I meet a Seventh Day Adventist missionary, and a descendant of a mutineer of the Bounty—They tell me the story of Pitcairn island—An epic of isolation.

MAPUHI, though a zealous Mormon, was not illiberal in his posture toward other faiths. In his long years he had entertained a number of them as ways to salvation before the apostles of Salt Lake sent their evangelists to Takaroa. A day or two after landing he brought to Nohea’s hut two aliens, whom, he said, I should know, because their language was my own. He introduced them as Jabez Leek, mahana maa mitinare, a “Saturday missionary,” and Mayhew December Christian, his assistant. They had come to the atoll to dive in living waters for souls. A few words and they were revealed as exceptional men, from far-away places. The Reverend Jabez Leek was my countryman, as were the opposing elders I had met here and at Kaukura. He said, with our half-defiant local pride, that he came from the home of “postum and grape nuts.” A divine of the Seventh Day Adventist persuasion, he cheerfully associated diet and religion, as do most sects, the Jews with kosher foods and no pork; the Catholics with abstinence from meat on certain days, and Mormons from alcohol, coffee, and tea; and Protestants with the partaking of the Lord’s Supper.

“I am hoping to win for the true Christ a few souls for saving from the lake of fire in that final day,” said the Reverend Mr. Leek, with the accent of sincerity. There are few hypocrites among missionaries. They believe in their remedies.

Mapuhi, when Mr. Leek’s declaration was interpreted to him by Mayhew December Christian, was stirred. He said so, and the most interesting subject in the world to elderly people the world over—the state of man after death—was discussed eagerly, though with the reserve of proselytizing disputants. They agreed that in Mormonism and Seventh Day Adventism they had in common the personal reign of Christ on earth and prophecy. Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, the pastor from Battle Creek, Michigan, compared with the God-inspired Ellen G. White, who, he said, had led humanity back to the infallibility and perfection of the Bible as the sole rule of life and faith. They both believed in a Supreme God, and that only in the last century, two thousand years after his son had been here in person, God had raised up men and women to conduct sinners to paradise. It had been a revolutionary century in revealed religion. The Battle Creek preacher began to tell of the apocalyptic Mrs. White and her prophetic announcements, and Mapuhi was beginning to prick up his big brown ears when he was called away. The Mormon elders needed him in a conference. The slow, interpreted speech of the minister flowed into rapid English as he directed his words to me and Mr. Christian. The latter was evidently of mixed blood, with Anglo-Saxon features, light-brown hair, dark-blue eyes, but a dark skin and the voluptuous mouth of these seas. His voice, too, had a unique timbre, and his English was slightly confused by Polynesian arrangement of sentences.

“God has set his seal upon rebellion for his own purposes,” continued Leek. “The conflict with Satan is fiercer every year, but the Lord listens to those who supplicate him. He is proof of his mercy.”

He put his hand on the shoulder of Mayhew December Christian.

“The first white settlers in the South Seas were rebels. They were traitors to their king, murderers, and revolters against religion, morals, and society. They were in the hands of Satan, and some of them must perish in the lake of fire after the final judgment. But Christian here is a true sample of the strange way God works out his plans. He is a great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny of the British ship Bounty, and he is a Seventh Day Adventist and a missionary of our denomination.”

The mutiny of the Bounty! A phrase projects a hazy page of history or raises the curtain upon an almost-forgotten episode. Fletcher Christian! There was a name. They frightened children with it while he was still alive, and it became a synonym for insubordination at sea. A thousand sailors in two generations were spread-eagled or hailed to the mast and given the cat while the offended officer shouted, “You’d be a damned Christian, would you? I’ll take the Christian out o’ you!” He and his desperate gang had committed the most romantically infamous crime of their time, and their story had been for a hundred years singular in the manifold annals of violent deeds in the tropics. Their rebellion and its outcome was written scarlet in the records of admiralty, and for long was a mysterious study for psychologists, a dreadful illustration to the godly of sin’s certain punishment, and the most fascinating of temptations to seamen and adventurers.

