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The British government, which has subsidized the minuscule possession almost as long as it's been a colonial outpost, has in recent weeks made it clear to the islanders that it is no longer prepared to do so. At the beginning of this year, the authorities freed the basic necessities of island life -- electricity and freight, mainly -- from the price controls that made them affordable to an island people who have for years lived no more than a frugal subsistence.

But at the same time, Britain has also held out the vague promise that later this year it might begin work on building a tiny airstrip on the mid-oceanic outcrop. This would allow people who want to remain -- and who will pay for the privilege -- to have at least rudimentary contact with the outside world.

Currently it is only the occasional passing passenger liner and a thrice-annual cargo ship that deliver goods to the island. More often the passing ships that stop do so to take Pitcairners away. The ships take them to New Zealand and Australia for education, employment or, as emigrants, the chance of a better life. The population, which 50 years ago stood at more than 200, is now down to the smallest number that can properly be called a community. The remaining 44, defiant in their pride as British citizens and determined -- at least until very recently -- to cling to their precarious existence, have become one of the world's more charming curiosities. They are the stuff of Trivial Pursuit questions and gawking from the few tourists who are rich or adventurous enough to make it here.

Pitcairn, first seen by Europeans in 1767, was settled in 1790 after the infamous mutiny against Capt. William Bligh -- well known to fans of Charles Laughton and Marlon Brando, who starred in the two epic movies based on the story. Fletcher Christian, his eight fellow mutineers, six Tahitian men, 12 women and one child landed at Pitcairn in what is now Bounty Bay, burned the British man o' war to the waterline and settled. They remained undiscovered for 17 years: Smoke from their cooking fires was eventually spotted by an American whaling vessel, whose skipper on his return home broadcast the news of the settlement to an incredulous and fascinated outside world.

The romance of the Pitcairners' early story has never quite been matched by the realities of the islanders' insufferably dreary lives. The island itself is hopelessly cut off from outside contact -- it is 300 miles from the nearest inhabited atoll, it is well off the normal trans-Pacific shipping lanes, its coast is too rocky to allow many landings from most vessels able to heave-to offshore and its topography is too mountainous to allow enough agriculture for more than a few score inhabitants to live on. A century ago, with famine and privation depleting the colony's numbers drastically, the entire population decamped to the former prison colony of Norfolk Island, midway between Australia and New Zealand. Today many of the lineal descendants of Fletcher Christian and his men continue to live there, comfortably and in some prosperity.

But at the turn of the century a determined minority of Pitcairners decided to return to their tiny island, and -- with British colonial assistance -- to try to eke out an existence. It is these people -- most bearing the historic Bounty surnames of Christian, Young, Warren or Adams -- who are at the center of today's agonized discussions: Should they be encouraged to stay put on the island, and should the extraordinarily high cost of keeping them there be paid for by the British government? Or should the colony be closed down for good, and the people moved back to Norfolk, or elsewhere, with the tacit acceptance that some colonial anachronisms are simply too much of a luxury to afford?

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