Schlange im Paradies. Meine Reise nach Pitcairn Island.

by Dea Birkett

Pitcairn Island, ein Inselfleck gerade so groß wie der Hyde Park, ist einer der abgelegensten Orte, auf die es einen verschlagen kann. Bekannt wurde er, als 1790 die Meuterer der Bounty auf ihm Unterschlupf fanden. Mitten im südlichen Pazifik, eintausend Meilen von Tahiti und dreitausend Meilen von Neuseeland entfernt, konnten sie hier vor Verfolgern sicher sein.

Knapp 200 Jahre später hat es dieser einsame Flecken der Reisejournalistin Dea Birkett angetan. Nach zweijährigen Bemühungen gelingt es ihr, die Genehmigung zum Besuch von Pitcairn Island zu erhalten, wo heute noch 38 direkte Nachfahren der rebellischen Schiffsmannschaft leben.

Paradiesische Landschaft und ebensolche Zustände sind es, die die Autorin mit dieser Insel verbinden. Doch auf Pitcairn Island angekommen, muß sie erkennen, daß ihre Vorstellungen keineswegs der Wirklichkeit entsprechen. Ihr begegnen keine hulatanzenden, bastrockgeschmückten Eingeborenen, sondern modern gekleidete Menschen in T-Shirts und mit Baseballkappen. Sie kauen auch nicht auf Blättern, sondern zeigen voll Stolz auf die bis obenhin gefüllten Kühltruhen, in denen sie Leckereien von Lammrücken bis Erdbeereis verstaut haben, die sie im Tauschhandel von den Schiffen erhalten, die ab und zu an ihrer Insel vorbeifahren.

Die Insel und ihre Bewohner sind voller Widersprüche. Zwar gibt es in jedem Haushalt moderne Küchengeräte, aber die Stromversorgung reicht nicht aus, so daß die Kühltruhen nur zu bestimmten Zeiten betrieben werden können, was ein ständiges Auf- und Abtauen zur Folge hat. Und trotz dieser Errungenschaften der Zivilisation sind die Bewohner den Naturereignissen auch weiterhin ausgeliefert. Ein wütender Sturm kann die winzige Insel in kurzer Zeit verwüsten und mühsam angepflanzte Nahrungsmittel vernichten. Es liegt eine merkwürdige Stimmung über Pitcairn Island, wo jeder von jedem weiß und kein Schritt unbeobachtet und unkommentiert bleibt.

Dea Birkett beschreibt auf offene und humorvolle Weise ihre Bemühungen, sich der Gemeinschaft anzupassen. Doch auch das friedliche Miteinander erweist sich als Täuschung. Auch hier gibt es Haß, Neid und Aggression, sind Sein und Schein zweierlei und ist Unverständnis und Unaufrichtigkeit an der Tagesordnung. Die Autorin muß erkennen, daß die Menschen wie überall auf der Welt sind, aber gerade die Tatsache, daß es auf dieser kleinen Insel kein Entrinnen gibt, macht das Zusammenleben mit ihnen zunehmend unerträglicher. --Anne Hauschild

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, History, Memoir, True Story

Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I went to Portland, OR for a conference in April, I tried finding a book I hadn't heard of at the marvelous Powells (City of Books). I visited the travel book section, to the shelves of travel writing. One small shelf labeled "Oceania/South Pacific" was at the bottom near the floor, and I recognized almost all the books except this one. This is the story of a journalist who made her way to Pitcairn Island (over 1,000 miles from Tahiti and 3,000 miles from New Zealand). Her book was published right before an enormous sex abuse scanadal started being investigated, a case with multiple defendants and almost ten year process that brought a lot of negative press to the island. In that context I definitely wondered if Birkett had learned of some of these power dynamics and secrets; some things she mentions (her one liaison with a man and the weird island-wide knowledge of the event; the little shack with the sex scent) but she never articulates them if so. I don't have much to say about that situation except that severe isolation with a tiny community of people largely descended from mutineers is bound to have some unsavory practices. And Birkett seems to have the experience that every Pitcairner knows everything about everyone.

"In other places, people acted differently, dressed differently and spoke differently once they crossed the threshold of their home. But on Pitcairn, inside your weatherboard house was the same as outside; they were not two different worlds. There was no house with a door, yard with a gate, or field with a fence. The threshold over which a stranger was intruding on private ground wasn't the veranda, it was the shoreline, it was the sea."

