PITCAIRN'S ISLAND.

Lyttelton Times, Volume II, Issue 89, 18 September 1852, Page 8

PITCAIRN'S ISLAND.

The diary of a gentleman who was detained for several days on Pitcaivn's Island, the retreat of the Mutineers of the Bounty, has been placed in ouv hands. We have great pleasure in giving extracts therefrom, as it contains much interesting information respecting the present state of the Island, and of the position and prospects of the descendants of the Mutineers and their Tahitian wives. "Sunday, March 24th, sighted Pitcaivn's Tsland, rather unexpectedly, immediately under the moon, as she rose. The schipper informed us that our halting chronometer, which we have set and reset by the dead reckoning, was right within thirty miles, after all. Like the German clock in Love's Labours Lost, it is— Still a repairing, ever out of frame, And never going a right, being a watch, But beiug watched, that it may still go right. This island is memorable as the refuge of the " Bounty" mutineers. As we have but three tanks and a-half of water left, one of which is undrinkable, we shall take the opportunity of filling up. A whale boat, with nine Islanders, came alongside. They advised us to anchor, there being good anchorage, in 12 fathom, N. W. of the island. The schipper said that it was Dot worth while getting up the chain. They objected to bringing off water on a Sunday, unless as " a work of necessity ;" the plea was put in and accepted. Pulled for the shore, with a native in the boat to shew us the landing place, which a stranger might easily miss. The "Bounty" men pulled twice round the island before finding it. It lies concealed in a very small bay, to the northward and eastward, with a break right across, and on the weather side of the island. There is likewise a kind of boat harbour on the lee side, but as there is no beach to haul up upon, it is nearly useless. The islanders possess about twenty canoes, made of the lightest wood I ever saw, Avhich is now very scarce ; in them almost, any sea may be faced ; should they fill, it is only jumping out, giving a shake, and all is right again. There are three whale boats, two of them presents from the British Government, and a third purchased by themselves from a Yankee whaler, for 72 dollars; an enormous price, considering that a •whaler will not sell a boat at all, while he has any use for it, but breaks it up for firewood when its work is done. Walking past the church, we perceived that the service had not long begun, and all went in. I was much struck with the demeanour of the congregation ; no turning round to stare at the strangers ; beyond the handing up of prayer books by those who sat nearest to us, not the slightest notice was taken. We were lucky enough to fall in with a wedding—the second only that had ever been witnessed by strangers ; for had we been expected in church, it would have been put off. The minister read the whole of the marriage service; he did not think it necessary, like some of our diamond-ringed, al-mond-pasted, mealy-mouthed curates at home, to omit any portion of what was set down for him, as calculated to offend the chaste ears of this refined generation ; neither did bride and groom think it incumbent upon them to scurry away across country immediately after the ceremony, as if there were anything to be ashamed of in holy matrimony. I once heard a bachelor song, commencing thus:—" I'm not a poor Dog, with a canister tied to his tail," a natural .association enough; for now-a-days, the Bene- . dick seems always to have taken fright, as if he.-had some such caudal appendage made fast .to,.hup, and away he goes across country, with.out I,(iuking to the right or left, running" a ring, like ahunted hare, and then back again to the old form. Of all affectations, false modesty, or .squeainishness, is one of the worst. Let us still adhere to what Jeremy Taylor terms " that Macedonian simplicity which calls things by their right jiames." '■' Ilfautiaisserauxfemmes cette vaine..superstition dcs mots," says that most straight forward of gossips, Michel de Montaigne. ,Paine Knight, no bad judge in his way, wrote a book upon the principles of taste, in which a. passage occurs that hooked itself on to my .recollection some twenty years ago, " A certain degree of false delicacy and affected timidity, has once, through fashion, prevailed, but is -now happily exploded, and left to chamber-maids and waiting-women, whose invariable characteristic it has been, from the time when the princess Nausicaa went out from her father's house to wash her garments, to that when Sophia Western went from

hers to avoid her lover." But what has all this to do with the log ? Once the habit of running riot among quotations gets hold upon a man, he never can stop : and as the hobby-horse is harmless enough, perhaps the better way is not to try.

