The official reason for the trip was to see a solar eclipse and Pitcairn Island. The eclipse was total only over water, so we had to go on a cruise to see it. Also, cruise ships rarely visit Pitcairn, so this was a two-in-one opportunity.
M/S Paul Gauguin
Our cruise ship was the M/S Paul Gauguin, operated by Radisson Seven Seas Cruises. More pictures...
Pitcairn Island
Pitcairn Island is a remote island in the South Pacific which belongs to the United Kingdom. Fletcher Christian and eight other mutineers of the Bounty, along with six Polynesian men and twelve Polynesian women, decided in 1769 that it was a suitable place to stay, one where they were unlikely to be found by the English military. As it turned out, they weren't -- all of the men except one had been killed by drink or by each other by the time the island was next visited in 1808 by an American sealing ship. Today there's a population of between 45 and 55. Most of the inhabitants are descended from the mutineers, but now the inbreeding has stopped. There's a current scandal: the Polynesian custom of marrying young (like 12 or 13) has conflicted with the British age of consent, and now seven men, about half the adult male population, are at risk of imprisonment for this conflict. More pictures...
The Eclipse
The moon and the sun are very much the same size in the sky, despite their vastly different sizes and distances. In fact, the elliptical orbit of the moon around the earth results in it being sometimes larger than the sun (when it's a little closer to the earth) and sometimes smaller than the sun (when it's farther). This makes some "central" eclipses (when the moon is exactly lined up between the earth and the sun) total, and some of them "annular" (a ring of the sun's surface is visible around the moon). This eclipse was "hybrid" -- people on the surface of the earth nearest the moon saw it as total, while people a quarter of the way around the earth saw it as annular just because of the slight extra distance caused by the size of the earth. For those of us who saw it as total, the period of totality was very short, around 30 seconds. More pictures...
The Marquesas
After the eclipse, we spent three days at sea enroute to Hiva Oa and Nuku Hiva, two islands in the Marquesas Islands group which is also part of French Polynesia. Our cruise archaeologist Mark Eddowes gave a series of fascinating lectures. We'd already heard one about the settlement of Polynesia (early carbon dating attempts gave dates like 750 BC, but later more accurate tests indicated that widespread settlement of the islands didn't occur until 800 or 1000 AD). We also heard one about what really happened with the Bounty (the books and movies were made from the perspective of the Englishmen, but a more recently discovered and translated diary by one of the Tahitian women on Pitcairn added much more interesting information, showing how the Tahitians were manipulating the Englishmen just as much as the reverse). It was very interesting to learn that everywhere we'd gone on the trip, including Fiji, New Zealand, and the Cook Islands, were part of the greater Polynesian area, and were settled by pretty much the same people, starting out from South East Asia. En route to the Marquesas, Mark gave another lecture about them, highlighting the ceremonies performed after capture of rival warriors, which frequently involved cannibalism. More pictures...
Fakarava and Moorea
After another day at sea, we arrived at Fakarava, an atoll in the Tuamotu group. The next day, we went to Moorea, a large island very close to Tahiti. More pictures...
