ISBN : 9782296113039
ISLAND FEVER AND MUTINOUS MOOD ON PITCAIRN
Michel Pérez
There is no other place like Pitcairn in the world. It is inhabited by the
smallest human community on the planet — a tiny population of just forty-seven
souls — and is home to a unique Anglo-Polynesian culture and the first Creole
language in the Pacific: Pitkern, an odd mixture of 18th century West Country
dialectal English and archaic Tahitian. It is also a model of splendid isolation, lying
roughly 5,000 km from New Zealand and about the same distance from Chile, and
the journey to her closest neighbour — Mangareva in the Gambier archipelago —
takes about four or five days by chartered yacht.
The island itself is a large, rugged rock jutting spectacularly out of the
Pacific, and the steep volcanic shoreline explains the absence of any safe anchorage,
let alone a harbour. As for the mountainous interior, it prevents the building of any
airstrip or facilities for any type of aircraft,