What Happened to the People on the Bounty
Tom Christian, Descendant of Bounty Mutineer, Dies at 77
Tom Christian, known equally the Phonation of Pitcairn for his half-century-long office in keeping his tiny S Pacific isle, famed as the refuge of the Compensation mutineers, connected to the world, died at his home in that location on July vii. Mr. Christian, Pitcairn's chief radio officeholder and a great-swell-great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, the mutiny's leader, was 77.
With his expiry, Pitcairn's permanent population stands at 51.
The cause was complications of a recent stroke, his daughter Jacqueline Christian said.
Though Mr. Christian was the world'due south best-known gimmicky Pitcairner, word of his death — reported in the July issue of The Pitcairn Miscellany, the island's monthly newsletter — reached a broad audition only this week, when information technology appeared in newspapers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
"It takes awhile for news to go out," Ms. Christian said by telephone from Pitcairn on Thursday.
Mr. Christian's death is a window onto colonial history as played out in the South Pacific; onto a storied 18th-century wildcat, which lives on in books and motion pictures; and onto a 21st-century criminal instance that fabricated globe headlines a decade ago — a case on which Mr. Christian took a public position, described in the news media as courageous, that led to his ostracism on the island on which he had lived his unabridged life.
Britain's only remaining territory in the Pacific, the Pitcairn archipelago lies roughly equidistant between Peru and New Zealand, about iii,300 miles from each. Information technology comprises iv modest islands: Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno. Only Pitcairn Island, named for the sailor who sighted information technology from a British transport in 1767, is inhabited.
Pitcairn, settled by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts in 1790, is a rocky speck of about ii square miles. (Manhattan, by comparison, is near 24 square miles.) About of its inhabitants are descended from the mutineers and the Tahitian women they brought with them.
Mr. Christian, who for his services to Pitcairn was named a Member of the British Empire in 1983, was long considered an elder statesman on the island. He served for years on the Island Council, the local governing body, and was a lay elder in the 7th-day Adventist Church, to which almost islanders belong.
For decades, starting in the mid-1950s, he operated radio station ZBP, Pitcairn's official lifeline to the earth. His duties included filing daily reports to the island's administrative headquarters, formerly in Suva, on Republic of the fiji islands, and at present in Wellington, New Zealand.
Mr. Christian filed his reports in Morse code, switching to vocalisation advice only in the mid-1980s afterward Pitcairn acquired a radiotelephone.
Though Pitcairn today has some trappings of 21st-century technology — electricity 14 hours a twenty-four hour period and a land code, .pn, on the Cyberspace — it still maintains a striking degree of isolation. The island has no airstrip: information technology can exist reached past flying to Tahiti and taking a in one case-a-calendar week airplane from there to Mangareva Isle, in the Gambier Islands, followed by a two- to three-day sea voyage.
There are no automobiles on Pitcairn, and the island's rocks and cliffs conduct names redolent of long-agone tragedies: "Where Dan Fall," "Where Minnie Off," "Oh Dear."
The supply send comes quarterly, and is met by Pitcairners in aluminum longboats. Boarding the ship, they sell the local wares (stamps, baskets, dear) on which the isle'due south economy has long depended, along with the curios they carve from miro forest, which they harvest on Henderson Isle. They do likewise with the few passenger ships that telephone call at Pitcairn each year.
Conversing with outsiders, Pitcairners speak a New Zealand-inflected British English. Among themselves, they utilize an indigenous creole — an amalgam of Tahitian and late-18th-century English — that confounds outside ears: "Wut a mode yous?" (How are you?), "Fut you no bin learn me?" (Why didn't you lot tell me?), "You se invert and o-o!" (You'll fall over and get injure!)
For many years Mr. Christian also manned an unofficial just no less vital lifeline: his shortwave radio, which he used to converse with amateur radio operators around the world. Over time — he officially retired in 2000 but connected his apprentice dissemination until just a few years ago — Mr. Christian reached more than than 100,000 people.
As The Sunday Star-Times of Auckland wrote this week, "Tom Christian — forth with the late Rex Hussein of Jordan — was the well-nigh pop contact in the ham radio world."
On his occasional trips overseas, Mr. Christian lectured on Pitcairn'due south history and daily life. To his enraptured listeners, he was, similar the isle itself, a living link between the 1700s and the present.
"They think we've all got sticks through our noses," Mr. Christian, grinning, told The New York Times Magazine in 1991.
He brought the past to life in more tangible ways. In 1957, as a young assistant on a National Geographic-sponsored swoop off Pitcairn, Mr. Christian helped bring upwardly a cache of nails, carbonized forest and old hull fittings — the sunken remains of the Bounty.
