Thursday, April 07, 2005
Island of the Christians
Yesterday we arrived at Pitcairn Island. We circled the island looking for suitably flat seas, and stopped on the west side. About a half-hour later a boat containing forty people (the population of the island is fifty-six) came alongside and they all climbed onto the cruise ship and came up to the sun deck carrying their bags of souvenirs. The cruise ship wasn't quite prepared -- they didn't have nearly enough tables and the cruise director wasn't very accommodating to them; it probably would have been nicer to set up in the Grand Salon auditorium, but he dictated that they set up on the deck. It did rain once or twice, but generally it all turned out OK. It also turns out that lots of people on Pitcairn are named Christian. All of the carvings we bought were signed by a Christian, and we met several of them over the course of the day. They've had a pretty insular existence for the last 200 years, but now seem to be making a little more contact with the world -- the last wedding between two Pitcairners was 20 years ago; most marriages since involve at least one outsider. The captain of our cruise ship and the mayor of the island decided that the seas were calm enough to attempt letting passengers visit the island. They worked out an arrangement where four groups of 30 of us could go for an hour. To go, you had to be really motivated, to the point of getting on a list of people, finding out that you had to go somewhere at some time to get a yellow ticket, or in our case, just being persistent and hanging around until they let us off the ship and onto the Pitcairner's boat.
You also had to be fit enough to climb up and down the rope ladder on the side of the cruise ship -- they rejected a few people they didn't think would make it. (There are lots of canes and walkers on board.) The loudspeaker overdramatized considerably to cut down demand, as the majority of people were not going to be able to go in any case. All about this terribly dangerous Jacob's Ladder you had to descend for some unspecified distance from deck 3, making it sound like you had to sail an open launch to Timor. Very much the same tone of voice the astronomers upstairs were using to caution the Pitcairn salesladies and their kids not to look at the sun no matter how dark it gets (the eclipse will be about 96% on Pitcairn, an amount that will ensure a lot of eye damage and nobody has done much outreach and education around this, it seems.) We used the same tone of voice ourselves, and I gave Andrew Christian my set of Absolut Eclipse goggles.
The seas were about three feet so if you were too low on the ladder there was a danger of getting crushed when the longboat bounced up. So each departing passenger remained suspended over the side of the Paul Gauguin until the guy in the boat decided that this was the moment of a crest of a wave, and then he snatched you and told you to let go and in one motion threw you onto the deck of the longboat like cargo. In fact they were a bit gentler with the cargo; Pitcairn being a dry island, owing to earlier unfortunate experiences involving the combination of guns and rum and it not being Christian to give up one's guns, the only way for the Kiwi and Ozzie guest workers to get grog is to cadge it from passing cruise ships, and they cradle it carefully back to the island.
The seas are pretty three-dimensional on a small boat near Pitcairn -- it achieved some pretty steep angles but never really took on more than the occasional splash. Landing there is quite a trick -- you have to time things just right and then surf in as a large wave breaks. The Bounty mutineers didn't have a nice port to tie up to like they have today, but the approach is still quite a challenge. They're planning on building a breakwater so that cruise ship "tenders" can dock there directly and they can become a regular port of call. As it is they get only a handful of cruise ship visits a year, and a supply ship every month or so. We only had an hour so we couldn't see much. It took awhile just to get off the boat and walk up the steep road to the top of the cliff where the "town" is. There was a small museum, various pieces from the Bounty (an anchor, a cannon, etc.), and various graveyards. Some of the more privileged of the group got to ride around on ATVs and go to the high points of the island and get some great views. It was still nice just to walk around and see the flowers and banyan trees (planted by earlier Polynesians) that greeted the mutineers. The captain of the cruise ship enjoyed jogging on the island, and later went for a little sprint in the ship's canoe after having been motoring at sea continuously for four days. (Captain Gilles Bossard is an athlete in his own right; he is on the ship's rowing team, which last week came in something like 7th in a field of something like 70 on the Tahiti-Moorea canoe race.)
