from a few troublemakers, life in Taylor Camp – which deliberately had no designated ‘leader’ – seems largely to have been harmonious. But, nevertheless, writes Wehrheim, it was seen by the indigenous islanders as a disruption of their lives. However well-intentioned they might have been, people weren’t flooding into a conveniently deserted paradise. Kauai had its own customs and practices. And Taylor Camp only lasted as long as it did because of a resourceful local lawyer. For the majority of its existence, he succeeded in fending off attempts by the state Attorney General’s office to evict the inhabitants. When the government finally won, state employees shipped out the remaining residents and torched the site. Since then, Kauai has become a tourist hotspot. There’s a park where the camp used to be.
Real-life Utopias are fragile – vulnerable to the same vagaries of human nature and commercial imperatives as anything else. Even in its best years, Taylor Camp couldn’t entirely shut out the rest of the world. The local shop accepted government food stamps; and while some campers owned businesses, others lived on state welfare. Cutting all ties with whichever society we are trying to leave behind is no easy task.
That was certainly the lesson of Castaway, the BBC’s reality TV social experiment from 2000. The programme followed a group of men, women and children as they attempted to establish a self-sufficient, sustainable community on an isolated Scottish island. It was a classic example of the back-to-basics impulse; another attempt to return to a ‘truer’ state of nature.
But the problems that beset the group showed how enmeshed in the modern world they still were. A flu outbreak saw some shipped off the island, while a nearby case of meningitis prompted the programme-makers to supply everyone with antibiotics. And although the volunteers may have fallen short of actually killing each other, there is kinship between their jealousies, rivalries and cliques and the tensions of the settlers in Pitcairn.
If there is a connecting thread throughout all of this, it is people’s tendency to treat the spaces in which they seek to carve out their utopias as little more than reflections of their dreams and ideals, rather than real places. Such ignorance can lead to disaster. Several of Pitcairn’s early settlers were wiped out by disease, as were many Pilgrim Fathers before them. Countless grand social schemes have come crashing to the ground because of a fundamental lack of knowledge.
A recent case in point is the complete failure of Fordlândia, a now-abandoned industrial town erected deep in the Amazon Rainforest in 1928 by the industrialist Henry Ford, to secure a source of rubber for Ford Motor Company. His utopian vision of creating a model community in the jungles of Brazil quickly fell apart, as disgruntled native workers clashed with – and eventually revolted against – the US-style management of the factory, food and accommodation.
On top of this, Ford’s managers didn’t understand the complex tropical ecosystem of the Amazon. Rubber trees that had been widely spaced in the jungle were packed too closely together in plantations. These soon fell victim to tree blight and the depredations of countless insects – ultimately failing to produce the rubber that had been the point of Fordlândia in the first place.
This is the risk of seeking out utopia: while an idea may sound simple, people and places rarely are. And, too often, the successful realisation of one person’s vision for society involves trampling another’s into the dirt. But yet, it is built into our nature to keep departing for the next horizon – for better or for worse.
Tom Wicker is an arts writer and reviewer.
ON PITCAIRN | by Dea Birkett
Pitcairn | Wileypics/Flickr
When you leave the theatre tonight, or travel home, or go to work tomorrow morning, imagine this. That the first step of your journey is to clamber a rope ladder, lashing in the South Pacific winds above the ocean swells. Then you can begin to know what it is like to leave Pitcairn Island. This fist of volcanic rock, marooned in the South Pacific Ocean, is joined to the rest of the world by no more than this lashing rope ladder. With no natural harbour, the islanders take out a longboat to passing ships. The ship throws down a rope ladder and they ascend the steel cliff-high side to the deck. This ladder is the sole means of arrival and of escape.
The islanders – those of them hearty enough to man the longboats – leap for the rungs on the crest of a wave like pirates, making it look easy. But behind their effortless ability lies eight generations of sea trading. The descendants of mutineers, they first benefitted from, then have battled with this sea-bound isolation for over two centuries. Less than 50 of them remain on Pitcairn.
The Pitcairn story began at dawn on 28 April 1789, in the South Pacific off Tonga Island, when Fletcher Christian, Master’s Mate of His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty, led a mutiny against Captain William Bligh. The Bounty was on a mission to collect breadfruit seedlings and transport them to the West Indies, to provide staple foodstuff for the slaves. But although Bligh was an outstanding navigator, having previously served under Captain James Cook, he was a poor commander, his stern, unforgiving manner losing the support of his men.
The Bounty had spent five months anchored off Tahiti as the breadfruit seedlings were gathered and grown. Here the crew lived on shore, had their buttocks tattooed Polynesian-style and shared their huts with local women. Returning to strict seaboard regime was like being cast back into a floating prison. The temptations of Tahiti still called them. Three weeks in to the return voyage, 24-year-old Christian rebelled, taking 25 of the crew with him.
Casting Bligh and his loyal followers adrift, the fugitives sailed back to Tahiti for women and food. Two thirds of the mutineers opted to stay, risking capture by the British. Just nine remained loyal to their new master, sailing off with 12 Tahitian women, six Polynesian men and one child. For nine months they dodged about the South Pacific, until stumbling across the tip of a volcano, mischarted by 200 miles, called Pitcairn Island. “Its beauty, its temperate climate and above all, in its now-demonstrated inaccessibility, Pitcairn was ideal,” recorded one mutineer. The Bounty was burned, and the mutineers’ one thread with the rest of humankind was cut. They disappeared from the face of the earth. For almost two decades, they were undiscovered. These are the years explored by Richard Bean’s Pitcairn. When contact was finally made by an American whaler in 1808, only one mutineer remained – with ten women and 23 children.
Over the following century, Nantucket whalers, British merchant ships, French adventurers and naval vessels from Portsmouth called on the island, each describing the community as a perfect, pocketsized community, close to Paradise. Born from mutiny, the Pitcairners continued to search out a new leader to free them from the infamy of their past. Messiahs washed up on the shore, promising to save the lonely flock, from the charismatic English adventurer George Hunn Nobbs to an American missionary called John Tay who arrived in 1886, clutching some Seventh Day Adventist literature. The whole island was converted and no other religion has been tolerated since.
The mutineers’ newfound land is still the smallest and most remote country on earth. Put your finger in the middle of the big blue blanket that is the South Pacific, and it will land near Pitcairn, although it’s too small to be marked. New Zealand is 3000 miles to the southwest, Tahiti 1300 miles to the northwest. The island covers under 1.75 square miles. There is no place you cannot hear the crash of the surf. The coast seethes with a white ruff of surf – cliffs and craggy rock faces battered by an untempered ocean. The only beach is Down Rope, called so because you have to climb down a rope nailed into a cliff face to reach it. It’s here the only evidence of inhabitants before the mutineers exists – petroglyphs scratched onto the rock by early Polynesians, probably passing through a couple of centuries earlier. There was no reason to stay.
Approaching the island from the sea – the only way, as there is
