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If you’ve seen the 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty, you will be familiar with the early residents of the Pitcairn Islands in the south Pacific. In 1789, a group of disillusioned crewmen on HMS Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian, took control of the ship and set their captain and his loyalists adrift on a small boat. The mutineers then travelled to Tahiti, where they kidnapped locals and took them to Pitcairn, a forbidding lump of volcanic rock midway between New Zealand and Peru. More than two centuries later, the mutineers’ descendants still populate the island, which is accessible only by small boat.
In the podcast The Pitcairn Trials, the journalist Luke Jones tells the grimly disturbing story of those islanders and a police enquiry, led by British officers, that began in 1996 and uncovered years of sexual abuse spanning generations. All the women on the island alleged they had been raped as children. But how to bring abusers to justice in a place that keeps outsiders at arm’s length, where there is no functioning legal system and where men were accustomed to living by their own rules? And how would this tiny community function if all its men were jailed?
These are the questions propelling this true-crime series, the reporting of which is done with the utmost care and sensitivity. One episode is built around the testimony of Glenda, a former Pitcairn resident who now lives in the UK and whose earliest memory is of being raped as a three-year-old. When police first came to visit her, her husband knew nothing of her history; she had kept it from him as she still believed she was to blame. Jones speaks to her with her counsellor present, a wise decision since mid-sentence Glenda “freezes”, meaning she falls silent and all expression drains from her face. This, the counsellor notes, is what happens when a person disassociates, a common out-of-body response for survivors of child sexual abuse when asked to relive their experiences.
Much of this makes for tough listening but, as the legal process gathers speed, it’s also gripping and illuminating. Among the obstacles to justice were the impossible conflicts of interest among islanders. One of the accused, for instance, was the island’s mayor Steve Christian, a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian. The community police officer who arrested him? That would be his sister, Brenda.
Along with the story of a knotty police investigation, The Pitcairn Trials is also a compelling portrait of a uniquely strange society created in a uniquely strange land. Jones delves into the dialect (18th-century English spliced with Polynesian words), the geology and Pitcairn’s unusual place names, which include McCoy’s Drop and Nellie Fall, which mark spots where islanders fell to their deaths. Such details add to a tale steeped in history and the dark side of human nature.
wondery.com/shows/the-pitcairn-trials