I learned quite a bit about Pitcairn Islanders. I had no idea that they were almost all Seventh Day Adventist, which has a profound effect on the community. The underlying community expectations are very much related to SDA belief systems. One example Birkett gives is that although Pitcairn Island is gifted with large, juicy, crustaceans, the islanders may only use them as bait for normal fish as their faith forbids consuming shellfish. Another is the hiding of all sexual desire, which may have contributed to the longtime sexual abuse.

It's the little details I enjoyed the most. The way Pitcairn Islanders navigate the tiny island (1 mile x 2 miles) with their toes (nobody wears shoes and everyone grips, climbs, depends on their toes!) - the author found her own feet changing in the months she was there. The language, a combination of Polynesian words and morphed English, was fascinating and I appreciated how she transcribed those words and their meaning rather than just covering them up with English. She includes a few recipes, a few of her own journal entries, and is not afraid of writing about her own discomfort, confusion, and inability to become fully accepted into the community. Navigating the social game was incredibly difficult! When 37 people have known each other their whole lives but can't escape one another, it has positive and negative ramifications. You can't escape, true, but your neighbors will help you harvest your arrowroot. Toss up I guess.

"Everywhere you went, you were on Pitcairn. It was the same heavy air, the same tangled weed and trees, the same clawing mud on every corner of the island. The only route you could draw on your travels was circular."

Pitcairn Island is actively working toward repopulation as most of their population is aging out or in jail. Their government website has that information but everything I could find indicated that only one person has even made the attempt. Getting there is almost impossible, something this book details well. There are no guarantees for supplies or food coming from the outside world on any regular schedule, something the islanders are always trying to plan around and work together on. Cruise ship traffic, 6-9 a year, provides the majority of their income (they sell crafts, basically.)

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up on a whim, not knowing anything about Pitcairn Island, and I wanted to like it more than I actually did. The author seemed so disconnected from her own story, and I was never sure exactly why she stayed on an island where she seemed ill-suited for just about everything, including interactions with the few inhabitants as well as the natural world around her. She implies that one night's indiscretion spoiled her experience, but it seemed like the whole endeavor was futile from beginning to end. All that said, I am glad I read it and learned a bit about this odd little corner of the world.

[Annet · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second book I've read on Pitcairn Island, but if you read this and Paradise Lost, read this book first. The author lives among the 40 or so (the number is declining) Pitcairn islanders, managing, through research and serendipity, to pry apart exotic legend from reality. In the process, she finds that outer expressions of warmth and welcome by the islanders actually conceal a secretive, paranoid community. If you follow this book by reading Paradise Lost, you discover more about "serpent" lurking among them.

[🐴 🍖]

first i would say 2/3 of this is magic. some of the immersivest travel writing imaginable. rly just picks you up & plunks you down among the breadfruit a million miles from everything. then... i never want to question whether a woman experienced what she says she experienced. but like the author becomes convinced that she is the topic of island-wide hot goss & if there's evidence thereof, i couldn't find it in the text. ended up coming across unfair to the pitcairners. spell broken. "go wipe" remains an awesome thing to tell someone you disagree with, however

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Towards the end of Serpent In Paradise Dea Birkett offers a personal confession. “We all hold a place in our hearts – a perfect place – which is the shape of an island. It provides refuge and strength; we can always retreat to its perfection. My mistake was to go there.” It may have been another mistake to have written about it.

Serpents In Paradise is a perfectly good read. It is well written, if a little clumsy here and there. Personally, I blame the editor. It’s a travel book, relating the history and experience of the author’s quest to Pitcairn island. At the time of writing, just over two hundred years had elapsed since sine the famous mutineers on The Bounty had stumbled upon a wrongly-mapped island in the south Pacific. Thus they found their own perfect hiding place, so they burned their bridges, in their case a ship. It is largely their descendents who still inhabit Pitcairn and it was in this society that Dea Birkett sought her own personal paradise.

Getting to and from Pitcairn is an adventure in itself. It has no regular services and no harbour. A visitor has to make an application to the island’s authorities – basically the entire population – for permission to land. And Pitcairn islanders don’t like writers. Dea Birkett’s ruse to gain access was a project on the Island’s postal service, whose stamps and franks are both rare and in high demand from collectors. Then you have to find a freighter, usually out of New Zealand, over three thousand miles distant, that happens to be charting a course near to Pitcairn and is planning to pause there.