The responses are intoned by the congregation on the key note, the final syllable descending to the flat seventh, which would produce a very good effect, were it not that each individual takes the liberty of choosing an independent pitch. I afterwards inquired with some curiosity into the origin of this fashion, and was told that it had formed itself, having crept in by degrees. They tried to sing a hymn, and a dreadful piece of work they made. But I confess to a secret pleasure in hearing a hymn break down. It is bad at the best; trashy verse, and lumbering music ; an intrusion, moreover, upon the service, more especially if suffered to usurp the place of the anthem. The English reformers found four styles of music pertaining to the JRoman Catholic Church Service, of which they retained three, excluding the fourth, which was the metrical h\mn. Queen Elizabeth took upon herself to permit it, at the commencement and conclusion of the service only, for the good of the art; but as the intentions of the royal mv- : ician would be best acted up to by disregarding that permission, her authority cannot be fairly pleaded. This relic of the mass, curiously enough, was at last brought into general use again by the Puritans, from whom it is retained, and even now, to my ears, savours more of the conventicle than of the church.

Adjoining Ihe school-house, in which the service is performed, is a burying-ground, overshadowed by a banyan free, the branches of which return themselves to the earth from which they sprang, again to shoot up from it with vigour renewed ; much more appropriately typical of the '* God's acre," as it was beautifully termed by our forefathers, than the Gothic Yew, or classic Cypress.

After service there was leisure for a mutual inspection. The men are clean built, and muscular, dressed with great neatness, and in European costume : that is to say, on Sundays, for the working-day dress, into which many slip themselves even between the services, is merely a pair of very short drawers, with or without a shirt. The women are a comely, buxom race ; what a sailor would call " boomers," but graceful, with^ a remarkably sweet expression of mouth. The costume is very becoming: a blue petticoat, not over long (but this is not the first time I have seen modesty and length of petticoat in inverse ratio to each other), with a white camise, about 12 inches shorter still, over all; no shoes, and consequently well-formed feet. The hair is worn en bandeau, gathered up behind in an indescribable fashion, apparently without a knot. Some few, in honour of. the day, as they supposed, had unfortunately attempted an' European style, but little to their advantage, as might be supposed. Two of them had mounted that coal-scuttle deformity,yclept a bonnet, and shewed like dowdy wenches for their pains. The maidens wear a single wreath round the head, either of beads, or a nexus of very small purple flowers, which, like our own everlastings, do not fade. After looking at the faces, I was surprised to see so many of the heads which belonged to them with tins significant adornment. The children wear the picturesque 'mara.'orwaistcloth,common to nearly all the South Sea Islands. Many questions were asked : I was not a little amused, even in this nook-shotten isle, the Monaco of Colonies, the St. Helena of the Pacific, at being catechised about Governor Grey. Curiosity was also expressed about the Baron de Thierry, not then on shore, who seems to be as well known as Sir George. It was shortly gratified, for he arrived, very thoughtfully and good-naturedly bringing with him a packet of seeds, which had been in° tended for his own prospective garden in California. As the whole of the water required could not be filled to-day, it Avas agreed that we should sleep on shore. George Adams carried off Mr. Taylor and myself; Arthur Quintal the elder took the Baron ; Evans, an Englishman, took Mr. Vaile ; and Mr. Nobbs, lay-minister, invited Brodie,

Climbed the peak, with Adams, to get a birds'eye view of the island, and walked back to his house, where he played .the host with unsophisticated politeness, and with a heartiness of welcome that could not be exceeded. He showed me his father's likeness, a print, from a drawing by Captain Beechey, very characteristic. " You. never can mistake a likeness," says Elia," though

