American Demons

Øen af Mytteristerne - The Island of the Mutineers

"There are many kings in the world, but only one Michelangelo." Pietro Aretino

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The Pitcairn Islands are an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. The island is best known as the home of the descendants of the participants of the Mutiny on the Bounty and the Tahitians who accompanied them.

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On an Admiralty Island, Texas Thunderbolt frightened descendants of Chinese who had been stranded a hundred years earlier.

"Not only artifacts prove the origin. The language of the new tribe also preserves words from another world. The people walk naked like their neighbors. What distinguishes them seems to set them apart from others in a frightening way. No descendant of the castaways has ever seen civilization and yet it is in everyone."

Legendary lost

A man kills another man and is observed doing so. As this happens on a ship, escape is not an option. The perpetrator calmly awaits his release on the next best Øen af Mytteristerne - Island of the Mutineers. A monolith jutting out of the boiling ocean is to become his prison. The murderous surf thwarts the success of the landing. The commander, a young German-American named Berman von Pechstein, suspects that he has failed at Pitcairn. The island, initially thought to be deserted, is named after the European who "discovered" it. The first positioning by Philipp Carteret in 1767 was so inaccurate that the island was not found again and again.

The first positioning by Philipp Carteret in 1767 was so inaccurate that the island was not found again and again. Fletcher Christian, leader of the Bounty mutineers, relied on this in 1789/90. The crew wandered the seas for two months until they arrived the lost place. They found it uninhabited, but not free of traces of settlement. Today it is assumed that an ecocide in the 16th century led to the sudden depopulation of Pitcairn.

Pechstein sails on to Norfolk Island, an offshoot of the first British colony in Australia. Since 1788, criminals have been concentrated there under the supervision of Philip Gidley King. 

Over dinner at King's house, Pechstein met the whaler and seal butcher Mayhew Folger. In 1808, Folger managed to discover Pitcairn once again and meet the only white survivor of a series of murders, John Adams, who had become a believer to the point of madness at blood feasts, in the company of his loved ones. Folger shows off a pocket watch whose signature proves that it once belonged to the legendary missing Captain Jean-François de Galaup. Born a commoner, Galaup fought for the renegade colonists in the American War of Independence and was a fond memory of George Washington. When Louis XVI sent Galaup to Oceania in 1785 with the sister frigates Astrolabe and Boussole, America's first diplomat and Washington's closest confidant, the botanist and ornithologist Texas Thunderbolt, strengthened the scientific staff. Thunderbolt boarded the Astrolabe (under the command of Paul Antoine Fleuriot de Langle) in Brest. His biographer Margarete Mason classifies Thunderbolt as second in command. The expedition reached Port Jackson (Sydney) in March 1788. Thunderbolt resigned after a scandal in the captain's cabin. Galaup and Fleuriot set sail for New Caledonia. From then on, the world remained without news of the venture. The expedition vanished mysteriously, writes Mason.

Les deux navires disparaissent - In 1789, Thunderbolt crossed the strait between Australia and New Guinea, named after Luis Váez de Torres. On an Admiralty Island, he frightened descendants of Chinese who had been stranded a hundred years earlier.

"Not only artifacts prove the origin. The language of the new tribe also preserves words from another world. The people walk naked like their neighbors. What distinguishes them seems to set them apart from others in a frightening way. No descendant of the castaways has ever seen civilization and yet it is in everyone."

In the third year of the French Revolution, Thunderbolt recalled the lost Galaup expedition in Paris. The Marquis de La Fayette, also a veteran of the American War of Independence, immediately put him in charge of the search party. 

Thunderbolt hesitated, the French capital was the most exciting place on the planet right now. Apprentices were playing cultural revolution. They carried heads on pikes through the alleys. The king had become a hostage in a ghost train of ideas, he had been asked to join the National Assembly. Thunderbolt joined the Feuillants. He observed the royal artillery from Marseille that had just been directed against the castle. The Swiss Guards, who had been sworn to defend the monarch in a centuries-old covenant of loyalty, fraternized with the excited people as a precaution. The Swiss grenadiers had their bearskin caps pulled off in feigned good-nature. Suddenly the fun was over. A gunfight started. Thunderbolt walked over dead bodies. He slipped off his dramatic burgundy jacket.

Red was the color of a Swiss detachment. To be mistaken for a Swiss now meant being dragged over stones by a volcanic, sulphurous mob. The combatants refused pardon. They appeared as furies in the bloody theater. Such losers, who crawled before them to elicit pity, trampled them to the ground with dedication. They stabbed anyone who tried to restrict them from above. Later it was said that the Swiss Guards had opened fire in the Tuileries.