The Bounty had gone to Tahiti from England to transport breadfruit-trees to the West Indies. George III was on the throne of maritime England, and between the equator and the polar circle his flag flew almost undisputed. Captain Cook had carried home knowledge of the marvelous fruit in Tahiti, “about the size and shape of a child’s head, and with a taste between the crumb of wheaten bread and Jerusalem artichoke.” The West Indies had only the scarcely wholesome roots of the manioc and cassava as the main food of the African slaves, and their owners believed that if the breadfruit were plentiful there, the negroes would be able to work harder. Lieutenant Bligh, Cook’s sailing-master, was despatched with forty-four men in the two-hundred-ton Bounty to secure the trees in the Society Islands, and fetch them to St. Vincent and Jamaica. When they at last reached maturity there, the slaves refused to eat them, and another dream of perfection went by the board.

Bligh was a hell-roarer of the quarter-deck, of the stripe less common to-day than then, only because of such mutinies as it prompted. Crowded in a leaky ship, with moldy and scanty provisions, half around Cape Horn, and all around Cape of Good Hope, after twenty-seven thousand miles of sailing, and a year and two months of harsh discipline and depressing lack of decent food or sufficient water, the green and lovely shores of Tahiti were a haven to the weary tars. They were greeted as heaven-sent, and for six months they ate the fruits of the Isle of Venus, swam in its clear streams, and were made love to by its passionate and free-giving women in its groves. When, with a thousand breadfruit shoots aboard, Bligh ordered up-anchor and away, the contrast between the sweets of the present and the prospect of another year of Bligh’s tyranny, with a certainty of poverty in England or hardship at sea, turned the scale against the commander. An attempt to wreck the ship by cutting its cable failed, but the second night of the homeward voyage Fletcher Christian, master’s mate, who had made three voyages under Bligh, being in charge of the deck, led a mutiny. Bligh was seized in his bunk, bound, and, with eighteen of the crew who were not in the plot, and a small amount of food and water, set adrift in a small boat. Bligh’s party reached Malaysia after overcoming overwhelming dangers and sufferings, and most of them went from there in a merchant’s ship to London, where Bligh’s account of the mutiny, and his and his loyal men’s wanderings, “filled all England with the deepest sympathy, as well as horror of the crime by which they had been plunged into so dreadful a situation.” The frigate Pandora, with twenty-four guns and 166 fighting men, blessed by bishops, and with a special word from the king, but just temporarily recovered from his recurrent insanity, sailed speedily to “apprehend the mutineers.”

Those hearties had meanwhile arranged their own fates. The Bounty was now a democracy with Christian as president, and the vote, after an experiment in another islet, was to go back to the fair ones in the groves of Tahiti. There sixteen of the twenty-five aboard, determined to become landsmen, and, with the joyous shouts and hula harmonies of their native friends, transferred their share of the plunder on the ship to the shore, and went to dancing among the breadfruits. Christian was shrewder. He knew well the long arm of the British monarchy, and warned his shipmates their haven would be but for a little while. They were capering to the pipes of Pan and would not listen, and so with nine Englishmen, six Tahitian men, ten Tahitian belles, and a girl of fifteen, the Bounty weighed and steered a course unknown to those who stayed.

These latter weltered in an Elysium of freedom from humiliations, discipline, work, and unrequited cravings for mates, and in a perfection of warmth, delicious viands, exaltation of rank, and amorous damsels. Chiefs adopted them, maidens caressed them, the tender zephyrs healed their vapors, and they were happy; until the Pandora arrived, snared them, and took them in chains to England, where they were tried and three hanged in chains at Spithead. The Pandora reported that no trace could be found of the Bounty, and the most that could be done was to anathematize Christian and the mutineers, and to make the path of the ordinary seaman more thorny, as a deterrent to others.