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In December 1787, His Majesty'southward Armed Vessel Bounty left England for Tahiti to collect breadfruit with which to feed slaves on Britain's Caribbean area plantations. On April 28, 1789, less than a month into the render voyage, the master's mate, Fletcher Christian, weary of what he described as the bullying of the helm, William Bligh, led crewmen in seizing control of the transport.
Captain Bligh and 18 sympathizers were bandage adrift; almost, Bligh included, eventually fabricated their manner to England. Christian and his men sailed the Bounty to Tubuai, in the Austral Islands, and and then back to Tahiti, where some mutineers chose to remain.
Knowing that the British admiralty would scour the seas for him — and that a court-martial and a hanging would follow — Christian gear up canvass once again with viii of his men, plus a modest grouping of Tahitian men and women. They landed at Pitcairn, then uninhabited, in January 1790. There, to avoid detection, they burned and scuttled the Bounty.
The ship'southward history was recounted in the popular 1932 novel "Mutiny on the Bounty," by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Hollywood filmed it three times: in 1935, with Charles Laughton as Bligh and Clark Gable as Christian; in 1962, with Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando; and in 1984, with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson.
But what the films did not depict was the mutineers' brutal lives on Pitcairn: past the time an American seal-hunting vessel came beyond the isle in 1808, virtually of them, including Christian, had been killed in fights with the Tahitian men.
For the mutineers' descendants, life is challenging in more everyday ways.
"Pitcairn is not a identify for a lazy person; you have to piece of work or you're not going to exist able to exercise anything," Herbert Ford, the founder and director of the Pitcairn Islands Study Eye at Pacific Spousal relationship Higher in Angwin, Calif., said on Thursday.
Besides his radio work, Mr. Christian, similar all the isle's adults, had a spate of duties.
"He had three or four garden plots, because you have to grow your own nutrient or you'd starve to death," Professor Ford said. "He besides was responsible for public works, as the other people were, like the budget of roads and work on the Pitcairn Island longboats: there's such a terrible surf that they have to be constantly up-kept. And he would spend part of his week crafting some of the curios that he or members of his family would be selling to passing ships."
Thomas Colman Christian, son of Frederick Christian, grandson of Daniel Christian, peachy-grandson of Thursday Christian, great-great-grandson of Friday Christian and great-cracking-groovy-grandson of Fletcher Christian, was born on Pitcairn on Nov. one, 1935.
As a male child, he became fascinated by the local radio station, ZBP, erected on Pitcairn by the New Zealand military during World War Ii. At 17, after completing his schooling on the island, he was sent to Wellington to train every bit a radio operator.
"I was up earlier daylight," Mr. Christian told People mag in 1989, recalling his approach to New Zealand. "I went on deck and saw Wellington and these lights running. It seems impaired, merely I didn't know that those running lights were cars."
At 20, Mr. Christian returned to Pitcairn and began running ZBP. When he was ill or injured (in 1972, after existence dashed against the rocks when his longboat capsized, he was evacuated to a New Zealand hospital, where he spent iv months), Pitcairn savage silent.
The rest of the time, he kept the island going. In Jan 1974, amidst the global energy crisis, Mr. Christian put out the call on shortwave radio that Pitcairn needed fuel. Barrels of it materialized from around the world.
Besides his daughter Jacqueline, Mr. Christian's survivors include his married woman, the former Betty Christian, whom he married in 1966 (like many Pitcairn couples, they are distant cousins); iii other daughters, Raelene Christian, Sherileen Christian and Darlene McIntyre; and six grandchildren.
Pitcairn received broad unwelcome attention in 2004, when seven men were tried on charges of sexually assaulting nether-age girls there. The defendants maintained that initiating girls into sex was a fourth dimension-honored South Seas custom and that they were unaware that British police was in result on Pitcairn.
Mr. Christian, who was not implicated, publicly disputed the defendants' contention, as did his wife. (At the trial, held on Pitcairn, half-dozen of the seven defendants were convicted under English language police force of more 30 sexual offenses in all; the convictions were later upheld on appeal.)
Equally a result of their stance, Mr. and Mrs. Christian were shunned past much of the island for years afterward, Professor Ford said.
Mr. Christian went almost his life, tending his garden, working his radio and continuing to travel and lecture.
At a talk in London in 2005, he had the joy of catching upward with an Englishman he get-go met in 1971.
That November, a cargo ship on which the Englishman was traveling stopped at Pitcairn and, disembarking, he was introduced to Mr. Christian.
The Englishman was Maurice Bligh, the great-great-great-grandson of Capt. William Bligh.
From that 24-hour interval forward, Mr. Bligh and Mr. Christian were fast friends.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/world/asia/tom-christian-descendant-of-bounty-mutineer-dies-at-77.html
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