The mayor who swapped Pickering for the Pitcairns – and wants you to join him

Few islands grip the British imagination as fiercely as Pitcairn. It is the beautiful but desolate rock in the Pacific where the mutineers from HMS Bounty hid, and where their descendants have been riven by infighting, tragedy and crime for hundreds of years.

These days, however, the islanders tend to have more prosaic preoccupations: Wi-Fi, for one. Of all the twists in Elon Musk’s career, saving Pitcairn might count among the most surprising. Simon Young, the Yorkshire-born mayor who became the first non-native-Pitcairner to hold the position when he was elected in 2022, says that thanks to Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet service which delivers high-speed connections to even the most remote places, the inhabitants of Pitcairn are enjoying a renewed optimism about the future.

“It has been a game changer for communications,” says Young, 59, speaking by Zoom – another recent luxury – from his office on Pitcairn, which takes 13 days to get to from the UK. “We’re joining the rest of the world.”

It makes a welcome change from all the bad news. Starlink means one could conceivably move to Pitcairn and work remotely, watch Netflix and keep in touch with relatives on the far side of the world. The results have been immediate.

“In the past month we have had five applications to the council from people intending on settling,” adds Young, who has been a permanent resident since 1999. “It’s unprecedented.”

Five applications might not sound like a mass migration, but it is a significant percentage given the total population is only 40 – the equivalent of five million people applying to join the UK in a single month. “Our demographics are ageing,” Young says: more than a third of the population is over 65. “Repopulation is at the top of our list of strategic objectives. We’ve changed legislation to encourage that and made land more available.”

This internet-boosted uptick in immigration is not the only good news. Young has also focused on making Pitcairn a haven for scientific research. As well as the inhabited Pitcairn there are three uninhabited neighbouring islands: Henderson, Ducie and Oeno, with plenty of ocean around them. In 2015 the British government voted to establish a marine reserve around them, then the largest in the world at 324,000 sq miles (it is still the third-largest). Young has followed up on that by establishing a science centre, which he hopes will encourage regular research trips.

“It’s absolutely pristine water, because we have never had any commercial fishing and we don’t have tourism developments,” he says. The progress was detailed in a recent article in New Scientist magazine, headlined “How the Infamous Pitcairn Island became a model of ocean conservation”.

Any step in the right direction is welcome. Young is understandably keen to paint an optimistic picture, but the sole British Overseas Territory in the Pacific is used to being in the news for the wrong reasons. For years, it has looked as though the population might be doomed, finally collapsing under demographic change and the weight of its tragic past.

While Polynesians lived on the islands for hundreds of years until the 16th century, Pitcairn was uninhabited by 1790 when it received the arrivals who have determined its modern history. Nine of the mutineers on HMS Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian, went ashore on Pitcairn with 17 native Tahitians and sank their vessel behind them. One can see why they were drawn to it; rising steeply from the sea, Pitcairn looks like a fortress as much as a haven. Living by farming and fishing, the mutineers successfully hid from expeditions sent to bring them to justice for nearly 20 years. The dramatisations of the story, in which Christian has been portrayed as a hero and played by Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson, have done little to show the grim reality of the Mutiny or the years afterwards, in which the Pitcairners quickly died of disease, murder and alcoholism.

It wasn’t until 1808 that their presence was documented, by which time only one of the original mutineers, John Adams, was still alive, living with nine women and 19 children. As Pitcairn became a regular stop for whaling vessels and was assimilated into the British Empire, its population grew, peaking at 233 in 1937. Many of the population are still descended from the original mutineers.

Yet Pitcairn has been long been dogged by stories of paedophilia and incest. In the 1950s, three cases of underage sex were reported. In the late 1990s, a police officer from Kent uncovered more allegations of abuse. Its annus horribilis came in 2004 when seven men, a third of the island’s male population, faced 55 charges related to child sexual abuse. All but one were found guilty and jailed, including the then mayor Steve Christian, a descendant of Fletcher’s. The jail had to be built especially. The impression, supported by other reports, was of an island with its own moral code and customs – nominally related to its Polynesian ancestry – where it was accepted that women over the age of 12 were fair game for sex.

Young says the island has moved on, even if the press hasn’t.

“Twenty years ago it was a different story, it was very fractured, which you would absolutely expect,” he says. “But we have changed legislation, we have an external police officer, we’ve had special training. It has taken a long time to get through it, but we have become stronger. It has been dealt with, it’s now considered historic. We’ve learnt from it, we didn’t sweep it under the carpet, we’ve moved on.”

The abuse cases were not the end of Pitcairn’s problems. It became an unlikely victim of Brexit, which saw its EU infrastructure funding dry up. The pandemic meant that the cruise ships which had occasionally visited stopped coming. Almost everything must be imported, which means it will never become economically self-sufficient, and depends on handouts from the British government: £5 million per year, at the last count, or around £125,000 per person.

“The bottom line is, unless we are Guyana and find oil off the coast, we are never going to be self-sufficient,” Young says. “It looks awful when you look at the population size, but there is no other way around that having to meet the needs of a British Overseas Territory.” He says two-thirds of the money goes on the Silver Supporter, Pitcairn’s dedicated supply ship, which ferries people and supplies from the French Polynesian island of Mangareva. Pitcairn remains shockingly remote. The sea journey from Mangareva, 300 miles west north-west of Pitcairn, takes 32 hours. Mangareva is a four hour flight from Tahiti, which is a five hour flight from Auckland, which is not especially near London itself.

Young hopes this remoteness, modified by a few modern conveniences, will lure newcomers to Pitcairn as it once did him. He grew up in Pickering, North Yorkshire. After 10 years in the air force, he went travelling and, in 1992, visited Pitcairn, fascinated like so many visitors by the history of the Bounty. He found something more beguiling, a place where humpback whales blow as they swim past, birds sing in the pine trees and a small, strange community makes do in difficult circumstances, driving quad bikes up and down the dusty paths and helping each other out. Young moved permanently with his American wife Shirley in 1999, and they became the first people without a Pitcairn connection to be naturalised. It was “not hard at all” to persuade her to come, as she is a “natural traveller”.

“What drew me was the historical interest, and the fact it was so isolated,” Young says. “There was this little community just surviving and clinging to the rock. It conjures up these romantic images.

“Pickering is just as beautiful, and the people in both are adaptable and resilient. I miss the beauty of the seasons, which we take for granted in the UK. Ice under your feet, autumn leaves falling, spring. I also miss the British sense of humour, and my Mum.” Even his sister has never visited him here.

Still, he says he wouldn’t change it for anything: “What I love about Pitcairn is the lifestyle. You have to accept that it’s extraordinarily isolated: there are limitations if we have a serious medical emergency and things like that.

“But it has a lot of qualities that have perhaps been lost in the outside world, where you come together for one another when you need to,” he adds. In a world of eight billion people, he hopes there are a handful for whom this life sounds appealing.

Because, satellite internet or not, Pitcairn is unlikely to resemble the rest of the world any time soon. That is just how the people there like it. The first thing Young watched after the Starlink was set up? Escape to the Country, of course.