For twenty-four years England heard nothing of the further movements of the pirates. The new generation forgot them, but Christian’s name lingered as a threat and a curse. The ship and crew disappeared as completely as though at the bottom of the sea; and when their refuge finally was disclosed, horrifying and also wonderfully poignant chapters were added to the log of the Bounty, and one of the most curious and affecting conditions of humanity brought to light. The bare outline of all this is in every Pacific chronography, but one must have heard its obscure intricacies from a scion of a participant to appreciate fully their lights and shadows. Mayhew December Christian told me these, and the Reverend Jabez Leek commented and pointed the moral.

“My great grandfatheh want go farthes’ from Engalan’,” said Mayhew, “and he look on chart of Bounty an’ fin’ small islan’ not printed but jus’ point of pencil made by cap’in where English ship some years before find. It was call’ Pitcairn for midshipman who firs’ see it from mas.’ He steer there an’ in twenty-three day Bounty arrive. That where I was born.”

Not by any spelling or clipping of letters could I convey the speech and accent of the islander, English, Tahitian, and American,—Middle Western,—combined into a peculiar patois, soft at times, and strident at others, with admixture of Tahitian words. He went on to tell how his ancestor and his companions looked with hope at the land which must give them safety or death. They reached the shore through a rocky inlet and rough breakers, and, on finding stone images, hatchets, and traces of heathen temples, were cast down by fear of savages. But as days passed, and they gradually wandered over the entire island without trace of any present inhabitants, they felt secure. Its smallness in that vast and then trackless waste of waters below the line reassured them of its insignificance to mariners or rulers, it being only five miles long by two wide, and with no harbor or protected bay. Rugged in outline, and uninviting from the deck, with peaks and precipices sheer and sterile-looking, the mutineers were gladdened to walk through forests of beautiful and useful trees, with fruit and grasses for making native clothes; and about its borders to be able to catch an abundance of fish and crustaceans.

They drove and warped the ship into the inlet against the cliff, and fastened it by a cable to a mighty tree, and in a few weeks removed everything useful to the upland where they pitched their first camp. Christian, with the determination and foresight that saved his group from the ignominious end of those who would not abjure the ease of Tahiti, insisted on burning the Bounty, to remove all indication of their origin to visitors, and, doubtless, to make impossible belated efforts to desert their sanctuary. They lived in tents made of the canvas until they built houses from the ship’s planks, and these among the spreading trees so that they were completely unseen from the sea. They had ample provisions from the stores until they could raise a crop of vegetables, and the plants they brought might supplement those indigenous. The island was covered with luxurious growths, there was water, and they extracted salt from pools among the rocks. They parceled out all the land among the Englishmen, and each with his Tahitian wife set up his own home. The Tahitian men helped different ones in their building and cultivation, and in peace and comparative plenty they began one of the most startling experiments of mankind.

Nine Englishmen, mostly rude sailors, with ten Tahitian women and a girl, and six Tahitian men,—unevenly divided as to sex, whites and Polynesians unable to converse except meagerly, with totally different inheritance and habits,—were there as the experimenters, with no restraint upon passions or covetings except the feeble check of mutual interests. A hamlet in the ripest civilization has difficulty to govern by these. Compromise through a supposed expression of the will of the majority in elections has become an accepted solvent, but in reality the determined and organized minority wins usually. On Pitcairn, as in Eden, a woman caused the failure. After two years of associated achievement, the wife of Williams, a mutineer, having fallen to death from a cliff while gathering sea-birds’ eggs, that subject of King George demanded and was awarded the wife of a Tahitian comrade. The committee of the whole, Anglo-Saxon whole, in contemplation of their own naked souls, could not deny Williams. The woman left the hut of her husband and shared the couch of the victor in the award. There was no appeal, for the supreme court, as in America, was final, no matter what the congress of the people wished. The lady was complacent, but the cuckolded Tahitian got together his color majority and protested. He was told to nurse his wrath in hell, and the court administered summary sentences to all who disputed its power or equity. Timiti had murmured, but, as mere treason was too sublimated a charge, they brought another against him, and the tribunal was assembled, with the entire citizenry as witnesses and auditors. Christian walked up and down in the house as evidence was offered, and once, as he turned, Timiti, sure of the court’s finding, flew out of the door. He escaped to the other shore of the island, but after weeks was decoyed by false promises and murdered as his deceivers combed his tangled hair, a sign of friendship.