When this happens, the Island’s entire population turns out. There are supplies to be delivered, fish to sell to the ship, trinkets to sell to the crew. Occasionally, there are people to transfer up or down the rope ladder. The author made it into the pitching longboat below, but initially failed in several other feats during her stay.

What she did accomplish was the creation of a rather light, impressionistic view of life within a dwindling island community. We are on first name terms form the start, but strangely most of the characters we meet retain an anonymity. As we read on, an explanation emerges. Dea Birkett eventually records how this community usually seems to act as a single entity. They share tasks, forage, fish and cultivate in groups. Decisions emerge out of communally chewing over an issue, apparently without ever confronting it directly. They are driven by their religion, Seventh Day Adventism, to impose restrictions on possibility, but then not everyone takes the rules seriously, hence the local division of inhabitants into “old and young”, effectively traditional and modern. But the tradition came from foreigners in the late nineteenth century, and the modern involves imported beer.

And it was into this largely biblically-literal society that Dea Birkett brought her serpent. As in the original, it was temptation embodied. Forbidden fruit were tasted. There was a fall from Grace. And yet the author does not tell us whether there were consequences as a result of her island fling. She does, however, continue the quote at the start of this review as follows: “Dreams should be nurtured and elaborated upon; they should never be visited. By going to Pitcairn, I had vanquished the perfect place within myself.”

And thus we reach the nub of the problem. With the printed word, the medium is not the message. This always has to be disentangled, revealed and understood. In Serpent In Paradise, we have a perfectly good read, a well-described travel experience, but it may be too focused on a journey within to really take us there.

[Rock Angel]

I got interested in Pitcairn Island after picking up "Norfolk".

Too bad I couldn't find a copy of this programme by film-maker Nick Godwin. Jacqui Christian, who grew up on the Island gave an interview on the film:
"Trouble in Paradise: The Pitcairn Story"
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wor...

Reader comments on the same article:
http://www.privateislandsblog.com/200...

Since the trial, Pitcairn Island is a community divided, with the lines of division splitting right through some families. The community is now one of the most heavily policed populations in the world - its 47 inhabitants have been joined by two Ministry of Defence police officers, two social workers, a diplomat and a doctor. And not everyone is happy about the newcomers.

The documentary includes interviews with the island's former mayor Steve Christian, one of the convicted men; his wife Olive, whose son, father and brother were also charged with sex crimes; his sister Brenda, who served as the island's police officer throughout the four-year investigation; Jacqui Christian, a Pitcairn Islander who testified against three men in the trial and who now lives in Britain; and the two principle investigating British police officers.

This is an overly long article. Skip the Bounty History & the rest is explosive:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/fea...

2011 update on the island:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environm...

Current news:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world...

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Found it interesting- especially the beginning when the author first decides to head to Pitcairn Island. Once she's there and writing, I keep thinking that she must be pretty sure no one from the island will
1. ever read this or
2. if they do, ever see her again.

[Elaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hated it, but it was good.

[Yvonne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the author, I have always been fascinated with Pitcairn Island, reading what I could find and watching Youtube videos. But it would never be my wish to actually go there and live.
I consider it a nightmare to be stuck on a rock a mile wide, living in a community where everyone knows everyone and you can't sneeze without someone finding out.

Dea Birkett, a British travel writer and journalist, is not me thank goodness, and after trying for two years, she was able to arrange passage on a ship that was passing near Pitcairn, and be 'dropped' off. Birkett lived with a family on the island for many months in 1995 I believe. What a brave woman.

If you don't know, Pitcairn, is a volcanic rock (mostly) in the Pacific ocean, 3,300 miles west of New Zealand. It is the island the H.M.V. Bounty mutineers accidentally found and settled. The mutineers burned the ship to avoid ever being found, or ever being able to leave, in the bay now known as Bounty Bay. Descendants of some of the original mutineers, most famously of Fletcher Christian, live there today.

Is Pitcairn the island paradise that so many people dream of finding? Is it the peaceful, exotic, leisurely, free of crime and free of all the stresses that encompass our complicated non-island lives?

