Pitcairn’s prison mail

There is a reason for Pitcairn Island’s notoriety. In the early 1930s three books were written by two authors adrift in Tahiti. Charles Nordhoff and James Norman hall had heard rumors of a strange story. They decided it was worth retelling in novel form. Nordhoff and Hall described the seizure of HMAV Bounty by a mutinous crew led by Fletcher Christian, their disappearance, and the remarkable survival of the ships’ captain, Lt. William Bligh. The “Bounty’ trilogy became a worldwide bestseller.

Those who have read the three books know what happened to the mutineers. The movies all seem to end just when they seem to have found a safe home on Pitcairn. But was it so safe?

The answer is both yes and no. Pitcairn is very mountainous, it is the tip of an ancient volcano. But at only two square miles it hasn’t got much flat land. Early Polynesians