Book Review of The Lonely Island

The Lonely Island is about some sailors who are under a brutish tyrannical captain who abuses them for no good reason. They decide that they've had enough and they mutiny, sending their captain and the officers who wouldn't join them in a life boat with a minimal supply of food and water. They sail back to Tahiti where they had been coming from when they mutinied and get supplies before they sail off in search of a place to live out their lives since they cannot return home.

They land on an island that had had people on it who had died out leaving food that they had planted to grow wild, so the fifteen men, five of whom are married to native women decide to settle down. Six of the men are natives who had come with the mutineers and they kind of over time became the servants of some of the white men two of which were scoundrels. The leader of the mutiny, Fletcher Christian, is consumed by guilt over leading the other men astray, so he takes to sitting up in a cave that overlooks the ocean and reads a Bible that someone had brought off of the ship before they burned it, and he for the first time believes in it.

Meanwhile things aren't going so good down in the colony. One of the men named Quintal decides to steal the wife of one of the native men after his wife dies while gathering eggs, and the man isn't too jazzed about that, although his wife doesn't mind. So he runs off and starts plotting revenge and sowing discord among the other native men until they decide to kill the white men. Quintal hears about this and has his new wife and one of the other women kill the two ringleaders of the plot. They have no problem with this, and the deed is soon done.

The four remaining native men return soon after that, and things settle into more or less a normal rhythm but underneath, bitterness and resentment are building up again, for Quintal, and his friend McCoy are mercilessly beating and abusing their servants, until they decide that they just won't take it. So they run away again this time taking guns and ammunition with them and they murder all except four of the men, including Christian who was teaching one of the other men what he had learned while reading the Bible.

Young, the man he was teaching was one of the men who managed not to get killed and he, and Adams, and Quintal, and McCoy are the only ones left alive with all of the women and about six or seven children. Unfortunately McCoy figures out how to make whiskey, and he and Quintal drink themselves to death, leaving Adams and Young with several widows and even more children on their hands. Fortunately Young had taken what Christian taught him to heart, and he taught Adams and everyone else what he himself learned before he dies from the strenuous life of living in Pitcairn (the island) coupled with asthma.

The rest of the story is about how Adams single handedly raised that whole pack of kids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and how God blessed his huge family and himself for many, many generations.

Inashoe.com