Six Degrees of Separation 

Forewarning: The following essay has no religiously, spiritually, morally, socially or mentally redeeming content. It’s just a story. And not all that riveting, even. So you’ve been forewarned. 

With that disclaimer out of the way, allow me to share an introductory explanation from Wikipedia about the title. “Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other.”

Having introduced you to this fascinating concept, I’d now like to have you let it rest in the recesses of your mind while I tell you the story.

The 240-acre farm on which I grew up in Missouri had a small stream running through it. The stream had no name—at least, none that I’d ever heard spoken or seen on any map. At some points, “the creek,” as we called it, was about 30 feet wide. At other points, you could jump across it—if you got up a good run before you jumped. But during heavy spring or fall rains, the raging waters of the creek might spread out to 150 feet wide or more. 

Our farm had about 15 acres of scrub and forest through which the creek flowed. And in that wooded area the creek had two islands. Each was about 15 feet wide and probably 20 feet long. Small, in other words. My sisters named these two water-surrounded land masses Nantucket Island and Pitcairn Island. 

Our version of Nantucket Island was named after the much more famous Nantucket Island just off the coast of Massachusetts. It was there that the progenitor of the American Coffin family had settled after arriving from England in 1642. For the young Coffins living in Missouri in the 1950s, that east coast island was certainly a place of considerable significance and mystique. So we named one of our very own islands Nantucket.

Our fascination with Pitcairn Island, a volcanic outcrop in the South Pacific, was quite different from our love of Nantucket. In 1790, the sailors on board the ship the Bounty mutinied not long after having sailed from Tahiti en route back to England. They set adrift in a lifeboat their captain and a few sailors loyal to him. Fortunately, the castaways survived the ordeal.

Meanwhile, the mutineers sailed back to Tahiti, convinced a number of Tahitian woman to join them, then headed off to find a place so remote that they’d be unlikely to be tracked down and hanged. Pitcairn Island turned out to be the perfect place. 

A century and a half later, Hollywood fell in love with the story, making at least three big movies over several decades about the mutiny, successively starring such leading characters as Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson. 

But it wasn’t the sensationalism of the Hollywood productions that put Pitcairn on the map for our family. Rather it was the fact that in 1886 a Seventh-day Adventist missionary went to Pitcairn, and nearly all of the island’s inhabitants joined the Adventist Church. 

Moreover, because of the great evangelistic success there, when the Adventists built a mission ship to facilitate outreach in the South Pacific, they named it the Pitcairn. And several decades later we named one of our privately owned islands Pitcairn.

Ironically, the only two names we could come up with were taken from islands that were half way around the world from each other and were just about as different as one could imagine. Yet our version of the islands were only a few hundred feet apart along the no-name creek that flowed through our farm.

My three older sisters and I didn’t just name our islands. Rather, we set about to make them wonders of nature. With axes and shovels, vision and determination—as well as our bare hands—we removed all the wild underbrush from the islands and set about to convert each into its own paradise. 

There were lots of wild violets growing in the woods, so we carefully transplanted them to the terraces we’d lovingly built along the islands’ two-foot embankments going down to the creek. The finished flower-festooned product was lovely. In fact, to my 6-year-old mind, it looked more or less like I imagined the Garden of Eden—but on a much smaller scale, of course.

Then came several days of rainy weather. Really rainy. The creek spread out to its 150-foot width, and the water rose, burying both Nantucket and Pitcairn under a raging torrent. When we checked after the floodwaters receded, we no longer saw wild violets on terraced embankments, but only mud and debris and unsightly erosion. Neither our version of Nantucket nor our version of Pitcairn were ever restored to their short-lived former grandeur. The island beautification initiative was abandoned and new challenges were sought.

Granted that I’ve reported the untimely de-beautification of our private islands, it seems a good time to have you tuck into the recesses of your mind—along with the six-degrees-of-separation information you put there earlier—all I’ve just told you about the two islands on our creek. Now, with all that information appropriately sequestered . . . 

In 1976, my wife, Leonie, and I, arrived in Tamworth, New South Wales, Australia, where I took up my first assignment as a pastor. Someone in the church where I would be assisting passed the details of my arrival to the local newspaper. And even before I’d seen the article, I received a phone call from a woman who’d grown up on Norfolk Island, whose mother—who’d come from Pitcairn Island—was a Coffin. Was I related to the Pitcairn Coffins? she wanted to know. I hadn’t known that there were Coffins on Pitcairn.

I got such information from her as I could in order to see if I could establish the connection, if any. She said her mother was a descendant of Philip Cook Coffin, who had been shipwrecked in the Pacific, rescued and taken to Pitcairn, where he decided to stay for the rest of his life. I got my family back in the United States to see what they could find out. But no luck.

A decade+ later, about 1988, I went to New Zealand as guest speaker for a week of spiritual emphasis at Longburn College. One of the students there was from Pitcairn. She told me her mother was a Coffin—also a descendant of Philip Cook Coffin. Again I tried to find out how this ship-wrecked sailor fit into the Coffin family tree. Again, failure. (The Internet was in its embryonic stage back then, making genealogical research much more difficult than it is today). 

Well, as fate would have it, just a few weeks ago I was out for my morning walk (this was more than 35 years after my visit to New Zealand) when, for no discernible reason, I thought about Philip Cook Coffin. So I reached into my pocket, pulled out my cell phone and did a Google search as I walked along. My, how things have changed! It is indeed the information age! And the missing links in the Philip Cook Coffin mystery began to emerge right there as I trudged down the Seminole-Wekiva Trail. 

Philip Cook Coffin was born in Boston—into the Nantucket Coffin clan, I quickly learned. Apparently, he’d gone to sea at such a young age that there was little record of him that American Coffin genealogical researchers had come across. But on Pitcairn, he and his wife had 9 or 10 kids (depending on which information source you believe), several of them boys. So the Coffin name was quite ubiquitous for years on that small volcanic outcrop in the South Pacific.

If you’re still reading, I now invite you to retrieve from the recesses of your mind the six-degrees-of-separation hypothesis that you have stored there, as well as what I told you about the two private islands on our farm, as well the information about the Coffin family connection to Nantucket Island as well as the much more recent discovery about the Coffins on Pitcairn Island. 

The six-degrees-of-separation theory turns out to be more than true in the case of members of the Coffin family who resided on Nantucket and on Pitcairn. And it proved to be true when it came to connecting two seemingly disparate islands in two of the world’s major oceans, as well as two diminutive islands in the middle of the no-name creek that flowed through our family farm in Missouri. 

But it doesn’t stop there.

Perhaps equally significant, this story highlights the truth of the words of a song made popular at theme parks created by Walt Disney—a man who himself came from Missouri—that “It’s a Small World After All.”