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Coconut Chaos: Pitcairn, mutiny and a seduction at sea, By Diana Souhami

Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski
Sunday 11 May 2008 00:00 BST
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In 1789 Fletcher Christian led a mutiny on the Bounty. He eventually took the ship to Pitcairn Island – stopping on the way to capture some women – where he established the small community that still exists there.

Diana Souhami's deliriously bonkers travelogue-come-adventure yarn reconsiders the mutiny, pondering the likelihood that Christian and Captain Bligh shared more than a love of the sea, while relating her own journey to Pitcairn island 215 years later with a bizarre upper-class eccentric called Lady Myre. Describing several kinds of seduction, including her own, she somehow avoids too much speculation about the men of Pitcairn and their sexual relations. (At the time of her stay several of them, some claiming direct descent from Fletcher Christian, were being tried for a range of sex offences against young girls.) Maybe it's for the best: the last thing Souhami would claim is that much of her story is actually true.

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