Later in the day, Mike told Dave Brown he thought Vaine had a very marketable product with his coffee.
"Well, then let's get in on that," Dave said. "Let's make some coffee."
The Pitcairners were once renowned for their cooperation and communal living. Take, for example, the old Pitcairn ritual of the "share out." In nearly every film, article, or book about the Pitcairners, the author or narrator speaks approvingly of it, saying it shows what a true community the island was.
Whenever a passing ship visited, all the islanders would pool together all of the fruit their trees had produced, huge mounds of bananas, passion fruit, oranges, grapefruit, along with some of the vegetables they grow.
The communal pile of fruit would be brought aboard the ship, Brenda told me, and would be offered to the captain, who would give in return whatever food or supplies he had to offer.
Then, all that the island received for the fruit would be divided equally among all the families of the island.
"We don't do that anymore," Brenda said. Now, when a ship comes, it's every islander for him or herself. Each person climbs on board a ship, armed with a basket of fruit." Whoever gets there first gets to trade first; move too slow, and you might get nothing.
Pitcairn still holds a share out on the rare occasions when a captain makes a blanket gift to all islanders, but the tradition is otherwise dead.
Jay, the magistrate, estimates that an average family on the island makes about $6,000 a year, including more than $2,000 from the many government jobs every islander has. Jay, for instance, is the island's magistrate, assistant engineer, and conservation officer, three jobs that earn him more than $5,000 a year.
The government admits that many of these jobs require little work and are often unnecessary. As the administration states in its official "Guide to Pitcairn" : "Public appointments and benefits from them are more widely distributed than is warranted by the work to be done."
During my stay, Brenda and Mike were disappointed to learn they had not been selected to fill the vacant spot of rubbish collector. "Back in the U.K., I dealt with million-pound budgets, and now I can't get chosen as a rubbish collector," Mike joked.
Pitcairn isn't unique in the way it pursues western goods, or in the ways they affect their lives. It has happened to almost every native culture to come in contact with the technologically superior West: The natives start to trade for goods, and their self-sufficient, communal way of life is replaced with a constant fight for gadgets, status, and money.
It's happened to Eskimos in Canada, Aborigines in Australia, and tribes in sub-Saharan Africa. It's happened on islands across the South Pacific.
After the mutiny on the Bounty, Captain Bligh made another trip to Tahiti, this time on the Providence. He arrived in 1792, only 15 years after his first visit, with Captain Cook. Upon his arrival, Bligh was shocked at how the island culture had degenerated.
Many of the Tahitians had become alcoholics and wore dirty clothes given them by passing sailors rather than their native garb. Their language had become a patois with a large amount of English mixed in. They were almost entirely dependent on European iron tools, having forgotten how to fashion their own from stone.
Perhaps Bligh, when looking at what his culture had wrought in Tahiti, thought of the words of his mentor, Captain Cook, during his last visit to the island in 1777:
"It would have been far better for these poor people never to have known us."
"What makes a person a loser?"
Sheils Carnihan, the island schoolteacher, asked her class. Sheils's charges are the seven children of elementary school or junior high age. Only five are Pitcairners; two are Sheils's own daughters.
On Pitcairn, a new schoolteacher arrives every two years, arranged through the New Zealand government. The teacher, his or her spouse, and their kids spend the next 24 months living the life of a Pitcairner. The teacher brings in new knowledge of the outside world; the children provide new friends for the island kids.
The students toss out a few answers to Sheils's question: "stealing friends," "being a spoilsport," "pushes you around." The children range from 8 to 13, but they all learn together.
At first glance, it seems that might be a challenge, but Sheils doesn't think so: "I've been in a class of 30 kids where some were severely retarded, some could barely read, and some were writing at an adult level. This is nothing compared to that."
Pitcairn children are taught by the schoolteacher until they reach the equivalent of ninth grade. Then, for two years, they take correspondence courses from New Zealand. Three older kids, aged 14 and 15, are taking the correspondence courses.
After those two years, around age 15, they have a choice: they can remain on Pitcairn and take two more years of correspondence courses, or they can move to New Zealand and finish their education there.
Nearly everyone chooses to move to New Zealand; almost no one ever moves back to Pitcairn. That, in a nutshell, is the source of the island's population problem: Its young people, realizing that even a high school diploma is next to useless on Pitcairn, decide for the outside world.
