Teehuteatuaonoa

Who is Teehuteatuaonoa?

Teehuteatuaonoa, known to the English-speaking world by her nickname "Jenny," was one of the Tahitian women who sailed with the Bounty mutineers to Pitcairn Island, arriving with the group in January 1790 as the consort of mutineer Isaac Martin. She lived through the settlement's violent and unstable first decades, during which nearly all the mutineers and several of the Tahitian men were killed. In 1817, she became the first of the founding generation to leave Pitcairn, eventually making her way back to Tahiti after twenty-nine years away, a journey that made her one of the most traveled women connected to the Bounty story. In the 1820s she gave detailed firsthand interviews about life and violence on Pitcairn to newspapermen who published her account in the Sydney Gazette and the Bengal Hurkaru; these interviews, conducted by men familiar with Tahitian language and custom, were largely forgotten until the historian H. E. Maude rediscovered them in the 1950s. Her testimony, including her statement that Fletcher Christian was killed by a Polynesian man during the settlement's internal conflict, offers an independent Indigenous perspective that stands apart from the frequently shifting accounts given over the years by John Adams, the last surviving English mutineer. Her account remains one of the very few surviving firsthand Tahitian records of Pitcairn's earliest and most turbulent years.

Sources: Island Studies Journal, "Teehuteatuaonoa aka 'Jenny', the most traveled woman on the Bounty" (2021) · Sydney Gazette (1826) and Bengal Hurkaru newspaper interviews with Teehuteatuaonoa · H. E. Maude, Bounty-settlement research, Australian National University