From Mutiny to Mormonism BOOKS OF THE DAY
By V. S. PRITCHETT THE story of the Bounty ' mutiny is a good one and has attracted many writers. So has the sequel in which a party of the mutineers colonised the austere lava island of Pitcairn and lived lost in the Pacific for eighteen years, before they were discovered, like some , shy Swiss Family Robinson with a skeleton in, its closet. Indeed Pitcairn gradually became after 1808 the wonder of the nineteenth century, the pride of missionary tracts, the ideal Sunday School fable, the perfect story of repentance, reformation and the reign of simple, muscular godliness in a modern Eden. The piety of the islanders was a by-word. The inhabitants, having startled English naval officers by their perfect English and their pain- fully good manners, went on to shame them by kneeling to say grace before and after meals and combined, with religion, a devotion to Queen Victoria .which was almost idolatrous. Their mass conversion in the 'eighties to the Mormon faith caused some distress at first, but did no serious damage to their legend. Thousands of miles away in the Pacific swell, the descendants of mutineers and murderers, the great great- grandchildren of English seamen by Tahitian mothers, were industriously singing hymns, fasting twice a week because they thought Ash Wednesday and Good Friday were weekly festivals and refusing to drink alcohol, with a fervour worthy of a Band of Hope.
To be just, not all travellers stressed this sanctimoniousness. Obviously a social and biological experinient of extraordinary interest had taken place, fascinating to others beside the reli- gious and philanthropical. Towards the end of the century a note of scepticism enters the reports. One begins to hear of the loose morals of the community, of its physical and mental degeneration through inbreeding, but these reports were greatly exaggerated. When one looks to the facts which Dr. Shapiro has put down after studying the islanders in 1984 and 1935 and examining the history and records of six generations, one still sees a sturdy, rather English-looking band of people, tolerably intelligent, with some fine exceptional figures, and all marked with that curious quality of shy niceness which is so common an English trait.
Dr. Shapiro was chiefly interested in studying the history and effects of inter-breeding between whites and Polynesians on a soil where little or no new blood and no external influences had had a chance to spoil his material. On Pitcairn a very happy field had been preserved for science, for none of the coloured men whom the mutineers had taken with them in 1790 had fathered children ; and when the community was purged and cut down by the first massacres -which marred its early history, it settled down to a simple patriarchal life under the surviving white man, undivided by those social barriers which elsewhere make for the degeneration of the half- caste. One family, in effect,. occupied the' island. The two great migrations did not seriously affect the blood.
The history of the colony shows that although the English seamen had taken the Tahitians to be their slaves and made a strong stand for English customs, they by no means suc- ceeded entirely in enforcing their will. They were without the tools and equipment to construct a familiar environment ; on the other hand, the women' were, with some slight diff- erences, in their own country. The Tahitian ways of living in consequence dominated. All the. household arts followed the customs of the women. From them came methods of fishing, agriculture, thatching, lighting and clothing. From them also came the custom of not eating with men at meals ; and, possibly their early rebellion against the brutal treatment Heritage of the Bounty. By Dr. H. L. Shapiro. (Collancz. 10s. 13d4 by the seamen (and their scarcity value) contributed to the advanced innovation of the political and social equality of
the sexes. The greatest victory on the English side was in the decisive matters of education and religion. One might have supposed that the Tahitian women, secure in the mystery of their native tongue, would have fed their children upon pagan traditions, and that although Fletcher Christian and John Adams—the outstanding English figures—were serious men, who in their remorse and solitude had turned passionately to what they could remember of Anglican teaching, there would have been a secret andobscure undercurrent of Tahitian belief, just as the Mexican Indians have Indianised so much in the Roman Catholic faith. The complete spiritual domi- nance of John Adams and his religion came presumably from the patriarchal position in which he found himself, through the chance of being the only man left.
Early visitors found the colony Arcadian. Even after private. property appeared and differences of wealth, the back- ground of simple communism remained. It was impossible to tell whose children were whose, for the women looked after one another's children with a general affection. A man's house and fond were his neighbour's and all had a right to the common store for their necessities. The chastity of the women was the despair of the American whalers who called.
Dr. Shapiro traces in fascinating detail the development from this state of innocence to a more sophisticated condition. Today there does not seem to be very much misdemeanour. Dr. Shapiro records one case of wife beating while he was on the island and it seems genuinely to have shocked everyone. Rigid sexual morality has relaxed as it has in all white Pro- testant communities and 25 per cent. of births are now illegiti- mate. Extra-legal unions, which apparently last as long as the orthodox kind, are tolerated. This change seems to correspond with a period of decline in the fertility of the women, earlier marriage and a shorter child-bearing phase, but which is cause and which is effect, Dr. Shapiro says, there is no evidence to show. He is convinced, however, that there is no degeneration from in-breeding.
I detect a note of disappointment in Dr. Shapiro, that the result of the racial fusion should have been anthropologically so unexciting. There was a certain dinginess in the scene, a faint suggestion of the poor white. For this, the outside
world is to some extent responsible, in making a kind of philanthropical pet of the community, and sending its second-
hand clothes and furniture to the island. Neither intelligence nor sensibility seems to have guided all visitors : one philan- thropist even came to teach the young women stenography. There is an abundance of information about daily life,
work, habits. The biological chapters are particularly interesting, although the conclusions, as in so many scientific works, are apt to degenerate to the Bouvard and Pecuehet level : " We may sum up the heredity of the Pitcairn Islanders by saying that they show in their traits evidence of both their English and Tahitian ancestry. Some of them are, in their physical expression, more influenced by the English heritage, some more by the Tahitian and others appear to be intermediate. Each one is a varying mixture of both."
'his might have come from the Sottisier. One begins to wonder after a paragraph like this whether the dullness
of Pitcairn has not been imported and whether the report; of science are much less obtuse than the self-congratulatory messages Of the religious. If, however, Dr. Shapiro is right,
it would seem that more decisive than blood in the prosaic character of the kindly and industrious islanders has been 'hat austere two square miles of rock on whieb they live:
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