Pitcairn

Pitcairn is a small volcanic island in the southeastern Pacific, its steep shores rising above the ocean. Polynesian people inhabited it before European arrival, leaving tools and other traces of their communities. In 1767 Robert Pitcairn sighted the island from HMS Swallow; Captain Philip Carteret named it for him.

In 1790 Fletcher Christian and eight other Bounty mutineers reached Pitcairn with Polynesian men, women and a child from Tahiti. They settled on an island that had been uninhabited when they arrived and burned the Bounty. The island’s incorrect position on the charts helped make it a remote refuge from pursuit. The community’s early years were marked by violence and conflict among the settlers, but their descendants made the remote island their home.