Hi, I'm the History Guy .I have a degree in history,
I love history and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
There's an old saying that the Sun never sets on the British Empire,
and what that really means is that the Empire was, at least at one time, so large and its height,
2/5 of the world's land mass, that the Sun didn't set on the Empire, no matter what time
it was in England it was daytime somewhere in the empire. But that was a long time ago right,
I mean that the empire is pretty much gone now, there must be a time now in 2017,
when the Sun does not shine on the British Empire. Well actually no there isn't. See,
Great Britain still has 13 overseas territories in addition to the United Kingdom, and there is never
a time of day when all 13 of those territories are in darkness, and so the Sun still does not,
as it has not since the 1700s, set on the British Empire. But there is a weak link,
you see every night at about midnight Greenwich Mean Time, The Sun Goes Down over the British
Cayman Islands and it won't be for about another hour, about 1 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, that the
Sun will come up of the island of Diego Garcia and the British Indian Ocean Territories and so
for one hour a day the Sun only shines on one tiny piece of the British Empire, Pitcairn Island, the
least populous national jurisdiction in the world, and oh, does Pitcairn Island have a history.
Pitcairn Island is a volcanic island, one of the southernmost of the Tuamotu Archipelago
which also includes the French Polynesia. It at one time had a Polynesian population that
lived there for at least several centuries, but abandoned the island sometime around the
15th century. It got its name in 1767 when it was cited by the British sloop HMS Swallow,
and it was named after fifteen-year-old midshipman Robert Pitcairn, who happened
to be the first person to cite the island. But the island at that point was uninhabited,
however its future was about to change, in 1787 a ship left Britain bound for Tahiti,
its mission was to collect several breadfruit plants and to move those to the West Indies,
where it was thought that they would be a cheap source of food. The ship had three full masts in
full rigging even though it was rather small, its name HMS Bounty captained by one William Bligh.
And as you may have heard in April of 1789 there was a mutiny aboard HMS Bounty,
led by masters mate, Fletcher Christian. The mutineers put Captain Bligh and the loyal
members of the ship adrift in a boat and several the mutineers asked to be let off in Tahiti, and
so it was that only eight of the Bounty mutineers, and eighteen native Tahitians, 11 of them women,
set sail with Fletcher Christian aboard the Bounty in search of a home that would be safe from
British Retribution. It took some months for the Bounty to find Pitcairn Island, it seems that when
HMS Swallow had identified the island in 1867 they had been off on their calculations, and the island
was actually some hundred eighty nautical miles from where they thought it was, but that was an
advantage thought Christian, because that made it just that much less likely that the British would
find them. When they arrived they burned and sunk the Bounty so that it wouldn't give them away,
its wreck is still visible under water in Bounty Bay. The island was a good choice, it had an ample
supply of fresh water, had plenty of food and lots of arable land, and so the small group settled
down and set about the business of creating the next generation of Pitcairn islanders.
But life on the island was far from idyllic, it was actually a subsistence existence,
and a combination of drunkenness and jealousy led to a series of murders that took the lives of five
of the mutineers, including Fletcher Christian, and all of the Tahitian men who had come aboard
the Bounty. Of the four mutineers that were left, one more died of drunkenness and another one was
killed in self-defense, but the remaining two were able to re-establish order and they did
so through the Scriptures, using the Bible that had come aboard the Bounty. They used the Bible
to teach Christianity and literacy to the nine remaining women and 19 children, one of the
mutineers eventually died of an asthma attack so that when finally a ship arrived to visit them,
the American ship Topaz in 1808, only one of the original mutineers was still alive
his name was John Adams. And when the British Admiralty heard about it and came to pay a visit,
they found that Adams was the leader of a thriving community and so they forgave him his role on the
mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty and they held up Pitcairn Island as a symbol of Victorian virtue.
Adams died in 1829 and the only settlement on Pitcairn Island is still called Adams Town.
Pitcairn Island became an official British colony in 1838 and then in that year established their
first constitution which guaranteed the right to vote for all Pitcairn islanders over the age of
eighteen, and thus it became the first British Constitution to guarantee women's suffrage.
Still today it is the smallest population of any democracy in the world. By the 1850s,
the population had grown to around 200 and was exceeding the resources of the island,
they appealed to the British government for help and Britain offered them Norfolk Island, which
is in between New Zealand and Australia, and the entire population of Pitcairn Island was packed
off to Norfolk, but a number of the Pitcairn islanders decided that they wanted to go back,
and eventually another group followed them as well, and so life continued on Pitcairn Island.
In 2004, the island was rocked when seven men, fully one-third of the adult men on the island,
were charged by the British government with 33 counts of sexual abuse of children,
some of them going back decades. Apparently the abuse was the result of a long term culture,
partly maybe because of legal ambivalence, some derived from Tahitian culture, and some of it may
be the survival culture which had been there since the island was first settled which said
that you had to populate the island, but charges bitterly divided the island and many Islanders
chose to leave. In the end the men that were convicted had to be incarcerated on the island,
they built a jail for them because their services were still needed, especially to operate the long
boats which is the only way that the island has to get goods from ships to the island.
Life on Pitcairn is not easy, the island has no air service, the few supply ships are often
chased away by weather and it is difficult to get supply from off the island. Much of
the food supply is still provided by subsistence agriculture and everybody has to pitch in to keep
the island's small infrastructure running. The islanders do sell stamps, and coins and souvenirs,
but for the most part the operating cost of the island are subsidized by the British government.
The island has electricity for several hours a day that's provided by diesel generators, and during
that period they do have access to the Internet although the bandwidth is limited, but the only
person who is qualified to operate the electrical grid is now 67 years old. The island produces
honey and has one of the world's best population of disease-free bees, their honey is said to be a
favorite of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles. 80% of the island's revenue comes from tourism,
despite its remoteness and the difficulty in accessing the island, and the fact that because
of the abuse trials and a child below the age of 16 requires an entry clearance application
to even visit the island. The island survives on the edge, it only has a population of around
50. Young people tend to emigrate away because of the remoteness and the lack of opportunity.
As of 2014, the island only had a workforce of 31 and just seven of those are below the age of 40,
attempts to attract back former islanders and new settlers have so far been unsuccessful.
And so for one hour a day, the Sun shines on just one tiny remnant of the British Empire,
and in that Sun we see the juxtaposition between the past and the future, between
wilderness and civilization, between Paradise found and Paradise Lost, and the rich history
alone is enough reason for us to appreciate the world's smallest national jurisdiction.
I'm the History Guy. I hope you enjoy this addition to my series,
five minutes of history, short snippets of forgotten history five to ten minutes
long. If you did enjoy it then please click that thumbs up button that that's there on your left,
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