2

      The Angry Widow

      I climbed to the top of the cliffs and I looked back on our island.

      It was like looking at Paradise. Our island, Pitcairn, was Paradise.

      Pitcairn is a tiny garden in the middle of an endless ocean. A densely wooded rock in the middle of nowhere. Just two miles square. And the loneliest island in the South Seas.

      We had looked for it long and hard before we found it.

      The Bounty had visited more than thirty islands before we landed on Pitcairn. Yes, more than thirty islands bobbing in the South Seas, and they all had something wrong with them.

      There were islands where the natives thought they might decorate their grass huts by putting our heads on the ends of muddy sticks.

      There were islands with so little water we would have died of thirst before the year was out.

      There were islands with nothing to eat. Islands with nothing to drink. Islands where the natives came screaming out of the bushes and chased us back to our long boat. We saw them all.

      And then we saw Pitcairn, our beautiful island in the sun. The last home that any of us would ever know.

      It was a place of rough beauty. The steep cliffs. The jagged rocks in the bay and the wild sea beyond. The craggy green hills. The deep blue of the sea and the lighter blue of the sky.

      There was fresh water and food galore. It was uninhabited. And the sea winds made it far cooler than Tahiti.

      Pitcairn was perfect.

      We almost missed it. We almost sailed right by. Not because it is such a tiny speck in that endless expanse of blue water that men call the Pacific Ocean.

      No, we almost sailed straight past our future home because, according to every single map in the King’s navy, Pitcairn was not there.

      The maps were wrong.

      Pitcairn was charted wrong on the Bounty’s map, which means that it was charted wrong on all of them. Mister Christian spotted it. According to the map, Pitcairn was meant to be 150 miles from where God had seen fit to drop it.

      It was too good to be true. The men could scarcely believe their luck. Pitcairn was a paradise that showed itself on no man’s map.

      Even old Fletcher had a smile on his dark and handsome chops for once.

      We would hide ourselves forever on the only island in the Pacific that, as far as the King’s navy was concerned, did not exist.

      It felt as if we had stumbled into the Garden of Eden. The soil was rich and fertile, and there was food galore. Game. Yam. Papaya. Pineapples. Watermelons. Mandarins. Grapefruit. Lemon. Limes. And breadfruit – bloody breadfruit!

      We all had a good laugh at the sight of breadfruit.

      For breadfruit was the reason for the Bounty’s doomed mission to the ends of the earth. We were meant to bring back a cargo of breadfruit so that it could be fed to the slaves of the West Indies. And if it kept those busy fellows going until teatime then the British powers that be were going to feed breadfruit to the entire Empire.

      Captain William Bligh was to be to breadfruit what Sir Walter Raleigh had been to the potato. That was the grand plan. Except the Bounty never made it home.

      And the only breadfruit that I ever picked went straight into my belly. Or the sea, when we were throwing them at Bligh’s head as we cast him adrift in his little boat to drown in shark-rotten waters, or get his private parts sliced off by unfriendly natives, or – my guess as to Bligh’s fate – starve to death.

      But our diet was now better than anything the King had ever dished up when we served in his navy.

      There was game on Pitcairn – mostly birds, with lovely crunchy bones – and those wild blue waters teemed with fish. Lobster, yellowtail, Wahoo, snapper, cod. And fish that none of us had never seen before and did not know the names of. These we had to name ourselves – as though we were the Lord himself, naming His creatures.

      A soft southern breeze made the climate more like a hot English summer than the furnace we had known in Tahiti or on board the Bounty. Work was easier on Pitcairn, and soon some of us were growing carrots, peas, beans, yams, sweet potatoes and sugarcane (while some of us got drunk on what was left of the rum).

      Most importantly, they – the Royal Navy – would never find us here. And even if they did – which they wouldn’t! – find Pitcairn by accident, as we had found it, then we would see them coming.

      The only access to the island was the bay where we moored our ship. Bounty Bay, we came to call it – the first place on the island to be given a name.

      I looked out at Bounty Bay now from the top of those white cliffs. While a gentle breeze moved my hair, and all of Paradise lay spread below me, I remembered the Bounty as she burned.

      The fire had been brighter than the stars, and brighter than the moon. If there had been a ship within one hundred miles, then they would have seen that fire and we would have dangled on a rope in Jamaica or Java or wherever they decided to give us a fair trial before they strung us up.

      But nobody saw the fire.

      In that great blue expanse of ocean, we were all alone now.

      It was like being the last men and women alive in the world.

      I stretched my arms to the heavens and let out a breath that I felt I might have been holding for a lifetime.

      Then I walked back down the green hill and we buried Fletcher Christian.

      ‘Perhaps we should help them, Ned,’ said John Adams to me, stooping to whisper in my ear so that none of the others should hear.

      We were watching a few of the men from Tahiti dig Fletcher Christian’s final resting place. Our dead leader’s body was wrapped in an oily sailcloth and his young widow was weeping and wailing over it.

      I looked up at John. I was a big man but he was bigger. In his meaty hands he held the ship’s Bible.

      ‘Help them?’ I said, not getting his drift. I turned back to the fresh grave and barked a command. ‘Put your back into it, you idle savages, or you will feel the end of my boot!’ I cried, offering them support in their labours. ‘Soon the sun will be high and the body will be getting ripe!’

      The copper-skinned Tahitians looked up at me and grinned with apologies. Then they mopped their brows and carried on digging.