Susanne Chauvel Carlsson

Susanne Chauvel Carlsson is the daughter of Charles and Elsa Chauvel. Her interest in Pitcairn Island grew from her parents' relationship with the island, which began with their 1932 visit to film parts of In the Wake of the Bounty (Errol Flyn's first movie). The book is a mix of fascinating potted history, family lore, personal reminiscence and observation. People who read the newspapers more carefully than I do, and that's probably most people, may already know a lot of the story told in this book, but even if I'm coming late to the party, I'm compelled to say it's a fabulous one. Pitcairn was settled in 1790 by a party of Bounty mutineers led by Fletcher Christian and accompanied by a number of Polynesians: nine mutineers, six Tahitian men, nine Polynesian women (all but one Tahitian) and one baby girl. The first decade was a bit rough, with quite a bit of rioting, some murder, a suspicious suicide. Some of the women tried to escape, and after that failed murdered the remaining Tahitian men. By 1900 the population comprised one man, the mutineer Aleck Smith; ten women (I don't know where the extra one came from -- the book is plagued with such little inconsistencies that make one suspect it didn't receive a lot of editorial attention); and 'about 23 children'. It was another eight years before the Pitcairners had any contact with the outside world, and isolation has been a major factor in the Island's cultural , economic and political development ever since. It's a story that provides a template for any number of lost-in-space fictions: the language developed as a mixture of rough English and Tahitian; the religion grew from the one semi-literate man's determination to read and then communicate what he found in the Bounty's bible. Susanne Carlsson makes no bones about having fallen in love with the place and the people -- it's one of those unfathomable complexities that the object of her affection has also been the site of a long history of sexual assault and of sanctioned sexual practices that in most other places would be condemned as paedophilia. All that news was bad enough already. It becomes much worse when you've read accounts of these people playing a cheerfully innovative version of cricket (you have to innovate when your total population is about 50), sharing out Christmas presents in the town square, praying in their Seventh Day Adventist Chapel, rowing their longboats out to meet the still infrequent visiting ship.… (mere)