Trouble in Paradise: Uncovering the Dark Secrets of Britain’s Most Remote Island

Only one person dissented, and that was Len Brown. Len was concerned because, as he saw it, women were hopeless in the longboats. In his quaintly accented English, he told Moore, ‘The island will be doomed, Si-mon.’

Never before in his long career had Moore had ‘a more profound feeling of the difficulty and significance of the decision we had to take’. It was not until February 2002 that he finally made up his mind. The prosecution would go ahead. He informed the community in a videotaped message that reached the island in May. Moore said he would not be laying charges, however, until the vexed issue of a trials venue had been resolved.

Faced with an indefinite period of limbo, the Pitcairners decided it was time to fight back.

In August 2002 the New Zealand Herald ran an article across two pages, quoting three ‘former Pitcairn Islanders’ living in Auckland. The three said that their cousins on the island were frustrated by the media coverage, which in their opinion was based exclusively on information from the British. One of the interviewees, ‘Alex’, who revealed that he had been questioned by police, suggested that Britain was trying to rid itself of its financial obligations. He also told the Herald that, on Pitcairn, teenage sex was common and even some ten-year-olds were sexually active. His companion, ‘Sarah’, said that Britain was partly to blame for this, as it had failed to provide the Pitcairners with guidance. The third interviewee, ‘Mary’, claimed the islanders could not be judged as if they lived in New Zealand. ‘Different countries have their own way of life,’ she explained.

This article, presenting the child abuse case as a David and Goliath contest, set the tone for the way it was reported until the trials two years later. Almost every news report reproduced the Pitcairners’ claims of a culture of under-age sex, and a plot by Britain to shut down the island. It was the mutineers’ descendants versus the big bad colonial power—and the fact that the alleged victims were Pitcairners too, with an equally impeccable lineage, was rarely mentioned.

From mid-2002 the islanders were able to use email, and they joined the propaganda campaign, corresponding regularly with their supporters and with journalists whom they believed to be sympathetic. They also bombarded Richard Fell, who had replaced Martin Williams as the British Governor, with angry emails.

Meanwhile, the other parties were quiet. Simon Moore was unwilling to comment until charges were laid, British officials were cautious, and police were not talking. Neither were the complainants, of course. As for those Pitcairners who, as it later turned out, were horrified by the men’s alleged behaviour, such as Pawl Warren and Brenda Christian, they were keeping their own counsel.

That left the accused men and their families in a position to monopolise the debate, and to assert, without fear of contradiction, that Britain was getting itself into a lather about youthful canoodling behind the coconut palms. The men, who had not yet been named, made public statements about the case, with few outsiders aware that they had their own agenda. ‘Alex’, for instance, was Brian Young, later to be charged with serious sexual offences. ‘Sarah’ was his Norwegian-born wife, Kari, who had lived with him for 15 years on Pitcairn.

Steve Christian did not bother with pseudonyms. Instead, he exploited his position as mayor to attack the British government and the prosecution. He did not disclose—and few people outside the island realised—that he was himself directly affected by the legal action. Another man in his situation might have stepped down. Not Steve. Already in October 2000, shortly after being interviewed by police, he had flown to London for a gathering of leaders of the British Overseas Territories. Baroness Scotland was among seven British ministers who attended the meeting, which included drinks parties and official receptions. Steve also travelled to Chicago in his official capacity, and in May 2002, soon after Simon Moore’s announcement that he planned to lay charges, gave a speech to a United Nations seminar in Fiji on decolonisation. Steve inveighed against the delays in the criminal case, calling them ‘an abuse of process’, and criticised Britain for neglecting the island and its infrastructure. ‘Must we hijack a yacht, or be invaded like the Falklands, to get attention?’ he inquired theatrically.

On his way home via New Zealand, Steve was due to see Richard Fell, a courteous, unflappable man who had become the islanders’ principal bête noire. When Fell refused to allow him to bring a lawyer, the meeting was cancelled. Steve called it ‘yet another example of the pattern of high-handed behaviour exhibited by the Governor’s office’.

He did not seem worried about the impending prosecution. ‘I think Steve thought that nothing was going to touch him,’ says one British official.

A key figure behind the scenes was Leon Salt. In theory, the Commissioner was just a British employee; in practice, he was enormously powerful. He ordered supplies for the islanders, and arranged for them to be delivered. He organised passenger berths on container ships. All mail to and from Pitcairn passed through Salt’s hands, as did email messages, via a central server in his Auckland office.

Salt—tall and rangy, with long, curly hair and a big moustache—had Pitcairn blood; he was well educated, somewhat alternative in his lifestyle. He owned a smallholding north of Auckland and had a passion for vintage cars. He was fiercely attached to the island and its inhabitants, having spent three years teaching on Pitcairn before becoming Commissioner in 1995. He knew the individuals, their relationships, their feuds and affairs. He knew precisely how the tiny, squabbling community functioned.

While some locals saw the softly spoken Salt as their champion, others claim that he favoured certain families, particularly Steve Christian’s. If Steve wanted an item loaded onto the next ship leaving Auckland, it would get on, some islanders say, at the expense of goods belonging to others. Leon Salt was good friends with Steve, who called him ‘Boss’, and with Steve on Pitcairn and Salt in Auckland, it is said, the pair ran the island between them. In 2002 they deported an English journalist, Ben Fogle, who had arrived by yacht. Salt, who was visiting, spat at Fogle’s feet and would not permit him beyond The Landing. ‘We don’t want your sort spying on us,’ he told him.

When Operation Unique started, Salt was helpful. Police worked out of his office, at his invitation, and he unearthed documents from his archives for them. He was a fund of useful information, most of which he carried in his head. When police voyaged to Pitcairn to interview suspects, the Commissioner went too, and stayed with them at the Lodge. Salt, say British officials, was level-headed about the island and ‘didn’t buy into the myth’. Almost everyone, including Simon Moore, regarded him as a thoroughly good bloke.

Those who know him say he was revolted by the child abuse allegations. But he felt it was ‘inappropriate to apply a UK solution to a Pitcairn problem’, he told the Governor. Salt wrote, ‘The UK has ignored law and order on Pitcairn for 200 years … It would seem perhaps incongruous that UK justice is to be imposed in all its might after all this time, particularly given the fact that reported serious crime has escaped investigation in the past.’

Salt supported an amnesty and, astonishing as it seems, he even told police, according to Peter George, ‘I’ll get the men to plead guilty—provided there’s an amnesty first.’

After that avenue was closed, his attitude changed. Detectives asked Salt to sign an affidavit releasing documents from his office; if the affair got to court, he would have to give evidence for the Crown. He refused, and withdrew all co-operation from the inquiry, telling prosecutors that if they proceeded as they intended, history would ‘judge them very poorly’.

The men and their families, unwilling to see the case go to trial, pressed, instead, for a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’, based on the body that probed human rights abuses in apartheid-era South Africa. The idea of transposing truth and reconciliation to Pitcairn had initially appealed to major players, including Simon Moore, but had to be abandoned once it was decreed by Baroness Scotland, Britain’s Overseas Territories Minister, that the conventional legal process had to take its course. Still, Moore remained hopeful that the healing principles it embodied could be integrated into that process.

New Zealand is a pioneer of ‘restorative justice’, which offers criminals who plead guilty the opportunity to express remorse, apologise to their victims and make reparations; when they then go before a court to be sentenced, they can expect a significantly reduced penalty. Moore believed that this approach would enable most of the Pitcairn men to avoid prison. Christine Gordon, his deputy, consulted restorative justice experts, and researched a model employed in a Canadian – Indian community where generational child sexual abuse had been exposed.