Word: pitcairns
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From the blue and surf-ringed isolation of French-owned Tahiti, Author James Norman Hall (Pitcairn's Island, Mutiny on the Bounty) decided that the world's dirty, teeming and fear-ridden old nests of civilization needed a word of cheer. After noting, with obvious satisfaction, that French Oceania was free of the ships, planes and men which cluttered it up during World War II, he sent TIME two items of news about its people...
...when. Scholars have ransacked Easter Island, photographed its relics, cross-questioned its modern natives (there are less than 500)-aii to no avail. It has never seemed possible that the people of a small, barren island 1,100 miles from the nearest inhabited land (Pitcairn Island) should have carved several hundred weighty stone ornaments and lugged them up & over the rim of a volcano. Because of these stone heads, Easter Island has remained one of anthropology's most cherished mysteries...
...Pitcairn's teachers have long been natives trained by Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries and hired at $20 to $40 a year. British inspectors who had seen them at work found that few of them had ever read a book outside school, knew little about teaching a course, could barely spell themselves. The islanders were fast forgetting their English, and were slipping into a droning dialect all their...
...recent years, on the strength of all the books written about the mutiny on the Bounty, Pitcairn had found itself an island of world-wide interest. It had $130,000 in the bank, earned by selling stamps to collectors all over the world. What should be done with the money? The islanders asked Britain's High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, lanky Sir Leslie Brian Freeston. Said he: if Pitcairn Islanders would build a school, the British would promise to keep it going in perpetuity. And to show he meant it, his office placed an ad in New Zealand...
Last week on Pitcairn, the man who answered the ad-blond, 40-year-old Albert Wadkins Moverley-was pitching in with the work on the new schoolhouse. Teacher Moverley will have a few modern gadgets to help him with his 25 charges that John Adams would never have thought possible on Pitcairn. Among them: electricity, radios, and a 16-mm. movie projector...