Saturday 10/3/09 

We have been motoring away in calm windless seas. The sun intermittently burns through the fog, illuminating the sea a brilliant blue. It has been warming up as we move south, so much to the point we had happy hour in the cockpit. We were joined by a dozen or so playful porpoise, rising and diving all about the ship, timing their short breaths as their backs broke the surface in the swift flow of their transit. We(eric i should say) did a noon sight and did his best to explain as he went along. I understand only the vagaries of the concept, and he said it is a practice that has to be learned through repetition. He has been giving us a bit of a history lesson everyday-today it was on Sir John Franklin's fatal journey through the northwest passage.Yesterday he told us all about easter and pitcairn islands. He spoke of how the polynesians wiped out the environment on easter island building their strange monoliths, and how later their population was decimated by the dutch capturing them for slave work in the guano mines of peru and chile. There was a great market for this fossilized bird poop, and it was being shipped back to europe as fertilizer. It was terrible labor to work in these mines and much like coal, it was surely a death sentence due to inhalation of this dry and dusty excrement.  He gave us a brief history of the mutiny on the bounty and how captain Bligh completed what is now considered one of the greatest navigational feats in history, during which he piloted a small whale boat from tahiti through the polynesian islands, across the australian barrier reef and on to the dutch province of timor, a 4000 mile journey.  Bligh was later made an admiral and became the governor of tasmania. The reason the mutiny had occurred in the first place was because the sailors were having such a good time with the island women of tahiti, whose cultural boundaries on sex were far removed than that of the strict victorian ones. They would do anything for a piece of iron, and the sailors pretty soon were dismantling the ship for every last nail. When Bligh tried to put a stop to this, they set him afloat with his few remaining loyal followers in a small whale boat. The mutineers took what women they could and sailed the Bounty to Pitcairn island where they sunk the ship. They started a small community there and were never found, and consequently, were never brought to justice. Eric told us about his own experience amongst these strange pacific islands and how culturally unique they are from the rest of the modern world. There is a population of about 300 people on the island. Apparently they retain some of the old cultural values passed down from the horny men of the Bounty, and until yesterday I had never heard of the relatively famous sex scandal on Pitcairn island that occurred within the recent years. Pitcairn is under the protectional supervision of New Zealand, and a dozen or so men were brought to the courts for crimes of pedefilia. In their own defense, they claimed it as part of a cultural ritual passed on from the mutineers in which all the girls were deflowered at age 12. Some of them were actually acquitted, and those convicted were "punished" by incarceration on the island, which in itself was a farce as they were free to come and go from the jail as they pleased. They basically were put up in accommodations that were far nicer than any of the residences on the rest of the island! It sounded like such a bizarre place.