Pitcairn is a cliff-walled rock in the South Pacific with about thirty-five people living on it, most of them descended from the men who burned HMS Bounty here in 1790. They chose the place because nothing about it is easy to reach. There is no harbour, and apart from one beach at the foot of a cliff there is no sand. The coast takes the open-ocean swell with no reef to soften it, and the island hid its mutineers for eighteen years. Boats still cannot dock. Everything comes ashore by longboat into Bounty Bay, and every arrival is met at the jetty by the entire community. That is not a staged welcome so much as arithmetic: with thirty-five people, everyone really does turn out, and the crew that carried you in swings straight into unloading the cargo.
Paths climb from Adamstown through banyan, breadfruit and rose apple to a ridge 347 metres up, where the island ends in every direction you turn and there is nothing past it but ocean. On the coast, St Paul's Pool is a tidal basin walled in by basalt spires. It is deep enough to swim in and clear enough to watch reef fish over the rock, with the swell bursting through a channel behind you. The one sandy beach, at Down Rope, is named for the rope that used to get people down to it. The rock above it carries carvings cut by Polynesians who lived here long before the Bounty arrived. From June to November humpbacks come in under the cliffs to breed, close enough that a blow rises and drifts away while you stand on the path. The islanders speak Pitkern among themselves. It grew out of eighteenth-century sailors' English and Tahitian, because the mutineers and the Tahitians with them shared almost no words, and fewer than fifty people speak it now. And every year on 23 January they build a model of the Bounty, tow it out past the landing and set it alight.