MY KNOWLEDGE of Captain Bligh is limited to Sir Anthony Hopkins’s melodramatic portayal of the man in the film Mutiny on the Bounty. But I am sure that Bligh cannot have been any more menacing than the flotilla of lawyers, judges and police officers who have just effected the prosecution of six of the mutineers’ distant descendants on Pitcairn Island on charges of rape and under-age sex. These convictions will almost certainly spell the end of the Pitcairn community, which at present numbers just 47.

The trial has cost British taxpayers £3.5 million, but it is not the expense that bothers me so much as our moral imperialism. Rape, of course, is utterly reprehensible in any culture, but what of the other charges. It may suit us in Britain to have an age of consent of 16, but what right do we have to apply our own standards, retrospectively, to a remote society on the other side of the earth? It is clear that until the trials were announced many of the island’s population were unaware that they were supposed to conform to British laws. We expect the islanders to obey our rules, but we do not grant them the same rights: the accused were tried without a jury, the verdict being given by three judges from New Zealand.

I would feel uncomfortable living in a community where, as several Pitcairn women have claimed, it is considered normal for grown men to have sex with 12-year-old girls. Yet anthropological history would suggest that it is we in advanced industrial societies who are unusual in insisting that sexual intercourse be delayed until well after sexual maturity. You would not expect Bushmen to have an age of consent and neither, until the Marriage Act of 1753 outlawed the marriage of child brides in the Fleet chapel, did we. Our Government has an obsession with preserving “diversity”, by which it seems to mean languages and headscarves. Yet a genuine example of cultural diversity is treated as perversion and is stamped out with the full force of the human rights charter.

The story of Pitcairn is the story of St Kilda all over again. Pitcairners were a people happily minding their own business until a British policewoman was dispatched to help with “community policing” in 1999. Our missionary zeal in modernising this engaging and in many ways primitive society will not end until the island has been evacuated and its inhabitants rehoused on a grim council estate in Britain.

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