On the wall of the Pitcairn schoolhouse, incongruously, is a poster sporting a quote from Donald Trump: "I like thinking big. I always have. To me, it's very simple: If you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big."
"I probably won't be coming back," said Candace Warren, who got her Pitcairn driver's license when she turned 15 this year. "I like New Zealand."
Candace wants to become a professional singer. That's not an easy career path on Pitcairn, where the fullest house possible is 40 people.
The future will likely not be kind to Pitcairn's little school. Seven children are enrolled, plus the three doing a correspondence course. In three years, if everyone stays, there will be only three students, plus one doing correspondence.
"The kids will get a lot of attention, but how are they going to learn interaction?" Sheils asks. "How to you play a game with three people?"
Growing up on Pitcairn is a mixed bag. On one hand, you live in an enormous playground; for an outdoors-loving kid, it's heaven to be able to roam around the cliff sides, swim in St. Paul's Pool, or pick oranges from the tops of trees.
And, if it takes a village to raise a child, the entire adult population of Pitcairn plays its part, watching out for each other's kids whenever they can.
The downside of communal parenting is that parents, on the whole, give their kids less attention than western parents. Kids have to fend for themselves, which builds self-reliance but also makes it easier for them to imagine living on their own off-island.
A boy ostracized by two or three kids can't just find new friends on Pitcairn. It can become very lonely very quick, for the adults as much as for the children, if disputes get in the way of friendship.
And let's say you want to learn to play the trumpet, or design Web pages, or join a sports team. On Pitcairn, you're out of luck.
Once a week, Pastor takes aside the three oldest kids who are about to go to New Zealand to tell them what the outside world is like. Yet these kids have all been to New Zealand and know the basics about cars, TV, and other objects of the modern age.
"It's frustrating sometimes," Pastor said. "There are some things you just cannot get them interested in. I talked about AIDS one day, and they could not have been less interested. 'That's not something we need to worry about,' they think."
While I was there, Pastor's weekly lesson was about culture shock. He and the students enumerated some of its forms: climate, language, food, dress, religion, standards of cleanliness. A South African who has done missionary work throughout the Pacific, he had plenty of examples.
Tony Warren, 14, was raised on New Zealand and came to Pitcairn recently to live with his grandmother, who thought it would be a nice change of pace for him. He's the expert on New Zealand life.
"It's really different from here," he said. "They'll see cars and get used to closing doors."
"I hate cars!" said Adelia Brown, also about to head to New Zealand and the child most likely to move back to Pitcairn when her schooling is over.
Pastor concludes his lesson by offering ways to deal with culture shock: "Take it as it comes, one step at a time" ; "Figure out what it is I don't like, and think: I have to adapt to it."
After class, I talked to Adelia, who will be heading to Auckland at the end of the year for her last two years of high school. "It'll be a change," she said. "I wanted to see what it's like."
She's visited New Zealand before, and "it was OK. There were different things you could do. You could go to the park and play if you wanted to."
She listens to New Zealand rock music and wants to become a kindergarten teacher. "It's always been a dream of mine," she said.
But she says she plans to "hopefully" return to Pitcairn in two years: "I'll miss the island too much."
The "hopefully" is important. The decision to live on Pitcairn or New Zealand is entirely hers, and if she wants to move back, no one will stop her. But over the years, lots of people have said they'll come back, only to change their minds once they've lived outside. The "hopefully" means she knows the outside might be too attractive a few years down the line.
What will she do if she does come back? "I'll start all my old chores again. I'll probably start weaving the baskets," she said without enthusiasm.
Then she switched to what she considered the best thing about New Zealand: "There'll be new people to talk to."
The Pitcairners never asked to be made into symbols of good, of course. That's just the way it turned out: a few dozen normal human beings, made into symbols of perfection.
As a result, many of the islanders have nothing but anger for the writers who, over the years, have created that impression. The story of the Bounty and Pitcairn have been the subject of almost 3,000 articles, hundreds of books, dozens of documentaries, and five feature films.
"It's difficult to have people writing about you and all your family, just because of where you live," Brenda said. "It makes some people mad, that writers are making money off of writing about us."
