Pitcairn Island

IslandsAdamstown, Pitcairn Islands

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

August·Peaking now

Jun–Oct

Winter and spring, the headline: humpbacks of sub-stock F2 breed and calve under the cliffs (peak in August) and the Milky Way core stands highest on dark winter nights, though 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 stand every day, and no settlement glows nearby, so the sky is dark whenever it clears; what turns is the sea, the swell and the whales.

Pitcairn is the least populous territory on Earth: about 35 people live on 4.6 square kilometres of volcanic rock, and most of them descend from the men who mutinied on HMS Bounty. Fletcher Christian and eight fellow mutineers landed in January 1790 with six Tahitian men, eleven women and a baby girl, then burned the ship in the bay below the village so nobody could leave and no passing sail would see her. The island was charted in the wrong place, and the outside world took eighteen years to find them. Polynesians had lived here centuries earlier and vanished, leaving carvings on the cliff at Down Rope. Today Pitcairn is Britain's last territory in the Pacific, and its hardest problem is arithmetic — the population peaked at 233 in 1937 and has drained away to New Zealand ever since, so the government now offers free land to anyone willing to settle. A supply ship crosses from Mangareva in French Polynesia, roughly 32 hours at sea, about two dozen times a year, and there is no harbour at the end of it: an aluminium longboat waits for the right breaker and rides it through a gap in the rocks into Bounty Bay. If the swell is wrong, the landing is called off with the island in plain sight. Ashore, it is steeper and greener than its size suggests — banyan and breadfruit climb to a ridge 347 metres up, and black cliffs drop into deep water. On the east coast, St Paul's Pool sits behind a wall of basalt spires, the ocean bursting through a channel into water clear enough to swim in. The sea around the island is one of the planet's largest marine reserves, and no town glows anywhere against its sky. Each austral winter, humpback whales come in under the cliffs to breed.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The sea has the last word, not the timetable — the longboats can only run the gap into Bounty Bay when the swell allows, and a landing can be called off with the island in sight.
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.
Walk down to St Paul's Pool in the morning — the track drops steadily through the bush to a stairway over the boulders, and the pool reads clearest before the early afternoon.
The whole island group is a Dark Sky Sanctuary — no town glows anywhere against the horizon, so on a moonless night the Milky Way reads as clear here as almost anywhere on Earth.

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.