Birkett ponders those ideas and becomes obsessed with the idea of Pitcairn. She is searching for inclusion, to become part of the Pitcairn community, to fit in and be part of the magic of living on Pitcairn.

This is an insightful, non-judgemental, honest and surprising account of Dea Birketts time on Pitcairn. While Birkett tells us the history of the Mutiny on the Bounty and the history of Pitcairn island, it's the people who live there that are most compelling.

Pitcairn islanders are Seventh Day Adventists and don't allow drinking, dancing or card playing. But Birkett found out early on that down the road from where she was staying, drinking and card playing were a regular occurrence, just never acknowledged openly by any islander.

Birkett gives living on Pitcairn her all, she dives into island life, and learns most all the skills the islanders revere and rely on. But still, do the islanders even like her? It seems like they do, but eventually she hears talk about herself that suggests they don't. And eventually even her host family have days where they won't speak to her.

As with many things in life, if it seems to good to be true, it is. Birkett was on Pitcairn in the mid 1990's and she contemplated how difficult it would be if an actual crime such as murder were committed on the island and what an impact that would have on everyone's lives. Most everyone is related for one thing, and they are steadfast as a group. They sometimes seemed like they were all of one mind.

So it's not that surprising that fast forward to present day and a number of men on the island have been charged and found guilty of child sexual abuse. The island is divided into two different camps, those of the side of the victims and those for the perpetrators. The British sent lawyers and magistrates and there was a big trial. A jail has been built on Pitcairn.

The guilty men are still roaming around as the British give time for appeals to be filed. The police say the crimes were brutal and not a case of sex underage but consensual as the convicted are saying.
It's all on Youtube.

I googled Dea Birkett's response to these horrific abuses and the interview I read quoted her as saying that she wasn't surprised. I read the book first and then found out about the abuse convictions afterward. But that won't stop people from still wanting to go and live on an 'island paradise'.

[Gill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't recall what made me pick up this book, but it may have been a recommendation of the author, I was totally unaware of the subject matter of the book when I began reading it. Dea Birkett is one of the small number amongst the large number of requesters given permission by the population of Pitcairn, to land, and an invitation to stay as a member of one of the families descended from the original mutineers from the Bounty.
The book details her attempt to get this permission and those she came into contact with in these attempts. Ron, an amateur radio enthusiast gives her a lot of help with this. Her application is successful, largely due to her ability to research and find the information she needs to turn her application into a viable one, ostensibly to find out about the strange and sporadic postal service, whose stamps form a major part of the islands' trade economy. Postal matters and stamps, though, form a very minor part in her visit and in her writing.
Her real reason to go to Pircairn seems to be her belief that it will be easier to become an accepted part of a very small community, something she feels she lacks. So perhaps deception is already present when she arrives on Pitcairn. She discovers early on that writing is frowned upon, and writers despised. Her attempts to integrate and become one of the community seem to be welcomed, but also to be rejected.
I find it interesting that Lawrence Switzer's review condemns Dea Birkett as being deliberately causing mischief on Pitcairn. Most of the reviews are by women, and find that the insularity and 'hive-mentality' of the Pitcairners was where the mischief started. I'd say that Dea Birkett was naive, in not suspecting that she was welcomed by Irma and Ben, because they saw her as a potential wife for their only son. But it appears that that thought did not occur to her, nor the fact that her refusal of Dennis' advances would cause friction in the family where she is a guest.
She does not say how long she remained on the island, but it appears to have been only somewhere between three or four months and seven at the most. I'd have expected her to stick it out for a year, but her disillusion was making her paranoid about island gossip.
Having lived in rural very small communities I know that feeling that everyone knows who has sneezed, that there is no privacy.Being alone she finds this unbearable, and the very smallness of the community and the island that attracted her, become a prison, and her fears overwhelm her desire to stay.
All of this took place in the mid-1990s along with a huge decline in the number of ships passing the island, and I wonder how things stand now.
Having done a bit of research, the subsequent trial for child abuse and rape of a third of the men on Pitcairn, rings true with Mark Twain's satirical short story where hiss fictional traveler in 1903’s The Great Revolution in Pitcairn talked with an islander: “You speak of that young woman as your cousin; a while ago you called her your aunt.”
“Well, she is my aunt, and my cousin, too,” came the reply. “And also my step-sister, my niece, my fourth cousin, my thirty-third cousin, my forty-second cousin, my great-aunt, my grandmother, my widowed sister-in-law—and next week she will be my wife.”
The dream of Paradise is just a dream, perhaps, as Dea Birkett suggests, best left as a dream.

