Just on two
and a quarter centuries ago, Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers headed
into the vast expanses of the mid-Pacific looking for a habitable island that
did not appear on any maps. That way, they figured, the Royal Navy wouldn’t
come looking for them there. They found such an island – it had earlier been
mapped but the coordinates were miles out – and settled there with their
Tahitian wives, the descendents now being the people of Pitcairn. It was not
until almost two decades had elapsed that an American whaler stumbled upon the
island, by which time there was but one surviving mutineer.
Times have
changed. We would like to think that there is no way a ship can just sail off
into oblivion nowadays, whether it stays afloat or sinks. We have all sorts of
gizmos and gadgets these days, from satellites above to robotic submersibles
below, that will enable us to locate it. HMAS
Sydney took 67 years to find, which goes to show how far technology has
progressed in that time.
