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Trying to stay afloat | page 1, 2
One young islander has to be trained (by an officer temporarily posted from London) to perform police, customs and immigration duties. A teacher has to offer the compulsory education to the half-dozen island youngsters. And once each child has reached high school age, he or she has to be shipped to New Zealand, taught and given board and lodging -- all at the expense of the someone, somewhere, who pays the Pitcairn-bound taxes. And that, most certainly, is not the Pitcairn islanders, for the simple reason that they do not earn any appreciable money on which any taxes could be levied. No one on the island works -- beyond a half-dozen able-bodied men who occasionally repair the rutted mud roads or drive one of the community's aluminum longboats out to greet passing ships. The only official island revenue comes from the sale of postage stamps; the only income for the islanders comes from the sale of carved Bounty models, sharks and T-shirts to sympathetic tourists. The former sum is barely sufficient to pay for the official running of the island; the latter allows the islanders to buy basic goods, beyond what they grow and farm. Twice in recent years, schemes that might have proved their salvation have failed. The first came 10 years ago when an eccentric coal-mining millionaire named Smiley Ratliffe, from Frog Level, Va., offered to buy Henderson Island -- part of the four-island colony, about 60 miles from Pitcairn -- so that he could start a community of like-minded Virginians. For a 99-year lease, he offered the British government $5 million, a small airstrip on Henderson and a ferry that would allow Pitcairners easy access. For the first time, in other words, the islanders would have real contact with the outside world. But the World Wildlife Fund objected, claiming that Henderson Island sported a flightless rail, a fruit-eating pigeon and a uniquely rare species of snail. The British agreed and turned down Ratliffe's offer. To this day, the islanders smart at the memory: "So close to some kind of prosperity," snorted Mavis Warren in an interview, "and then it all failed because of one wretched snail. What do we care about a snail, for heaven's sake?" The other scheme, which is still being pursued, is the drying of island-harvested fruit -- mainly pineapple -- and the marketing of it in New Zealand. The much-vaunted Bounty brand of Pitcairn fruit, which was supposedly grown in "the world's cleanest air," soon fell victim to rumors of contamination from the French nuclear testing site at Mururoa Atoll, 500 miles west, and well out of the track of the prevailing southeasterly trade winds. If that were not enough, the British government's sudden removal of the island's generous electricity subsidy now seems likely to doom the project altogether. Tom Christian, the great-great-great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, and one of the most publicly determined to keep the tiny community together, said that by raising the electricity costs 150 percent, as has just been announced, "our one chance of making a go of things seems to have been condemned." "Now what is going to happen to us?" he asks. "If we cannot pay our way, if we cannot survive without help, and that help is taken away -- what will happen to the community?" The question is all the more pertinent now, considering the current discussions about building a 2,000-foot gravel airstrip on the eastern side of the island -- a project that would be underwritten almost wholly by the British government. Soldiers, like the British Royal Engineers who built the island jetty 15 years ago, will probably construct the airfield as part of a training exercise. If built, it could provide a link with the outside for those willing to pay for the privilege of remaining on Pitcairn. There could be regular connections with Mangareva, 300 miles away in the French possession of the Gambier Group. And it is this French connection that seems to offer -- heresy though this will sound to most British imperialists -- the best long-term solution for Pitcairn's current dilemma. For if the airport were built, if connections to the Gambiers were established and if Pitcairn and its three sister islands were then to be handed over, sold or leased to the French colonial authorities, then some logic and perhaps cost-effectiveness would settle on this remote corner of the South Pacific. The French have vast territories in the region: For Paris to add four more tiny islands and a few thousand more square miles of sea to their possessions would be a trivial new responsibility. The Pitcairn islanders, who have seen all too often in recent years the appearance of French warships and aircraft in their territorial water and airspace, have long been hostile to the idea of a French-run Pitcairn. But now that the choice is being offered to them so very bluntly -- pay up or prepare to leave -- the French choice may turn out to be the only one that makes sense and will permit this curious relic of mid-ocean history to survive at all.
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