Passes

Another 'Pitcairner’

Death of Aunt Naomi Quintal

Picturesque 93 Years

From Our Own Correspondent

Norfolk Island, Oct. 2.

AT half past four on Sunday morning, September 27, there died, in the house of her only surviving son, Captain Fletcher Quintal, old Aunt Naomi Quintal, oldest of the five last Pitcairners—aged 93 picturesque years.

She was the daughter of George Hunn Nobbs, an Irishman and exofficer of the Chilean Navy, who threw in his lot a hundred years ago, with the then recently discovered refugees from the stolen King’s ship, Bounty— which they had sunk off the little lost isle of Pitcairn, marooning themselves with their Tahitian wives, prisoners of the sea for ever.

Nobbs, whose own name was an assumed one, and his birth a romantic mystery, married Sarah Christian, daughter of Fletcher Christian, first lieutenant of the Bounty—who led the mutiny against his overbearing commander, and who paid the price of his rebellion in long years of grief and despair within his island paradise and died and was buried there.

With their family, Mr. and Mrs.

Nobbs (how odd and prosaic that sounds) made the great migration to Norfolk Island in 1856, and Naomi, then a handsome, well-grown girl of 19, never set foot upon another shore.

She married Caleb Quintal, grandson of Ordinary Seaman Quintal, sometime of the Bounty, and had five children, of whom only two —Captain Fletcher Quintal, who fought for Britain both in the Boar War and the Great War, and a daughter, Mrs. Mallett, who lives in Sydney—survive her.

But there is still a sister, “Aunt Alice” Hebblethwaite, now resident in Auckland; and there are many, many relatives and descendants of varying degrees of kinship. In fact it might be said that the whole island community is one big family. For so many easy, dreamy generations they lived apart from all the world that inter-marriage was imposed upon them, and they are related, and related again, beyond hope of disentanglement. === Exports from the British Solomon Islands for 1929-30 were valued at £353,441, as compared with £480,831 for the previous 12 months. ===