P.S. The best article about subsequent events on Pitcairn that I have found is that in Vanity Fair's article 'Trouble in Paradise' at
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/...

[Lawrence Switzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many readers and moviegoers are familiar with the story of Mutiny on the Bounty and most are aware that the mutineers eventually settled on a hard-to-find rock known as Pitcairn's Island in the South Pacific (hard to find because it had been charted incorrectly by the Royal Navy). There they remained undiscovered for about twenty years.

In the interim, the European mutineers and their Tahitian slave/companions engaged in continuous violence, which resulted in the deaths of all but one of the original mutineers. When the Royal Navy discovered the island, the sole survivor of the Europeans was John Adams. As to the Tahitian's, the men were all dead. Nine native women were still alive, along with their numerous mixed race children. Several of them were the offspring of leading mutineer Fletcher Christian, most notably his first son, named Thursday October Christian. How's that for quaint? And there's quite a bit of "lore" surrounding this morsel of human history from the Hollywood alpha-male standpoint: Fletcher Christian was successively portrayed by Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and Mel Gibson. Marlon Brando went on to marry his Tahitian co-star and father children whose lives were eventually marked by violence.

Meanwhile, back at Pitcairn....

Jump ahead almost 200 years to the present day. Our authoress, Dea Birkett, is overtaken by a sudden urge for an adventure, inspired by the Mel Gibson film "The Bounty" and heads for Pitcairn on a freighter. Something already smells "fishy" before the freighter arrives at Pitcairn, population now 48 persons, 49 counting the authoress.

The islanders who are about to make Dea Burkitt's acquaintance are insular, somewhat inbred people, who have established a unique society. They are isolated and they like it that way. Enter our authoress, the protagonist and the antagonist rolled into one. Now the trouble begins.

Very few persons are permitted to visit Pitcairn. Written applications are reviewed and very few persons are accepted. The writer begins her South Sea adventure by fabricating her answers, completely misrepresenting her reasons for wishing to visit Pitcairn. Once accepted and arrived, she begins to make mischief while accepting the island's hospitality. She knowingly beds a married local man, while ignoring the romantic attentions of a readily available alternative suitor. Does it take long for the entire populace (48 persons) to figure out they've been duped? Then what?

Birkett doesn't attempt to deny that the "serpent in paradise" of the title is self-referential. There are other snakes to be found on the island, but it's fair to say that, for most readers, Birkett is the worst of them.

It's rather interesting to read a story where the person who tells it is the worst person within a radius of a few hundred miles. Actually, this is fascinating stuff. It's just hard to describe because Pitcairn is a society unlike any other in my recollection. A healthy five star rating for this unusual escapade.

[Nelson Minar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the idea of remote islands. Particularly those inhabited by Westerners like Ascension Island or Christmas Island. Or Pitcairn Island, a 1.75 square mile island with fewer than 50 people on it. No airstrip, no reliable communcations, not even a place to easily land a boat. But it has a website! Lots of them.

I just finished reading Serpent in Paradise, the narrative of an Englishwoman who went to Pitcairn pursuing her fantasies of island paradise only to find cold loneliness as an outsider in a complex, tiny, isolated society. Everything she describes about the island — the gossip, the newspaper, the work, the language, the religion — all seems so alien. Good book. For a taste, read this short article by the same author.

Pitcairn was in the news a lot a decade ago, the result of child rape charges against most of the adult men on the island. Lots of complications: arguments about British sovereignty, arguments about where the trial will be held, and of course the question of what punishment means in such a tiny community. Things didn't really improve after the conviction, either. It seems to be a broken place.