This morning we sailed around Henderson Island, another in the Pitcairn group which has a completely different appearance. The volcanic part of Henderson wore away long ago, and left a coral atoll. A later upthrust in connection with other undersea volcanoes has lifted the whole reef about thirty meters out of the water, so the island appears as a big flat green patch sticking above the waves. The waves are violent against the rocks. The sea remains relatively calm today with widely spaced whitecaps, but against the rocks it splashes all the way up to the top of the island. There are beaches on the north side of the island but nobody lives there because there's no dependable source of fresh water; it's a World Heritage Site to prevent it being sold and converted to a cattle ranch.
You also had to be fit enough to climb up and down the rope ladder on the side of the cruise ship -- they rejected a few people they didn't think would make it. (There are lots of canes and walkers on board.) The loudspeaker overdramatized considerably to cut down demand, as the majority of people were not going to be able to go in any case. All about this terribly dangerous Jacob's Ladder you had to descend for some unspecified distance from deck 3, making it sound like you had to sail an open launch to Timor. Very much the same tone of voice the astronomers upstairs were using to caution the Pitcairn salesladies and their kids not to look at the sun no matter how dark it gets (the eclipse will be about 96% on Pitcairn, an amount that will ensure a lot of eye damage and nobody has done much outreach and education around this, it seems.) We used the same tone of voice ourselves, and I gave Andrew Christian my set of Absolut Eclipse goggles.
The seas were about three feet so if you were too low on the ladder there was a danger of getting crushed when the longboat bounced up. So each departing passenger remained suspended over the side of the Paul Gauguin until the guy in the boat decided that this was the moment of a crest of a wave, and then he snatched you and told you to let go and in one motion threw you onto the deck of the longboat like cargo. In fact they were a bit gentler with the cargo; Pitcairn being a dry island, owing to earlier unfortunate experiences involving the combination of guns and rum and it not being Christian to give up one's guns, the only way for the Kiwi and Ozzie guest workers to get grog is to cadge it from passing cruise ships, and they cradle it carefully back to the island.
The seas are pretty three-dimensional on a small boat near Pitcairn -- it achieved some pretty steep angles but never really took on more than the occasional splash. Landing there is quite a trick -- you have to time things just right and then surf in as a large wave breaks. The Bounty mutineers didn't have a nice port to tie up to like they have today, but the approach is still quite a challenge. They're planning on building a breakwater so that cruise ship "tenders" can dock there directly and they can become a regular port of call. As it is they get only a handful of cruise ship visits a year, and a supply ship every month or so. We only had an hour so we couldn't see much. It took awhile just to get off the boat and walk up the steep road to the top of the cliff where the "town" is. There was a small museum, various pieces from the Bounty (an anchor, a cannon, etc.), and various graveyards. Some of the more privileged of the group got to ride around on ATVs and go to the high points of the island and get some great views. It was still nice just to walk around and see the flowers and banyan trees (planted by earlier Polynesians) that greeted the mutineers. The captain of the cruise ship enjoyed jogging on the island, and later went for a little sprint in the ship's canoe after having been motoring at sea continuously for four days. (Captain Gilles Bossard is an athlete in his own right; he is on the ship's rowing team, which last week came in something like 7th in a field of something like 70 on the Tahiti-Moorea canoe race.)
This morning we sailed around Henderson Island, another in the Pitcairn group which has a completely different appearance. The volcanic part of Henderson wore away long ago, and left a coral atoll. A later upthrust in connection with other undersea volcanoes has lifted the whole reef about thirty meters out of the water, so the island appears as a big flat green patch sticking above the waves. The waves are violent against the rocks. The sea remains relatively calm today with widely spaced whitecaps, but against the rocks it splashes all the way up to the top of the island. There are beaches on the north side of the island but nobody lives there because there's no dependable source of fresh water; it's a World Heritage Site to prevent it being sold and converted to a cattle ranch.
