PITCAIRN ISLAND. THE name alone may not ring any bells, but perhaps the HMS Bounty will. Fletcher Christian’s 1789 uprising against Lieutenant William Bligh
on that vessel inspired Charles Nordhoff’s and
James Norman Hall’s 1932 novel Mutiny on the
Bounty, several movies, and even a musical.
Marlon Brando played Christian in the 1962
film, and the star-studded cast of 1984’s The
Bounty featured Anthony Hopkins as William
Bligh, Daniel Day Lewis as John Fryer,
Laurence Olivier as Admiral Hood, Liam
Neeson as seaman Charles Churchill and a
young Mel Gibson as Christian.
The remote volcanic island, located about
1,350 miles southeast of Tahiti, was named
after British midshipman Robert Pitcairn,
who was the first person to spot it on July 2,
1767. T wo decades later, after overthrowing
Bligh, Christian sailed to Tahiti, where 16 out
of the 25 sailors and mutineers decided to stay.
The remaining eight crewmen, their Tahitian
women, several Tahitian men, and Christian
sailed forth before settling
on Pitcairn on January
23, 1790. The island’s
location had been charted
inaccurately, making it
an attractive hideaway
option, and a British ship
searched for the rogue
crew for three months to
no avail. The mutineers who stayed on Tahiti
didn’t fare as well — they were captured and
brought back to England, and some were later
hanged. The Pitcairn settlers weren’t discovered until 1808, but by that time they were
only survived by mutineer John Adams. The
majority were killed by either each other or
the Tahitians who accompanied them; Adams
wasn’t prosecuted and the descendants of the
original group continue to live on the island.
Tony Probst is an avid maritime collec-
tor and owner of San Rafael’s Audio Video
Integration. His interest in the Bounty and
Pitcairn Island dates back to age 7, when he
and his family left England for a 14-year sailing
trip around the world. For entertainment, his
father provided him with two books: Mutiny on
the Bounty and Men Against the Sea. The stories
resonated with young Probst, and though the
family didn’t make it to Pitcairn, he decided
that one day he would. In January 2010, he
made his first visit. In a series of subsequent
trips, Probst formed bonds with inhabitants
of the island, gaining unprecedented access to
artifacts, family stories and other uncommon
information about the world’s most isolated
place. The ties he developed were so deep, in
fact, that he’s been entrusted with Christian
family relics throughout the years. His photo-
graphs document these visits.
The earliest photo of Pitcairn Island in 1916
and one almost 100 years later in 2012.
