Pitcairn's Progress

The great conch shell no longer blew to summon the people together, but from all over the island, leaving their goats and gardens behind, the people came flocking to watch the carpenters at work. Not since the days of the Bounty mutineers had Pitcairn Island made such an ado over a building. The island was getting a new schoolhouse, and with it, its first properly trained teacher.

It was a lot of progress for Pitcairn to swallow. For one thing, it would mean giving up the old schoolhouse that John Adams, last of the mutineers, had built some 150 years ago. There Adams first taught the islanders to read from the Bounty's Bible, and to write with the worn quill pens from Captain Bligh's desk.

Pitcairn's teachers have long been natives trained by Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries and hired at $20 to $40 a year. British inspectors who had seen them at work found that few of them had ever read a book outside school, knew little about teaching a course, could barely spell themselves. The islanders were fast forgetting their English, and were slipping into a droning dialect all their own.

In recent years, on the strength of all the books written about the mutiny on the Bounty, Pitcairn had found itself an island of world-wide interest. It had $130,000 in the bank, earned by selling stamps to collectors all over the world. What should be done with the money? The islanders asked Britain's High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, lanky Sir Leslie Brian Freeston. Said he: if Pitcairn Islanders would build a school, the British would promise to keep it going in perpetuity. And to show he meant it, his office placed an ad in New Zealand's Education Gazette for a new teacher to run it.

Last week on Pitcairn, the man who answered the ad--blond, 40-year-old Albert Wadkins Moverley--was pitching in with the work on the new schoolhouse. Teacher Moverley will have a few modern gadgets to help him with his 25 charges that John Adams would never have thought possible on Pitcairn. Among them: electricity, radios, and a 16-mm. movie projector.

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