bush—hibiscus, frangipani, banana and coconut palms, pandanus trees, bamboo and towering banyans. Turning down a side lane, we headed back towards the ocean, and after passing a cemetery stopped outside the Government Lodge, the rather grandly named dwelling allocated to the media.

The Lodge, generally occupied by official visitors, was a pre-fabricated four-bedroom house, rather basic, with spartan furnishings. It reminded me of my student days 20 years earlier, and the comparison was fitting, for we six adults, aged from late 20s to late 50s, were about to revert to precisely that kind of communal set-up. I agreed to share a room with Claire Harvey, a reporter with The Australian newspaper. Ewart Barnsley, the Television New Zealand (TVNZ) correspondent, took up residence with his cameraman, Zane Willis. Neil Tweedie, of Britain’s Daily Telegraph, was to have his own room, as would Sue Ingram from Radio New Zealand.

The Lodge was not only our new home, but a workspace. Media interest in the forthcoming trials was intense; TVNZ’s footage would be broadcast around the world, and our syndicated press stories and photographs would be published widely. I was acutely aware that we were all filing for different time zones, and mostly for more than one outlet—in my case, newspapers in the UK and New Zealand. Television, radio and print each had its own demands. I wondered how we would fare, all cooped up together and confronting Pitcairn’s peculiar logistical challenges.

Laptops were quickly arranged on the dining-room table and hooked up to the relatively new internet system. Zane and Ewart set up an editing suite in their bedroom. Satellite phones were lined up on a grassy bank behind the house, antennae pointing optimistically skywards: the island had no landline telephones and mobiles had not functioned since we had left Tahiti. Satphones would be our only means of speaking to anyone in the outside world.

We had brought with us every conceivable piece of technical equipment, as there was no question of getting anything repaired or replaced on Pitcairn. For the other necessities of life, only limited items would be available in the local shop. Packing for the trip had involved trying to envisage every eventuality—and we had only been allowed 20 kilograms of luggage.

After briefly settling in, Claire and I set off to explore. A back lane wound up past the Mission House, usually inhabited by the resident Seventh-day Adventist pastor but temporarily assigned to the three trial judges from New Zealand. The islanders were all Adventists, having converted en masse in the late 19th century. Beyond the Mission House, past a tall mango tree, stood Pitcairn’s newest building: a large, L-shaped prison, elevated on stilts above a dirt yard, with six double cells fronted by a wide wooden deck. The prison, which looked quite attractive, had been built by men who were at risk of becoming its first inmates—no one had wanted to miss out on the work, even in the circumstances.

The lane spat us out in the village, Adamstown, which appeared to be deserted. Scattered along the main road were houses of weatherboard and corrugated iron, somewhat ramshackle-looking; other homes, all single-storey, were found off a jumble of tracks that meandered further up the hillside. Although there was, notwithstanding the steep terrain, quite a bit of space on which to build, people seemed to be living almost on top of each other.

Above the main road was the square, the heart of the community, where a few mainly timber buildings clustered around a patch of roughly laid concrete. The brick Adventist church faced the public hall, with its graceful white verandah; between them were squeezed the pint-sized library and post office. A bench ran along the fourth side.

In front of the hall, which was also the courthouse, was an imposing sight: the Bounty’s anchor, mounted on a plinth. Outside the hall, among several notices pinned up on a board, was one that warned the islanders about ‘personal incidents that could be sensationalised in the media’. It was signed by Steve Christian. Another reminded the locals that ‘malicious gossip’ was an offence.

As we wandered back to the Lodge, I was struck by the stillness in the lanes and a heaviness in the air. Dusk was falling, but it was still humid, and everything around us seemed exaggerated: the spring flowers were too vivid, as if daubed from a child’s palette, the bees buzzing around them were a little too loud. Perhaps I was affected by thoughts of why we had come here. But I smelt a definite whiff of menace.

My other lasting impression was the sheer ordinariness of the place. While the island had a kind of wild beauty, Adamstown looked like a run-down rural village in England or New Zealand. And it was tiny. Already I felt hemmed in, and unsettled by the omnipresent ocean, an immense blue blanket swaddling and smothering us, a wall separating Pitcairn from the world. The sense of isolation was overpowering.

Back home, we were greeted by the aroma of something burning. Baking was one of the new skills we would have to learn, for bread, like so many everyday commodities, could not be bought. A colleague had gamely put a loaf in the oven, but then forgotten about it, distracted by deadlines.

At 10 p.m. the living room went dark, prompting a chorus of groans and curses. Public electricity, supplied by a diesel generator, was rationed to ten hours a day. Most homes had a back-up system, with a bank of 12-volt batteries providing a few hours of extra power. However, in our ignorance we had already drained our batteries, and had to carry on working by candlelight.

Hours later, after everyone else had gone to bed, I paced up and down outside the house, trying to send my first day’s copy via satellite phone. The temperature had dropped, and I was surrounded by a darkness more complete than I had ever experienced. With no moon or stars, and no artificial light for hundreds of miles, I would not have found our back door again without a torch.