Serpent in Paradise

Dea Birkett

Dea Birkett's book about her four months spent on Pitcairn Island is at its best when she comes up with an anecdote or metaphor which underlines just how remote the tiny island is. On her way out to Pitcairn on board a chemical tanker (there are no scheduled passenger ships, nor can you fly there) she drops in on Houston in Texas and visits the NASA space centre. She points out that it's not unreasonable to assume that more Americans have set foot on the moon than have set foot on Pitcairn.

The two mile long Pitcairn Island, half way between Panama and New Zealand, is the famous tropical island hiding place Fletcher Christian and the Bounty mutineers fled to after they had tipped Captain Bligh into a long-boat somewhere near Indonesia in 1793. They were looking for somewhere the British Admiralty wouldn't find them and they decided to try and make a go of it in Pitcairn along with a dozen or so Polynesian women they brought along with them to ensure the community would be able to sustain itself. We've all probably seen at least one of the five films made about their adventures.

In so far as it was more than a decade before they were discovered and their whereabouts reported to London they were successful. In so far as most of the mutineers were dead by that time you have to say it was more of a score draw.

A small community of islanders, all of them descendants of the mutineers and their Polynesian wives, has lived in the island ever since. It's a strange sort of existence however you measure it. Because of the many films and books the islanders are aware of their celebrity status. One of the consequences of this is they are wary of so-called "paradise-seekers" and they grant very few permits ("licence to land") to visitors to the island. They are also said to be none too keen on travel writers. Dea Birkett got permission to stay there by pretending she was researching the Pitcairn postal service (stamps are one of the Pitcairners' main source of revenue). But the occasional passing ship, to which the Pitcairners hurry out to in their little boats to trade, are always welcomed.

The trouble I had with the book was that I just didn't end up liking Dea Birkett very much. For a thirty-year-old well-travelled woman she seems to have gone to Pitcairn with some remarkably naive ideas. It doesn't take much imagination to see that a community of fewer than fifty adults three hundred miles from their nearest inhabited neighbour is going to be a difficult one to infiltrate. There might be little privacy and there might also be gossip, small-mindedness and intolerance. And so it proves.

When Dea Birkett documents some of the strange behaviour of the islanders she generally tries to explain and defend but her explanations often sound begrudging and half-hearted. She writes that the islanders' homes are generally full to bursting with vast state-of-the-art freezers and other kitchen appliances. Food is both stored and eaten in spectacular quantities. She explains that these habits aren't formed by greed but by necessity. But the writer seems to find it hard to hide her own sense of bafflement and frustration. Another example is the difficulty she finds in making strong personal attachments with the islanders. Near the end she realises that when a visitor like her leaves Pitcairn an islander will never see them again. It's a sort of death. Strong friendships would be madness. Nevertheless her bitterness and sense of isolation near the end of her stay is hard to disguise. Ultimately she tries using sex as a way of breaking through the barriers. That this backfires, and badly, is more of a surprise to her than it will be for the reader.

Another thing that frustrated me was the layout of the book. There are two maps, which are useful and welcome. There is also an appendix listing the flora and fauna of Pitcairn, along with latin names, which unless you're especially interested in botany is pointless. There are three pages at the beginning listing the fates of all the original Bounty seaman - almost none of them escaped hanging, disease or murder. I'm sure the intention is to underline what a bloody affair it was from start to finish. But a full list of the present population, the ones who wander in and out of Dea Birkett's book with little guide to help the reader remember who is related to who or who lives in which house, would have been infinitely more useful. Another useful appendix would have been a glossary of the Pitkern language, a sort of pidgin English-Tahitian cross. Some words are explained in footnotes as the book progresses but it would have been nice to have it in one place.

Having complained about the author I have to admit it was a very rapid read. Her material was never going to let her down but Birkett makes a good story out of it all the same and is good at analysing why her project went wrong. And at least she made it to Pitcairn and stuck it out for several months and you have to admire that. Harry Ritchie, in his feeble book about Britain's remaining colonial possessions, dismissed Pitcairn in a sentence as too hard to get to. This is a much better book than Harry Ritchie's.

At one point one of the islanders explains to Birkett why they have a problem with writers and journalists. He says the rest of the world has an idealised notion of Pitcairn and when the truth is revealed in magazines and books the rest of the world blames the islanders for destroying their notion of tropical perfection. Serpent in Paradise could be the first instance where the rest of the world blames the writer.