Of Pitcairn's Island and American constitutional theory.

• Author: Coenen, Dan T.

Few tales from human experience are more compelling than that of the mutiny on the Bounty and its extraordinary aftermath. On April 28, 1789, crew members of the Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian, seized the ship and its commanding officer, William Bligh.(1) After being set adrift with eighteen sympathizers in the Bounty's launch, Bligh navigated to landfall across 3600 miles of ocean in "the greatest open-boat voyage in the history of the sea."(2) Christian, in the meantime, recognized that only the gallows awaited him in England and so laid plans to start a new and hidden life in the South Pacific.(3) After briefly returning to Tahiti, Christian set sail for the most untraceable of destinations: the uncharted and uninhabited Pitcairn's Island.(4) On this island, Christian's coterie of nine English sailors, six Tahitian men, and twelve Tahitian women established a society disconnected from the rest of the world.(5) According to the best-known account of these settlers' experiences--Charles Nordhoff's and James N. Hall's Pitcairn's Island--Christian also established a government for the colony based on the principle of pure democracy.(6)

It is a curiosity of history that the mutiny aboard the Bounty occurred in the same year--some might even say the same week--that the national government organized under the Constitution of the United States came into being.(7) The republican form of government established by that Constitution now has endured more than two centuries, while the polity established on Pitcairn's Island lasted, according to Nordhoff and Hall, no more than four brief years.(8) These contrasting histories invite the question whether the failed experiment in democracy on Pitcairn's Island offers insight into the durability of our own constitutional regime.

To hold out the account provided by Nordhoff and Hall as an accurate touchstone for true comparative legal analysis would be emphatically wrong. Their tale, after all, is more a novel than a history(9) and, even in its broad outlines, rests largely on inference and surmise.(10) Additionally, even if Nordhoff and Hall's account were accurate in every detail, greatly differing social conditions would render treacherous any fruitful comparison of the government of America and that of Pitcairn's Island. Nonetheless, the tale of Pitcairn's Island provides a useful allegory for reflecting on the American constitutional experiment.(11) In particular, the stark simplicity of the Pitcairners' tale pushes into bold relief our own Constitution's complex organizing principles: fear of majority faction, the preference for checked and divided powers, and the evolutionary inclusion in the political process of all persons affected by it.(12) The story of the settlers of Pitcairn's Island suggests the wisdom of these key elements of American constitutional theory, while a study of American constitutional theory raises the question whether those same settlers, in those same circumstances, would have met a different fate had they opted for a different set of governmental structures.

1. THE TALE OF PITCAIRN'S ISLAND

   After "careful study of every existing account,"(13) Charles Nordhoff and James N. Hall published Pitcairn's Island in 1934.(14) According to the authors, "discrepancies and improbabilities" marked earlier chronicles of the island's settlement.(15) As a result, the authors "selected a sequence of events which seem[ed] to them to render more plausible the play of cause and effect."(16) Although little is known with certainty about what happened on Pitcairn's Island, the broad outlines of the Nordhoff and Hall chronology seem inherently plausible.(17) Their tale may be summarized as follows.

   In late December 1789, Fletcher Christian and his Tahitian wife, Maimiti, first set foot on Pitcairn's Island.(18) With Christian were eight other Englishmen and their eight Tahitian wives, three Tahitian noblemen and their three wives, and three unmarried Tahitian men.(19) After salvaging all that was of value from the Bounty, Christian set the ship ablaze.(20) The settlers were on Pitcairn's Island to stay.

   Before leaving the vessel, Christian had called a meeting of the Englishmen to discuss the governance of the colony. At this meeting, Christian proposed, and the Englishmen agreed, that each of them would have an equal vote in the settlement's affairs.(21) Christian opted for a system of pure democratic rule despite the misgivings voiced by his chief assistant and closest confidant, Edwin Young.(22) Although Young found trustworthy two of the mutineers--sailor Alexander Smith and the Bounty's assistant botanist, Edwin Brown--he knew that the other five Englishmen--Isaac Martin, William McCoy, John Mills, Matthew Quintal, and John Williams--were rough seamen who might lapse into unwise judgment.(23) Christian responded that justice demanded an equal vote for all whom he had induced to join him in his venture.(24) He also expressed the hope that he and Young could "direct" the men "to wise decisions" by providing them with sound counsel.(25)

