O happy people! happy in your sequestered state!

After Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers subvert the ship in the starkest way possible, they decide to settle on an island, a chronotope I haven’t really explored. The island is a place to remake civilization, start from scratch with a new society, and really, with a whole new world. The sailors are as isolated as can be on Pitcairn’s Island. It’s almost impossible to land a ship or even a boat there, and they leave a line of trees to hide their houses and cultivated land from the sea. They had to do this to avoid paying for their crimes, but what a beautiful way of escaping. Reset time entirely to make your crimes disappear and start everything over.

Of course, Christian and his crew brought people to paradise, which tends to ruin things. All accounts seem to agree that nine mutineers and six native men, along with an unclear number of native women, went to Pitcairn’s Island together, where they wrecked and burned the Bounty and established a settlement. A few ships that stopped by Pitcairn decades later noticed them and were astonished to find English-speaking “natives.” They leave conflicting accounts of the history of the islanders, though all agree it was settled by the mutineers.

The two main accounts of Pitcairn’s Island are those of two of its original inhabitants, though. Jenny, one of the Tahitian women, and John Adams (aka Alexander Smith), the last surviving mutineer, both tell the story of the colony, and both stories are highly at odds. They seem to disagree about the most pointless and superficial things as well as the important. And despite the fact that all the accounts so far had disagreed, I was puzzled by these two.

Jenny and John Adams were elderly when they told their stories, and they had done a truly amazing thing together—colonized an uninhabited island. Neither had any conceivable reason to lie. (The CP says, of course they did, everyone has a reason to lie. Well yeah. But these two had the least reason to lie of anyone whose words are recorded in this book.) And they disagree on: Who died? How? When? How did they acquire the women? Did the women want to stay or leave? The one thing we really know is that a couple decades after the mutiny John Smith was the only white man left on the island, patriarch to a clan of native women and the children of the whole community. How he ended up that way remains mysterious, though it is tempting to believe some of the simplest and most romantic of the explanations.

When Europeans and Americans chanced upon Pitcairn’s Island later and found its inhabitants, they were not only surprised to find English-speakers, but Christians as well. It’s hard to say whether John Adams and Mr. Young did really start instructing them in religion after all the other men had died, or whether the evangelization of the women had occurred earlier, or why Adams was raising them Christian at all. (It’s hard to start totally anew, even on the island.) But when the islanders were discovered they were by all accounts extremely pious, chaste, and polite. And their discoverers gave all the credit for this state of things to Adams and were even willing to forgive him entirely for his (possible) conduct on the Bounty years before—something that had been unthinkable in all the pamphlets Edward Christian wrote. Adams is “a venerable old man…whose exemplary conduct, and fatherly care of the whole of the little colony, could not but command admiration.” The Quarterly Review held that:

It would have been an act of the greatest inhumanity to remove him from the island; and it is hardly necessary to add that Sir Thomas Staines lent a willing ear to their entreaties, thinking, no doubt, as we feel strongly disposed to think, that if he were even among the most guilty [of the mutineers], his care and success in instilling religious and moral principles into the minds of this young and interesting society, have, in a great degree, redeemed his former crimes.

Ah, poor Fletcher Christian, if only you had lived to sire a brood of Christ-followers, who, moreover, were helpfully fluent in both English and Tahitian, thus making excellent potential missionaries. Then you might have been redeemed as well.

How hard it is to write history—and how easy to let someone else write it for us and not think too much about it. Maybe easy, but not as much fun. I love parsing the conflicting evidence myself, sitting myself in the courtroom with the unfortunate prisoners and tragic witnesses. And if after reading all the accounts I’m at least as confused as when I started, I still had the pleasure of personal and intimate narratives written with an immediacy that makes their stories really seem worth telling. And the Bounty story even more gratifying than usual: the impossible romance of a mutiny and a new world on a desert island to redeem the mutineers, with the addition of the unbelievable survival of captain and crew.