The remaining Tahitian males formed a committee of vigilance, and voted to rid the island of the entire supreme court. Its members were saved from immediate assassination by their wives, who, in the way of women on continent and islet, loved them because they were the fathers of their children. Moreover, since Cook claimed as paramour in Hawaii the Princess Lelemahoalani, dark women have been fired by ambition for social and environmental climbing on a white family tree. The wives of the English in Pitcairn were able to inform their husbands through the gossip of the wives of the Tahitians, who also sided with the whites. One carried her adherence far enough to murder her spouse while he slept. Life was made fearful for these wives, and once they constructed a raft and were beyond the breakers to sail to Tahiti or oblivion, when the Englishmen’s women’s wailing and pleading induced them to return. For months more it was touch and go as to survival. Murder stalked hourly, and the oppression of the whites became that of masters towards slaves. Then the Tahitians crept into their huts and secured the firearms, and with these hunted down the Europeans. They killed first John Williams, the successful litigant, and then Fletcher Christian, the chief justice, and, quickly, John Mills, Isaac Martin, and William Brown. William McCoy, John Quintal, and John Adams were fleet enough to reach the woods, and Edward Young, midshipman of the Bounty, beloved of all the women, was secreted by them. John Adams when hunger-pressed showed himself, and was shot and badly wounded. He ran to the bluff above the sea, and was about to hurl himself to destruction when induced to refrain by his pursuers, whose hearts failed them. Adams, Young, McCoy, and Quintal, but a quartet of the nine mutineers, remained, and five of the six Tahitian men. The latter had cut down the four to a minority of the male populace, and were delighted to swear eternal amity. Adams recovered, and, at a midnight session, the whites released themselves from their oaths and decreed the wiping out of every male but themselves. They swore as allies the widows of the other sailors, and, as fast as dark opportunity offered, the decree was executed. They were, shortly, the only men.

Now was a second chance for peace and success. The experiment of putting together without higher authority a band of white men with women and slaves as spoils had miscarried. The inferior tribesmen were finished, but there were four of the higher race, and eleven native women, still subjects for further probation. One would say for certain that on that lonely speck of land, having glutted any blood lust, and with twelve of their number already dead, these four men of the same race, religion, and profession would get along somehow. It was not to be.

“McCoy,” said Mayhew December Christian, “liked to drink liquor. Before he was a seaman he worked in a distillery in England, and on Pitcairn he distilled ti leaves in his tea-kettle. They all had drunk his alcohol, and it had been a factor in the quarrels. He got worse as he became older, and he and Quintal kept up a continuous spree until the devil gripped McCoy for his own, and McCoy tied a rock around his waist and leaped into the sea. Three whites were left, and Quintal had learned nothing from the past. He drank the ti liquor, and when his wife came from fishing with too few fish he bit off her ear. When she fell from the cliff and was drowned, Quintal, with all the other women to choose from, demanded the wife of one of his two shipmates. He made terrible threats against both of them, and they knew he meant what he said.”

In the first case since its institution the court of Pitcairn divided. Adams and Young, taunted by the continuing insults of Quintal to their matrimonial integrity, and faced with the probability of extinction unless they acted vigorously, seceded from the minority. They deluded Quintal into a momentary incautiousness when the recurrent insistence of his demand was being quarreled over in the presence of the entire community, and butchered him with a hatchet.

“I heard the daughter of John Mills, an old woman, relate the incident,” said Mayhew. “They were gathered together, children and all, in Adams’s house, when he and Young jumped upon Quintal and chopped him to pieces. The blood was everywhere, she said, and we grew up with a song about it. My mother used to croon it to me on her lap.”

Young, midshipman, of gentle breeding, and a serious man at his lightest, faded away, and in his last, melancholy days, uttered the name of God. Convinced that Adams would not strike him down, he gave way to a conviction of sin, the remembrance of his childhood at home. He died begging for mercy, which Adams assured him would be granted to a contrite heart. They laid him in a grave upon the land he had cultivated, and over him was said the first word of funeral sermon pronounced in Pitcairn. John Adams, the preacher, of the fifteen males who had sailed in the Bounty from Tahiti, was sole survivor. Fourteen had perished, thirteen violently, in the search for happiness and freedom from restraint. Man had almost annihilated his brother.