   At first, things went well. The island covered only four square miles, but it offered all that was necessary for a good life: fresh water, rich soil, fruit-bearing trees, and fish and game for the catching.(26) The settlers successfully divided tasks among themselves and worked hard at constructing shelters and cultivating yams and breadfruit.(27) All shared the island's produce, and this communal economy provided amply for seamen and islanders alike.(28) Although the Englishmen were not religious,(29) they accommodated the islanders' own traditional religious practices.(30) There was no illness,(31) and within a year Maimiti gave birth to the island's first child.(32)

   As time passed, however, the five Englishmen of whom Young had given warning became increasingly insensitive toward the Tahitians. Williams initiated an adulterous relationship with Hutia, the wife of Tararu, and came to blows with the Tahitian leader, Minarii, over this insult to Minarii's family.(33) Martin earned the enmity of the islanders by treating both his wife and the other Polynesians with scorn.(34) After the ship's rations of grog were exhausted, McCoy set up a secret distillery to feed his alcoholic needs.(35) Then, after two years of working side-by-side with the islanders, "certain of the white men took to loafing in the shade, while they forced the humbler natives to perform the daily tasks too heavy for womenfolk."(36)

   Relations between the races grew strained. The lower-caste Tahitian, Hu, a favorite victim of the white men's beatings, tried unsuccessfully to push Martin from a cliff to his death.(37) Tararu failed in his attempt to murder Williams, who by that time had taken away Hutia to live with him.(38) Hutia apparently undertook to poison Tararu in retaliation and, in so doing, killed both Tararu and Hu.(39) Meanwhile, Quintal and McCoy essentially enslaved the unmarried islander Te Moa, while Martin and Mills subjected the other lower-caste islander, Nihau, to similar degradation.(40) "The natives resented their new status deeply, but so far had not broken out in open revolt."(41) Perhaps this peace prevailed because the Tahitian noblemen, Minarii and Tetahiti, continued to lead lives of substantial independence and dignity.(42)

   As embitterment grew between Englishmen and islanders, however, McCoy came up with an idea that spelled doom for the colony: he decided that the useable acreage of the island should be divided among the Englishmen, with the Tahitians excluded from this allotment.(43) After secretly soliciting acceptance of his plan from Martin, Mills, Quintal, and Williams, McCoy put forward his proposal at a meeting of the English settlers.(44) Christian was stunned.(45) He reminded the mutineers that Minarii and Tetahiti had been chiefs on Tahiti, where landless men were deemed outcasts.(46) He described the land-division plan as "madness" and "charged with fatal consequences."(47) McCoy's proposal nonetheless carried by a vote of five to four, although Christian insisted that the action was so consequential that it required reconsideration at the group's next meeting.(48)

   Word of the vote was leaked to Tetahiti through Martin's wife, Susannah.(49) When Tetahiti approached Christian and demanded to know if the whites indeed intended to make the islanders into landless serfs, Christian offered an equivocal response.(50) Tetahiti then set off to find Minarii at the site where he was building a house. Tetahiti discovered Minarii standing near a pile of smoldering ashes.(51) Quintal had torched the chieftain's new home.(52)

   A bloodbath followed.(53) At dawn on September 22, 1793,(54) the four surviving Tahitian men launched a sneak attack on the Englishmen with the intention of killing all of them.(55) Within hours Martin and Mills were beheaded, Williams and Brown were shot dead, and Christian received a mortal wound.(56) A counterattack engineered by three of the Englishmen's wives took the lives of Tetahiti, Te Moa, and Niuha.(57) Minarii was killed in a violent battle with Quintal.(58)

   There followed on Pitcairn's Island a time of darkness and debauchery.(59) The only surviving males-McCoy, Quintal, Smith, and Young-fell into a perverse and persistent drunkenness nourished by McCoy's still.(60) The men so mercilessly beat and humiliated the Tahitian women that they tried to escape the island with their children in a small boat, avoiding certain death only because it capsized within rescue distance of the island.(61) The shock of the escape attempt only briefly halted the men's routine of sloth and abuse.(62) After giving the men countless opportunities to change their ways, the women separated themselves from the men entirely, gathered together both the island's children and its firearms, and ordered the men to keep away.(63) More bloody encounters ensued when the men ignored these commands.(64) McCoy and Quintal...