What Happened Next.

We all know the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, or at least the version that Hollywood has shown us, but how many know what happened afterward, in the intervening centuries between then and now? Not me.

I had Turner Classic Movies on the other night, as background noise while I wasted time online. They were showing the Clark Gable version of Mutiny and afterwards they played a short film about Pitcairn Island, the extremely isolated South Pacific island where the mutineers took refuge. I had never heard of Pitcairn, so I started Googling and that's how I found out about the sex scandal. I couldn't believe what had gone on that I had never heard about!

For the whole story, from the mutiny through two centuries, until the sex scandal broke in the late 90s, read this fascinating 10-page Vanity Fair article, "Trouble in Paradise":

"But the movies never moved past sunset endings with a Gable or a Gibson standing with the Tahitian maidens on the cliffs of Pitcairn, looking out over his torched ship and the boundless Pacific, both the evidence and the way home sinking offshore. That was the beginning, not the end, of the odd colony the mutineers founded. Over the centuries Pitcairn, its population rising as high as 233 and now holding at 47, has become a mystical destination for those seeking escape, freedom, and the dream of paradise in the South Seas.

The news that has come off the rock in the last decade shocked the world and tainted the myth. In 2004, six men—a third of the island’s adult male population, including Pitcairn mayor Steve Christian, a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian’s—had been convicted under English law of 33 sexual offenses, some dating back as many as 40 years. The trials had been held in a makeshift courtroom on Pitcairn. At the Privy Council, on July 10, 2006, the prisoners were appealing those convictions.

Headlines around the world had focused on the criminal case: pitcairn’s cloud of vice. But a more dramatic story lay buried in the thousands of pages piled high on a table partly shielding the Privy Council lords from the commoners facing them.

For most of its history, Pitcairn lived with a secret sex culture that defined island life. Adultery was not just routine but pervasive, as was the sexual fondling of infants and socially approved sex games among young children. Incest and prostitution were not unknown. The criminal charges stemmed from a longtime island practice of “breaking in” girls as young as 10."