With his death, Pitcairn’s permanent population stands at 51.

The cause was complications of a recent stroke, his daughter Jacqueline Christian said.

Though Mr. Christian was the world’s best-known contemporary Pitcairner, word of his death â€" reported in the July issue of The Pitcairn Miscellany, the island’s monthly newsletter â€" reached a broad audience only this week, when it appeared in newspapers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

“It takes awhile for news to get out,” Ms. Christian said by telephone from Pitcairn on Thursday.

Mr. Christian’s death is a window onto colonial history as played out in the South Pacific; onto a storied 18th-century mutiny, which lives on in books and motion pictures; and onto a 21st-century criminal case that made world headlines a decade ago â€" a case on which Mr. Christian took a public position, described in the news media as courageous, that led to his ostracism on the island on which he had lived his entire life.

Britain’s only remaining territory in the Pacific, the Pitcairn archipelago lies roughly equidistant between Peru and New Zealand, about 3,300 miles from each. It comprises four small islands: Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno. Only Pitcairn Island, named for the sailor who sighted it from a British ship in 1767, is inhabited.

Pitcairn, settled by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts in 1790, is a rocky speck of about two square miles. (Manhattan, by comparison, is about 24 square miles.) Most of its inhabitants are descended from the mutineers and the Tahitian women they brought with them.

Mr. Christian, who for his services to Pitcairn was named a Member of the British Empire in 1983, was long considered an elder statesman on the island. He served for years on the Island Council, the local governing body, and was a lay elder in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, to which most islanders belong.

For decades, starting in the mid-1950s, he operated radio station ZBP, Pitcairn’s official lifeline to the world. His duties included filing daily reports to the island’s administrative headquarters, formerly in Suva, on Fiji, and now in Wellington, New Zealand.

Mr. Christian filed his reports in Morse code, switching to voice communication only in the mid-1980s after Pitcairn acquired a radiotelephone.

Though Pitcairn today has some trappings of 21st-century technology â€" electricity 14 hours a day and a country code, .pn, on the Internet â€" it still maintains a striking degree of isolation. The island has no airstrip: it can be reached by flying to Tahiti and taking a once-a-week plane from there to Mangareva Island, in the Gambier Islands, followed by a two- to three-day sea voyage.

There are no automobiles on Pitcairn, and the island’s rocks and cliffs bear names redolent of long-ago tragedies: “Where Dan Fall,” “Where Minnie Off,” “Oh Dear.”

The supply ship comes quarterly, and is met by Pitcairners in aluminum longboats. Boarding the ship, they sell the local wares (stamps, baskets, honey) on which the island’s economy has long depended, along with the curios they carve from miro wood, which they harvest on Henderson Island. They do likewise with the few passenger ships that call at Pitcairn each year.

Conversing with outsiders, Pitcairners speak a New Zealand-inflected British English. Among themselves, they use an indigenous creole â€" an amalgam of Tahitian and late-18th-century English â€" that confounds outside ears: “Wut a way you?” (How are you?), “Fut you no bin larn me?” (Why didn’t you tell me?), “You se capsize and o-o!” (You’ll fall over and get hurt!)

For many years Mr. Christian also manned an unofficial but no less vital lifeline: his shortwave radio, which he used to converse with amateur radio operators around the globe. Over time â€" he officially retired in 2000 but continued his amateur broadcasting until just a few years ago â€" Mr. Christian reached more than 100,000 people.

As The Sunday Star-Times of Auckland wrote this week, “Tom Christian â€" along with the late King Hussein of Jordan â€" was the most popular contact in the ham radio world.”

On his occasional trips overseas, Mr. Christian lectured on Pitcairn’s history and daily life. To his enraptured listeners, he was, like the island itself, a living link between the 1700s and the present.

“They think we’ve all got sticks through our noses,” Mr. Christian, smiling, told The New York Times Magazine in 1991.