Pitcairn—An Inter-Ocean

Post Office

IT is not generally known that Pitcairn Island, famed for 100 years as the romantic and isolated home of the “Bounty” mutineers and their descendants, has became a kind of inter-ocean post office.

Pitcairn is almost exactly half-way be tween New Zealand and the Panama Canal —10 days from New Zealand and 11 days from Panama. It now has become a regular procedure for liners running be tween New Zealand and Europe, via Panama, to call at Pitcairn. The outgoing liners drop a mailbag there, addressed to New Zealand. A couple of days later a liner, coming from Panama, calls at Pit cairn, picks up the mailbag and takes it to New Zealand: and it, in its turn, drops a mailbag which the next liner going the other way picks up and takes back to Europe. In this manner, letters written aboard the ships can be sent back to the countries they have just left, and it is a service much appreciated by passengers.

The liners make only a brief call, lying about a mile from the rocky and forbidding shore, and passengers are seldom, if ever, allowed to land. The Pitcairners come out in a whaleboat, handing up one bag and receiving another. Whenever the weather permits, the Pitcairners send fruit aboard, either for sale to the ship itself, or for transport to the New Zealand market.