The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, and Mutiny in the South Pacific by Brandon Presser was both a history of Pitcairn Island as well as a travel diary of the author’s three months on the island. Presser told each story in alternating chapters, so it felt like reading two books at the same time. I didn’t mind switching from the distant past to more recent past. What I did mind was the author’s declaration, twice within the first 39 pages, that Pitcairn was “the most remotely inhabited island in the entire world” or “the most remotely inhabited place on the entire planet”. That distinction belongs to Tristan da Cunha, where I have visited, twice, and can assert that it takes a far longer time to travel there (from Cape Town) than it does to travel to Pitcairn from Mangareva.
Presser used resources that are often ignored in the telling of Pitcairn’s history, such as testimonials from the Tahitian women who were among those who first settled the island. All too often the history of the island relied on the diaries, shipping logs and testimonials of the men who mutinied. I liked how the author integrated the women’s details into stories which cemented their place in history. He used their Tahitian names and interviewed Polynesian historical experts to ensure that what he wrote wasn’t an incorrect white man’s interpretation.
I see that Presser made reference to both Lost Paradise and Serpent in Paradise, both books about Pitcairn that I have read. His research also took him to Norfolk Island, where many Pitcairn descendants live.
When Presser first arrived on Pitcairn, he remarked that no one walked anywhere. The local population drove everywhere on quad bikes. Therefore the ground looked like “untied shoelaces, a network of rutty roads”. One observation that he makes, that I also noted in Dea Birkett’s Serpent in Paradise, was how deceptively friendly the locals could be. At first I thought that the only reason Birkett was on the receiving end of such faux amicability was because her personality towards the locals was a bit abrasive. They likely shunned her because she wasn’t being too friendly herself. Yet Presser encountered the same thing. It was as if they resented him being there the second his foot touched the Pitkern red soil. Presser felt isolated and completely ignored by the islanders, even by those whose house he was sharing. He noted:
“I had begun to dread dinnertime at the Warrens. While everyone on the island would occasionally break into Pitkernese, a pidgin amalgam of English and Tahitian spoken with piratical inflections, Carol and Jay would frequently have long conversations in the local language at the kitchen table fully knowing that I couldn’t parse out a single word from their jargon. Linguists classify Pitkernese as a cant–a dialect purposefully constructed to be arcane so as to exclude outsiders from grasping it. ‘Hello,’ for example, was ‘watawieh.'”
and:
“The houses on Pitcairn didn’t have front doors, but it had been made clear to me that I was most definitely not welcome inside any of them.”
Was what Birkett had written true? Did the Pitkern population really despise visitors, only putting on a show of pressed-on-smiles and faux hospitality for the press and cameras? Presser’s experience on the island makes it seem so. I can imagine that the negative publicity that cloaked the island after its sexual abuse trials in 2004 didn’t help matters much, which would make any islander suspicious of foreign writers or journalists. Presser didn’t stand a chance of making any friends there once the locals learned that he was a travel writer, which they would have found out when his company put in his application for transport a year in advance of his trip.
Presser analyzed the mutiny on the Bounty and the crew who joined Fletcher Christian as they sailed around the Pacific looking for a place to hide away. He separated the truth from the fiction, and had some interesting stories to tell about Marlon Brando and Kate Hall, the granddaughter of Pitcairn novelist James Norman Hall. I enjoyed the detective work Presser did to remove Hollywood myth from the true mutiny story.