The trial of Steve Christian’s son Randy revealed the more perplexing aspects of the abuse on Pitcairn. His accuser testified to some of the most violent rapes, including one in which she was gagged and gang-raped by Randy, then 21, and his brother, Shawn, then 20. She was 11 at the time.

But her feelings for Randy grew conflicted. By age 14 she was infatuated. She wrote him in two love letters “that he made me feel special and that I really did like him,” she testified. Asked to explain her feelings toward a man who had assaulted her, she said, “I was confused. It was like he had two sides to him.… A great friendly guy and a person that did these awful things to me.”

Cruise-Ship Day

One morning, the mood changed abruptly. The court shuttered itself. The men transformed from criminal defendants into curio salesmen and tourist guides. Offshore, the Clipper Odyssey, loaded with 98 aging but eager American tourists, glimmered bright white. Trial or no trial, no day was bigger than Cruise-Ship Day. The defendants commanded the longboat and retrieved the visitors, who immediately began shopping for stamps and souvenirs and clambering all over the rock—to John Adams’s grave, to the site of Thursday October Christian’s house, and even to Fletcher Christian’s cave, high up on a rocky perch where, legend has it, the mutineer often went alone to brood.

For Burton Falk, 68, a retired Stanford man from Palm Desert, California, Pitcairn was a dream that almost didn’t come true. He had made two previous cruises, but on both trips bad weather yielded him no more than the frustration of a sighting and a decision that the sea was too rough to stop. “At last! At last! Thank God, at last!” Falk wrote in his diary.

The reporters looked on, amazed, and turned away questions about what generation they were. But they soon became as happy as the tourists. After weeks on the rock, civilization lay just offshore. They immediately decamped to rub their bare feet in the ship’s plush carpet and order tropical drinks from the bar. Talking to people who weren’t part of the extended Pitcairn family became an intellectual feast. Claire Harvey slipped off to the ladies’ room and flushed—and then flushed again and again, just to hear the sound of it.

The day ended in late afternoon at Big Fence, where, just out of the dock and back into his more practiced role as mayor and host, Steve Christian charbroiled yellowfin tuna for all the visitors. Then it was back to what had become Pitcairn’s new reality.

None of the men testified. With few other witnesses, the defense zeroed in on the antique quality of the charges. “You’re claiming to have a very good recollection over matters over 30 years ago, agree?” The women held fast.

The verdicts came down on October 24, with sentencing four days later. Jay Warren was acquitted of a single count of slipping his hand down a girl’s bikini bottom before she swam away.

The six other men were convicted on a grand total of 33 counts.

Simon Moore pronounced the sentences “incredibly lenient.” Rape carries life imprisonment under English law. Randy Christian drew the longest term—six years for four rapes.

The island’s postmaster and one of its beekeepers, Dennis Christian, pleaded guilty and received the most lenient sentence: 300 hours of community service. He had apologized to his victims before the trials. One found it “a healing event,” Judge Russell Johnson said. She felt no animosity and did not want him to go to prison. The judge praised Christian for his “courageous” decision to break ranks “with the generally confrontational approach adopted by others.” His case gave a glimpse of what might have been, without the bluster by two sides that refused to yield.