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

New Zealand. Most adapted and preferred it, but some yearned to go home, the way some people do, however hard home might be. Sixteen returned, drawn to the life they knew.

I thought how the gene pool needed mixing. How they’d all intermarried for far too long and that it was a worn-out island, its earth eroded, its native trees felled.

Rosie didn’t mention the names of the men on the island accused of sex crimes, but details were on the internet. Investigations began after a Kent policewoman, Gail Cox, went to Pitcairn in 1999 to train an islander in community policing. She gave the Pitcairn girls leaflets about sexual harassment. One of them then told her how Randy Christian, the man who saved Dr Scantlebury’s life, had used her for sex for a decade from when she was a young girl. Many allegations of sex abuse followed: twenty-one accusations of rape, forty-one of indecent assault, two of gross indecency with a girl under fourteen. British police investigated. They called it Operation Unique.

A picture emerged of men who, when the chance was there, preyed on girls, like they caught fish when they went to the shore: of rape in bushland or in a boat in Bounty Bay; of a girl accosted when sent to collect firewood; of a schoolgirl groped when she came out of a public toilet; of a ten-year-old molested as she played tag. It seemed that sex wasn’t much different from abuse by the mutineers of the Polynesian girls they’d abducted. One plaintiff said she’d tried to object to rape but there was no point. ‘I just lay there and let him get it over and done with. The quicker he did it the quicker I was able to go.’

Steve Christian, the mayor, was charged with five rapes including that of a twelve-year-old girl. One victim said, ‘He seemed to take it on himself to initiate all the girls and it was like we were his harem.’ His son Randall, chairman of the Internal Committee of the Island Council, was accused of four rapes and five indecent assaults. Len Brown, Steve Christian’s father-in-law – the quiet man helping Bea build her boat – was charged with two rapes in a watermelon patch. His son Dave Brown was charged with nine indecent assaults including molesting a fifteen-year-old girl on a spear-fishing trip. It was all, he said, ‘a normal part of Pitcairn life. It didn’t seem wrong.’ The postmaster Dennis Christian faced two charges of sexual assault and one of indecent assault against young girls. Terry Young, a descendant of midshipman Edward Young, was charged with one rape and six indecent assaults.

I wondered about unwanted sex in small closed communities and the breaking of silence, so necessary and terrible. Girls didn’t talk about it because what was the point? They were treated the same as their mothers and great-great-great-grandmothers before them. The abusers felt they themselves were now abused by a distant colonial power. Some of the island’s men accused British police of pressurising the women to lay charges. Steve Christian’s wife Olive, mother of Randy, daughter of Len, said sex on the island was a Polynesian tradition: ‘We all thought sex was like food on the table.’

The defence for the accused was that the age of consent in Polynesia was lower than in Britain and that Pitcairners had renounced British citizenship when they burned the Bounty, an act they ritually celebrated by setting fire to an effigy of it every January. From then on, they said, Pitcairners ceased to be under British protection or accountable to British law. It was claimed that Britain had never taken formal possession of Pitcairn or officially informed the islanders that British legislation such as the Sexual Offences Act of 1956 was applicable to them. Pitcairn had no trained police, lawyers or appeal structure. Its own ordinances were to do with property and land use. And now Pitcairn crime was to be tried by New Zealand lawyers, under English law. Bewilderment was real. The alleged offences went back so far, the defendants were accused of breaking laws they said they didn’t know existed. ‘No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence at the time it was committed’ was a clause of the Human Rights Act of 1998 according to British law. Did that statute apply to Pitcairn? From the girls’ point of view sex was violent and unwanted and they had no knowledge of their rights.

There had been previous convictions on the island in the 1970s for ‘carnal knowledge of minors’, rape and the abuse of girls. Men had served three-month terms in the old prison, which now housed farm machinery, and had then gone free. No reform of the sexual culture of the island followed those sentences. A couple of wardens had been sent from New Zealand to guard the prisoners, give them meals and release them to work the longboats.

Rosie blamed the bringing in of illicit alcohol by outsiders and the demise of religion, which she thought had led to a culture of wrongdoing by most of the men of a certain age. Hank didn’t want to talk about any of it. He disliked the divisiveness of it all.

The defence lawyers had encouraged the men to plead not guilty and to expect to be freed on legal technicalities and receive compensation. A bill passed by the British parliament in 2002 allowed the trials to take place in New Zealand, which would have been more expedient and less costly. But two years later the accused won a legal right to be tried on Pitcairn. So a prison had to be built, in case charges were upheld, and satellite communication links were installed. Three judges, prosecution and defence lawyers, court staff and journalists were to travel to the island, doubling the number of people there. Witnesses abroad would give evidence by video.

Rosie didn’t see how there