Word: pitcairners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...starving or drowning, Captain Bligh and his sailors made a voyage of 4,000 miles back to England, sent a frigate to punish the mutineers. When the frigate reached Tahiti, only a few of the mutineers were there to be hanged. The rest had sailed the Bounty to Pitcairn Island where they had beached and burned her and where their descendants still live...
Last year Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought Mutiny on the Bounty by James Norman Hall & Charles Nordhoff (TIME, Oct. 17, 1932). Last spring production started with Charles Laughton for Bligh, Clark Gable and Franchot Tone for sailors, San Miguel Island, 35 miles off Santa Barbara, for Pitcairn Island and a $15,000 barge with $50,000 worth of equipment for the Bounty. As unfortunate as her predecessor, the cinema Bounty last month broke a towrope, drifted out to sea with a watchman on board, remained lost for three days...
...Pitcairn Islanders are Seventh Day Adventists and only a few backsliders eat meat. Every family head owns his own plot of ground, contributes a tithe of his produce to the community and seven days' labor a year to public works. Equal suffrage was instituted long before any European nation had it. School attendance is compulsory. Each family has a brand with which it marks all its possessions, animate and inanimate. The local government consists of a council of seven headed by a magistrate. There is no such thing as money, and only occasional mail from the outside world...
Although the islanders read English, Dr. Shapiro found the spoken tongue a mixture of degenerate English, Tahitian, and Pitcairn-coined words. He heard children say, "see ahse scauws zsegoin out da big ship" ("see the boats going out to the big ship"); and, "pfwat youall comee do diffy daffy?" ("why are you coming to do this and that?"). A few words, such as "tai-tai" (tasteless), are retained from the Tahitian although long since obsolete on Tahiti itself...
...That Pitcairn Island (a British possession) has come to be one of the most famed dots on the world map is largely due to two writers, Charles Bernard Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, who live in Tahiti with their native wives and dusky children. In Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea and Pitcairn's Island, U. S. Authors Nordhoff and Hall effectively told the whole story of the Bounty and its tangled sequel (TIME, Aug. 20 et ante...