The vanished societies of the Pacific: A tantalizing historical mystery.

I’m hard at work on my next deep-dive video, which is why I don’t have a lot of time to write articles right about now. The next video is a geographic history of the mutiny on the Bounty, the famous British sailing ship whose crew took her over in mid-ocean in April 1789 shortly after leaving Tahiti. That event is quite famous, particularly because of its depiction (multiple times) in popular movies during the 20th century. While doing the research for this video, I encountered a truly fascinating bit of history that’s every bit as tantalizing as any historical mystery you can think of. It’s not the main focus of the video—in fact it will only get a one-sentence mention in a video that will probably be more than 2½ hours in length—but I thought it interesting enough to write about here.

The mystery is this. In 1789, Fletcher Christian, the lead Bounty mutineer, nine others of the ship’s former crew and several Polynesians, mostly from Tahiti and Tubuai, took the stolen sailing ship in search of an uninhabited island where they could hide out from the authorities they presumed (correctly) were chasing them. As is well-known, they settled on Pitcairn Island, one of the most remote and inaccessible locations on planet Earth. There were no human inhabitants there when the Bounty crew landed in January 1790. However, as the mutineers built their small and ultimately ill-fated settlement, they noticed unmistakable clues, such as stone tools, tikis and graves, that indicated that humans had lived on Pitcairn Island at some time in the perhaps distant past. Who were these people? What happened to them? Did they leave the island voluntarily on boats, or did their community die off, or perhaps a bit of both? When did it happen, and why? To this day, more than 200 years after these discoveries, we have no conclusive answers to these questions.