Bounty Bible Goes

Back to Pitcairn

AFTER many adventures and an ab sence of 110 years, the original Bounty Bible is on its way back to Pitcairn Island. That it is going back at all is due to a request by Mr. A. W.

Moverley, headmaster of Pitcairn Island school, to the Historical Society of Con necticut, USA.

In early January, the Bible had reached Suva. It was to be taken on to Pitcairn soon after by Mr. H. A. C. Dobbs, of the Western Pacific High Commission, who was due to make a routine official visit of the Island. The Bible was given a special locally-made display case of selected Fijian hardwood, and, as the original binding was worn to tatters, had been skilfully re-bound by the Public Records Office in London and brought, as nearlv as possible, to its original form.

A description of the re-binding is given in a portfolio which accompanies the Bible. The Bible itself will be placed in the top section of the display case, which has a plate-glass top, and the portfolio will be housed in a drawer below. Both compartments will be fitted with locks.

The title page and the first two or three pages of the Bible are missing, but the dedication shows that it was printed some time between 1761 and that day in December, 1787 when the Bounty set sail on her ill-fated voyage. It was probably used by. Captain Bligh in church ser vices on the vessel.

IT was taken ashore with the ship’s papers when the surviving mutineers burnt the Bounty at Pitcairn, and during the quarrelsome and riotous first years it must have lain unheeded some where on the island.

When Young and Adams were the only survivors, Young began to use the Bible to teach the women and children the rudiments of reading and writing. When he died, Adams became deeply religious and he modelled the small community on the precepts he found in the Bounty Bible.

In 1839, 21 years after the descendants of the mutineers had been discovered on Pitcairn, and the aged Adams had been pardoned, the American whaling ship Cyrus of Nantucket, called at the island.

Her carpenter, Levi Hayden, came ashore for a I few days and he became very friendly with John Adams, grandson of the original mutineer. When Hayden left, Adams gave him the Bounty Bible, and the record made by Hayden in pencil inside the cover can still be clearly read. It is headed “The Mutineer Bible of 1789,” and reads, “Presented by John Adams, grandson of the patriarch of Pit cairn Island, to Levi Hayden, February, 1839 and held by Peletiah Perit, President

of the American Seamen's Friends Society of New York, 1851, and at this date again in charge of Sidney Hayden of Windsor, Connecticut.” The record is signed by Levi Hayden.

The Bible was presented by the Hayden family to the Connecticut Historical Society, which in 1948 in response to Mr. A. W. Moverley’s request, handed it over to the British Ambassador at Washington to be returned to Pitcairn Island.

Mr. R. A. Spowart, of Suva, Fiji, who Is studying medicine at Otago University, New Zealand, visited Sydney during early February. He hopes eventually to com plete his medical studies in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Mr. R. Spowart, has been manager of the Dominion Fruit Co., Fiji, for the past 15 years.