Brenda points to one example in her life, in the early 1970s, when a man named Ian Ball came to the island to write a book, Pitcairn: Children of Mutiny. He singled out four Pitcairners to profile; the 18-year-old Brenda was one.
"Brenda Christian is Fletcher's loveliest descendant," he gushed. "She has impressive cleavage and no wish to conceal it from the dour little commune. . . . She is a pocket Venus."
One day, I asked Dobrey who was the last person to write something about Pitcairn that the islanders liked. "Rosalind Young," she answered.
Rosalind Young was an island native who wrote a book about Pitcairn in 1894.
It's an odd relationship, Pitcairn and its chroniclers. On one hand, Pitcairners have had more ink spilled on their behalf, per capita, than any other people in the world. Tom Christian, for instance, has probably been mentioned in more magazines and newspapers than many congressmen. And because most of the writing about Pitcairn comes from people who have either never been there, or have been there for only a brief time, they are easily stereotyped.
On the other hand, the Pitcairners owe their lifestyle - and probably the island's continued existence as a populated place - to the legends.
An average island family makes most of its money selling tourist trinkets, to passing ships or via mail order. If Pitcairn didn't have the image of romance and paradise, a lot of those ships wouldn't bother to stop.
Next year, the island is expecting three large cruise ships, each carrying hundreds of passengers. Those people probably will buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of trinkets, and none would care if the Bounty and Pitcairn didn't have such a hold on the imagination.
The South Pacific is dotted with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of beautiful islands with fewer than a hundred people on them, but their residents don't have VCRs and stereos and microwaves and nice homes, like the Pitcairners.
The latest writer to receive the islanders' ire is Dea Birkett, a British travel writer who visited the island for four months in 1991. In 1997, she wrote a book titled Serpent in Paradise, in which she portrays the islanders as having many of the standard flaws of small-town life: gossip, occasionally flaring tempers, and a love of material goods bordering on fetish.
Serpent in Paradise does include a few low blows. She writes about the one-night stand she had with one of the married island men. (He has since moved to New Zealand.) And Ms. Birkett seems to have a paranoid streak; at one point, she thinks the islanders are plotting to kill her. But for the most part, it is an honest, if subjective, account of life on Pitcairn.
Immediately after it was published, the island's many fans around the world were enraged: The island they had been dreaming of had been uncovered as a place with normal human failings. At a book reading in London, Brenda Christian decided to confront Ms. Birkett about her book.
Brenda found Ms. Birkett's responses unsatisfactory. Brenda told a British newspaper: "I'd like to see her hanged." (She told me, "when a Pitcairner says someone should be hanged, it doesn't mean she should hang, literally.")
Even though no actual copies of the book appeared on the island for almost a year, the response on Pitcairn was anger and a feeling of betrayal. Since Serpent, the islanders had not let any writers on Pitcairn; because of the difficulty reaching the island, Pitcairners can effectively decide who visits and who does not.
No writers, that is until me, and my application was the object of considerable debate, Dave Brown told me on the day I arrived.
"We weren't sure if we wanted to be written about again, but we thought you might be able to undo some of the lies in Birkett," said Dave, who sits on the island council.
And if the islanders didn't like my story? Then you might be the last writer we let on," Dave warned.
Sheils and her husband, Daniel, hadn't read Ms. Birkett's book when they arrived on the island a year and a half ago. But they have since.
"We read it and kept saying, 'Yeah, that's exactly right,' " Sheils said.
Daniel is more direct: "Every single word of that book is true."
The Carnihan family is easy to pick out of any photo of the islanders: their red hair and pale skin clearly don't betray any Polynesian ancestry.
But they've lived on Pitcairn for a year and a half and are in a unique position to talk about the island.
"When people come to visit Pitcairn for one day or a few days, the islanders do a terrific job," Sheils said. "They smile, and they tell their stories, and they're very generous. Pitcairn is a dream for so many people, and why just kill the dream?"
She paused: "It only takes three or four months here to have the dream taken away."
"There's a lot of selfishness," she said. "It's an island of individuals. There's no community at all, unless there's someone to oppose, and then they unite. I hate to say it, but it's true."
Daniel, who makes no bones about his dislike of Pitcairn, is blunt, and perhaps a bit extreme: "There's not an honest person here."
As schoolteacher, Sheils holds the position of government adviser, meaning she conveys information from the New Zealand administration and helps to run meetings and present the government's opinion.