you have not seen the original." The old man's grave is close to the house ; I promised to send a sprigl of weeping willow by the first opportunity, to set over it. His norn deguerre in the " Bounty" was Alexander Smith ; he even bore it a long while upon the island. His journal, an irreparable loss, was lent to the master of a Boston whaler, who carried it away. Adams lias a small library, composed principally of religious works. I noticed among them several old English stock books;— Pilgrim's Progress, Doddridge's Saints' Rest, Fox's Martyrs, Baxter's Rise and Fall, the Histories of Flavius Josephus—" that learned Jew," which Charles Lamb classes with dictionaries, directories, and back-gammon boards bound and lettered on the back, in his list of books that are no books— and what I was surprised to meet with in so out-of-the-way a place, Coleridge's Stateman's Manual, as incomprehensible as Sanscrit to mine host. Possibly the second title of the work, "Lay Sermons," was the pinion upon which it flew across the seas. ■•;■..;„-- We paid a visit to Susannah, the matriarch, widow of Young, the midshipman, and the only survivor of those who came in the " Bounty." She is supposed to be 80 years of age, stone deaf and one eyed, but hale and hearty still, straight as a lath, and able to bring down her load from the mountain as cheerily as any one of her grandchildren. She emulates the fame of Judith, or Jael, having killed a Tahiti-! n,who had been instrumental in the Pitcairn massacre, with an axe, as he lay asleep. "At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down ; at her feet he bowed, he fell ; where he bowed, there he fell down dead." In the evening the schipperwent on board, taking with him Matthew Quintal, one of the islanders. Monday, March 25. —-In the night it blew hard from the E. to S.E. In the morning the ship was out of sight, and the weather very thick ; I walked up to the top of the hill; she was then visible to the naked eye, about 10 or 12 miles to the westward. Still blowing band, but clearer. We should have tried to push through the surf in one of the whaleboats, and get on board, but it blew so strong from the E. 3 that although we might have made the ship, the boat could not have made the Island returning. Tuesday, March 26.-—Still blowing hard from the same quarter, and very thick. Ship out of sight the whole day ; towards evening the wind moderated. A long talk with Mr. Nobbs, the wise man oi the island, and the factotum, Pastor, Doctor, Dominie, man-midwife, and registrar. Grammatieus, Rhetor, Geometres, Pictor, Aliptes, Augur, Schoenohates, JYledieus, Mauus, orania novit. He was originally in the British navy—in what capacity I did not inquire; it is not discreet to be over-inquisitive—which he quitted for the Chilian service, under Lord Cochrane, by whom he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant, for his behaviour at the cutting out of the Emeralda, under Callao batteries. When he retired upon his laurels, he was unable, in common with many others, to recover his pay, a considerable sum, which is owing him to the present time. After several removes, up and down the world, he came to Titcairn's Island, where he finally settled down into Mr. Buffett's place as school-master. He appears a plain sensible man. At one time he had resolved to depart, and try his fortunes elsewhere; his possessions, owing to his not being descended from one o£ the nine original shareholders of the land, being insufficient to support his increasing family, but his parishioners met together and subscribed a certain quantity of land among themselves—one as much as would grow 2,000 yams, (so runs the document,) another 1,000, and so forth, conditionally upon his promising to remain. We inspected the few relics of the "Bounty." They are reduced to a sledge hammer and . anvil, two long nines, very much honey-combed, fished out of the sea in 1845, which* are fired on occasions of public rejoicing, and will eventually cause some half dozen of the amateur artillery men to lose the number of their mess 5 some kentledge and a very little copper. The bell, which used to summon to church, having been cracked, was exchanged for a smaller pne, and is now in St. Francisco. Wednesday, March 27.—Fine clear weather: the wind shifted early in the morning to N.N.W. Ship still out of sight; went out with the intention of examining some hieroglyphics, said to be cut in the cliff on the sea shore by the