John Adams had a dream in which it was pointed out to him that upon his head was not merely the blood of the many who had been murdered, but that the bodies and souls of the innocents remaining were in his care.

“Thou art thy brother’s keeper,” said the scroll in his vision. He counted his human kind. The feud had swallowed fourteen strong and wilful men, but nature, as it had allowed their crops to grow and their trees to become fruitful, had preserved eight of the women, and their fertility had given twenty-three children to the mutineers. Christian had fathered three, McCoy three, Quintal the bold, five, Young six, Mills two, and Adams four. Adams drew about him these thirty-one beings, and commenced a new regimen. He forswore the democracy of Pitcairn, and in the sweat of his soul dedicated the island to the God of the Bible and prayer-book that had molded on a shelf until then. In tears and with vows he gathered his flock about him and daily and nightly expounded to them verses and read them prayers. He did not lose sight of the material needs in his flinging himself on the compassion of heaven, but gave every one a task and saw that it was done. He taught the children English from these, the only books saved, and it was not the least of his accomplishments that he was able to make his language theirs, for their mothers knew nothing of it. The thirty-two became one family, the eight widows looking upon him as their father, as did the little ones. Morning and evening, and all Sunday, a stream of prayers for their welfare and salvation was directed by him toward the seat of the Almighty, and the theocracy of Pitcairn waxed fat and sweet. With one head, and many hands, yearly increasing as the children grew, they perfected their fields and bowers, their fewer houses and their gear, and, born into the environment, the adolescents became marvelously adapted to its necessities. When the scene was unveiled to the outer world, it would have needed a Rousseau to describe its felicity.

Captain Mayhew Folger, a sealer from Boston, commanding the Topaz, lifted the curtain twenty years after the mutiny and ten years after Adams had become its sole survivor. He sailed to Pitcairn to look for seals, and offshore was hailed in English by three youths in a boat who offered him cocoanuts, and told him an Englishman was there. He landed, and was received with warm hospitality. He put down Adams’s statement in the Topaz’s log, with the comment that whatever his crimes in the past, he was now “a worthy man, and might be useful to navigators who traverse this immense ocean.” He also recorded that Adams gave him hogs, cocoanuts, and plantains.

England did not gain a clue to the “mystery of the Bounty” through the Topaz log. Captain Folger tarried a day at Pitcairn, and his ship was confiscated at Valparaiso shortly afterwards by the Spanish governor of Chile. Young America and England were not close friends, and their navies and merchant marines were at odds. Six years elapsed before even the British admiralty knew the facts. They were gained on an expedition of immense interest to Americans. Captain Porter, of the Yankee navy, had been not long before in the Marquesas Islands, to which he had taken prize ships captured in the war between Great Britain and the United States, and where he had flown the American flag in token of possession, and killed many helpless natives to indicate his power. The British captured Porter in the Essex, undid at Nuku-Hiva what he had done, and did it over in the name of King George. Bound from the Marquesas to Chile, Captain Staines of the Briton unexpectedly sighted Pitcairn and was confounded at the signs of human life in huts and laid-out fields, but more so when Thursday October Christian and George Young shouted from a small boat to “throw them a rope.” Invited aboard the Briton and put at table, they asked a blessing in English, and said they had been taught by John Adams of the Bounty to reverence God in every act. The Briton commander, amazed at this apparition of civilization from the ghostly past, put ashore a party, and investigated the colony of forty-eight. The stupified Pitcairn folk were afraid that Adams would be taken prisoner, and he doubtless would have been except for the pleadings of the young, and especially of Adams’s “beautiful grown daughter.” The captain stayed a few hours and reported to the admiralty in England the answer to the Bounty riddle, and that never in his lifetime had he seen such a model settlement or such virtuous and happy people. England was at war with Napoleon, and left Adams to time. Ten years later came a British whaler, and Adams confessed himself old to its captain. He begged for a helper in governing his commonwealth, and especially in teaching them. The captain assembled the crew and asked for a volunteer. John Buffet, twenty-six, cabinet-maker, twice shipwrecked, and a lover of his fellow, stepped out and was accepted. He knew that it meant years of isolation from Europe, but that was what he had craved in his rovings. When his ship was ready to sail, Johnny Evans, nineteen, Buffett’s chum, was missing. He had hidden in a hollow stump. The community was obliged to receive him. And so two white men, fresh from Europe, became members of a family of several score half-breeds who, in an idyllic simplicity and a gentle savagery, had lived for years undisturbed by a foreign or dissentient element, and who in their common affection and openness of heart were remindful of the Christians of the catacombs. The second period of Pitcairn was ended.