The insurmountable challenge is that "the islanders hate outsiders. There's an island way of doing things, and if you try to tell them there's a better way of doing them, you get the stare and get blackballed. Anything negative that's said is taken so personally."
"We thought it would be an adventure," Sheils said. "But the best thing to come out of this is that our marriage has gotten a lot stronger. There's no one else I can talk to."
Brenda and Mike say some of the same things as Sheils and Daniel. They are trying their best to fit into the island culture, but Mike in particular shows signs of being exasperated.
Because of his experience managing shops in England, Mike was named chairman of the island general store not long after his arrival. He set about redoing the books and found that some island families who had bought items five years ago had never paid for them and never been asked to pay for them. The books had never been balanced.
He went so far as to burn all the store's books from before 1996 in the stove at Big Fence, because he didn't want to ever be asked about them.
He's even started referring to the store as "PIGS." The letters stand for Pitcairn Island General Store, but he admits it is calculated to see whether he can get a rise out of the non-pork-eating islanders.
I ask Mike whether he worries that, as an outsider, one bad move could turn the islanders against him.
"I worked in shops for more than 20 years," he says. "I had to learn how to deal with angry customers, suppliers, bosses and satisfy them all. This sort of thing is my skill."
The islanders know that the trends are all in the wrong direction and that if they don't act quickly, Pitcairn could someday be an empty rock again.
Tom Christian thinks he has the answer. He wants to end Pitcairn's isolation, build an airstrip, and bring in tourists by the dozen.
"The young people move away because there's no way to make money on Pitcairn," he says. "If we could provide them with a steady source of income, a good job, then I think they would come back."
Tom's plan: Have a weekly flight service from Mangareva, so 15 to 20 tourists could be on the island at all times. Those tourists would be buying carvings, baskets, coffee, and honey, not to mention paying a premium to stay in island homes. Throw in some profit from the flight service - Tom already has the name Air Pitcairn picked out - and you've got tons of money coming in, he thinks.
Presumably, the New Zealand Pitcairners will leap at the chance to come back if they can get a job cleaning up after the tourists.
The idea of an airstrip has been debated for generations, particularly since 1945. "The shipping industry is declining, and we're getting fewer and fewer ships stopping every year," says Jay, the island magistrate. "It used to be that everyone was against an airstrip, and some of the older folks still don't want it, but we need some sort of contact."
In the last two or three years, local public opinion has finally, grudgingly decided that ending Pitcairn's isolation through an airstrip wouldn't be a bad idea. And Tom has talked with Australian electronics billionaire Dick Smith, who has agreed to lead a fundraiser to pay for construction if that's what the islanders want.
But there are problems with their airstrip dream. The biggest one is that it may be physically impossible.
Surveyors have determined that a site on the island's southeast side would be suitable for a grass airstrip 1,800 feet in length. That's perilously short. The main runway at Toledo Express Airport, in contrast, is 10,600 feet, or six times as long.
On one end of the proposed Pitcairn runway is a large hill. On the other is a cliff, and the Pacific Ocean. And the winds change direction so quickly and so powerfully on Pitcairn that it is likely that many pilots would face a disastrous crosswind or tailwind.
Even if it did work logistically, there's no denying the impact that sort of change would have on the islanders.
"I think it would be hard on the islanders to have that many people to deal with," Jay says.
"It's going to change the entire way of life," Jay's wife, Carol, says. "The Pitcairners are famous for our hospitality to visitors, and that's going to wear thin after a while. Constant pressure to smile for camera-toting tourists could be too much.
But Carol is hopeful that an airstrip might bring young people back. "They don't stay because there's nothing for them here. Maybe with an airstrip, they'll see something for them."
Despite the optimism of people like Carol and Tom, Sheils isn't convinced that bringing in hundreds of tourists can do much good: "They think that money will solve the problem. It won't. It's a community in crisis. It's decaying from the inside."
Everyone, it seems, has ideas on how to "save" Pitcairn. Some say turn it into an offshore banking haven. Some say make it a huge coffee plantation or honey farm.
A decade ago, a satellite discovered what could be millions of tons of minerals encrusted on an undersea mountain, 50 miles southeast of Pitcairn. If underwater mining technologies improve, it may be reachable in a decade, and some of the islanders are happy waiting until then for a potential windfall.