extinct aborgines. To arrive at our destination it was necessary to clamber clown a precipice of several hundred feet, called the " Ridge of the Rope," from a rope having been used in former times to aid in the descent. The islanders, who are as sure-footed as the goats, actually chasing and catching them, like Alexander Selkirk, upon their native crags, no longer condescend to use one. When we arrived, we did not like the look of it; the height was dizzy, and broken necks would have been the consequence of missing a single step. Adams dissuaded us from making the attempt, and the " samphire gathering" was reluctantly abandoned. About 2, p.m., Mr. Buffett came down from the top of the look-out ridge, and told us that the ship was in sight, as far as she could be seen with the glass to the N.W. Thursday, March 28. —At daylight, the ship was about 20 miles to the northward. Wind northerly; got all ready for a start; felt so ashamed of having let ourselves be baulked of our object on the preceeding day, that we resolved upon another attempt, while the ship should be coming up. This time the ground was drier, and by dint of cutting steps in the face of the cliff, we accomplished our purpose. It was something at all events to know that the hieroglyphics are not curious ; neither Mexican nor Phenician, being merely the rudest conceivable representations of the human figure, the sun, moon, and stars, a bird, and what we at last agreed must have been intended for the Phallic emblem. We returned in haste, expecting to be shortly away. Mais l'homine propose, Dieu dispose. We saw the vessel, but to interpret her inancevres would have puzzled all the wise meij of Greece, or Gotham. She was visible with the naked eye from where we stood, about 200 feet, above the level of the sea, apparently about 15 miles distant. Adams, with t'.e glass, made out her ports. Something must have happened on board of which we are yet in ignorance ; meanwhile we must give up guessing, which is only just so much time thrown away. I give her up ; the Baron stoutly maintains that she is only gone to Elizabeth Island—about 120 miles N. E. by E. for a spar, and that she will return for us. ■"Wiill, now am I in Arden," says Touchstone ; " the more fool I ; when I was at home I was in a better place." Here we are, left to take our chance upon "the rock of the West," for some indefinite length of time, our worldly wealth consisting of the clothes we stand in ; and all this consequent of not having taken the trouble to get up a few fathom of chain. No matter; we must take heart of grace ; Nil desperandum Teucro duce et auspice Teuero. Pantagruelism, which Master Francis Rabelais de'fineth to be " a certain jollity of mind pickled in-the scorn of fortune"—pantagruelism must be the word for all, and patient resignation under the transition from pork to pineapples. Next to her coming here, lam best pleased with her going away, being sick of uncertainty. When Fox was asked, " what is the greatest pleasure in the world ?" " Winning at hazard," said he. " What then is the next greatest pleasure in the world?" He answered, after a little consideration "Losing at hazard." Friday, March 29. —The islanders are in a sad way about Matthew Quintal, who is on board. I assured them that the schipper would never have carried him away against his will; that he must have been talked over under promise of bringi no- him back again, and meanwhile showing him a little of the world. It is curious, that this very man should several times have said, that he would like to visit California, if he could be blown off in some vessel from the island, so as to spare him the pain of leave taring. Indeed, I never saw family ties so closely drawn as here. But is not this a Godsend to believers in presentiments ? I have always had a leaning that way, and my faith is only strengthened by experienoe. I called George Adams, my host, to a conference. I told him that we could not help remaining a burthen upon his people for awhile, but that we must endeavour to make it as light as possible ; that they must give up treating us as guests, and suffer'us to live like themselves, in their ordinary way : that for my own pa»f t, 1 did not choose to eat the bread of idleness while all were labouring around me, but that I would earn my keep, and could give as honest a days work in the yam plantations as any man on the island. But all my eloquence was thrown

away; no one would listen for a moment to the proposal: Adams said that "he had many times move pleasure in seeing me at his house than before, for that while the ship was here, it might have been supposed that he looked for some return, whereas it was now quite clear that I had none to make." They all seemed to rack their ingenuity in trying to reconcile us to our dependent position, and that with a delicacy and natural good breeding that have left an imprer/.sion which can never be effaced. But a return I was determined to make, in one shape or another, and. a lucky thought was suggested by a visit which I received this afternoon. John Buffett, who came to reside as schoolmaster, twenty-seven years ago, came seeking a solution to certain difficulties in mus'c. He had brought out with him a few treatises on the subject, over which he had been poring all this while, seemingly without being able to advance a step. Nevertheless, being a busy old gentleman, he had constituted himself leader of the island psalmody, and turned out to have been the owner of some extraordinary quavers, given out in true clerk of the parish style, which had much excited my curiosity in church. Were he but a bachelor, he would be a living impersonation of Geoffrey Crayon's Master Simon, in the inimitable Bracebridge Hall. The questions which he put were natural enough, for the treatises which he possessed were nearly all American, as clumsy as need to be, with the additional drawback of Yankee improvements, devised in utter ignorance of principle. I hoisted him over the different obstacles, which might have stopped a brighter genius than himself, and sent him away much relieved. He feed me for my lesson—in copper ; not as the monks paid Correggio, in a sack of copper coin, the weight of which on a hot day, together with the affront, threw the poor painter into a fever, which made an end of him ; but in a piece of sheathing from the Bounty, upon which the graver shall commemorate mv adventure. This suggested a more extensive scale of operations. I observed upon the imperfection of their Church performance and proposed teaching them to sing in parts. They caught at the offer with eagerness; I lined a board immediately, procured some chalk, and gave the first lesson, all the adults on the island, with the exception ofa few old women, being in attendance. They have proved remarkably intelligent ; not one among the number being deficient in ear, while many of them possessed magnificent voices. The interest they take in it is intense; indeed the novelty of the effect must be a surprise to them, for not one of them, excepting the three whitemen, had ever heard two sounds combined before, or was even aware of the existence of harmony—distinguished from melody—in nature. They fully perceive likewise what a resource this new art will be in passing away their idle evenings. (To be continued.)