[Suzesmum · Rating 3 out of 5]

84 📘🇵🇳 PITCAIRN ISLAND 🇵🇳 Everyone knows the history of this remote community of people, all descendants from “The Bounty” mutineers and their Tahitian women. Pitcairn Islanders are a unique people, isolated, insular, suspicious of outsiders yet desperate for trade from any passing ship, they live according to their interpretation of the strict Secenth Day Adventist social mores. Published in 1997, the author decided to visit Pitcairn after watching the Anthony Hopkins/Mel Gibson movie. She spent the next two years gaining permission and arranging her travel. Getting to Pitcairn is most definitely not straight forward. It is 3,000 from New Zealand, no airstrip and no harbour. She was billeted by Irma and Dennis Christian, and their 36-year old son Dennis. Her dream of an island paradise, very quickly because a living nightmare. Whilst nothing bad happened to her, she was the victim of gossip, harsh judgment and social isolation, mostly as a result of her own mislaid actions. Surely, an educated woman would know that having intimate relations with a policeman called “Nigger” was going to end badly. Her accounts of daily life of this inbred, and dying community of 38 was fascinating, and whilst she never actually states it, the title of the book is a early warning to readers that there is something very, very wrong with this community.

[Leon Connors · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very informational and interesting. I noticed a lot of similarities between their animal folktales and the ones I read about in childhood in America. Like the tortoise and the hare.

They also were really into snakes and apparently for a time had a more matriarchal society or beliefs ingrained in some of their myths. Which was interesting.

They didn't not consider death natural and had a lot of different myths on how death was created. My favorite was when some of them stole fire from gods mother three times and then she froze to death so humans gained fire but also gained death.

I also thought it was interesting that God was usually a normal guy with a wife, kids, or parents. They were very mean to twins at first but then started basically worshipping them.

And they believed children were born both male and female until they were circumcised to make them the correct single gender. Obviously circumcision especially for females is horrific and probably influenced by the Muslims or chirstians thatcamearound but their myth was interesting.

Just cool stuff I learned. There is so much more.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've long had a fascination with Pitcairn Island but the books I've read so far have been quite academic. I wasn't aware of this book until I went to a talk recently given by a photographer who had completed a project on Pitcairn in the last few years and was exhibiting the results at a local gallery, and who mentioned this book and had several books on Pitcairn on display. The book actually mirrors the photographer's experience in many ways.

I sped through the book and initially found the author to be really engaging (she also did a good job at summarising the history of the mutiny on the Bounty for the casual reader) however, I thought the story fizzled out towards the end and there was a quite a bit of ambiguity in the narrative/questions unanswered which became quite annoying (the author's reason for being on the island was to study their postal stamps but very little is mentioned about this once the author arrives!). That said, I would read other books by this author as I find her travel accounts an interesting read overall.

[Adam Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

A travelogue with a unique destination - the tiny, remote island of Pitcairn, with a small (<50) population, descended from the cast of the mutiny on the Bounty. And at the time of writing, the island was even more remote and more mysterious, which was part of the appeal for Dea in the first place.

The result of her experiences is an interesting insight into life in a small, remote community. I was particularly intrigued by the ways that island life paralleled "normal" life - especially the fact that some of them had holiday homes on the other side of the tiny island! It's also fascinating to read this in light of the later revelations of child sexual abuse.

Sadly, Dea turned her experience into a bit of a voyeuristic soap opera, which lost its momentum fairly soon after her arrival on the island, and at points left me feeling distinctly uncomfortable. There are probably better books on Pitcairn, which I meet seek out on a future occasion.

[The Bibliognost Bampot · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very self indulgent story with little analysis or insight into her own story or those people with which she came in contact. Her description of the attitudes of the people on Pitcairn seems at odds with what later came out about what was going on, though obviously there were several incidents that felt like clues.
However, Birkett writes well and engagingly and it is a very unique narrative of a very strange place and people.

[Sarah Gregory · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, an account of Dea Birkett's travel to and stay on Pitcairn Island. As time passes, the book centres on her relationship with this tiny community, descended from the Bounty mutineers. She , herself , is very much part of the story. As time goes by she becomes more puzzled and alienated from the community. I think these tensions make this book a good read but I also learned about the geography and history of the island and how to make bread with minimal ingredients.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, I thought that "Mutiny on the Bounty" was a fictional movie, but after reading this book, I've come to realize that Pitcairn Island is real and that the descendants of the mutineers still live there today. Funny how we think that tropical islands are paradise, but, in reality, it's all about survival and hard work. A delightful book!

