Stone axes, remains of sculptured stone pillars similar to those of Rapanui (Easter Island), and skeletons with a pearl-mussel beneath their head, have been found in the island, and show that, though it was uninhabited when discovered by Carteret in 1767, it had previously been occupied. Pitcairn was the name of the midshipman who first descried it from the mast-head. On 28th April 1789 a mutiny broke out on board the “Bounty,” then employed by the English Government in conveying young breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the West Indies. The commander, Lieutenant Bligh (q.v.), was set adrift in the launch with a number of his officers and crew, but managed to make his way to Kupang in Timor (Dutch Indies). The mutineers, twenty-five in number, at first all returned to Tahiti. Of those who chose to be landed on that island, six were condemned to death by court-martial in England, and three of these were ultimately executed (1792). Two years earlier (1790) the other party (consisting of Fletcher Christian, the leader of the mutiny, eight other Englishmen, six Polynesian men, and twelve Polynesian women) had taken possession of Pitcairn and burned the “Bounty.” The beautiful island, which might have been a paradise, was soon turned into a little hell. Treachery, drunkenness, madness, and murder fill the first years of its annals. By 1800 all the men were dead except Alexander Smith (afterwards known as John Adams), whose endeavours to train up the youthful generation thus left in his sole charge were crowned with success. An American vessel, the “Topaze,” under Mayhew Folger, discovered the strange colony in 1808, and again, by accident, it was visited by the “Briton,” Captain Sir F. Staines, and the “Tagus,” Captain Pipon, in 1817. On the death of John Adams, 29th March 1829, George Hunn Nobbs, who, after an adventurous life had settled at Pitcairn in 1828, was appointed pastor and chief magistrate of the settlement. Through fear of drought the islanders, now numbering 87 persons, removed in 1830 to Tahiti, but neither the climate nor the morals of the place were such as they approved, and in 1831 they returned to their lonely island. Hardly had they settled into their old ways when Joshua Hill, a strange adventurer, rather crazy than criminal, appeared among them; claiming to be under Government authority, he tyrannized over them till his removal by an English man-of-war in 1838. In 1856 the whole population of Pitcairn—60 married persons and 134 young men, women, and children—were landed on Norfolk Island (q.v.); and the little island was again left to the occupancy of goats and cattle. In 1858, however, two men, William and Moses Young, chose to return with their families to their old homes, and their example was afterwards followed by a few others.

See Shillibeer, The “Briton's" Voyage to Pitcairn’s Island, 1818; Beechey, Voyage to the Pacific, 1831; Sir John Barrow, History of the Mutiny of the “Bounty,” 1831; W. Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 1850; T. B. Murray, Pitcairn, 1854; Meinicke, Die Inset Pitcairn, 1858, and Die Inseln des Stillen Oceans, vol. ii., 1876; and Lady Belcher, The Mutineers of the "Bounty," 1870.

Soon after his return to Edinburgh, feeling the great want of the means of anatomical study, he importuned the town council to permit himself and certain of his medical friends to dissect the bodies of paupers in “Paul’s Work” unclaimed by their relations, and who therefore had hitherto been buried at the town’s expense. They offered to attend them gratis when ill, and after dissection to bury them at their own charges. Strangely enough this proposal was strongly opposed by the chief surgeons of the place, but ultimately the town council had the good sense to comply with Pitcairne’s request, and in this way he may be said to have the credit of laying the foundation of the great Edinburgh school of medicine.

Though, according to Boerhaave, Pitcairne had not completely emancipated himself from some of the fanciful theories prevalent in his age in the science of medicine, yet the main characteristic of his superiority appears to have been that, like Sydenham and the higher class of physicians in England at that time, he insisted on strict adherence to the Baconian method of attending chiefly to facts of experience and observation. “Nothing,” he remarks, “more hinders physic from being improved than the curiosity of searching into the natural causes of the effects of medicines. The business of men is to know the virtues of medicines, but to inquire whence they have that power is a superfluous amusement, since nature lies concealed. A physician ought therefore to apply himself to discover by experience the effects of medicines and diseases, and reduce his observations into maxims, and not needlessly fatigue himself by inquiring into their causes, which are neither possible nor necessary to be known. If all physicians would act thus we should not see physic divided into so many sects.”

Pitcairne’s medical opinions are chiefly contained in a volume of Dissertations which he published in 1701 (second and improved edition, 1713). In these he discusses the application of geometry to physic, the circulation of the blood in the smaller vessels, the difference in the quantity of the blood contained in the lungs of animals in the womb and of the same animals after birth, the motions by which food becomes fit to supply the blood, the question as to inventors in medicine (in which he repels the idea of certain medical discoveries of modern times having been known to the ancients, especially vindicating for Harvey the discovery of the circulation of the blood, and refuting the opinion of Dacier and others that it was known to Hippocrates), the cure of fevers by evacuating medicines, and the effects of acids and alkalis in medicine.

In addition to his great knowledge and rf skill as a physician, Pitcairne is understood to have -been also an accomplished mathematician. He was intimate with the two Gregorys, and is said to have made some improvement on the method of infinite series invented by David Gregory. His strong addiction to mathematics seems to have misled him, along with some other eminent men of his time, into the idea of applying its methods of reasoning to subjects for which they are quite unfitted: in Pitcairne’s case the attempt is made in one of his papers to adapt them to medicine.

He was also a very thorough classical scholar, and wrote Latin verses, occasionally with something more than mere imitative cleverness and skill. Some verses of his on the death of Lord Dundee were translated by Dryden, and, as one of the latest editors of Dryden’s poetry with perfect justice remarks, “the translation will not be thought so happy as the original.”

According to the representations which are left by his contemporaries of his personal bearing and character, he seems to have carried his great faculties very lightly. A strong man all round, with great animal spirits and jovial habits, somewhat contemptuous of the gravities and feeblosities around him, a loudly avowed Jacobite and Episcopalian, rather reckless in his jests and sarcasms, and spending a good deal of his time in clubs, public houses, and drinking jollities, he was evidently regarded with little favour and some suspicion by the sober and decent Presbyterian circles of Edinburgh. “Drunk twice a day,” according to the worthy, credulous, gossiping Wodrow (in one of his note books); “an unbeliever,” “much given to profane jests,” an “atheist,” according to others. These reports may be taken for what they are worth, which perhaps is not very much. What is certain is that he was repeatedly involved in violent quarrels with his medical brethren and others, and once or twice got into scrapes with the Government on account of his indiscreet political utterances. Among his friends, however, he was evidently well liked, and he is known to have acted with great kindhess and generosity to deserving men who needed his help. Ruddiman, the great Scottish scholar, for example, was rescued from a life of obscurity by his encouragement and assistance, and by no one was his memory more gratefully cherished.

“—Vale, lux Seotigenum, princepsque Medentum, Musarum columen deliciaeque, vale !”

are the concluding lines of a Latin epitaph by him on his venerated patron and friend, which still remains on Pitcairne’s monument in the Greyfriars churchyard. Mead too, appears never to have forgotten what he owed to his old teacher at Leyden. A son of Pitcairne’s had gone out in the rebellion of 1715, and, having been condemned to death was saved by the earnest interposition of Mead with Sir Robert Walpole. He pleaded, very artfully, that if Walpole’s health had been bettered by his skill, or if members of the royal family were preserved by his care, it was owing to the instruction he had received from Dr Pitcairne. Pitcairne died in October 1713. Among his other scholarly tastes he had been a great collector of books, and his library, which is understood to have been of considerable value, was, through the influence of Ruddiman, disposed of to Peter the Great of Russia.