Mauatua
Mauatua, also Maimiti or Isabella Christian, also known as Mainmast (c. 1764 – 19 September 1841) was a Tahitian tapa maker, who settled on Pitcairn Island with the Bounty mutineers. She married both Fletcher Christian and Ned Young, and had children with both men. Fine white tapa, which was her specialty, is held in the collections of the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum, amongst others.
Whilst the date of Mauatua’s birth is not historically recorded, in later life she claimed to have witnessed the arrival of James Cook in Tahiti in 1769. This information, combined with an estimate that she was 23 or 24 years old in 1788 when HMS Bounty arrived, suggests that she was born circa 1764. She was reputedly the daughter of a chief, or at least was born in a high social group. The suffix -atua means ‘for god/gods’ and indicates a position within nobility.
Fletcher Christian
Mauatua left Tahiti with Fletcher Christian and the mutineers; before they reached Pitcairn Island, they attempted to begin a new settlement at Tubuai. She was the oldest woman to travel with the mutineers, and became a matriarch of the new society that was ultimately founded by them on Pitcairn Island. She married Fletcher Christian, and they had two sons and a daughter. Their sons were Thursday October and Charles Christian; their daughter was called Mary Anne and she was born after her father was murdered on 20 September 1793. After Christian’s death, Mauatua became the partner of Edward Young, with whom she had three children: Edward, Polly, and Dorothea.
Along with the other Polynesian women, Mauatua brought the practice of beating tapa cloth to Pitcairn. They adapted the process to reflect the natural materials they had access to. During her lifetime, she gave tapa that she had made as gifts, including a bale of the cloth to Frances Heywood, wife of naval officer and mutineer, Peter Heywood. From surviving examples and contemporary observations, it appears that Mauatua specialised in making a fine white tapa.
In 1831 Mauatua was part of the group who returned to Tahiti, landing there, according to historian Henry Maude, on 23 March 1831. Many of the group were killed by infectious diseases they had no immunity to – this included her son Thursday October. She returned to Pitcairn Island the same year. According to her descendant, Glyn Christian, Mauatua was instrumental in having the right to vote for women on Pitcairn made into law in 1838.
Mauatua died on 19 September 1841 after catching influenza. After her death, Teraura remained as the only survivor of the original settlers and the island’s oldest inhabitant.
Legacy
Many of the families living on Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island can trace their ancestry back to Mauatua.
Three examples of tapa cloth made by Mauatua are held in the collections of the British Museum and at Kew Gardens in London. Examples made by her daughters Polly and Dorothea (Dolly) are found in collections of the Turnbull Library in New Zealand and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, respectively. Cloth made by her great-granddaughter, Helena Beatrice Young, is also held at both the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Mauatua’s craft as a tapa beater inspires the work of her descendant Jean Clarkson, whose work is held in the collection of Te Papa.
In popular culture
In the 1984 film The Bounty, Mauatua was played by Tevaite Vernette. In the film, the romance between her and Christian is portrayed as a cause of the mutiny. In the 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty she was played by Tarita Teriipaia, who received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Mamo Clark acted in the role.
Mauatua is the subject of several books, including a biography of her and Fletcher Christian by her great-great-great-great-grandson Glyn Christian. He also wrote a work of historical fiction based on her life. A novelisation of her life, and that of the other Polynesian women to live on Pitcairn, entitled Transit of Venus, was written by another descendant, Rowan Metcalfe, and published posthumously.
The artist Pauline Thompson, who was also a descendant, created several paintings inspired by Mauatua’s life and those of other Pitcairn Islander women.
The story of the Bounty mutiny is well known. Fletcher Christian’s mutineers set Captain William Bligh and others adrift in a ship’s boat. Bligh sailed some 5000 kilometres to safety; the mutineers returned to Tahiti before making their way to isolated and uninhabited Pitcairn Island. But what of the Tahitian women who joined the Bounty at Tahiti? Their powerful and compelling story is told in Transit of Venus. Mauatua and her friends and relatives speak directly to us in beautiful and startlingly perceptive ways as they move away from their homeland and pass into the feverish intensity of drunkenness, betrayal and murder that mark the early years on Pitcairn. In so doing they assert their place in a story that has fascinated readers for generations.
Get your copy here : https://www.amazon.com.au/Transit-Venus-Rowan-Metcalfe-ebook/dp/B00ER83N0K
This is the heroic and bloody, untold story of Mauatua, Tahitian lover and wife of BOUNTY mutineer Fletcher Christian and of what she and 11 other women endured to survive on Pitcairn Island, the mutineers’ secret refuge for almost twenty years. It is a story of Ma’ohi women succeeding where white men failed, women who then became first in the world to have the vote, in 1838, 90 years before the women of Britain. To secure and then protect two of womanhood’s most precious rights, the right to bear children and the right of those children to a life of loving security, Mauatua had to endure and sometimes motivate unspeakable brutality. In response to the drunkenness, madness and physical cruelty of their European lovers, Mauatua and the other Ma’ohi women mutinied against their BOUNTY mutineer-kidnappers. They used Christian’s revolutionary idea of voting to agree the only course to ensure the safe future of their children – an island with as few men as possible. But once they resorted to such extreme measures there were secrets that must never be told, confidences that must never be broken. A new history had to be written. When Pitcairn Island is rediscovered in 1808, a living reminder of Mauatua’s past life on Tahiti challenges her certainties and everything she has done to protect the island’s children. Thirty years later she led the Pitcairn community to ratifying two revolutionary concepts. Women had their right to vote written into law, ninety years before the UK. And education was to be compulsory for girls as well as boys. Eventually Mauatua is forced to disclose the truth about Pitcairn’s two greatest mysteries. Who did plan the massacres? What did happen to Fletcher Christian? By telling her secrets, Mauatua/Mrs Christian subjects herself to the judgment and outrage of those she fought hardest to protect, her own children.
Credit : Bounty Museum