The Bounty ̓s Primogeniture and the Thursday-Friday Conundrum

Abstract

This is a biography of an obscure individual born of the ashes of the H.M.A.S. Bounty on the remote, inaccessible, and uninhabited Pitcairn Island in 1790. Thursday October Christian is best known to amateur and professional historians, philatelists, and others interested in the romance and adventure of the South Seas. He was eighteen years old when he first had contact with the outside world with the arrival of the American sealer Mayhew Folger of the Topazin 1808. In the forty years of his life he would meet, greet, and otherwise interact with sealers, whalers, naval officers, traders, and others calling on Pitcairn. This article synthesizes these disparate encounters while exploring a name change conundrum revolving around the protagonist.Thursday October Christian was an ordinary person whose life story now lingers in disparate reports, notices, and accounts of archived and otherwise rare documents.