Thursday August 15 – Pitcairn Island

Today, we had a photo taken of all the people who have done the world cruise.  This was taken with Pitcairn island in the background.  It is a much smaller island than Easter Island and is the smallest administered island in the world.  It looked beautiful in the sunshine with a halo of cloud hovering over it, lots of trees and grass on the island and the turquoise sea around it.  Evidently one of the pointers the Polynesians looked for when in search of land was this type of cloud formation which indicated land.  We did not go ashore, of course, as our ship is too big.  If you want to land on the island, you have to take a plane to one of the ‘nearby islands’ (several thousand km away) and then take the cargo vessel that leaves from there.   This ship, according to the pictures that James showed us, is not very comfortable but costs $5000 for a passage.  Put in perspective, this makes our world cruise very cheap.

We circumnavigated the island twice.  Once for the advantage of the port side passengers and once for the starboard side people.  We could see the substantial houses in Adamstown, which is the only town on the island, and the ramp launch which is situated where the Bounty was burned. 

When Fletcher Christian and the other mutineers, together with some Tahitian women and men landed here, it was sheer luck that they found the island as it had been wrongly charted.  The latitude was correct, but the longitude was three degrees off.  This was the reason that Captain Cook could not find it and why the English who came looking for the mutineers could not find them.  It was only eighteen years after they landed that an American whaling ship chanced upon the island.  When three young teenage boys came out to meet them in their Polynesian vessel and one of them introduced himself as Thursday October Christian it was then that the whalers realized that they had solved the long established riddle.  Later, Thursday learnt that the international date line had not been considered when he was named and he changed his name to Friday.

We went to a lecture on the Bounty.  When the mutineers put Bligh and those loyal to him on a tender with some provisions and a sextant, Bligh travelled 5793 miles to Timor on meager rations and not one of his men died.  One ounce of bread and one quarter a pint of water per day per man. He must have been a great navigator despite the way he is depicted in the movie.  James said that he actually did not mete out punishment until he reached Tasmania on his original voyage and that the number of punishments and the severity of them was less than those on other ships of the time.

This afternoon we watched the 1962 film “Mutiny on the Bounty” with Marlon Brando.  It had quite a different emphasis than that given by James.  Also, the ending of the movie claimed that Christian died when the Bounty caught fire whereas in reality he was murdered by one of the Tahitian men while he was tending his vegetable garden.

We really got into the movies today and went to watch “Long Shot” tonight.  A few fun lines but not a great movie.