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Review by Bruce Tierney
Most of us, at one time or another, have entertained a fantasy about being marooned on a remote South Seas island: sun-drenched days, balmy nights cooled by the ever-present trade winds, swaying palms, sultry raven-tressed wahines in grass skirts, perhaps a volcano burping benignly in the distance . . .
For five months, in the winter of 1788-89, one Fletcher Christian, Master's Mate on the HMS Bounty, lived this dream, and, according to legend, was so reluctant to give it up that he led a band of merry pranksters into an adventure we've all come to know as the Mutiny on the Bounty. William Bligh, Commander of the Bounty, was put to sea in a small launch with 18 of his staunchest supporters, while the mutineers absconded with the Bounty, headed in search of friendly Polynesian shores. After a series of false starts, they wound up at Pitcairn Island, a two-square-mile dot of volcanic rock, conveniently mismarked on British naval charts of the day, so it was exceptionally unlikely that they would be found and called upon to answer for their crimes.
Pitcairn has remained a remarkably unvisited and unspoiled travel destination to this day, in part because of the remoteness of its location, in equal measure because of the insularity of its handful of inhabitants, almost all of whom are direct descendants of the Bounty mutineers. Thus, the tiny island has inflamed the imaginations of travelers the world around, those who have done Togo and Tibet, the folks who are looking for that last untouched corner of the world. Few requests to visit Pitcairn are approved, however; British author Dea Birkett, through a combination of persistence and good fortune, was one of those few. The diminutive size of the island, she felt, ". . . would make the island and the islanders relatively simple, and meant that it would be easy to become one of them, a member of the Pitcairn family . . . I was pleased at the neatness of the idea. I reckoned that, within a month, I could conquer Pitcairn." How naive that notion would prove to be.
In "Serpent in Paradise," Birkett writes of her stay on the island, a complicated and unsettling Utopian dream. Although she was welcomed into the community, the 38 residents clearly had their own ideas of her role in their society; many of these ideas were in direct conflict with one another. Pitcairn presented Birkett with a microcosm of the things she had sought to escape in the "civilized" world: deceit, sexual aggression, family feuds, narrow-mindedness and other, um, skullduggery. The major difference between Pitcairn and most other given locations in the world, however, was that if one didn't like it, one couldn't leave, at least not easily. Ships passed only occasionally. Slowly, unhappily, Birkett began to realize she was a captive in Eden, tenuously connected with the outside world only through the static crackle of the short-wave radio.
"Serpent in Paradise" is an unusual and compelling book, a story of a social experiment born in violence; of a society which is a strange amalgam of Polynesian and British, circa 1790; of a place so far removed from the mainstream that its inhabitants have evolved along a parallel, but strikingly different, path from the rest of the world.
Bruce Tierney is an avid traveler.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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