Kingston is a Georgian town on the south coast of Norfolk Island, in the South Pacific, and every stone in it was cut by the men imprisoned in it. From 1825 it existed for second punishment: men already convicted again in the colonies were sent here, and for thirty years nothing in the empire carried a harder name. They built what held them. The gaols, the pier, the store, the mill and the eleven Georgian houses of Quality Row along the ridge all came out of the same golden limestone. The row was laid out deliberately above and apart from the men below. Number ten is a house museum now, number one the golf clubhouse. The stone came from the islet you can see offshore, and the best of it lay below the high-tide line, so the gangs cut it standing waist-deep in the sea. Men drowned in the channel bringing loaded boats back. The steps they chiselled into that islet are still there.
On 8 June 1856 the town changed hands. A hundred and ninety-four descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian wives came ashore at the pier and were handed the emptied settlement. Their families farm the island still and speak Norf'k, eighteenth-century sailors' English tangled with Tahitian. Heavy wooden whaleboats sit on the grass by the convict boat shed, and boats like them are still rowed ashore through the surf. Emily Bay next to it is held flat by its reef while the swell breaks white further out, so you snorkel over coral heads with the sheds in sight behind you. Under those dunes is a marae, a ceremonial platform left by East Polynesians who reached this bay centuries before the British and were gone before Cook. And in the cemetery above the surf, convicts, soldiers and Pitcairn families share one field. The headstones tell you outright how each person died: drowned, hanged, taken by a whale, carried off by typhoid. Over the men executed after the 1834 mutiny the lettering is short and badly cut, as though friends did the work instead of a mason.