It continued as a secluded handful of people, but new theocracies began to govern them. God had been always their dependence and lord paramount, but his vicegerents had guided them in tortuous paths toward his throne.

The Reverend Jabez Leek, who had often supplied links in the chain which had led the relation of Mayhew December Christian from the mutiny to the coming of Buffett and Evans, said this:

“I was induced to go to Pitcairn by the devotion of one of its sons to the place of his birth,” he explained. “I met him in California. He was a young man, and one of the few Pitcairners who had ever been to America. He had voyaged to England as a sailor on a ship that had touched at Pitcairn, and was trying to return home. That seemed impossible. Twice he had shipped on vessels bound for Australia, with promises to land him if the wind permitted, and once had sighted his island, but his ships were driven past both times, and he had been forced to go half-way round the world on them. He told me that he had left home in order to earn money to start married life better. He had engaged himself to a Pitcairn girl, and, as is the custom there, the marriage day was put three years away. It was already two years and a half since he had departed. He had not the means to charter a ship,—that would have cost thousands,—and his health was fast going. Just homesickness. It was nothing else. The doctors said there was nothing the matter with his body, but he got weaker. There was no ship offering, and I doubt if he could have passed muster, but daily he examined the shipping lists, and often went to the docks and offices to get a chance. It was he who told me about Pitcairn and its God-fearing people, and he first introduced me to the true religion of Christ. He was a sincere Seventh Day Adventist, and confident of the coming of Christ on earth and of his own salvation. It was pitiful to see him fail. We lodged in the same house, and I talked to him daily. He said that when he saw Pitcairn receding in the distance after seven months on the Silverhorn, he could not leave the rail of the ship, and remained there when night came peering into the darkness until at dawn he had to take up his duties. His only hope was in God, but he was destined to wait until the first resurrection, unknowing time or space, until he comes before the judgment of God. As the day set for his marriage came nearer, he abandoned desire to live past it, and the only sorrow he had was that his sweetheart could not know his inability to keep his troth. He died the day before the three years expired, and in his last moments advised me that God had made him the channel through which the truth of religion might be made known to me. His death opened my eyes, and I accepted the gospel.

“I studied for our ministry, and, with service in other fields, I was fortunate enough to be chosen to go to Pitcairn after expressing my earnest desire to see God’s will and power shown in such manifest ways. Our denomination had its own missionary vessel, the Pitcairn, doing the Master’s work in these seas, and I went on it. On the thirty-third day we came to Bounty Bay and anchored, and in the boat that put off to greet us, besides two of our own elders, was this young man, great-grandson of the Fletcher Christian who had, we fear, died without knowing God’s mercy. I remained on Pitcairn a long time, a fruitful, peaceful span, for all there were devout members of our church, and God had blessed them greatly in faith and works. They had not been without religious trials, though, and it was only in 1886 that they received the gift of the truth. Buffett, the young Englishman upon whom Adams put the teaching, married Midshipman Young’s daughter, Dorothy; and Evans, John Adams’s girl, Rachel. They were there a half dozen years when George Hun Nobbs arrived with an American named Bunker. They came from Chile in a yawl. Nobbs had heard there the Bounty story, and was so excited over it that he induced Bunker to start out with him for Pitcairn in a small boat. Nobbs said he was the son of a Marquis, and soon claimed the hand of Sarah Christian, the mutineer’s granddaughter. Bunker tried for her sister, Peggy, and when she refused, threw himself from a cliff, as McCoy had done long before. Nobbs built a house out of the lumber of his boat, and, because he was the best educated man, took Buffett’s place as schoolmaster. Buffett was angry, but the people chose Nobbs because Buffett had fallen once into a very terrible sin. Everybody knew it, and though he had repented bitterly, it was remembered. Then John Adams died after forty years on Pitcairn, and thirty of contrition, and Nobbs became pastor, too.