[Thomas J · Rating 4 out of 5]

A while back I read a review in a magazine of a new book about Pitcairn Island and I thought I'd like to read it. Then I must have lost the magazine and couldn't remember the title - so I did a search and came up with this one, which of course is older and not the book I was looking for but I figured if I was going to read one book about Pitcairn in my life, it would probably do the job. And it did.

Ms Birkett spent about 6 months on the island, living with one family and getting to know the people and their activities. It was interesting to see how the islanders live, or at least lived twenty years ago. Travelling to Henderson Island to get wood for carving, visiting passing freighters to trade handicrafts for food (and secretly, beer) as well as trying to garden and help build a house with probably limited supplies. Overall, the book was interesting but jumped around a bit.

The islanders naturally don't want writers to visit (and nobody visits without the approval of the community) because they know that they will be presented to the world as curiosities. Well, I've lived in a couple of small, remote communities, although not on islands, and the residents of Pitcairn could easily be the residents of anywhere else. I think Ms Birkett is very careful in what she says about them and treats everyone respectfully.

Oddly my one takeaway was in the afterword, when she was home again and was told that Ben, who she had lived with, had died and she wrote a nice obituary piece about him and his character and life and gave it to a British newspaper, and they chopped most of the personal information and instead added a bunch of history about the mutiny. I have, in recent years, developed a fair amount of disgust with the popular press and the supposed profession of journalism, and this little anecdote reinforced that feeling.

T

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

her story about her opinion of experiences in Pitcairn.

[Ginger Perry]

Great info. I was hooked from the beginning.

[Padraig Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obsessed as I am with Pitcairn, I was always likely to give this a high rating.

[Suzanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book will certainly take you out of your comfort zone and into a not quite tropical paradise. Dea Birkett took the grand adventure to a new level.

[groovy · Rating 1 out of 5]

she fetishized pitcairn and then was surprised when her grandiose illusions of a remote island wasn't like the movies. odd book overall idk

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fascinating little book about a British journalist who makes her way to one of the most secluded places in the world, Pitcairn Island, a square mile little rock of an island in the Pacific where Fletcher Christian and some of the rest of the mutineers from the Bounty settled after their infamous naval coup. Certianly, Pitcairn may be one of the strangest places in the world: a pacific island populated by fifth-/sixth-generation English/Tahitian people, perhaps slightly affected by inbreeding, who speak a strange language that sounds like English but is not, who are all Seventh-day Adventists, and whose only contact with the outside world is when a freighter happens to pass b and agrees to stop for a few hours or the occasional radio contact with New Zeeland. Birkett becomes fascinated with the island, as many people have become, and sets out to try to get there. The resulting book is the record of her long attempt to gain access to the island and her few month residency there. Birkett's prose is crystal clear and at time poetic. She does an excellent job of placing the reader in her shoes. Eventually, her tale becomes a sort of nightmare as she becomes increasingly frustrated by the insular habits of the islanders, particularly their gossiping, and becomes paranoid for her safety. She leaves under a cloud after having had an affair with one of the married men on the island. What I found difficult was Birkett's failure to understand and accept the reality of the Pitcairners' community and her failure to see her own complicity in the failure of assimilation. That she would think sleeping with a married man in a small (37 residents), highly religious community would do anything other than make her life difficult is beyond comprehension. She is actually surprised and offended when people gossip about this. To be sure, Pitcairn is a dysfunctional community in many ways, but it is also, at root, a community. And Birkett's instigating of a community-destroying act, as an affair certainly is, is a moral and cultural failure on her part, one she doesn't appear to ever come to terms with. Ultimately, I began to suspect Birkett didn't come to the island expecting a paradise at all, as she claims she did, and only just so happened to find a nightmarish community. This metanarritve she spins is bogus. I greatly suspect that her goal was to find just such a dysfunctional community so that she could dispel all our utopian naiveties, a path I find quite irresponsible and representative of the (post)modern inclination to demythologizing. She went to this island and found what she expected to find, and without a genuine attempt at understanding a community as a community and the complexities involved in such an endeavor.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A "wherever you go there you are" kind of travel book. After seeing one of the Mutiny on the Bounty movies, author Dea, a young Englishwoman, becomes obsessed with the notion of visiting Pitcairn, the island community of descendants of the Bounty mutineers.

