Kingston is a Georgian town of limestone on the south coast of Norfolk Island, an Australian territory in the South Pacific between New Zealand and New Caledonia, built by the convicts held in it in the harshest penal settlement of the empire and handed in 1856 to the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, who were moved here from Pitcairn and still live on the island, and it is walked along Quality Row, read in a cemetery above the surf and swum beside in a lagoon closed by reef. The settlement was a prison twice, from 1788 and again from 1825 to 1855, when the worst of the convicts of Sydney were sent here to be broken, and the men built the town that held them, the gaol whose walls stand, the boat shed on the foreshore, the stone bridges and the eleven Georgian houses of Quality Row along the ridge for the officers, laid out deliberately above and apart from the men below; the cemetery on the point says plainly how each person died, drowned, hanged, taken by a whale, carried off by typhoid, and the graves of the mutineers' descendants lie beside them. East Polynesians reached this bay centuries before the British and left a marae, a ceremonial platform, buried in the dunes until the archaeologists dug it out.
Emily Bay beside the town is closed off by a coral reef that holds it flat while the open swell breaks in a white line further out, the island's swimming place, and the whaleboats sit hauled up on the grass beside the convict boat shed at Slaughter Bay, still used to unload the supply ship through the surf, since the island has no harbour. The islanders speak Norf'k, eighteenth-century sailors' English tangled with Tahitian, carried here from Pitcairn, and humpbacks pass from July to October with their blows visible from the high ground above the town, the sooty terns returning with them to nest on the islets offshore. Kingston is a prison built by its prisoners, and the mutineers' children inherited it.