Coconut Chaos by Diana Souhami (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📗

to bring more chapattis. Da Silva called her a true Christian and again said if ever she was in Mumbai she must stay at his house.

With a motive I didn’t understand she then teased me with direct questions, wanting me to be embarrassed. What did I think about love? Was there a man in my life? Did I have a significant other? I said I still hadn’t found the love I was looking for. She asked if I thought I’d find it on this journey. Captain Dutt laughed. Soni said she thought it wrong that two lone women were going to Pitcairn Island without the protection of a husband or a brother, and Da Silva agreed.

In the afternoon Soni showed me her embroidered fabrics and devotional paintings of her guru, husband and Krishna, her shrine of holy relics, her photographs of the voyage. I thought again of the women abducted on the Bounty, how they must have yearned for home, without even a snapshot to console them.

22

For months Christian circled the Society, Cook and Friendly Islands. He hoped to find the lost isles of Solomon as a place to hide. He had a ship, crew, maps, charts, women and supplies, but no freedom to stop at any inhabited island.

Near Raratonga he bartered a piece of iron for a pig brought out to the ship by a man in a canoe. The man returned to his tribe to tell of the sight he’d seen: white-faced men and strange animals on a floating island that arrived from nowhere and where fresh water flowed and sugar cane grew. Other tribesmen went to the ship to barter coconuts and bananas. A boy stole a box of oranges. Another touched the pearl buttons on Christian’s jacket. On impulse Christian took off the jacket and gave it to him. The boy stood on the gunwale and displayed his prize. A mutineer shot him dead. The boy’s friends hauled his body from the sea then raced to the shore, shouting with shock and fear.

Bligh’s command of the Bounty had been tight and focused. Now the ship was lawless. It buffeted where the wind took it. Its crew were unpredictable. Its boatmen explored whatever islands came into view. At Vatoa they caught birds and fish and picked up coconuts from the beach but when they saw people, pariahs as they were, they retreated to the ship and sailed on with the wind.

The Polynesians on board knew that Bounty was a misnomer, Christian a liar, and that they’d not meet again with Captain Cook or Bligh. The six young Polynesian men were called blacks by the mutineers and not given equal shares of food or comfort. No reckoning was made of the resentment this caused. Their expertise was needed for navigation and the lore of the islands. Two of them, Titahiti and Oheu, were from Tubuai, brothers of Chief Taroatehoa who’d ruled the district where Christian tried to build Fort George. Of the other four, Tararo was from the island of Raitea, two hundred miles north-west of Tahiti, and Teimua, Manarii and Niau were from Tahiti.

The twelve young women trapped on this voyage to isolation were in their early teens. One had a baby girl. They’d been taken for sex, to cook, serve and produce children in Christian’s secret society. He called his woman Isabella. Her Polynesian name was Mauatua and she was the daughter of a Tahitian chief, from the raatira – the landed gentry. So was the woman/girl claimed by Edward Young. He called her Susannah though her given name was Teraura. She was thirteen when she was taken from home. She had dark curly hair and was still growing. Bligh described Young as from a good family. Young’s uncle, Sir George Young, had recommended his nephew to Bligh to sail with the Bounty.

The most vocal of the women, Teehuteatuaonoa, was called Jenny by the mutineers. Her ambition was to get home to Tahiti. She achieved this thirty-one years later in 1811. Her version of events was transcribed by a Captain Dillon and published in 1829. She was paired up with ‘reckless Jack’, a workhouse boy from Hackney, who’d run off to sea. He’d deserted from another ship to join the Bounty under the alias of Alexander Smith. On Pitcairn Island he again changed his name – to John Adams.

The rest of the women were shared among the mutineers and the Polynesian men with the rule that the mutineers’ desires took precedence. The two most feared men in the group, William McCoy and Matthew Quintal, both volunteers with the Bounty, were sexually violent when drunk.

23

In my cabin I read the account of Pitcairn that inspired Christian to go there. He’d found it in Bligh’s copy of Hawksworth’s Voyages and it was by an Englishman Captain Philip Carteret. ‘It appeared like a great rock rising out of the sea. It was not more than five miles in circumference and seemed to be uninhabited.’

‘Uninhabited’ was the word Christian needed to see: no prior possession, no fights for displacement, no massacre like on Tubuai.

‘It was however covered with trees and we saw a small stream of fresh water running down one side of it.’

Water meant life: meat, vegetables, fruit, wood for houses, furniture, fences, boats, the opportunity to cultivate the seeds and plants he’d brought on the Bounty.

‘I would have landed upon it but the surf broke upon it with great violence, and rendered this impossible. I got soundings on the west side of it, at somewhat less than a mile from the shore, in twenty-five fathoms, with a bottom of coral and sand. It is probable that in fine summer weather landing there may be practicable.’

This told Christian that were he to approach the island around December or January, unloading might be possible. And after that – no hostile ship could easily seek him out.

‘We saw a great number of sea birds hovering about it at somewhat less than a mile from the shore and the sea seemed