I was recently on Google Maps doing some cursory pre-holiday "research", and decided for some unexplainable reason (no, I have no ambitions to be a geoguesser) to randomly explore. After some random mouse click-and-dragging, I found myself in the middle of nowhere. Okay well, in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. Zoomed out far enough on Google Maps, it's just a complete sea of blue. But zoom in more and little islands start to appear (actually their names start appearing before the actual islands do, which gives you a sense of their size or lack thereof). 

And so, Pitcairn Islands - a tiny collection of islands in the middle of nowhere exactly feeds my fascination with the remote and unknown. 

So, Wikipedia it is then, and it initially is as fascinating as you expect. The territory consists of four islands, though its probably worth focusing on Pitcairn, the only inhabited island. With just 35 permanent inhabitants (as of 2023), it is the smallest territory in the world in terms of permanent resident population. And more interestingly, the European settlement of the island was a result of a mutiny. Mutiny!

"In 1790, nine of the mutineers from the British naval vessel HMS Bounty, along with the native Tahitian men and women who were with them (six men, 11 women, and a baby girl), settled on Pitcairn Island and set fire to the Bounty." Sounds like the opening crawl of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. 

That quaintness quickly takes a dark turn, with the insularity of the island becoming a seeming festering ground for sexual abuse: "In 2004, charges were laid against seven men living on Pitcairn and six living abroad. This accounted for nearly a third of the male population, and half of the island's adult males." "A study of island records confirmed anecdotal evidence that most girls bore their first child between the ages of 12 and 15" is also a pretty brutal sentence to read. 

Food for thought

I wonder if we do sometimes take for granted the modern trappings of developed civilisation. Perhaps my fascination with remote places have something to do with feeling the cudgelling weight of technology and hyper-connectivity. Contrast that with a place like Pitcairn, which did not have connection to the Internet prior to 2012, and that perhaps allows us to reframe how we think about our own lives. 

I'm not suggesting we return to a more tribalistic, pre-technology life (though the argument could be made that technology, and social media in particular, has had an effect in exacerbating tribalistic mindsets in recent years). Clearly there are problems when a community is completely cut off from the norms of the rest of the world. But it's interesting to consider the multiple perspectives of society, and not just assume that our individual context holds true everywhere else. 

Images from Wikicommons, Unsplash