by Few islands capture the British imagination as strongly as Pitcairn. The beautiful but lonely rock in the Pacific Ocean is where the mutineers from HMS Bounty hid, and where their descendants have been drawn together by infighting, tragedy and crime for centuries.
These days, however, islanders tend to have more interests: Wi-Fi, for one. Of all the twists and turns in Elon Musk’s career, saving Pitcairn might be among the biggest surprises. Simon Young, the Yorkshire-born mayor who became the first non-native Pitcairner to hold the post when elected in 2022, says thanks to Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet service that delivers high-speed connections to even the most remote places. , the Pitcairn people have renewed hope for the future.
“It’s been a big change in communications,” says Young, 59, speaking with Zoom – another recent asset – from his office on Pitcairn, which takes 13 days to arrive from the UK. “We’re catching up with the rest of the world.”
It’s a welcome change from all the bad news. Starlink means one could move to Pitcairn and work remotely, watch Netflix and keep in touch with relatives on the other side of the world. The results were immediate.
“In the last month we’ve had five applications to the council from people who intend to settle,” says Young, who has been a permanent resident since 1999. “It’s unprecedented.”
Five applications may not amount to mass migration, but it is a significant percentage given that the total population is only 40 – the equivalent of five million people entering the UK in a single month. “Our demographics are getting older,” says Young: over a third of the population is over 65. “Repopulation is at the top of our list of strategic objectives. We have changed legislation to encourage that and have made more land available.”
The rise of the internet in immigration is not the only good news. Young also focused on making Pitcairn a haven for scientific research. In addition to the inhabited Pitcairn there are three neighboring uninhabited islands: Henderson, Ducie and Oeno, with plenty of ocean around them. In 2015 the British government voted to establish a marine reserve around them, the largest in the world at 324,000 square miles there (it is still the third largest). Young followed that up by establishing a science center, which he hopes will encourage regular research trips.
“It’s fresh water, because we’ve never had any commercial fishing and we don’t have any tourism developments,” he says. The progress was detailed in a recent article i New Scientist magazine, entitled “How the Famous Pitcairn Island Became a Model of Ocean Conservation”.
Any step in the right direction is welcome. Young is understandably keen to paint an optimistic picture, but Britain’s only Overseas Territory in the Pacific is used to being in the news for the wrong reasons. For years, it seems that the population may be doomed, finally collapsing under demographic change and the weight of its tragic history.
Although the Polynesians lived on the islands for hundreds of years until the 16th century, no one lived on Pitcairn by 1790 when the people who came forward decided its modern history. Nine of the mutineers on HMS Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian, landed on Pitcairn with 17 native Tahitians and sank their vessel behind them. One can see why they were drawn to it; rising steeply from the sea, Pitcairn looks like a fortress as much as a wharf. Living off farming and fishing, the rebels managed to hide from expeditions launched to bring them to justice for almost 20 years. Dramatizations of the story, which featured Christian as the hero and featured Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson, did little to portray the grim reality of the Rebellion or the years that followed, in which the Pitcairners find themselves. died quickly of disease, murder and alcoholism.
It was not until 1808 that their presence was documented, by which time only one of the original founders, John Adams, was still alive, living with nine wives and 19 children. As Pitcairn became a regular stop for whaling ships and was assimilated into the British Empire, the population increased, peaking at 233 in 1937. Many of the population are still descendants of the original mutineers.
However, Pitcairn is awash with stories of pedophilia and genital mutilation. In the 1950s, three cases of underage sex were reported. In the late 1990s, further allegations of abuse were revealed by a police officer from Kent. Its annus 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 were found guilty and jailed, including the mayor at the time, Steve Christian, a descendant of Fletcher’s. The jail had to be built in particular. The impression, supported by other reports, was an island with its own moral code and customs – nominally linked to its Polynesian ancestry – where women over the age of 12 were considered fair for sex. .
Young says the island has moved on, even if it hasn’t.
“Twenty years ago it was a different story, it was very fractured, which you would totally expect,” he says. “But we have changed legislation, we have an external police officer, we have put in special training. It took us a long time to get through, but we have become stronger. It was dealt with, it is now considered historic. We’ve learned from it, we haven’t swept it under the carpet, we’ve moved on.”
The cases of abuse were not the end of Pitcairn’s problems. It was an unlikely victim of Brexit, when EU infrastructure funding fell. The pandemic meant that the cruise ships that visited from time to time stopped coming. Almost everything has to be imported, which means it will never become economically self-sufficient, and it depends on handouts from the British government: £5 million a year, at last count, or around £125,000 per person.
“The bottom line is, unless we have Guyana and get offshore oil, we’re never going to be self-sufficient,” says Young. “It looks terrible when you look at the population size, but there’s no other way around that to meet the needs of the British Overseas Territories.” He says two-thirds of the money goes to the Silver Supporter, Pitcairn’s dedicated supply ship, which transports people and supplies from the French Polynesian island of Mangareva. Pitcairn is still incredibly remote. The sea journey from Mangareva, 300 miles northwest of Pitcairn, takes 32 hours. Mangareva is a four-hour flight from Tahiti, which is a five-hour flight from Auckland, which is not particularly close to London itself.
Young hopes that this remoteness, modified by some modern conveniences, will attract new people to Pitcairn as it once did. He grew up in Pickering, North Yorkshire. After 10 years in the air force, he took to travel and, in 1992, visited Pitcairn, interested like so many visitors in the history of the Bounty. does something more attractive, where humpback whales blow as they swim past, birds sing in the pine trees and a small, strange community does so in difficult circumstances, driving quad bikes up and down the dusty paths and helping each other. Young moved permanently with his American wife Shirley in 1999, becoming the first people without Pitcairn connections to be naturalized. It was “not difficult at all” to convince her to come, as she is a “natural traveller”.
“What attracted me was the historical interest, and the fact that it was so isolated,” says Young. “This little community was just living and clinging to the rock. It conjures up the romantic images.
“The picking is just so beautiful, and the people in both are adaptable and resilient. I miss the beauty of the seasons, which we take for granted in the UK. Ice under your feet, autumn leaves falling, in spring. I also miss British comedy, and my Mum.” Not even his sister visited him here.
However, he says he wouldn’t change it for a thing: “What I love about Pitcairn is the lifestyle. You have to accept that it’s very isolated: there are limits if we have a serious medical emergency and things like that.
“But it has a lot of qualities that are perhaps lost in the outside world, where you come together when you need to,” he says. In a world of eight billion people, he hopes there are a few for whom this world is attractive.
Because, satellite internet or not, Pitcairn is unlikely to be like the rest of the world anytime soon. That’s just how the people like it. The first thing Young looked at after the Starlink was set up? Escape to the Countryof course.
