PITCAIRN MEMORIES Cameras and whaleboats

In the middle of the Pacific, on a line roughly between Wellington, New Zealand and Balboa, Panama, is the tiny Pitcairn Island. Volcanic and fertile, it is just two miles long, a mile wide and around 1,000ft at its highest point. In January 1790 Pitcairn was the final resting place of HMS Bounty with her crew of Royal Navy mutineers and their Tahitian partners.

Having been run ashore in the small inlet that is now called Bounty Bay, the ship was burnt, ensuring that the fate of both vessel and crew remained unknown for many years. Alcohol, the allocation of land and disputes over women resulted in murder and bloodshed which claimed the lives of senior mutineer Fletcher Christian and his followers.