Pitcairn Island

IslandsAdamstown,Pitcairn Islands

Fragile nature — stay on the trail, leave no trace.

The least populous territory on Earth, 35 people on a cliff-walled Pacific rock, most descended from the Bounty mutineers who burned their ship here.

September·Peaking now

Jun–Oct

The Milky Way core stands highest on dark winter nights. Westerly fronts raise the roughest swell and coolest sea, near 22°C, so landings are chanciest.

Year-round The cliffs, the banyan-and-breadfruit forest and St Paul's Pool are here every month, and the petroglyphs at Down Rope do not move. What turns is the sea: the swell that decides whether a boat can land, and the whales that come and go.

Pitcairn Island is the least populous territory on Earth, a rock of basalt cliffs five kilometres across in the South Pacific, halfway between New Zealand and Peru, home to about 35 people, most of them descended from the mutineers of HMS Bounty, who burned their ship in the bay below the village in 1790, and it is reached by a supply ship from Mangareva four times a year, with every arrival met by the whole community at the jetty. Bounty Bay is the only place a boat can land on an island with no harbour, and the aluminium longboats come out through the surf to take passengers off the ship; the village of Adamstown stands on the slope above with its church, its museum holding the Bounty's anchor and its store, and the paths climb from it through banyan, breadfruit and rose apple to the ridgeline at 347 metres, where the whole island lies below and there is nothing beyond it but ocean. Every 23 January the islanders build a model of the Bounty, tow it out and set it alight off the landing, a public holiday re-enacting the night that stranded their ancestors, and they speak Pitkern, a creole grown from eighteenth-century sailors' English and Tahitian. St Paul's Pool is the swim, a tidal basin walled in by basalt spires on the eastern coast, filled by the swell coming over the rocks, and the longboats circle the island under cliffs and sea stacks that take the open-ocean swell with no reef to soften it. Down Rope, the only sandy beach, lies at the foot of a cliff on the southeast coast, and the rock above it carries petroglyphs cut by the Polynesians who lived here centuries before the Bounty and left. Through the austral winter humpbacks gather in the water below the island to breed, seen from the clifftop above Bounty Bay, and the whole island group is a dark-sky sanctuary with no settlement glowing within 600 kilometres. Pitcairn is a rock where a mutiny ended, and the mutineers' great-grandchildren still meet the boat.

Worth knowing

Good to know

St Paul's Pool is only swimmable when the sea is down — the ocean pushes in through a channel in the basalt, and on a big day the basin surges instead of sitting still.
Whale season is also swell season — the winter fronts that bring the humpbacks in also make the roughest landings, while the calm warm months are the empty ones.
Both Magellanic Clouds circle the pole and never set here — at 25° south these two satellites of the Milky Way stay above the horizon every clear night, plainly visible in dark this deep.

Things to do

1
Swim in St Paul's Pool
St Paul's Pool is a tidal basin walled in by basalt spires. It is deep enough to swim in and clear enough to watch reef fish moving over the rock, while the ocean swell bursts through a channel behind you. The track in drops steadily through the bush and ends in a stairway across the boulders, almost at the water's edge.
2
Meet the entire population at Bounty Bay
Every arrival is met by the whole community at the jetty in Bounty Bay, the only place a boat can land on an island with no harbour. It is not a staged welcome: with about 35 people living here, everyone really does turn out, and the same longboat crew that carried you in swings straight into unloading the cargo.
3
Walk the forest tracks up to the ridge
Paths climb from Adamstown through banyan, breadfruit and rose apple to the ridgeline 347 metres up, where the whole island lies below you and there is nothing beyond it but ocean. The interior is steep and quiet even by Pitcairn's standards, and islanders pick fruit along the same tracks.
4
Circle the island by longboat
Ride out in the aluminium longboats and follow the coast, where basalt cliffs and detached sea stacks take the open-ocean swell with no reef to soften it. From the water you see the thing that kept the mutineers hidden for eighteen years: no harbour, no beach, just rock rising out of deep blue.
5
Climb down to the carvings at Down Rope
Pitcairn's only sandy beach lies at the foot of a cliff on the southeast coast, and the rock above it carries petroglyphs cut by the Polynesians who lived here long before the Bounty. The descent is steep — the place is named for the rope that once got people down — and you go with an islander who knows the line.
6
Watch for humpbacks from the cliff edge
Through the austral winter, humpback whales gather in the water below the island to breed, and the clifftop above Bounty Bay turns into a lookout. Mothers and calves come close enough to the rock that you can watch a blow rise, drift and disappear without leaving the path.