Pitcairners have no shortage of dreams. But none of their previous ideas convinced young people to stay.
Tom is one of the island's most religious residents, and before I ask him about the airstrip, he reads a verse from 1 Timothy, Chapter 4:
"Let no one despise your youth, but set believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity."
As he was reading that, the Sabbath began; it starts at sundown Friday for Seventh-day Adventists. Across the island, the younger half of the island was preparing to crack open a few beers and have their usual Friday night drinking party. Their parties are nothing outrageous by western standards - a few beers, some darts, country music - but to much of Tom's generation, it qualifies as an affront.
I walked up the hill to Pulau, near the school, to meet the oldest couple on the island.
Millie Christian is 91; her husband, Warren, is 84. Neither one gets around the island much, but both are, by western standards, in fine shape for their ages.
(Pitcairners have long been noted for their long lives and the strength they maintain late into them. The islanders like to tell of the late Andrew Young, the last fifth-generation descendant of the mutineers. When he was 83, a neighbor teased that he was getting old. Angered, he went down to Bounty Bay, climbed into his one-man boat, and proceeded to paddle all the way around the island in a hour.)
I spotted Mr. Christian struggling around in his walker outside Tom's house. I introduced myself, and he happily invited me in. We sat and chatted for a while, and he told stories of the old days on Pitcairn, like the time the men had to go to neighboring Henderson Island during World War II to clear an airstrip if Allied planes ever needed one. He seemed to be the best of old Pitcairn: friendly, open, generous.
Millie suffers from a variety of ailments and is in pain much of the time. In New Zealand or the United States, she'd be making regular trips to doctors; here, she has to settle for regular visits from the pastor's wife and hope that medications don't run out before the next supply ship.
But she too can tell stories. She talked about how different hymns used to sound: "There used to be all these beautiful voices, tenors and altos and basses and everyone singing harmonies. Now, it's not so good."
Mr. Christian was born in 1914, so he had seen the island's population soar past 200 and drop to its current level. I asked him what he thought about the ideas other people had on how to draw young people back, about the airstrip and tourists and money. I asked him whether he thought the grand plans would work.
"Oh, no, I don't think so," he said matter-of-factly. "Once you see New Zealand and the world, you want to stay there. You don't want to be here."
My final day on Pitcairn was the island Sabbath, so we went to another church service. It was time for one of the biggest events on the SDA calendar: the foot-washing ceremony.
Every three months, the religious of Pitcairn separate into men and women, go into rooms, and wash each other's feet. "It's a very important symbol," Pastor said. "It shows that we are a community and that we are willing to help each other, to wash each other's feet."
I followed the men. Only four island men were willing to perform the traditional brotherhood ceremony: Jacob Warren, Michael Warren, Tom, and Mike. (Mike, a lapsed Roman Catholic, freely admits he's not a Seventh-day Adventist but wanted to participate anyway.) Pastor participated, too, but had to recruit one of the other visitors to make the numbers even.
After the ceremony, the pastor gave a sermon on the importance of a spiritual education. The dozen parishioners enjoyed it.
It was time to leave. I gathered my things and headed down the Hill of Difficulty to the landing at Bounty Bay. Most of the island had gathered to send us off; some would be manning the longboat to take us back to the Dione, which would be taking us back to Mangareva, Tahiti, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Toledo.
There were hugs and good-byes. A few of the islanders appeared at the landing to complete business deals, selling jars of jam or bags of dried fruit before their customers left.
Then Tom quieted the Pitcairners and started them in "The Good-bye Song." Written by an island woman in the 1800s, it's the song they sing every time someone leaves Pitcairn.
With few exceptions, people visit the island only once; there's little reason to return, once the stamp is in your passport and you have a few stories to tell the folks back home.
But if life on the island continues as it is - divided among young and old, drinkers and teetotalers, religious and secular - and the number of Pitcairners keeps dropping, it might not be long before they sing their song to the island itself.
Now one last song we'll sing - good-bye, good-bye,
Time moves on rapid wings - good-bye,
And this short year will soon be past,
Will soon be numbered with the last.
But as we part to all we'll say -
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.
But as we part to all we'll say -
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.
First Published October 20, 2000, 5:36 p.m.