The Island that Was Not There: Slavery and Rebellion on Fletcher Christian's Pitcairn

It was nearly a decade before news of the fate of the Bounty mutineers reached American readers. In 1808, the Nantucket whaler Topaz had happened upon an unknown island in the remote reaches of the Polynesian archipelago. Due to an error by an eighteenth-century British chart maker, the Island appeared on no maps or charts. For Pitcairn Island was said to lie several hundred miles west of its actual location. What American readers discovered when accounts of the unknown island and its inhabitants began appearing in 1816 was a peaceful, orderly, Christian and English-speaking community of non-whites. They also discovered that that community had come into being as a result of a series of violent slave revolts. This paper has two purposes. The first, to situate the Pitcairn revolts in the context of other early nineteenth-century slave revolts. In part, because most historians of the Bounty affair and early Pitcairn have approached them from the Pacific, slavery has not figured prominently in their analyses (except insofar as the purpose of the Bounty's initial voyage was to acquire Breadfruit trees for West Indies plantations). And yet by all accounts, the mutineers effectively enslaved the Tahitians they brought with them. The paper's second purpose is to explore how, if at all Americans reconciled their sense of the newly colonized Polynesian archipelago with the sort of violence and rebellion suggested by the history of Pitcairn. The latter will necessarily be impressionistic since the primary sources are fictionalized accounts and periodicals. But given that Polynesia was a principle arena for American overseas expansion in the ante-Bellum period, it seems worthwhile to ask how slavery figured into Americans' sense of this place. Was it anathema, making the Pitcairn rebellions somehow inevitable? Or was it somehow intertwined with the tropical ideals evoked by the South Pacific?