The 37 (give or take a few) inhabitants of the island (at the time of the authorʻs visiting) have evolved their own culture, language and customs and live in delicate balance. Introduce anything into a fragile closed system and one is taking huge risks. Risks which the author seems to disregard in her plans, driven, as she is, so by her own huge need to see and be there. She is determined and driven and manages to overcome obstacles to get to the island - not the least of which is that this island is not on any normal travel routes. One cannot book a flight, or easily book passage. But that is part of the attraction of adventure travel writing - seeing how the problems were resolved.

The narrative engrossed me: this author writes fluently and did give me a lot to think about in terms of isolation, closed communities and how societies survive. The sheer remoteness of Pitcairn and the methods the islanders have worked out to survive and evolve was fascinating.

In reflection, however, I realise that, as the book progressed, I was becoming hugely irritated by the authorʻs naiveté, self absorbed arrogance and developed world meddling kind of attitude. She lied to get to the island in the first place because she wanted to write about the island community - something which the islanders are not necessarily receptive to.

Then she tries to buy her way into the society with sex. Of course everything goes downhill after that. The age old serpent in Paradise rears its head. Eating forbidden fruit or offering oneself as the same does not get one residency in Paradise - one risks expulsion, more likely.

This title would make for great discussions on the topic of moral dilemmas as well as insider/outsider notions. This the reason for the 4 stars

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Lost in the surf of the South Pacific lies a speck of volcanic rock. Home to thirty-eight islanders -- descendants of the Bounty mutineers -- Pitcairn has no cars, no crime, no doctor, and no regular contact with the outside world. For two centuries, 'Fletcher Christian's children,' whose culture and language are a bizarre blend of Polynesian and eighteenth-century English, have lived out a unique social experiment.

"Acclaimed British travel writer and journalist Dea Birkett, obsessed like many with the island's image as a secluded Eden and its connection to the mysterious and intriguing Bounty legend, traveled across the Pacific on a cargo ship and became one of the very few outsiders permitted to land on Pitcairn. Although the islanders initially seemed welcoming, they soon wove her into a web of decades-old disputes and thwarted desires. The story of one woman's pursuit of an elusive dream, Serpent in Paradise is a compelling, sharply observed account of the darker side of Utopia."
~~back cover

Well I wouldn't call Pitcairn Island Utopia or Eden by any means. But certainly there is a darker side to a small, totally isolated community. Two centuries of inbreeding didn't help matters either. This is a portrait of people turned inward on themselves and their neighbors by necessity, until any other kind of human contact becomes uncomfortable.

Having read The Bounty Trilogy as a child, I was startled to learn the fate of the mutineers, and the fate of their descendants. I had always assumed that the residents of the island would be living lives similar to those of most Polynesians, and reading about their reality was upsetting and haunting.

And as the population of the island continues to shrink, the question remains of how long there will be any descendant of the original settlers living there.

[Sibyl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jane Austen once advised ".... Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on."

There's relatively little that's light, bright or sparkling in Dea Birkett's account of spending several months in one of the most remote places in the world. But the claustrophobic nature of the small Pitcairn Island coummunity gives this book a wonderful intensity.

In some ways it's a sad book about how a visitor who doesn't fully understand a different social code is first tolerated, then marginalised and finally excluded.

There are times when the writing is as noir as any thriller.

Although Dea Birkett describes a society where there are no public displays of affection, and the Seventh Day Adventist Church shapes people's values, she creates a sense that desire for what's forbidden is never far from the surface.

So it doesn't seem surprising that, a few years after this book appeared, Pitcairn became the centre of attention when a significant number of men on the island were charged with sexually abusing girls.

Living in a fragmented post-industrial society it's easy to idealise the 'simpler' life of island communities. Dea Birkett's book shows us just how flawed our wishful thinking can be..

[Micah Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mix of Bounty mutineers and their 'captured' tahitian brides landed on this tiny 1-mile wide rock in the 1700s...almost 3000 miles from the next piece of habitable land. Their ~40 descendants still live there. Isolated from contact with the outside world, they've got a language that's a mix 300yr old english sailor-slang and polynesian, a very shallow gene pool, and some seriously odd habits.

It's just fascinating that this place & community actually exists. It's like taking a couple dozen grungy Gloucester fishermen, putting them on the moon, and then checking back 300 years later to see what kind of society they've come up with.