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The rum on his lips, boys!’
    We had always used rum for medicinal purposes.
    If a man needed his arm or leg sawn off, we got out the ship’s rum. If a man needed a tooth removed from his mouth or a native arrow removed from his arse, we turned to the rum.
    Only now that pair of drunkards John Mills and William McCoy looked all sheepish.
    ‘The rum is gone,’ McCoy bleated.
    ‘Gone?’ roared John Adams. ‘It can’t be gone! There must be rum!’
    But of course it could be gone. Because everything that we salvaged from our poor doomed ship would one day be gone. Including our lives. The rum was just the first thing to go.
    ‘Oh well,’ said John Adams, bending over me. ‘It can’t be helped. That bad tooth must come out tonight. Hold him tightly now.’
    I could feel the stinking breath of John Mills and William McCoy in my face.
    ‘This is going to hurt you,’ laughed Mills, ‘a lot more than it hurts us.’
    My scream rose to the starry sky.
    John Adams, our holy master and commander, was right. Pitcairn Island was a land of plenty. Fruit. Fish. Game. A rich soil and a moderate climate, like a summer’s afternoon in England that would go on for all eternity. Everything was there for the picking, the hunting, the fishing, the planting and the taking. Apart from two things.
    There was a shortage of women.
    And there was a shortage of rum.
    Not enough women.
    Not enough rum.
    And so, to the men who had sailed the
Bounty
, Pitcairn Island would forever be a land of famine and thirst.
    They held me down and pulled my tooth out by its blackened root. My cries of agony travelled across the endless expanse of the South Seas, but there was nobody to hear them.
    Nobody apart from the Tahitian men and women. They kept well back from our fire on the beach, moving in the shadows, and speaking quietly in their own language.

5
The Woman on the Cliff
    I watched the woman as she hunted for eggs.
    She was at the top of the white cliffs, peering down at a nest perched on some stumpy branches. I licked my lips at the thought of gull eggs for dinner.
    She was some distance from me. I lounged on the beach in a hammock strung between two palm trees, feeling quite exhausted from watching all her hard work.
    Even from here I could see the identity of the woman.
    Her name was Jenny.
    She was my wife.
    You might say that Jenny doesn’t sound like much of a name for a Tahitian wench. And of course you would be right.
    But, you see, some of those Tahitian names were real tongue twisters. The leader of the native men was called Tetahiti – try saying that with your teeth out. Another fellow was Tararu. Then there was Maimiti and Balhadi and Taurua among the women.
    It all got a bit much for uneducated seamen like me and my simple-minded shipmates. And that is why some of the Tahitians had proper Christian names that we had handed out with the buckets of glass beads.
    So you might see some half-naked devil shinning up a banana tree like a monkey with his tail on fire, and his name might be George. In fact we did have a Tahitian called George, and his climbing was extremely fine.
    Or you might see some dusky Tahitian beauty looking for gull eggs on the edge of a cliff, and her name might be Mary or Jane or Jenny.
    And so it was.
    As I lazed in my hammock, yawning and scratching my arse, the only thing that kept my eyes open was wondering how many gull eggs Jenny would find in that nest.
    The gull eggs on our island were large and light blue, speckled with marks of darker blue. We stuffed them into our greedy faces either soft boiled (the white of the egg showing the faintest shade of blue) or fried up in a dollop of fat and served with the day’s catch.
    Suddenly Jenny straightened, and that woke me up, for I suspected she had spied some fat eggs in the nest. She stood stock still at the top of the cliff, having a think.
    The drop of the cliff was quite shallow at the top. It sloped away gently for a bit, like a harmless little hill,