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WHEN THE MUTINEERS FROM HMS BOUNTY LANDED ON PITCAIRN ISLAND, THEY FOUND NO PEOPLE- JUST A DESOLATE LAND MARKED BY THE RELICS OF A VANISHED SOCIETY. THE STORY OF THAT LOST CIVILIZATION IS JUST NOW BEING LEARNED. AND IT'S FAR MORE FRIGHTENING THAN ANY TALE OF CAPTAIN BLIGH. MANY CENTURIES AGO, immigrants came to a fertile land blessed with apparently inexhaustible natural resources. It lacked a few raw materials that were important for industry, but they were readily obtained by overseas trade. For a time, the land and its neighbors prospered, and their people multiplied.
But the population of the rich land grew too large for even its abundant resources. As its forests were stripped and its soils eroded, the land could no longer nourish even its own population, let alone grow food for export. Then, as trade declined, the imported raw materials began to run short. A kaleidoscopically changing succession of local military leaders overthrew established political institutions, and civil war spread. To survive, the starving populace turned to cannibalism. The fate of their former overseas trading partners was even worse: deprived of the imports on which they had depended, they ravaged their own environments until no one was left alive.
We don't know yet if this grim sequence of events represents our own future, but we do know that the scenario has already played itself out on three tropical Pacific islands. One of them, Pitcairn, is famous as the island to which the mutineers from HMS Bounty fled in 1790. Unpeopled and very remote, Pitcairn offered a hiding place for Fletcher Christian and his mates from the vengeful British Navy. But although Pitcairn was indeed uninhabited when they landed, the mutineers found evidence that it wasn't always so: temple platforms, petroglyphs, and stone tools gave mute testimony to Pitcairn's former Polynesian settlers. Farther east, an even more remote island named Henderson remains uninhabited to this day, yet it too bears abundant marks of a former Polynesian population. What happened to those original Pitcairn Islanders and to their vanished cousins on Henderson?
The romance and mystery of the Bounty, retold in so many books and films, are matched by the earlier tales of these two populations and their mysterious ends. Basic information about...