“A tremendous change came about then. Tahiti was controlled by the London Protestant missionaries; and they made an arrangement with the Pitcairners to give them land, and transportation to Tahiti. Every one was moved to Tahiti, and Pitcairn left uninhabited. In Papeete they saw for the first time in their lives, money, immorality, saloons, vile dances, gambling, and scarlet women. Buffett and his family returned within a few weeks, and after fourteen had died of fever, a schooner was chartered to take all back. It was paid for by the copper stripped from the Bounty, which had been carried to Tahiti. Back in their old homes, all was not as before. Adams had never broken the still used by McCoy and Quintal, and it began to be more active. Nobbs and Buffett, though good men, liked a drop of the ti juice, and there was a let-down in strict morality. Things were at a pass when Joshua Hill arrived. In England he had learned about Pitcairn, and through Hawaii and Tahiti had come a roundabout route. Hill pretended to have been deputized by the British Government, and declared he was the governor and pastor, both. He fired out Nobbs from the church and school, and made no bones of what he thought of Buffett and Evans, the other Englishmen. Hill was past seventy, but he had his way. Nobbs, Buffet, and Evans were supported by Charles Christian, Fletcher’s son, but Hill ruled with an iron hand. He had Buffett beaten with a cat-o’-nine-tails in public, and announced that he was going to reform Pitcairn if he had to flog every person. He quoted Jesus’s action in the temple, and when he heard that several of the women had been talking about his own dereliction, he called everybody in prayer to judge them. His own prayer was:

“‘O Lord, if these women die the common death of all men, thou hast not sent me.’”

“This was going too far, and there were no amens, which made Hill furious. I have heard this from one who was present. When he learned about Buffett’s sin, and that it had been concealed from him, he made up his mind to give Buffett an unforgettable lesson with a whip. Then he put the three whites on the first vessel touching Pitcairn, and exiled them. This was the straw that broke Hill’s rule. A schooner captain brought back the trio, and they and others opposed Hill. An elder’s daughter took some yams that did not belong to her, and at her trial Hill said she should be executed for her crime. The father indignantly opposed any severe sentence. Hill, who had felt his authority lessening, rushed into his room and returned with a sword, and shouted out for the father to confess his sins as he intended to kill him immediately. A grandson of Quintal, who had bitten his wife’s ear off, leaped over a table, and though he threw Hill down, he could not prevent Hill from stabbing him many times. Others came to his rescue, and Hill was disarmed. He was soon deported, as the Englishmen had written to the British admirality in Chile about his madness, and a war vessel came to quiet things. Nobbs took hold again, and when our missionary came, they were ready for the real word of God. Within two weeks they all had given up Sunday as the Sabbath and were keeping Saturday, the Seventh Day, the Sabbath instituted at the end of creation, and the day Christ and his apostles rigidly observed. I loved the Pitcairn brethren. When my time came to go into other fields, I brought with me Mayhew December Christian, who had been selected for his understanding of our beliefs and his spiritual growth.”

The Reverend Mr. Leek stopped, and Nohea, who had awakened with a start from a fitful slumber, said loudly, “Amene!”

“You should read the account of Pitcairn by Buffett’s granddaughter,” said the minister. “Mayhew, we will sing before we go to sleep our hymn of Pitcairn, fifth and last verses!”

The descendant of the arch-mutineer led in a mellow baritone, which Mr. Leek supported in a firm bass: