The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
Caroline Alexander
The bestselling author of The Endurance reveals the startling truth behind the legend of the Mutiny on the Bounty – the most famous sea story of all time.More than two centuries have passed since Fletcher Christian mutinied against Lt. Bligh on a small armed transport vessel called Bounty. Why the details of this obscure adventure at the end of the world remain vivid and enthralling is as intriguing as the truth behind the legend. Caroline Alexander focusses on the court martial of the ten mutineers captured in Tahiti and brought to justice in Portsmouth. Each figure emerges as a richly drawn character caught up in a drama that may well end on the gallows. With enormous scholarship and exquisitely drawn characters, The Bounty is a tour de force.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
The Bounty
The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
Caroline Alexander
TO SMOKEY
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ua900d155-b7c1-534b-a7c9-5e7770abd314)
Title Page (#ua4e52288-e070-5de9-9baa-b177b6db47e1)
Dedication (#u56a7a4d8-c08d-522d-8d9f-fa985237e125)
Ship’s Company (#u0dc8ce5a-ba10-5392-b012-974d92d80aa7)
Author’s Note (#ue1b9eb38-1a30-51f1-9d2a-48b413c67f74)
PRELUDE (#u61f7baca-df0b-5e94-bfc3-20185ce993a6)
PANDORA (#u5e384970-2ddf-5d27-b3a4-95bc06d8482a)
BOUNTY (#u7ab6f18c-41d3-596c-944c-642289cc176e)
VOYAGE OUT (#u8650769f-7f45-573b-9de6-554d7778daa0)
TAHITI (#ucee6dd6d-b709-5290-a77b-9014a29a9e65)
MUTINY (#litres_trial_promo)
RETURN (#litres_trial_promo)
PORTSMOUTH (#litres_trial_promo)
COURT-MARTIAL (#litres_trial_promo)
DEFENCE (#litres_trial_promo)
SENTENCE (#litres_trial_promo)
JUDGEMENT (#litres_trial_promo)
LATITUDE 25° S, LONGITUDE 130° W (#litres_trial_promo)
HOME IS THE SAILOR (#litres_trial_promo)
A Note on Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Caroline Alexander (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
SHIP’S COMPANY (#ulink_86e2ed7e-7593-5649-9996-a9153988e265)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_2a6920ff-18b0-5ef4-a6b7-a6c8784da91d)
Every attempt has been made to use and quote from firsthand source material wherever available. In such quotations, the original and often erratic spelling, punctuation, grammar and typographical conventions (e.g., liberal use of uppercase initial letters) have been retained. In the case of John Fryer’s ‘Narrative’ alone, punctuation has on occasion been added for more straightforward reading. Similarly, a few abbreviations common in the era (‘wr.’ for ‘weather’, ‘larbd.’ for ‘larboard’) but now unfamiliar have been spelled out so as not to cause unnecessary stumbling over sense.
Personal names are particularly variable, and I have attempted to use the form the individual in question used where this can be ascertained, rather than to rely on Bounty story conventions. In the case of the ten mutineers brought to court-martial, this is not difficult to establish, as each of the ten defendants left a deposition signed with his signature: thus ‘Burkett’, not ‘Burkitt’; ‘Byrn’, not ‘Byrne’; although the alternate forms occur frequently in the language of second parties. In other cases, problematic names were established by correspondence, wills or similar personal documentation. Midshipman John Hallett’s father signed his correspondence ‘Hallett’ – not, as Bligh and others wrote, ‘Hallet’ – and so forth. There is strong evidence to suggest that Matthew Quintal, one of the mutineers, regarded himself as Matthew ‘Quintrell’, but here deference is made to the spelling adopted by his present-day descendants. Geographical places are referred to by their names at the time, with the modern equivalent in parentheses on first mention: Coupang (Kupang), Endeavour Strait (Torres Strait).
A nautical day began and ended at noon, with the noon sighting, not at midnight as in civil time. Thus the mutiny on the Bounty occurred on the morning of 28 April 1789, in both sea and civil time; some four hours later, however, it was April 29 by nautical reckoning. There is occasional awkwardness when the two systems collide, as when a returning ship comes into port, and a running commentary begun at sea resumes on land. No attempt has been made to convert sea to civil time; dates of events recorded at sea are given as stated in the ship’s log.
All mileage figures for distances at sea are given in nautical miles. A nautical mile consisted at the time of 6,116 feet, or one degree of latitude; a statute mile consists of 5,280 feet. All temperatures cited in the ship’s log are in degrees Fahrenheit.
One pound sterling (£1) comprised twenty shillings (20s.); a guinea equalled £1 plus IS. The valuation of currency of this time can be gauged by certain standard-of-living indicators. Fletcher Christian’s mother expected to live comfortably on 40 guineas a year. A post-captain of a first-rate ship received £28 os. od. (28 pounds, o shillings, o pence) a month in pay; a lieutenant, £7 os. od. (7 pounds, o shillings, o pence); an able seaman, £1 4s. od. (1 pound, 4 shillings, o pence) – less deductions!
PRELUDE (#ulink_ca12efda-f6d3-5414-9b27-e95eacd0421b)
Spithead, winter 1787
His small vessel pitching in the squally winter sea, a young British naval lieutenant waited restlessly to embark upon the most important and daunting voyage of his still young but highly promising career. William Bligh, aged thirty-three, had been selected by His Majesty’s government to collect breadfruit plants from the South Pacific island of Tahiti and to transport them to the plantations of the West Indies. Like most of the Pacific, Tahiti – Otaheite – was little known; in all the centuries of maritime travel, fewer than a dozen European ships had anchored in her waters. Bligh himself had been on one of these early voyages, ten years previously, when he had sailed under the command of the great Captain Cook. Now he was to lead his own expedition in a single small vessel called Bounty.
With his ship mustered and provisioned for eighteen months, Bligh had anxiously been awaiting the Admiralty’s final orders, which would allow him to sail, since his arrival at Spithead in early November. A journey of some sixteen thousand miles lay ahead, including a passage around Cape Horn, some of the most tempestuous sailing in the world. Any further delay, Bligh knew, would ensure that he approached the Horn at the height of its worst weather. By the time the orders arrived in late November, the weather at Spithead itself had also deteriorated to the extent that Bligh had been able to advance no further than the Isle of Wight, from where he wrote a frustrated letter to his uncle-in-law and mentor, Duncan Campbell.
‘If there is any punishment that ought to be inflicted on a set of Men for neglect I am sure it ought on the Admiralty,’ he wrote irascibly on 10 December 1787, ‘for my three weeks detention at this place during a fine fair wind which carried all outward bound ships dear of the channel but me, who wanted it most.’
Nearly two weeks later, he had retreated back to Spithead, still riding out bad weather.
‘It is impossible to say what may be the result,’ Bligh wrote to Campbell, his anxiety mounting. ‘I shall endeavor to get round [the Horn]; but with heavy Gales, should it be accompanied with sleet & snow my people will not be able to stand it…Indeed I feel my voyage a very arduous one, and have only to hope in return that whatever the event may be my poor little Family may be provided for. I have this comfort,’ he continued with some complacency, ‘that my health is good and I know of nothing that can scarce happen but I have some resource for – My little Ship is in the best of order and my Men & officers all good & feel happy under my directions.’
At last, on 23 December 1787, the Bounty departed England and after a rough passage arrived at Santa Cruz, in Tenerife. Here, fresh provisions were acquired and repairs made, for the ship had been mauled by severe storms.
‘The first sea that struck us carryed away all my spare yards and some spars,’ Bligh reported, writing again to Campbell; ‘– the second broke the Boats chocks & stove them & I was buryed in the Sea with my poor little crew…’
Despite the exasperating delay of his departure, the tumultuous passage and the untold miles that still lay ahead, Bligh’s spirits were now high – manifestly higher than when he had first set out. On 17 February 1788, off Tenerife, he took advantage of a passing British whaler, the Queen of London, to drop a line to Sir Joseph Banks, his patron and the man most responsible for the breadfruit venture.
‘I am happy and satisfyed in my little Ship and we are now fit to go round half a score of worlds,’ Bligh wrote, ‘both Men & Officers tractable and well disposed & cheerfulness & content in the countenance of every one. I am sure nothing is even more conducive to health. – I have no cause to inflict punishments for I have no offenders and every thing turns out to my most sanguine expectations.’
‘My Officers and Young Gentlemen are all tractable and well disposed,’ he continued in the same vein to Campbell, ‘and we now understand each other so well that we shall remain so the whole voyage…’
Bligh fully expected these to be his last communications on the outward voyage. But monstrous weather off Cape Horn surpassed even his worst expectations. After battling contrary storms and gales for a full month, he conceded defeat and reversed his course for the Cape of Good Hope. He would approach Tahiti by way of the Indian Ocean and Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), a detour that would add well over ten thousand miles to his original voyage.
‘I arrived here yesterday,’ he wrote to Campbell on 25 May from the southernmost tip of Africa, ‘after experiencing the worst of weather off Cape Horn for 30 Days…I thought I had seen the worst of every thing that could be met with at Sea, yet I have never seen such violent winds or such mountainous Seas.’ A Dutch ship, he could not resist adding, had also arrived at the Cape with thirty men having died on board and many more gravely ill; Bligh had brought his entire company through, safe and sound.
The Bounty passed a month at the Cape recovering, and was ready to sail at the end of June. A still arduous journey lay ahead but Bligh’s confidence was now much greater than when he had embarked; indeed, in this respect he had shown himself to be the ideal commander, one whose courage, spirits and enthusiasm were rallied, not daunted, by difficulties and delays. Along with his ship and men, he had weathered the worst travails he could reasonably expect to face.
The long-anticipated silence followed; but when over a year later it was suddenly broken, Bligh’s correspondence came not from the Cape, nor any other port of call on the expected route home, but from Coupang (Kupang) in the Dutch East Indies. The news he reported in letters to Duncan Campbell, to Joseph Banks and above all to his wife, Elizabeth, was so wholly unexpected, so unconnected to the stream of determined and complacent letters of the year before as to be almost incomprehensible.
‘My Dear Dear Betsy,’ Bligh wrote with palpable exhaustion to his wife on 19 August 1789, ‘I am now in a part of the world that I never expected, it is however a place that has afforded me relief and saved my life…
‘Know then my own Dear Betsy, I have lost the Bounty…’
PANDORA (#ulink_824bb355-dc27-5fdd-a31c-c284080b0b23)
Tahiti, 1791
At daylight on a fine, fair, breezy day in March, a young man in his late teens said goodbye to his wife and stepped out of his neat cottage picturesquely set amid citrus trees at the foot of a hill for an excursion to the mountains. Darkly tanned and heavily tattooed with the traditional patterns of manhood across his backside, the youth could have passed for one of the Tahitians who met him outside. Peter Heywood, however, was an Englishman, not an ‘Indian’, and close observation would have revealed that one of the tattoos inked on his leg was not native, but the symbol of the Isle of Man. Young Heywood had been living here, in his idyllic garden home just beyond Matavai Bay, since September 1789, when the Bounty, under the command of Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian, had deposited him and fifteen other shipmates at Tahiti – and then vanished in the night, never to be seen again.
Peter Heywood, former midshipman on the Bounty, had been only a few weeks short of seventeen on the morning the mutiny had broken out and his close friend and distant relative Fletcher Christian had taken the ship. At Christian’s command, Lieutenant Bligh and eighteen loyalists had been compelled to go overboard into one of the Bounty’s small boats, where they had been left, bobbing in the wide Pacific, to certain death.
Fletcher Christian’s control of the mutineers was to last no more than five months. When he eventually directed the Bounty back to Tahiti for what would be her final visit, he had done so because his company had disintegrated into factions. The majority of his people wished to bail out and take their chances at Tahiti even though, as they knew, a British naval ship would eventually come looking for them; some of these men had been loyal to Bligh, but had been held against their will on board the Bounty.
Peter Heywood had been one of the last men to take his farewell of Christian, whom he still regarded with affectionate sympathy. Then, when the Bounty had departed for good, he had turned back from the beach to set about the business of building a new life. Now, on this fresh March day, a year and a half after Christian’s departure, Peter was setting out for the mountains with friends. He had gone no more than a hundred yards from his home when a man came hurrying after him to announce that there was a ship in sight.
Running to the hill behind his house, with its convenient lookout over the sea, he spotted the ship lying to only a few miles distant. Peter would later claim that he had seen this sight ‘with the utmost Joy’, but it is probable that his emotions were somewhat more complicated. Racing down the hill, he went to the nearby home of his close friend Midshipman George Stewart with the news. By the time he and Stewart had splashed their way out to the ship, another man, Joseph Coleman, the Bounty’s armourer, was already on board. On introducing themselves as formerly of the Bounty, Heywood and Stewart had been placed under arrest and led away for confinement. The ship, Pandora, had been specifically commissioned to apprehend the mutineers and bring them to justice in England. These morning hours of 23 March 1791 were the last Peter Heywood would spend on Tahiti.
The news of the mutiny on board His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty had reached England almost exactly a year before. How the news arrived was even more extraordinary than the mutiny – for the messenger had been none other than Lieutenant William Bligh himself. After Fletcher Christian had put him and the loyalists into the Bounty’s launch off the island of Tofua, Bligh, against all imaginable odds, had navigated the little 23-foot-long craft 3618 miles over a period of forty-eight days to Timor, in the Dutch East Indies. Here, his starving and distressed company had been humanely received by the incredulous Dutch authorities. Eventually, passages had been found home for him and his men, and Bligh had arrived in England in a blaze of triumph and white-hot anger on 13 March 1790.
Notice of the mutiny and a description of the mutineers were swiftly dispatched to British and Dutch ports. In Botany Bay the news inspired seventeen convicts to escape in an attempt to join the ‘pirates’ in Tahiti. Although it was at first supposed that two Spanish men-of-war already in the Pacific might have apprehended the Bounty, the Admiralty took no chances and began to mobilize an expedition to hunt down the mutineers. The expense and responsibility of sending yet another ship to the Pacific was not appealing: England seemed poised on the verge of a new war with Spain, and all available men and ships were being pressed into service. However, putting a British naval officer overboard in the middle of the Pacific and running away with His Majesty’s property were outrages that could not go unpunished. Eventually, a 24-gun frigate named Pandora was dispatched under the command of Captain Edward Edwards to hunt the mutineers.
Departing in early November 1790, the Pandora made a swift and uneventful passage to Tahiti, avoiding the horrendous storms that had afflicted the Bounty three years before. Whereas the Bounty had carried a complement of 46 men, the Pandora bore 140. The Pandora’s commander, Captain Edwards, had suffered a near mutiny of his own nine years earlier, when in command of the Narcissus off the northeast coast of America. Eventually, five of the would-be mutineers in this thwarted plot had been hanged, and two more sentenced to floggings of two hundred and five hundred lashes, respectively, while the leader of the mutiny had been hanged in chains. As events would show, Captain Edwards never forgot that he, the near victim of a mutiny, was now in pursuit of actual mutineers.
Also on the Pandora, newly promoted to third lieutenant, was Thomas Hayward, a Bounty midshipman who had accompanied Bligh on his epic open-boat journey. With memories of the thirst, near starvation, exposure and sheer horror of that voyage still fresh in his mind, Hayward was eager to assist in running to ground those responsible for his ordeal. His familiarity with Tahitian waters and people would assist navigation and island diplomacy; his familiarity with his old shipmates would identify the mutineers.
So it was that in March 1791, under cloudless skies and mild breezes, the Pandora sighted the lush, dramatic peaks of Tahiti. Closer in, and the mountain cascades, the graceful palms, and the sparkling volcanic black beaches could be seen beyond thundering breakers and surf. The few ships that had anchored here had all attempted to describe the vision-like beauty of the first sight of this island rising into view from the blue Pacific. Bligh had called Tahiti ‘the Paradise of the World’.
Now, as the Pandora cruised serenely through the clear blue waters, bearing justice and vengeance, she was greeted by men canoeing or swimming towards her.
‘Before we Anchored,’ wrote Edwards in his official report to the Admiralty, ‘Joseph Coleman Armourer of the Bounty and several of the Natives came on board.’ Coleman was one of four men whom Bligh had specifically identified as being innocent of the mutiny and detained against his will. Once on board, Coleman immediately volunteered what had become of the different factions. Of the sixteen men left by Christian on Tahiti, two had already been responsible for each other’s deaths. Charles Churchill, the master-at-arms and the man described as ‘the most murderous’ of the mutineers, had in fact been murdered by his messmate Mathew Thompson, an able seaman from the Isle of Wight. Churchill’s death had in turn been avenged by his Tahitian friends, who had murdered Thompson and then offered him ‘as a Sacrifice to their Gods’, as Edwards dispassionately reported.
Meanwhile, on his way to the anchored ship, Peter Heywood had learned from another Tahitian friend that his former shipmate Thomas Hayward was on board. The result of this friendly enquiry, as Peter reported in a long letter he wrote to his mother, was not what he had ingenuously expected.
‘We ask’d for him, supposing he might prove our Assertions,’ Peter wrote; ‘but he like all other Worldlings when raised a little in Life received us very coolly & pretended Ignorance of our Affairs…So that Appearances being so much against us, we were order’d in Irons & look’d upon – infernal Words! – as piratical Villains.’
As the Pandora’s company moved in, inexorably bent upon their mission, it became clear that no distinction would be made among the captured men. Coleman, noted as innocent by Bligh himself and the first man to surrender voluntarily, was clapped in irons along with the indignant midshipman. Edwards had determined that his job was simply to take hold of everyone he could, indiscriminately, and let the court-martial sort them out once back in England.
From the Tahitians who crowded curiously on board, Edwards quickly ascertained the likely whereabouts of the other eleven fugitives. Some were still around Matavai, others had by coincidence sailed only the day before, in a thirty-foot-long decked schooner they themselves had built, with much effort and ingenuity, for Papara, a region on the south coast where the remainder of the Bounty men had settled. With the zealous assistance of the local authorities, the roundup began and by three o’clock of the second day, Richard Skinner, able seaman of the Bounty, was on board Pandora.
A party under the command of Lieutenants Robert Corner and Hayward was now dispatched to intercept the remaining men. Aiding them in their search was one John Brown, an Englishman deposited on Tahiti the year before by another ship, the Mercury, on account of his troublesome ways, which had included carving up the face of a shipmate with a knife. The Mercury had departed Tahiti only weeks before Christian’s final return with the boat – she had even seen fires burning on the island of Tubuai, where the mutineers had first settled, but decided not to investigate. Brown, it became clear, had not been on terms of friendship with his compatriots.
At Papara, Edwards’s men discovered that the mutineers, hearing of their approach, had abandoned their schooner and fled to the mountain forest.
‘Under cover of night they had taken shelter in a hut in the woods,’ wrote the Pandora’s surgeon, George Hamilton, in his account of this adventure, ‘but were discovered by Brown, who creeping up to the place where they were asleep, distinguished them from the natives by feeling their toes.’ British toes apparently lacked the telltale spread of unshod Tahitians’.
‘Tuesday, March 29th,’ Edwards recorded in the Pandora’s log. ‘At 9 the Launch returned with James Morrison, Charles Norman and Thomas Ellison belonging to His Majesty’s Ship Bounty – prisoners.’ Also taken in tow was the mutineers’ schooner, the Resolution, an object for them of great pride and now requisitioned by the Pandora as a tender, or service vessel.
The three newcomers were at first housed under the half-deck, and kept under around-the-clock sentry. Meanwhile, the ship’s carpenters were busy constructing a proper prison, a kind of low hut to the rear of the quarterdeck, where the prisoners would be placed, as Edwards reported to the Admiralty, ‘for their more effectual security airy & healthy situation.’ The prisoners in their turn assessed their circumstances somewhat differently, referring sardonically to the shallow, cramped structure, with its narrow scuttle, as ‘Pandora’s Box’.
At some point during the pursuit of James Morrison and the men on the Resolution, Michael Byrn, the almost blind fiddler of the Bounty, either was captured or came on board of his own accord. Insignificant at every juncture of the Bounty saga, Byrn, alone of the fugitives, arrived on the Pandora unrecorded. Eight men had now been apprehended and were firmly held in irons; six men remained at large, reported to have taken flight in the hill country around Papara.
Over the next week and a half, while searches were made for the fugitives under the guidance of the ever helpful Brown, Captain Edwards and his officers got a taste of life in Tahiti. Their immediate host was Tynah, the stately king, whose girth was proportionate to his outstanding nearly six-foot-four-inch height. Around forty years of age, he could remember William Bligh from his visit to the island in 1777, with Captain Cook, as well as his return eleven years later with the Bounty. Upon the Pandora’s arrival, Edwards and his men had been greeted by the islanders with their characteristic generosity, with streams of gifts, food, feasts, dances and offers of their women.
‘The English are allowed by the rest of the world…to be a generous, charitable people,’ observed Dr Hamilton. ‘But the Otaheiteans could not help bestowing the most contemptuous word in their language upon us, which is, Peery, Peery, or Stingy.’
Generous, loyal, sensual, uninhibited – the handsome people of Tahiti had won over most who visited them. By now the Bounty men were no longer strangers, but had lived among them, taken wives, had children…
‘Sure Friendship’s there, & Gratitude, & Love,’ young Peter Heywood would later write, exhibiting a poetic bent:
Sure Friendship’s there, & Gratitude, & Love,
Such as ne’er reigns in European Blood
In these degen’rate Days; tho’ from above
WePrecepts have, & know what’s right and good…
Now, sitting shackled in the sweltering heat of Pandora’s Box, Heywood and his shipmates had more than usual cause, and time, to contemplate this disparity of cultures.
On Saturday, the last fugitives began to trickle in. Henry Hilbrant, an able seaman from Hanover, Germany, and Thomas McIntosh, a young carpenter’s mate from the north of England, were delivered on board; as predicted, they had been captured in the hill country above Papara. By the following evening, the roundup was complete. Able seamen Thomas Burkett, John Millward and John Sumner, and William Muspratt, the cook’s assistant, were brought in, also from Papara.
As the ‘pirates’ were led into Pandora’s Box, ship activities bustled around them. Carpenters and sailmakers were busy making repairs for the next stage of their long voyage and routine disciplinary activities continued. On Sunday, the ship’s company was assembled for the weekly reading of the Articles of War: ‘Article XIX: If any Person in or belonging to the Fleet shall make or endeavour to make any mutinous Assembly upon any Pretence whatsoever, every Person offending herein, and being convicted thereof by the Sentence of the Court-martial, shall suffer Death.’ After the reading, three seamen were punished with a dozen lashes each ‘for theft and drunkenness’. It was a cloudy evening and had rained the day before. This was the last the Bounty men would see of Pacific skies for several months.
Fourteen men were now crowded into the eleven-by-eighteen-foot space that was their prison. Onshore, they had kept themselves in different factions and were by no means all on good terms with one another. Strikingly, both Thomas McIntosh and Charles Norman, who had been among those who fled from the Pandora’s men, had been exonerated by Bligh. Perhaps family attachments on the island had made them think twice about leaving; or it may be, less trusting than Coleman who had so quickly surrendered, they did not believe that innocence would count for much in the Admiralty’s eyes.
Within the box, the prisoners wallowed in their own sweat and vermin.
‘What I have suffer’d I have not power to describe,’ wrote Heywood to his mother; he had characterized himself to her as one ‘long inured to the Frowns of Fortune’ and now waxed philosophical about his situation.
‘I am young in years, but old in what the World calls Adversity,’ he wrote; Peter Heywood was not quite nineteen. ‘It has made me acquainted with three Things, which are little known,’ he continued, doggedly. ‘First, the Villainy & Censoriousness of Mankind – second, the Futility of all human Hopes, – & third, the Enjoyment of being content in whatever station it pleases Providence to place me in.’
Among the possessions confiscated from the mutineers were journals kept by Stewart and Heywood in their sea chests, and from these Edwards was able to piece together the history of the Bounty following the mutiny, up to her final return to Tahiti. Two days after Bligh and his loyalists had been left in the Pacific, Fletcher Christian and his men had cut up the ship’s topsails to make jackets for the entire company – they were well aware of the impression made by a uniformed crew.
Soon all the breadfruit – 1015 little pots and tubs of carefully nurtured seedlings, all, as Bligh had wistfully reported, ‘in the most flourishing state’ – were thrown overboard. More sails were cut up for uniform jackets, and the possessions of those who had been forced into the boat with Bligh were divided by lot among the ship’s company. But in a telling report made by James Morrison, the Bounty boatswain’s mate and the mastermind behind the ambitious Resolution, ‘it always happend that Mr. Christians party were always better served than these who were thought to be disaffected.’
Tensions among the men already threatened to undermine Christian’s tenuous control. In this state of affairs, the Bounty made for Tubuai, an island lying some 350 miles south of Tahiti, and anchored there on May 24, nearly a month after the mutiny.
‘Notwithstanding they met with some opposition from the Natives they intended to settle on this Island,’ Edwards wrote in his official report, gleaning the diaries of Heywood and Stewart. ‘But after some time they perceived they were in want of several things Necessary for a settlement & which was the cause of disagreements & quarrels amongst themselves.’ One of the things they most quarrelled about was women.
Consequently, only a week after landing at Tubuai, the Bounty sailed back to Tahiti, where they had lived and loved for five memorable months while gathering Bligh’s breadfruit. Here, as the men knew, their loyal friends would give them all they required. The story they prepared was that they had fallen in with the great Captain Cook (in reality long dead), who was planning to found a settlement on the island of Whytootackee (Aitutaki), and that Bligh had remained with his old commander and delegated Christian to sail with the Bounty for supplies. The Tahitians, ever generous and overjoyed at the news that Cook, whom they regarded with worshipful esteem, would be so close to them, gave freely of hogs, goats, chickens, a variety of plants, cats and dogs. More important, nine women, eight men, seven boys and one young girl left with the Bounty when she returned to Tubuai.
For three months the mutineers struggled to make a settlement on the tiny island. Construction was begun on a defensive fort that measured some fifty yards square, surrounded by a kind of dry moat or ditch. A drawbridge was planned for the entrance facing the beach, while the walls were surmounted by the Bounty’s four-pounder cannons and swivel guns. Patriotically, the mutineers had christened their fortress Fort George, after their king.
Again, there were early signs that this would not be a successful experiment.
‘On 5th July Some of the people began to be mutinous,’ according to an extract made by Edwards from Peter Heywood’s journal. ‘& on 6th 2 of the Men were put in Irons by a Majority of Votes – & drunkenness, fighting & threatening each other’s life was so common that those abaft were obliged to arm themselves with Pistols.’ The following day, an attempt was made to heal the growing breach and ‘Articles were drawn up by Christian and Churchill specifying a mutual forgiveness of all past grievances which every Man was obliged to swear to & sign,’ according to an extract from Stewart’s journal. ‘Mathew Thompson excepted who refused to comply.’ Despite this gesture, an inner circle evolved around Christian. When John Sumner and Matthew Quintal spent the night onshore without leave, declaring that they were now their own masters and would do as they pleased, Christian clapped the pistol he now always carried to the head of one, and had both placed in leg irons.
Violence also escalated without as well as within this fractious company, erupting as the Bounty men fought with the Tubuaians over property and women. In one particularly bloody encounter, Thomas Burkett was stabbed in the side by a spear and Christian wounded himself on his own bayonet. When the dust settled, sixty-six Tubuaians were dead, including six women, and the Bounty men were masters of the field. One of the gentle Tahitian youths who had journeyed to Tubuai with his English friends, according to James Morrison, ‘desired leave to cut out the jaw bones of the kill’d to hang round the quarters of the Ship as Trophies,’ and was much displeased when this request was denied.
In September, in recognition that the different factions could not coexist, a collective decision was made to return once more to Tahiti. Here, the ship’s company would divide. Those who chose to remain on the island could do so; the rest would depart with Christian, taking to sea once again in the Bounty. Each man remaining onshore was given a musket, a pistol, a cutlass, a bayonet, a box of cartridges and seventeen pounds of powder from the ship’s arms and lead for ball – everyone save Michael Byrn, that is, who, as Morrison stated, ‘being blind and of a very troublesome disposition it was thought that arms put into his hands would be only helping him to do some mischief.’
On anchoring for the third and final time in Matavai Bay, Christian and many of the eight men who had cast their lots with him did not even bother to go ashore. Arriving on 21 September 1789, they departed secretly the same night, quietly cutting the Bounty’s anchor cable. Joseph Coleman, the most relentless loyalist, had been once again held against his will for his skills as an armourer; but as the ship slipped away, he dived overboard and swam to land. At dawn, the sixteen men deposited onshore saw their ship hovering off Point Venus; by midmorning she was gone.
When here with Bligh, each man had acquired a taio, or special protector and friend, and to these each now turned. Soon, the fugitives had settled down, either with their taios’ families or, like Heywood and Stewart, in cottages of their own. They took wives and some had children, and so a year and a half had passed, until the day the Pandora loomed out of the early morning to drag them back to England.
Now captured and pinned inside Pandora’s Box, the Bounty prisoners listened in anguish as their wives and friends wailed and grieved under the Pandora’s stern. Standing in canoes around the ship, the women enacted their terrible rites of mourning, hammering at their heads with sharp shells until the blood ran. As the day of departure approached, more canoes came from across the island, filling the harbour around the ship. Men and women stripped their clothes and cut their heads in grief, and as the blood fell, cut again and cried aloud. Tynah came on board and, with tears streaming down his cheeks, begged to be remembered to his friend, the King of England.
‘This I believe was the first time that an Englishman got up his anchor, at the remotest part of the globe, with a heavy heart, to go home to his own country,’ wrote Dr Hamilton – an astonishing admission from a naval official who had come in search of deserting mutineers.
On 8 May 1791, under pleasant breezes, the Pandora, recaulked and overhauled, left Tahiti with the mutineers’ schooner, Resolution, in tow. Edwards’s commission was far from fulfilled. Still missing was His Majesty’s stolen ship as well as the ringleader of the mutiny and his most hard-core followers.
‘Christian had been frequently heard to declare that he would search for an unknown or an uninhabited Island in which there was no harbour for Shipping, would run the Ship ashore, and get from her such things as would be useful to him and settle there,’ Edwards recorded in his official report to the Admiralty, continuing with admirable understatement, ‘but this information was too vague to be follow’d in an immense Ocean strew’d with an almost innumerable number of known and unknown Islands.’ Specifically, the Pacific contains more than twenty thousand islands scattered over some 64 million square miles. Christian and the Bounty had departed Tahiti in September 1789 – a twenty-month head start, long enough to have taken the Bounty not only as far as North or South America, but, in theory, around the globe.
Edwards’s instructions from the Admiralty offered some guidance: If no knowledge of the mutineers had been gained at Tahiti, he was to venture west to Whytootackee (Aitutaki), ‘calling, in your way, at Huaheine and Uliatea.’ If nothing was found here, he was to make a circuit of the neighbouring islands. If nothing here, he was to continue west to the Friendly Islands (Tonga), ‘and, having succeeded, or failed,’ to return to England, through the Endeavour Strait (Torres Strait) separating New Guinea from New Holland (Australia). Be mindful of prevailing winds, the Admiralty admonished, ‘there being no dependence (of which we have any certain knowledge) of passing the Strait after the month of September…’
For roughly the next three months Edwards doggedly followed the Admiralty’s prescribed itinerary in a desultory chase from island to island. At each landfall, a uniformed officer was disembarked and in the cloying heat tramped along the beach, offering presents and seeking information. Anchored offshore, the Pandora received the now customary canoe-loads of eager visitors. Spears, clubs and other curios were collected, differences among the islanders, who appeared ‘ruder’ and less civilized as the Pandora progressed, were duly noted, but no hint of the Bounty’s whereabouts emerged.
A week out from Tahiti, Hilbrant, one of the mutineers, volunteered that Christian had spoken to him on the day before his departure of his intention to make for an uninhabited island that he knew from earlier accounts to be ‘situated to the Westward of the Islands of Danger.’ This description seemed to refer to Duke of York Island (Atafu) but was to prove to be another dead end. En route, however, Edwards stopped off at Palmerston Island (Avarau) and sent his boats ashore to search that isle’s bays and inlets. Two of these returned in the late afternoon full of coconuts, and nothing more. But that night the tender arrived with hopeful news: it had discovered some spars and a yard marked ‘Bounty’s Driver Yard’ embossed with the Admiralty’s broad arrow mark.
Over the next two days, all the ship’s craft – a cutter, two yawls and the mutineers’ schooner – were dispatched to examine the island as well as islets and even reefs in the vicinity. The belief that the mutineers might be at large nearby caused everyone to move with great circumspection. One party camping overnight on the island were woken abruptly when a coconut they had placed on their campfire exploded. ‘Expecting muskets to be fired at them from every bush,’ Dr Hamilton explained, ‘they all jumped up, seized their arms, and were some time before they could undeceive themselves, that they were really not attacked.’
As the various small craft tacked to and fro around the island, Edwards remained with Pandora, cruising offshore and making the occasional coconut run. On the afternoon of 24 May, one of the midshipmen, John Sival, returned in the cutter with several striking painted canoes; but after these were examined and admired, he was sent back to complete his orders. Shortly after he left, thick weather dosed in, obscuring the little craft as she bobbed dutifully back to shore, and was followed by an ugly squall that did not lift for four days. When the weather cleared on the twenty-eighth, the cutter had disappeared. Neither she nor her company of five men was ever seen again.
‘It may be difficult to surmise what has been the fate of these unfortunate men,’ Dr. Hamilton wrote, adding hopefully that they ‘had a piece of salt-beef thrown into the boat to them on leaving the ship; and it rained a good deal that night and the following day, which might satiate their thirst.’
By now, too, it was realized that the tantalizing clues of the Bounty’s presence were only flotsam.
‘The yard and these things lay upon the beach at high water Mark & were all eaten by the Sea Worm which is a strong presumption they were drifted there by the Waves,’ Edwards reported. It was concluded that they had drifted from Tubuai, where the mutineers had reported that the Bounty had lost most of her spars. These few odds and ends of worm-eaten wood were all that were ever found by Pandora of His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty.
The fruitless search apart, morale on board had been further lowered by the discovery, as Dr Hamilton put it, ‘that the ladies of Otaheite had left us many warm tokens of their affection.’ The men confined within Pandora’s Box were also far from well. Their irons chafed them badly, so much so that while they were still at Matavai Bay, Joseph Coleman’s legs had swollen alarmingly and the arms of McIntosh and Ellison had become badly ‘galled’. To the complaint that the irons were causing their wrists to swell, Lieutenant John Larkan had replied that ‘they were not intended to fit like Gloves!’ Edwards had an obsessive fear that the mutineers might ‘taint’ his crew and, under threat of severe punishment, had forbidden any communication between the parties whatsoever; but from rough memos he made, it seems he was unsuccessful. ‘Great difficulty created in keeping the Mutineers from conversing with the crew,’ Edwards had jotted down, elsewhere noting that one of his lieutenants suspected that the prisoners had ‘carried on a correspondence with some of our people by Letter.’
From Duke of York Island down to the rest of the Union Islands (Tokelau), thence to the Samoas, the Pandora continued her futile search. To aid them in making rough landfalls, Lieutenants Corner and Hayward donned cork jackets and plunged boldly into the surf ahead of the landing boats. Parakeets were purchased on one island, splendid birds resembling peacocks on another, and on others still the use of the islands’ women. Striking sights were enjoyed – the large skeleton of a whale, for example, and a deserted shrine with an altar piled with white shells. They had even discovered whole islands, whose newly bestowed names would form a satisfying addition to the report Edwards would eventually turn over to the Admiralty. In short, the Pandora had discovered a great deal – but nothing at all that pertained to the missing mutineers and the Bounty.
Thousands of miles from England, adrift in one of the most unknown regions of the earth, Hamilton, who seems to have enjoyed this meandering sojourn, mused tellingly on the strange peoples he had seen and their distance from civilized life: ‘And although that unfortunate man Christian has, in a rash unguarded moment, been tempted to swerve from his duty to his king and country, as he is in other respects of an amiable character, and respectable abilities, should he elude the hand of justice, it may be hoped he will employ his talents in humanizing the rude savages,’ he wrote, in an astonishing wave of sympathy for that elusive mutineer who had, after all, consigned his captain and eighteen shipmates to what he had thought was certain death.
‘So that, at some future period, a British Ilion may blaze forth in the south,’ Hamilton continued, working to a crescendo of sentiment, ‘with all the characteristic virtues of the English nation, and complete the great prophecy, by propagating the Christian knowledge amongst the infidels.’ Even here, at the early stage of the Bounty saga, the figure of Christian himself represented a powerful, charismatic force; already there is the striking simplistic tendency to blur the mutineer’s name – Christian – with a Christian cause.
In the third week of June, while in the Samoas, Edwards was forced to report yet another misfortune: ‘Between 5 & 6 o’clock of the Evening of the 22nd of June lost sight of our Tender in a thick Shower of Rain,’ he noted tersely. Edwards had now lost two vessels, this one with nine men. Food and water that were meant to have been loaded onto the tender were still piled on the Pandora’s deck. Anamooka (Nomuka), in the Friendly Islands, was the last designated point of rendezvous in the event of a separation, and here the Pandora now hastened.
The people of Anamooka are the most daring set of robbers in the South Seas,’ Hamilton noted matter-of-factly. Onshore, parties who disembarked to wood and water the ship were harassed as they had not been elsewhere. Edwards’s servant was stripped naked by an acquisitive crowd and forced to cover himself with his one remaining shoe. ‘We soon discovered the great Irishman,’ Hamilton reported, ‘with his shoe full in one hand, and a bayonet in the other, naked and foaming mad.’ While overseeing parties foraging for wood and water, Lieutenant Corner was momentarily stunned on the back of his neck by a club-wielding islander, whom the officer, recovering, shot dead in the back.
There was no sign of the tender.
Leaving a letter for the missing boat in the event that it turned up, Edwards pressed on to Tofua, the one island on which Bligh, Thomas Hayward and the loyalists in the open launch had briefly landed. One of Bligh’s party had been stoned to death here, and some of the men responsible for this were disconcerted to recognize Hayward.
From Tofua, the Pandora continued her cruising before returning to Anamooka, where there was still no word of the missing tender.
It was now early August. Edwards’s laconic report reveals nothing of his state of mind, but with two boats and fourteen men lost, uncowed mutineers on board and a recent physical attack on the most able of his crew, it is safe to hazard that he was anxious to return home. His own cabin had been broken into and books and other possessions taken as improbable prizes (James Morrison, with discernible satisfaction, had earlier reported that ‘a new Uniform Jacket belonging to Mr. Hayward’ had been taken and, as a parting insult, donned by the thief in his canoe while in sight of the ship). Now, ‘thinking it time to return to England,’ Edwards struck north to Wallis Island, then west for the long run to the Endeavour Strait, the route laid down by the Admiralty out of the Pacific – homeward bound.
The Pandora reached the Great Barrier Reef towards the end of August, and from this point on Edwards’s report is closely concerned with putting on record his persistent and conscientious depth soundings and vigilant lookout for reefs, bars and shoals. The Pandora was now outside the straits, the uncharted, shoal-strewn divide between Papua New Guinea and the northeastern tip of Australia. From the masthead of the Pandora, no route through the Barrier Reef could be seen, and Edwards turned aside to patrol its southern fringe, seeking an entrance.
After two days had been spent in this survey, a promising channel was at last spotted, and Lieutenant Corner was dispatched in the yawl to investigate. It was approaching dusk when he signalled that his reconnaissance was successful and started to return to the ship. Despite the reports of a number of eyewitnesses, it is difficult to determine exactly how subsequent events unfolded; a remark made by Dr Hamilton suggests that Edwards may have been incautiously sailing in the dark. Previous depth soundings had failed to find bottom at 110 fathoms but now, as the ship prepared to lay to, the soundings abruptly showed 50 fathoms; and then, even before sails could be trimmed, 3 fathoms on the starboard side.
‘On the evening of the 29th August the Pandora went on a Reef,’ Morrison wrote bluntly, adding meaningfully, ‘I might say how, but it would be to no purpose’; Morrison had prefaced his report with a classical flourish, ‘Vidi et Scio’ – I saw and I know. In short, despite soundings, despite advance reconnaissance, despite both his fear and his precautions, Edwards had run his ship aground.
‘The ship struck so violently on the Reef that the carpenters reported that she made 18 Inches of water in 5 Minutes,’ the captain was compelled to write in his Admiralty report. ‘In 5 minutes after there was 4 feet of water in the hold.’ Still chained fast in the darkness of Pandora’s Box, the fourteen prisoners could only listen as sounds of imminent disaster broke around them – cries, running feet, the heavy, confused splash of a sail warped under the broken hull in an attempt to hold the leak, the ineffectual working of the pumps and more cries that spread the news that there was now nine feet of water in the hold. Coleman, McIntosh and Norman – three of the men Bligh had singled out as being innocent – were summarily released from the prison to help work the pumps, while at the same time the ship’s boats were readied.
In the darkness of their box, the remaining prisoners followed the sounds with growing horror; seasoned sailors, they knew the implication of each command and each failed outcome. The release of the exonerated men added to their sense that ultimate disaster was imminent, and in the strength of their terror they managed to break free of their irons. Crying through the scuttle to be released, the prisoners only drew attention to their broken bonds; and when Edwards was informed, he ordered the irons to be replaced. As the armourer left, the mutineers watched in incredulity as the scuttle was bolted shut behind him. Sentinels were placed over the box, with the instructions to shoot if there were any stirring within.
‘In this miserable situation, with an expected Death before our Eyes, without the least Hope of relief & in the most trying state of suspense, we spent the Night,’ Peter Heywood wrote to his mother. The water had now risen to the coamings, or hatch borders, while feet tramped overhead across the prison roof.
‘I’ll be damned if they shall go without us,’ someone on deck was heard to say, speaking, as it seemed to the prisoners, of the officers who were heading to the boats. The ship’s booms were being cut loose to make a raft, and a topmast thundered onto the deck, killing a man. High broken surf around the ship hampered all movement, and compelled the lifeboats in the black water to stay well clear.
The confusion continued until dawn, when the prisoners were able to observe through the scuttle armed officers making their way across the top of their prison to the stern ladders, where the boats now awaited. Perhaps drawn at last by the prisoners’ cries, the armourer’s mate, Joseph Hodges, suddenly appeared at the prison entrance to remove their fetters. Once down in the box, Hodges freed Muspratt and Skinner, who immediately scrambled out through the scuttle, along with Byrn who had not been in irons; in his haste to break out, Skinner left with his handcuffs still on.
From above, some unseen hand suddenly closed and barred the scuttle again. Trapped with the prisoners, Hodges continued to work, striking off the irons in rapid succession, while the confined men renewed their pleas for mercy.
‘I beg’d of the Master at Arms to leave the Scuttle open,’ Morrison wrote; ‘he answered “Never fear my boys we’ll all go to Hell together.”’
As he spoke, the Pandora made a fatal sally, rolling to port and spilling the master-at-arms and the sentinels into the water. The boats had already left, and Morrison claims he could see Edwards swimming towards his pinnace. Nowhere in his long report of the wreck and abandonment of his ship does Edwards make any mention of the prisoners.
With the ship under water as far as the mainmast, Pandora’s Box began to fill. Hen coops, spars, booms – anything that would float had been cut loose and flung overboard as a possible lifesaver. Passing over the top of the prison roof on his way into the water, William Moulter, the boatswain’s mate, heard the trapped men’s cries, and his last action before he went overboard was to draw the bolt and hurl the scuttle away.
Scrambling inside the box, the men fought their way towards the light and air. Peter Heywood was one of the last to get out, and when he emerged in the sea he could see nothing above the water but the Pandora’s crosstrees. All around him, men floundered and called for help, lurching to take hold of anything afloat. A gangway floated up with Muspratt riding on one end. Coleman, Burkett and Lieutenant Corner were perched on top of the old prison. Heywood, stripped stark naked, had grasped a floating plank.
‘The cries of the men drowning in the water was at first awful in the extreme,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘but as they sunk, and became faint, it died away by degrees.’
Slowly the lifeboats circled the wreckage, gathering up distressed men as they found them. After an hour and a half in the water, Morrison was picked up by the master’s mate, and found Peter Heywood already on board. One by one, the boats made their way to a sandy key, some three miles distant, and here when a muster was held it was discovered that eighty-nine of the ship’s company and ten prisoners were accounted for; thirty-one of the company and four prisoners had drowned – but, as Morrison pointedly noted, ‘all the Officers were Saved.’ Of the prisoners, Richard Skinner had gone down while still in handcuffs, along with John Sumner and Peter’s closest friend, George Stewart, both of whom had been struck and killed by a falling gangway; Henry Hilbrant, also still in irons, had never made it out of Pandora’s Box.
On the day following the disaster, a boat was sent back to what remained of the Pandora, to see what could be salvaged. Nothing much was gained, and the boat returned with the head of the topgallant mast, some rigging, the chain of the lightning conductor – and the ship’s cat, who had made his way to the crosstrees.
As the blazing Pacific sun rose over the sandy key, Edwards took a survey of his new situation. An assessment was made of the supplies that had been saved, which were now spread out along the sand to dry. Somehow, with the whole of the night to prepare for certain disaster, no orders seem to have been given for the salvaging of provisions.
‘Providentially a small barrel of water, a cag [keg] of wine, some biscuit, and a few muskets and cartouch boxes, had been thrown into the boat,’ Hamilton wrote, suggesting that what little supplies there were had been saved by chance. A daily ration was determined of three ounces of bread, two small glasses of water and one of wine, with the occasional addition of an ounce of portable soup, or cakes of dried soup, and half an ounce of essence of malt. Edwards’s plan was to sail for the Dutch East Indies settlement of Coupang, in Timor, the same port that had received Bligh and his company at the end of their ordeal in the Bounty’s launch. The irony that the Pandora’s boats were to replicate part of Bligh’s famous voyage is unlikely to have escaped anyone – least of all poor Thomas Hayward, who had been with Bligh and was thus about to embark on his second Pacific open-boat journey in a little more than two years. A voyage of some eleven hundred miles lay ahead.
On 31 August the third day after the Pandora had struck the reef, the little squadron set sail, with Captain Edwards leading the way in his pinnace, followed by the red and blue yawls and the launch. The prisoners had been carefully apportioned among the vessels. Peter Heywood, in the launch under the sympathetic Lieutenant Corner, had drawn what was probably the happiest boat, while James Morrison, as he reported, ‘had the good or evil fortune, call it which you please to go in the Pinnace with Capt. Edwards.’
Proceeding northwest, the little squadron now at last passed through the reef by way of a channel that, as Edwards reported to the Admiralty, was ‘better than any hitherto known’ – a discovery that had come rather late in the day. In the morning of the following day, they came to the desolate, treeless coast of New Holland. Here, the parched men had the rare good fortune to find a spring rushing onto the beach. The prisoners in particular were tortured by the sun; their skin, pale and tender after five months of confinement, had quickly burned and blistered. Peter wrote, ‘We appeared as if dipped in large tubs of boiling water.’
The company passed the night off a small island, where they were awakened by the howling of dingoes, which they mistook for wolves. On the afternoon of 2 September, they passed a series of distinctive islands that were recognized from Bligh’s account and a chart made during his boat voyage. By the evening, the boats were in sight of Cape York, the northernmost tip of New Holland, and the end of the strait. Ahead was the Indian Ocean and a one-thousand-mile run to Timor.
‘It is unnecessary to relate our particular sufferings in the Boats during our run to Timor,’ wrote Edwards, with his usual literary sangfroid, ‘and is sufficient to observe that we suffered more from heat & thirst than from hunger.’ The weather, at least, was good and the overloaded boats made satisfying progress. At dawn on the sixteenth the Dutch fort at Coupang, Timor, was at last hailed. Edwards had lost no men on this leg of the journey, although they had been reduced to drinking the blood of captured birds and their own urine.
Backed by gentle, verdant, wooded hills, the small settlement of Coupang was built at the head of a deep natural harbour. It consisted of little more than a fort and a handful of houses, a church, a hospital and company stores serving a population of Dutch officials, Chinese merchants and Malay slaves. A European ship at anchor amid other small craft offered a comfortingly familiar sight. The Pandora’s four boats hailed the fort, and the men were welcomed ashore.
While the Pandora’s officers and men were dispersed in different houses around the settlement, the prisoners were taken to the fort itself and put in the stocks. Again, Edwards’s report makes no mention of the prisoners at all during this sojourn, but Morrison’s account is graphic: ‘Immediately on our landing Provisions were procured which now began to move our bodys and we were forced to ease Nature where we lay.’ Most of the men had not moved their bowels for the duration of the journey, and some were now administered enemas through a syringe.
‘The Surgeon of the Place who visited us could not enter the place till it had been washed by Slaves,’ Morrison continued. ‘We had laid 6 Days in this situation…’ A compassionate Dutch officer of the fort, clearly appalled at the prisoners’ treatment, arranged to have the men released from the stocks and placed in leg irons, manacled two by two, but otherwise at liberty to walk about. The prisoners were still almost naked, but with ‘some of the leaves of the Brab Tree…set to work to make hats’, a skill undoubtedly learned in those faraway days in Tahiti. These hats the enterprising prisoners then sold and with the little money earned bought tobacco.
As it turned out, the Pandora’s company were not the only distressed British sailors at Coupang. Some months earlier, seven men, a woman and two children had arrived at the fort in a small six-oared cutter with the story that they were part of the crew and passengers of a wrecked brig called Neptune. They too had been treated with great compassion by the Dutch authorities. And when Edwards and his men came ashore, the kind Dutchmen had hastened to their guests to bring them the good news that their captain had arrived.
‘What Captain! dam’me, we have no Captain,’ Hamilton reports one of them had unwisely exclaimed. The small party, it turned out, had not been shipwrecked, but were convicts who had made a daring escape from Botany Bay (‘they were discovered to be Cheats,’ as Morrison noted self-righteously).
On 6 October having recovered strength, Edwards led his entire company to sea again, this time as passengers on a Dutch East Indiaman, the Rembang. Their destination was the Dutch settlement of Batavia, on Java, from where Edwards expected to get passages to Cape Town. Here, there would be other company ships bound for Europe.
This short passage from Timor to Batavia proved to be as eventful as any in the men’s now protracted travels. On the sixth day out, while they were off the coast of Flores, a tremendous storm erupted. According to Dr Hamilton, within a few minutes ‘every sail of the ship was shivered to pieces…This storm was attended with the most dreadful thunder and lightning we had ever experienced.’
At the height of this crisis, when the ship was in imminent danger of being driven onto the lee shore, the Dutch seamen, Hamilton reported, ‘went below; and the ship was preserved from destruction by the manly exertion of our English tars, whose souls seemed to catch redoubled ardour from the tempest’s rage.’ This appears to have been no exaggeration. Morrison himself, hardly one to volunteer praise for his captors, stated matter-of-factly that the ship was ‘badly found and Worse Managed and if Captain Edwards had not taken the Command and set his Men to work she would never have reached Batavia.’
On 30 October, the Rembang limped into Semarang, on the north coast of Java. The prisoners had been let out of irons during the battle with the storm to take turns at the pumps but had discovered they no longer had strength for this routine duty. But the spirits of the whole company were raised by an entirely unexpected and welcome surprise: the Pandora’s little schooner, Resolution, awaited them, safely anchored in the harbour. After having lost sight of Pandora in the gale four months earlier, the Resolution’s men set out from the Samoas to the Friendly Islands, skirted the southernmost of the Fiji group, made northwest for the Endeavour Strait, struck out for the Indonesian islands and came, through the Strait of Bali to Surabaya, on the north coast of Java. Their navigational equipment had consisted of two quadrants, a volume of Robertson’s Elements of Navigation and an edition of Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar, but no charts.
At Surabaya, the vessel’s young commander, Master’s Mate William Oliver, had presented himself to the Dutch authorities. All Dutch settlements, however, had been alerted to the fate of the Bounty; and as David Renouard, one of the Pandora’s midshipmen, said, it was ‘a singular coincidence that the mutineers who quitted Otaheite in the Bounty corresponded with ourselves both in rank and numbers.’ The Resolution, built in fact by mutineers, was moreover hand-hewn from Otaheitan wood. Distrustful of Oliver’s story, the Dutch authorities politely detained the small company for a month. At length, Oliver persuaded them to let him make for Batavia, by way of Semarang, where by another uncanny coincidence the Resolution had arrived on 29 October, the day before the Rembang. Between Bounty, Pandora, Resolution and the boat from Botany Bay, four epic voyages had been accomplished within a two-and-a-half-year period; the Dutch authorities, ever picking up the wreckage, must have wondered if the British had a penchant for this kind of business.
The Rembang and the Resolution proceeded together to Batavia, the principal port of the Dutch East Indies. Founded in 1618, it was now a spacious town set at the head of a deep bay half a mile from the sea, its streets cut, Dutch style, by tree-lined connecting canals. Picturesque from afar, it was also reckoned to be one of the most fever-ridden and pestilential places on earth. Out of the surrounding swamp and stagnant canals, malarial mosquitoes spread like miasma. A ‘painted sepulchre, this golgotha of Europe,’ Dr Hamilton described the city. Dead bodies floating into the sea from the canals had struck their ship on arrival, which, as Hamilton noted, ‘had a very disagreeable effect on the minds of our brave fellows.’ Two years earlier, four of Bligh’s men had died of fever here, after successfully weathering their great boat journey, and Bligh himself had fallen gravely ill.
On arrival, Edwards arranged for his men to be housed on board a Dutch East India Company ship then in the road, or anchorage, outside the harbour. Thirty of his sick were borne to a hospital – a number of these were men from the Resolution who had suffered badly in the course of their impromptu journey.
In the nearly seven weeks they were detained at Batavia, the majority of the prisoners were allowed on deck only twice, although once again Coleman, Norman and McIntosh enjoyed more freedom. But it may be that the confinement afforded the men some protection from the mosquitoes. ‘Here we enjoyed our Health,’ Morrison stated, noting with satisfaction that ‘the Pandora’s people fell sick and died apace.’
Edwards had negotiated an arrangement with the Dutch authorities to divide the Pandora’s complement among four ships bound for Holland by way of the Cape, ‘at no expense to Government further than for the Officers and Prisoners,’ as he somewhat nervously informed the Admiralty. A disaster such as the loss of a ship did not allow a captain of His Majesty’s Navy carte blanche in extricating himself from the disaster. All accounts for the £724 8s. od. in expenses incurred between Coupang and Batavia would have to be meticulously itemized and justified on return.
Edwards also used the sojourn at Batavia to write up his report to the Admiralty relating all that had transpired subsequent to 6 January 1791, the date of his last dispatch from Rio. Edwards’s report, in his own hand, filled thirty-two large, closely written pages and ranged over all his adventures – the capture of the mutineers, the fruitless search for Christian and the Bounty, the wreck of the Pandora, and the voyage to Timor. The events are narrated in strict chronological order, like a story, with discursive material about the customs and country of the islands visited and anecdotal asides (‘I took this opportunity to show the Chief what Execution the Canon and Carronades would do by firing a six pound shot on shore…’), so that their lordships of the Admiralty would have had no clue until page twenty-six that the Pandora had in fact been lost. Boldly noting that he was enclosing ‘Latitudes & Longitudes of several Islands, & ca discovered during our Voyage,’ with his report, Edwards then offered a tentative conclusion:
‘Although I have not had the good fortune fully to accomplish the Object of my Voyage,’ he ventured, ‘…I hope it will be thought…that of my Orders which I have been able to fulfil, with the discoveries that have been made will be some compensation for the disappointment & misfortunes that have attended us’; and, with a last rally of optimism:
Should their Lordships upon the whole think that the Voyage will be profitable to our Country it will be a great consolation to,
Sir,
Your most obedient humble servant,
Edw. Edwards.
Also before leaving Batavia, Edwards presented the mutineers’ schooner, Resolution, to the governor of Timor as a gift of gratitude for his kindness. Morrison watched this transaction closely. He had been the architect of the plan to build the schooner and although she was the handiwork of many, he had placed the greatest stake in her. Her timbers had been hewn from Tahitian hibiscus, and both her planking and the bark gum used as pitch had come from that versatile and fateful tree, the breadfruit.
On Christmas Day 1791, the Dutch Indiaman Vreedenburg, Captain Christiaan, weighed anchor and sailed out of the straits at the harbour’s entrance carrying a cargo of coffee beans, rice and arrack, a liquor distilled from coconut milk. On board as passengers were Captain Edwards, twenty-seven officers and men of the Pandora, twenty-six Chinese and the ten mutineers. The remainder of the Pandora’s company, including the Botany Bay prisoners, were divided among two other ships. Lieutenant Larkan and a party of twenty had departed a month earlier on the Zwan. Edwards had also taken on board a distressed English seaman from the Supply. In turn, he had been forced to leave in the deadly hospital one of his own men, who was too ill to be moved. All in all, Edwards lost fifteen men to the Batavian fever, one being young William Oliver, the twenty-year-old master’s mate who had commanded the Resolution with such leadership and skill on her unexpected voyage.
A few days from the Cape of Good Hope, nearly three months out on what had been a slow passage, the mutineers were released from their irons and allowed to walk the deck. Here, testing the wind, Morrison noted that the men ‘now found the weather Sharp and Cutting’. The balmy Pacific lay far behind.
On 18 March, the Vreedenburg anchored in Table Bay, at the Cape of Good Hope. Close by the harbour was the fortress that safeguarded the Dutch East India Company stores, and indeed the whole town had been established solely to serve the Company. Here ships could break the long journey between Europe and the East Indies, restock and refit and, if coming from Batavia, offload their sick at the Cape Hospital.
The Vreedenburg joined other sail at anchor, including to the universal joy of the Pandora’s company, a British man-of-war, the Gorgon, Captain John Parker. This 44-gun frigate had arrived from Port Jackson in New South Wales, where she had dropped off much anticipated and desperately needed supplies, including livestock and thirty new convicts. Seeing an opportunity to return directly to England, instead of by way of Holland where the Dutch Indiamen were bound, Edwards arranged passages for part of his mixed company on the Gorgon.
Thus, two days after arrival, Edwards added himself, the Botany Bay convicts and the Bounty mutineers to the Gorgon’s company, joining other passengers that included a detachment of marine privates and their families leaving Port Jackson, and fifteen distressed British seamen picked up at the Cape. Among the mixed cargo, boxes of dispatches for the colonial office were probably the most important. More burdensome were the sixty tubs and boxes of plants destined for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, under the direction of the great naturalist and president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks. Specimens of New South Wales timber cramming the main and quarter decks were for the Navy Board, while a dingo was a gift for the Prince of Wales. Similarly, two kangaroos and opossums were also gifts for Joseph Banks, whose tentacles of influence stretched to the remotest corner of all parts of the globe; it was Banks who had been the driving force behind the Bounty’s breadfruit venture.
The arrival of the mutineers was noted offhandedly in the Gorgon’s log, along with the more important additions: ‘Recd Wine fresh Meat; Bread for Ships Company; also Water. Caulkers Caulking within and without board. Carpenters as necessary. Armourer at his forge; Sent to Sick quarters 1 Supernumerary Marine. Came on board from the Dutch Ship Vreedenburgh 10 Pirates belonging to His Majesty’s Ship Bounty…’
At four in the afternoon of 5 April 1792, the Gorgon at last set sail for England, exchanging salutes with the fort as she passed. Blessed with fine weather and ‘a charming Breeze’, as one of the marines, Lieutenant Ralph Clark, noted in his private journal, the Gorgon passed the island of St Helena in under two weeks. Five days later they anchored at Ascension Island, primarily to refresh their food stock with local turtles. Although each passing mile brought the prisoners closer to their day of reckoning, they enjoyed the return to familiar British naval routine. Their confinement had been made less rigorous than under Edwards, and as Morrison noted, they had begun to regain their health and strength.
May 1 brought an extraordinary diversion: two sharks were caught and in the belly of one was found a prayer book, ‘quite fresh,’ according to Lieutenant Clark, ‘not a leaf of it defaced.’ The book was inscribed ‘Francis Carthy, cast for death in the Year 1786 and Repreaved the Same day at four oClock in the afternoon.’ The book was subsequently confirmed as having belonged to a convict who had sailed to Botany Bay in 1788 with the first fleet of prisoners consigned to transportation.
In the early rainy hours of 6 May died Charlotte Bryant, the child of Mary Bryant, the escaped convict who had sailed so boldly into Coupang before the arrival of the Pandora. Amid the mixed humanity that the Gorgon carried, it was not the pirates of the Bounty who appear to have stood out, but the young widow from Cornwall, age twenty-seven, ‘height 5′4″, grey eyes, brown hair, sallow complexion,’ as the register of Newgate Prison records, who had been sentenced to transportation for stealing a cloak. By coincidence, Marine Captain Watkin Tench, returning from Botany Bay, had gone out with Mary five years before, and recalled that she and her husband-to-be ‘had both of them been always distinguished for good behaviour.’ Now, he got from her the details of her extraordinary 3254-mile voyage, coasting the shores of New Holland, harassed by the ‘Indians’ when attempting to land, foraging for food and water – this story, which surely circulated around the ship, was one every sailing man on board would appreciate.
On 19 June, the Gorgon completed her long voyage and on an overcast day anchored at Spithead off Portsmouth alongside three of His Majesty’s ships, the Duke, Brunswick and Edgar, three frigates and a sloop of war. Captain Parker immediately notified Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, the port’s commander on duty, of his ship’s arrival and awaited further instructions. Meanwhile, his crew busied themselves with the numerous tedious and chaotic duties that awaited the end of a long voyage. The officers and men of the Portsmouth and Plymouth Divisions were disembarked, and water and victuals were brought onboard. The carpenter made his customary report, noting that the ship’s ‘works in general is very weak from carying large quantities of water and hay & tubs of Plants.’
Captain Edwards, a passenger, had nothing to do with these transactions. Most of his men were still behind him, on the other Dutch ships, and the pirates and convicts would now be turned over to the proper authorities. Disembarking early at the Isle of Wight, he was safe in Portsmouth by the time the Gorgon came to anchor. At some point in their wanderings, most probably during the sultry, sickly sojourn at Batavia, an anonymous member of the Pandora’s crew had immortalized their journey, and their captain, with a long doggerel poem:
Brave Edwards then with freindly Care
for men and boat began to fear…
by hard fatigue Our men were Spent,
the Ship keel’d Over and Down She went
An Equel Chance Our Captain Gave
to All Alike their Lives to Save…
Edwards’s last semi-official duty had been to accompany the captain’s wife, Mary Ann Parker, to shore, a journey that, perhaps predictably, turned into a four-hour ordeal, as she noted, ‘rowing against the wind’. Once onshore, nothing remained for Edwards but to await his own court-martial; like Bligh, he had returned without his ship.
On the day after the Gorgon’s arrival, Captain Hamond informed Captain Parker that their lordships of the Admiralty had directed that ‘the ten Prisoners belonging to the Bounty be sent to the security of one of the port guardships. The following day, a longboat, manned and armed, was sent from the Hector, Captain George Montagu, to collect the mutineers. Put over the side of the Gorgon in chains into the waiting boat, the prisoners were able to enjoy the sights of the busy, lively anchorage in the course of their short journey. The cloudy weather had briefly cleared and showed breezy and fair – an English summer day. Their arrival on board was mentioned briefly in the Hector’s log: ‘Post-noon received the above Prisoners, Wm Muspratt, James Morrison, Jn Milward, Peter Heywood, Thomas Ellison, Michl Burn, Thos Burkett, Josh Coleman, Thos. McIntosh & Charles Norman…and secured them in the Gun Room.’ A sergeant’s guard of marines was sent over to provide additional security. For Thomas Burkett, at least, the Hector was familiar territory: he had served as an able seaman on this same ship, six years previously.
Peter Heywood had brought away a single possession from his long ordeal, a Book of Common Prayer, which he had carried in his teeth as he swam from the wreck of the Pandora. On the flyleaves, he had made some notations of events and dates important to him: ‘Sept. 22 1789, Mya TOOBOOAI mye; Mar. 25 1791, We ta Pahee Pandora…We tow te Vredenberg tea…Pahee HECTOR’ – the most striking thing about Peter’s entries is that he had written them in Tahitian.
Back in Tahiti, the Bounty men who had cast their lot in with the islanders were remembered largely with affection. Less than eight months after the Pandora left Matavai Bay, Captain George Vancouver arrived with his two ships, Discovery and Chatham. Through conversations with the Tahitians, he and his men learned a great deal about the mutineers’ lives on the island: they had built a schooner; they had each taken a wife and treated their women well; Stewart and Heywood had laid out gardens that were still in a flourishing state; these two had conformed to Tahitian manners to such an extent that they ceremonially uncovered their upper bodies when in the presence of King Tynah, as was the local custom.
One day the Chatham’s men were ‘surpized at seeing alongside in a double Canoe, three women all dress’d in White Linen Shirts, and having each a fine young child in their arms, perfectly white,’ as Edward Bell, a young clerk on the Chatham, reported in his journal. These were the women who had lived with the Bounty’s mutineers, and their children.
‘One call’d herself Peggy Stewart, after Mr. Stewart, one of the Bounty’s midshipmen, and her child which was very beautiful was called Charlotte,’ wrote Bell. ‘Another’s name was Mary MacIntosh and the other’s Mary Bocket [Burkett].’
Following this first meeting, Peggy Stewart frequently came to visit, often bringing small gifts and always enquiring after her husband. At length, it was time for the ships to depart, and she came to make her affectionate and tearful farewell.
‘Just before she went away, she came into my Cabbin,’ wrote Bell, ‘and ask’d me the same question she had often done, whether I thought Stewart would be hung.’ Deeply moved, he replied that he didn’t know – perhaps not.
‘She then said “If he is alive when you return, tell him that you saw his Peggy and his little Charlotte, and that they were both well, and tell him to come to Otaheite, and live with them, or they will be unhappy.” She then burst into Tears and with the deepest regret forced herself into her Canoe and as long as we could see her she kept waving her hand.’ The next ship that came from Tahiti brought word that Peggy had pined away and died of a broken heart.
BOUNTY (#ulink_5c7879e2-558c-52d9-98fc-6b21fd2ace22)
England, 1787
The passion for exploration and discovery, the hunger to learn all things about all aspects of the physical world, the great and preposterous optimism that held that such truths were in fact discoverable – these remarkable traits that so characterized the British eighteenth century were embodied by one remarkable eighteenth-century man, the admired, envied and uniquely influential Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was forty-four years old in 1787 and already a national treasure, as powerful in his way as any member of government. And it was the interest of Banks, more than any other consideration, that ensured that the government undertook the Bounty’s breadfruit mission to the South Seas.
Banks had been born in 1743, to a prosperous and well-connected landowning family. Somehow he had managed to be educated at both Eton and Harrow and at Oxford, although under a tutor he had privately hired from Cambridge. He was only eighteen when his father died and he had inherited the first of his estates, and from this time, for the remainder of his life, Banks was the master of his own destiny. From an early age he had shown a passion for natural history, above all botany, and this he now pursued. At the age of twenty-one, having established himself in London society, where he quickly became the friend of distinguished men some decades his senior, Banks set out for a summer of botanizing along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Returning with a professionally compiled collection of novel specimens never before seen in Europe, and the basis of what would become his world-famous herbarium, he was, at twenty-three, elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Still restless, still implausibly young, Banks then decided that his next venture in gentlemanly enquiry would be with Lieutenant James Cook in the Pacific.
The first of what would be Cook’s three magnificent voyages left England in the Endeavour in August 1768. The primary objective was to enable British astronomers to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti, but after accomplishing such observations, the expedition was to proceed in search of the fabled Southern continent, surveying New Zealand and other islands en route. Banks was footing the bill for his own passage as well as that of his considerable entourage – his colleague and employee Dr Daniel Solander, a distinguished Swedish naturalist and disciple of Linnaeus, two artists to make records of what was seen, his secretary, four servants and his two greyhounds. It was popularly rumoured that Banks’s expenses for the trip had cost him some ten thousand pounds.
Cook’s first voyage made discoveries in New Zealand, Australia (where Botany Bay was named for Banks’s botanizing) and a multitude of new islands, but it was the visit to Tahiti that became most memorably etched in the English imagination. Tahiti had been ‘discovered’ before Cook – Captain Samuel Wallis of the Dolphin had touched here, on what he called ‘King George III Island’, in 1767 – but it did not become a subject of popular and fashionable fascination until the return of the Endeavour in 1771.
And at least one reason for the fascination was Joseph Banks. He had not just returned to England with thousands of unknown and expertly preserved botanical specimens, professional botanical drawings and watercolours (as well as landscapes and ethnological studies) from his artists; Banks had also returned as the subject of romantic, even titillating stories. With his zeal for new experiences, he had thrown himself into Tahitian life, learning its language, attending burials and sacrifices and dances, endearing himself to its people, even having himself discreetly tattooed. The happy promiscuity of the Tahitian women was already well known from Wallis’s reports and Banks’s adventures on this front provided additional spice. Outstanding among the stories that made the rounds of London social circles was the tale of the theft of Mr Banks’s fine waistcoat with its splendid silver frogging, stolen, along with his shoes and pistol, while he lay sleeping with his ‘old Freind Oberea’ in her canoe:
Didst thou not, crafty, subtle sunburnt strum
Steal the silk breeches from his tawny bum?
Calls’t thouself a Queen? and thus couldst use
And rob thy Swain of breeches and his shoes?
The romance of Banks and Queen Oberea, broadcast in facetious verse and ‘letters’, helped ensure that the most-talked-about phenomenon to emerge from Cook’s long, exotic voyage was Joseph Banks. To paraphrase one historian, Banks had no need to return to London with a lion or tiger – he was the lion of London. A few years after his return, he would make one more far-flung journey of discovery, this time a self-financed expedition to Iceland. In the course of his three rather eccentrically determined voyages, he had pursued natural history from Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, from extreme northern to extreme southern latitudes – a range unmatched by any naturalist of his day.
With these travels behind him, Banks purchased a London town house in fashionable Soho Square and settled into the sedate but stimulating routine he was to maintain until the end of his life. In 1778, he was elected president of the Royal Society – and would be re-elected annually for the next forty-two years – and he was raised to a baronetcy as ‘Sir Joseph’ in 1779. On his return from the South Seas, he had been introduced to King George, who also shared Banks’s enthusiasm for natural history; Banks had been appointed botanical adviser to the King, and the two men became enduring friends. From their conversational strolls together were laid the plans for what would become the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, an enterprise made successful by Banks’s energetic enthusiasm and dazzling connections with botanists and collectors throughout the world. This dedication would continue from his appointment in 1775 until his death. Banks’s nearby villa, Spring Grove, and its extensive land became a model of experimental farming, another interest he shared with the King. The stud stock of Spanish merino sheep, which he had acquired with much difficulty and bred at Spring Grove, was, with the royal stud, which he also managed, the foundation for the growth of the British export wool trade in the next century.
But mostly what occupied Banks, apart from his duties at the Royal Society, was his correspondence. In his town house, with his fine library and unique collection of specimens, beautifully mounted in cabinets of his own design, he was furnished with much of what he required for his further researches. The rest came to him from the eager outside world. Reports of the prodigious appetite of a cuckoo raised by hand, and of the tonal qualities of Tahitian wind instruments; descriptions of battles between spiders and flies; introductions to promising students of botany and natural history; queries about prospective African expeditions, proper methods of raising ships from riverbeds, the correct authorship of ‘God Save the King’; reports of unicorn sightings, of the later years of the famous German Wild Boy and his fondness for gingerbread; descriptions of destruction done to wall fruit by insects, the superiority of olives to other oil-producing trees; gifts of newly published treatises, specimens of seed, of insects, of fighting flies and remains of the spiders they had conquered – all streamed into 32 Soho Square. The kangaroos, opossums and plants that would so inconvenience the Gorgon in 1792 were all destined for Joseph Banks.
His correspondence, most of it now lost, is estimated to have comprised anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 letters. His correspondents included great names such as William Pitt the Younger, Lord Nelson, Benjamin Franklin and distinguished scholars of many nations. But there were also captains who offered interesting specimens from their travels, farmers and a letter forwarded from a schoolmaster giving testimony that he had seen a mermaid.
Anywhere in the world, everywhere in the British Isles, people noted curious phenomena, came up with curious questions, observations or theories and thought, ‘I’ll write to Joseph Banks.’ When Samuel Taylor Coleridge wanted ‘hashish’, he contacted Banks. Without straying far from London and his well-managed Lincolnshire estates, Banks knew everyone, and everything. Studiously apolitical, he was respected and trusted by most parties. Few British expeditions of discovery of any kind, whether to Africa or Iceland, were mounted without consultation with Sir Joseph Banks. In Banks’s correspondence is mirrored the British eighteenth century, with all its energetic, questing optimism, its dazzling sophistication and its occasional startling innocence; an age in which geographical and scientific discoveries surpassed anything previously dreamt of, and yet an age in which it was still, just barely, possible to believe in mermaids and unicorns.
Amid this flood of gloriously mixed correspondence came an insistent trickle from those with interest in the plantations of the West Indies, with the suggestion that the importation of exotic fruit-bearing trees would be useful to the islands. As early as 1772, Valentine Morris, a planter who would later be governor of St Vincent, had approached Banks regarding the ‘possibility of procuring the bread tree, either in seed or plant so as to introduce that most valuable tree into our American Islands.’
The virtues of the Artocarpus incisa – the handsome, broad-leafed tropical tree that bore fruit the size of a man’s head – had been related by early explorers, who gave accounts of the fruit’s tastiness and uncanny similarity to bread. Lord Anson’s account of his circumnavigation of the world, published in 1748, told how on the Pacific island of Tinian, where his scurvy-stricken crew had fortuitously washed up, the breadfruit had been ‘constantly eaten by us instead of bread: and so universally preferred that no ship’s bread was expended in that whole interval.’
Such reports by Anson, Cook and others were taken very seriously by the West India Committee, which was composed of merchants and property owners with island interests. At a meeting in February 1775, a letter was read to the chairman ‘relative to the introduction into England of the Bread-fruit tree and Mangostan from the East Indies, in order for their being sent over and propagated in the West Indies.’ A month later, a resolution was passed offering a hundred pounds to ‘the captain of an East India ship, or any other person’ who brought ‘the true Bread-fruit tree in a thriving vegetation’ to England. The matter dragged on over the years, the subject of various letters, treatises and resolutions put forth by the committee. And thus things might have remained indefinitely, with a vague and rather lowly bounty offered to any willing taker, if the enterprise had not caught the interest of Joseph Banks.
Banks had privately discussed the possibility with several eager planters and botanists: needless to say, he had himself tasted the fruit on Tahiti, but had personally preferred plantains, finding that breadfruit ‘sometimes griped us’. By 1785, Matthew Wallen, a botanist living in Jamaica to whom Banks had sent various exotic seeds for experimental planting, wrote to Banks with the bold observation that the ‘King ought to send a Man of War, a Botanist & Gardener for the Plants we want,’ adding he would not then ‘want the Example of the King of France who sends Duplicates & Triplicates of all valuable Plants to his Colonies.’ Banks was in agreement that a proper government-sponsored expedition was desirable; it was also the case that he lacked breadfruit specimens of his own for Kew. That the British had fallen behind the French on this front provided useful leverage, and in February 1787, a breadfruit expedition was formally announced to the West India Committee by Prime Minister Pitt.
Simultaneous with these proposals for the breadfruit expedition were the plans, now well under way, for the transportation of the first convicts from England to Botany Bay in New South Wales. Banks, who was instrumental to both ventures, had originally intended to combine the two, and had at first proposed an ambitious itinerary: a single vessel would carry the convicts to New South Wales, deposit them and then continue on to collect breadfruit in Tahiti. It did not take long, however, for Banks to awake to the fact that the two enterprises, although destined for roughly the same part of the globe, had wholly distinct requirements. An expedition devoted solely to the breadfruit was, he allowed in March 1787, ‘more likely to be successful’.
Thus some months later, Lord Sydney, a principal secretary of state, informed Banks that the Admiralty had ‘purchased a Vessel for the purpose of conveying the Bread-Fruit Tree and other useful productions from the South Sea Islands to His Majesty’s West India Possessions.’ The ship, formerly named Bethia, was one Banks had approved, and it had been purchased by the Admiralty for the sum of £1950. She was to be commissioned within a few days, according to Sydney, and was ‘to be called The Bounty, and to be commanded by Lieutenant Bligh.’
Exactly how, or through whose recommendation, William Bligh came to receive the command of the Bounty is not known. It does not appear to be the case that Banks knew Bligh personally, although he had undoubtedly heard of him, since Bligh had served as sailing master of the Resolution on Cook’s last expedition, which had departed England eleven years before, in 1776. It is possible that Banks had made a recommendation that the breadfruit expedition was best entrusted to one of Cook’s men. William Bligh, on the other hand, had certainly heard of Joseph Banks, and in his mind there was no question of to whom he was indebted.
‘Sir, I arrived yesterday from Jamaica,’ Bligh wrote to Banks on 6 August, with an outflowing of gratitude. ‘…I have heard the flattering news of your great goodness to me, intending to honor me with the command of the vessel which you propose to go to the South Seas, for which, after offering you my most grateful thanks, I can only assure you I shall endeavour, and I hope succeed, in deserving such a trust’
William Bligh had been christened on 9 September 1754, in the great naval town of Plymouth, where his father, Francis Bligh, was chief of customs. The Blighs were originally from Cornwall, and could claim such distinguished men as Admiral Sir Richard Rodney Bligh and the Earls of Darnley. Bligh’s mother, Jane Pearce, had been a widow when she married Francis Bligh, and had died before her son was sixteen. William Bligh appears to have been the only child of this union. Francis Bligh married twice again after the death of his wife, and had himself passed away at the age of fifty-nine in December 1780 – three months after his son’s return to England from Cook’s third Pacific voyage.
Bligh first appears in naval records in 1762, as a captain’s servant on the Monmouth, when he would have been all of seven years old. This should not be taken to mean that young William had actually gone to sea; more likely, he had been entered on the books of an accommodating captain. This well-established, if strictly improper, tradition enabled a captain to draw extra rations and the child to enjoy some early friendly patronage and ‘sea time’. Widespread as the practice was, it was only extended to families with some degree of ‘interest’, or influential connections. In Bligh’s case this appears to have come through a relative of his mother, although his father undoubtedly had connections through the customs office. Bligh’s name does not appear again in naval records until 1770, shortly after his mother’s death, when he was entered on the muster of the Hunter as an ‘able seaman’, a common, temporary classification for ‘young gentlemen’, or potential officers in training who found themselves on ships where the official quota of midshipmen was already filled. And indeed, six months after signing on, a midshipman position did open up and Bligh was duly promoted.
Bligh was to serve on his next ship, the Crescent, for three years as a midshipman, or from the age of seventeen to a few weeks short of twenty. This period, which saw tours to Tenerife and the West Indies, was undoubtedly a formative period of his professional life. Paid off in 1774, Bligh next joined the Ranger – not as a midshipman, but once again, initially, as an able seaman; such was the expected fickleness of a naval career. The Ranger’s principal duty was hunting smugglers, and she had been based where smuggling was known to be particularly egregious, across the Irish Sea at Douglas, on the Isle of Man. Manx men and women were to figure heavily in Bligh’s later life.
Then, at the age of twenty-one, Bligh received the news that would represent a turning point in his life: he had been chosen to join Captain Cook on his third expedition as master of the Resolution. Again, how or by whom he had been singled out for this prestigious commission is not known. Cook himself had stated that the young officers under his direction ‘could be usefully employed in constructing charts, in taking views of the coasts and headlands near which we should pass, and in drawing plans of the bays and harbours in which we should anchor.’ Given Bligh’s later proven abilities, it may be that even at the age of twenty-one a reputation for these skills had preceded him and recommended him to Cook. To work side by side, in this capacity, with the greatest navigator of the age was for Bligh both a great honour and an unparalleled opportunity.
It was also, however, strictly speaking, if not a step backward in the command hierarchy of his profession, at least a step sideways. For a young man of Bligh’s background and aspirations, the desired position following a successful midshipman apprenticeship was that of lieutenant, which would put him securely on the promotional ladder leading to the post of captain. A master, on the other hand, for all the rigour of his responsibilities, received his appointment not as a commission from the Admiralty, but by a warrant from the Naval Board. These were important distinctions, professionally and socially. And while it was not unusual for a young man to bide his time by serving as a master until a lieutenancy was offered, there was the danger of proving too useful in that rank and advancing no further. Most masters had not been young gentlemen and were not destined for the captain’s list. In Bligh’s case the risk seemed justified. If he did his job well, he could count on the ‘interest’ and recommendation of Captain Cook, the most highly regarded royal naval officer of his day as a cartographer and explorer.
With Cook’s expedition, Bligh sailed to Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand, Tahiti, and the Pacific islands. He patrolled the west coast of North America and searched for the Northwest Passage. Cook was justly famous for maintaining the health of his crew on his long, demanding voyages, and Bligh’s own later practices would reveal that he had closely observed and learned from his mentor’s innovations in diet and ship management.
From Cook’s own log, one catches only glimpses of the earnest young sailing master, usually being sent ahead of the ship in a reconnaissance boat to make a careful survey of some ticklish coast or bay. After Cook himself, Bligh was responsible for most of the charts and surveys made in the course of this last expedition, and had thus honed his already exceptional abilities.
Most unforgettably, Bligh had been present at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, when on 14 February 1779, James Cook was murdered by the island natives. The events that led to this shocking tragedy would be long disputed; dispassionate reading of the numerous, often conflicting accounts suggests that Cook behaved with uncharacteristic rashness and provocation to the islanders – but that at the moment of crisis he had been betrayed by the disorder and panic of the armed marines whose duty had been to protect him. In the horrified and frightened aftermath of their loss, Cook’s officers assembled an account of the events at Kealakekua Bay that vindicated most and made a scapegoat of only one man, a Lieutenant Rickinson. Some years later, William Bligh would record his disgust with this closing of the ranks in marginal annotations made in a copy of the official publication of the voyage: ‘A most infamous lie’; ‘The whole affair from the Opening to the end did not last 10 Minutes, nor was their a spark of courage or conduct shown in the whole busyness’; ‘a most Hypocritical expression’; ‘A pretty Old Woman Story’.
In Bligh’s opinion, the principal cause of the tragedy at Kealakekua Bay lay with the marines: they had failed to do their duty. After firing a first panicked volley, they had fallen back from the menacing crowd of islanders in fear, splashing and flailing to their waiting boat. ‘The Marines fir’d & ran which occasioned all that followed for had they fixed their bayonets & not have run, so frightened as they were, they might have drove all before them.’ The person most responsible for the marines’ disorder was their commander, Lieutenant Molesworth Phillips, characterized by Bligh as a ‘person, who never was of any real service the whole Voyage, or did anything but eat and Sleep.’
Bligh was at least in some position to pass judgement, for the day following Cook’s murder he had been sent onshore to oversee a party of men repairing the Resolution’s damaged mast. Shortly after landing, Bligh had found himself faced with a menacing crowd and had ordered his men to stand and fire; and he had held this position until joined by reinforcements from the ship.
The shock and tragedy apart, Cook’s death deprived Bligh of the valuable interest he had counted on at the expedition’s end, and which it would appear by this time he otherwise lacked; his own modest connections had been sufficient to secure him a young gentleman’s entry to naval service, but do not appear to have been extensive enough to have advanced him further. In both the subsequent flurry of promotions and the published account of the voyage, Bligh found himself somewhat marginalized; whether this was because he had made known his highly impolitic views of the expedition cannot be determined. But to his intense annoyance and mortification, the carefully drawn charts he had made throughout the voyage were published under another’s name.
Following his return to England, Bligh had indulged in a rare holiday and returned to the Isle of Man, with, as subsequent events would suggest, a determined objective; only months after his return, in February 1781, William Bligh was married to Elizabeth Betham, the pretty, twenty-seven-year-old daughter of well-to-do and exceptionally well-educated parents. Richard Betham, Elizabeth’s father, was the receiver general, or collector of customs, in Douglas, and the friend of such distinguished men as philosopher David Hume and economist Adam Smith, with whom he had been a student at university. William Bligh, prudent, diligent and ambitious, would have had much to recommend him as a husband. For Elizabeth Betham, intelligent and brought up in a family of enlightened thinkers, Bligh’s participation in a high-profile expedition of discovery and exploration was also an attraction, evidence that the young officer was a cut above the usual naval man. By now Bligh had not only served with, and been deeply affected by, the most progressive sea captain of his age, but also, as his ship logs would reveal, he shared Cook’s unflagging interest in recording not only the coasts and harbours but also the people and places he encountered. As Elizabeth Bligh had undoubtedly appreciated, William Bligh not only was ambitious in the naval line, but also possessed the diligent, enquiring curiosity that might destine him for association with the ‘scientifically’ minded men of the Royal Society.
Following his marriage, Bligh had served as a fifth or sixth lieutenant in a series of short commissions during the winding down of the American War of Independence. By 1782, the navy had begun to scale back and reverted to offering the meagre fare of peacetime – two shillings a day and no opportunity for prize money from enemy ships. William Bligh, newly married and now with a young daughter to support, had at first lain low in the Isle of Man, where life was famously cheap, and where, as he told a relative, he could at least get plenty of books and ‘improve’ himself by reading. But these circumstances were tolerable for only so long, and by the middle of 1783, Bligh had received permission from the Admiralty to take mercantile employment abroad; so for four years, until his appointment to the Bounty, Bligh had plied the rum and sugar trade from England to the West Indies for his wife’s wealthy merchant uncle, Duncan Campbell.
Bligh was of average to below-average height. His hair was black, his skin ‘of an ivory or marble whiteness’; in later years, it would be remarked of him that ‘his face, though it had been exposed to all climates, and to the roughest weather, was, even as years began to tell upon him, far from appearing weather-beaten, or coarse.’ He did not, then, have the look of a rough ‘salt’. Nonetheless, he was widely experienced, having served in time of war, in voyages of discovery and in the merchant trade, from the Pacific to the West Indies. Other considerations are likely to have recommended him in Admiralty eyes. While it was the often expressed opinion of Joseph Banks that the Bounty voyage was now exclusively about breadfruit transportation, the Admiralty had one other, highly regarded objective, as was clear from the sailing orders Bligh eventually received: after leaving Tahiti, his orders instructed him, ‘you are to proceed from thence through Endeavour Streights (which separate New Holland from New Guinea).’ The navigation and survey of this important, little-known and dangerous passage – where Cook himself had run aground – was of great interest to the Admiralty, and there were few naval men better qualified, or available, to undertake this than Captain Cook’s able sailing master.
For William Bligh, now not quite thirty-three years old and a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Navy, the command of Sir Joseph Banks’s prestigious breadfruit journey implied more than a return to naval service from the obscurity of the sugar trade – it put Bligh squarely in Cook’s footsteps.
The object of all the former voyages to the South Seas,’ Bligh himself wrote, ‘has been the advancement of science, and the increase of knowledge. This voyage may be reckoned the first, the intention of which has been to derive benefit from those distant discoveries.’
The vessel that Bligh would refer to with habitual affection as ‘my little ship’ awaited him at Deptford Dockyard, on the Thames. The Bounty was a beautiful craft, lying solid and low in the water like the full-bodied merchant ship she was, blunt-nosed and square-sterned, surmounted by her three spirelike masts. Fixed under her bowsprit was the painted figurehead of a lady dressed in a riding habit. But for all the neatness of her lines, Bligh could have been forgiven for a momentary loss of heart at his first sight. Resolution and Discovery, the two ships carefully chosen by Captain Cook for his last expedition, had been 462 and 295 tons, respectively – and Discovery, as a consort, was markedly smaller than any of Cook’s previous ships, which averaged around 350 tons burthen. The Bounty was of 220 tons. At 85 feet 1
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inches long, and with a beam of 24 feet 4 inches, she was rated as only a cutter. Of more consequence to Bligh, a cutter did not rate a captain as her commanding officer, or even a commander (the rank Cook had held on his second voyage). William Bligh would therefore not be promoted as he had optimistically hoped, but would sail as a lieutenant; if he were addressed as ‘Captain Bligh’, it would be only out of courtesy. Given that he was to be gone for at least two years, this was an acute disappointment; at the very least, it meant two years more on a lieutenant’s pay.
It was Banks who, in consultation with David Nelson, the gardener chosen for the voyage, had made the final selection of the vessel from the few candidates the Admiralty had deemed suitable. A merchantman had been chosen, since carrying capacity was the main object. Banks had very definite ideas about how exploration vessels should be fitted out – so definite that they had cost him a place on Cook’s second expedition of 1772. At that time, it had been assumed by everyone, including Banks, that he would participate in this next grand adventure. But after the ship selected by Cook had been completely reconfigured under Banks’s supervision to accommodate his entourage – heightened, redecked, fitted with a new raised poop to compensate for the scientists’ quarters – the ship had proved too top-heavy to sail. She was restored to her original state, and Banks withdrew from the enterprise in pique.
Fifteen years later, Banks’s ideas on how botanical expeditions were to be conducted were still adamantly precise. ‘As the sole object of Government in Chartering this Vessel in our Service at a very considerable expense is to furnish the West Indian Islands with the Bread-Fruit & other valuable productions of the East,’ Banks wrote in a draft of his instructions in early 1787, ‘the Master & Crew of her must not think it a grievance to give up the best part of her accommodations for that purpose.’ There were to be no dogs, cats, monkeys, parrots, goats or any of the other animals traditionally found on ships, excepting those kept in coops for food. Arsenic must be kept out for cockroaches and rats and ‘the Crew must not complain if some of them who may die in the ceiling make an unpleasant smell.’ Banks had estimated that ‘a Brig of less than 200 Tons Burthen would be fully sufficient.’ He also wanted a small crew – ‘no more than 30 Souls’, including the gardener – so as not to take up space that could be used by plants. An astronomer had also sought to go along ‘to observe the expected comet’, but Banks refused; in his eyes, the Bounty’s voyage had one object only – breadfruit.
This was made clear to Bligh personally from the moment he first looked over his new ship. Descending the companionway from the upper deck, Bligh entered the great cabin, the captain’s private quarters that encompassed the breadth of the vessel and extended from the transom almost to the mainmast. Paned windows at the stern and quarter windows flooded the spacious area with light. This was where the captain could retire for privacy and rest, where he could invite his officers and young gentlemen. For a navigator and draftsman like Bligh, it was also his library, where he could spread out his charts and drawings, and store his collection of books.
But the Bounty’s great cabin was not destined for the personal use of Lieutenant Bligh – it was to be converted into a nursery for the plants. Fitted with skylights and air scuttles, it would contain staging cut with holes for 629 pots; it also had a stove to ensure that the plants would be warm in cold weather. An ingenious drainage system provided a catchment for surplus water, which could be recycled. Bligh’s quarters would be improvised immediately forward of the nursery, to the starboard side of the companionway. A windowless cabin measuring eight by seven feet would form his sleeping area. Adjoining it was a small pantry where he would take his meals; if he wished to invite others to his table, they would meet him here, in this cramped, undignified space. Cook, too, on his first voyage, had shared his day cabin with Banks and his scientist and draftsman, but on that occasion the usurpation of the captain’s space into a kind of gentleman’s working library had not resulted in any symbolic loss of dignity. Unlike Cook, Bligh was not to enjoy an active and collegial engagement with his partner in this enterprise. Shunted into his cramped, dark solitude by the pots of Joseph Banks, he was effectively relegated to the role of botanical courier.
With the interior refinements out of his hands, Bligh spent the months of August and September making his ship as seaworthy as possible for her long, dangerous voyage. Her masts were shortened so as to make her more stable, and her wooden hull was sheathed with copper against the ravages of ship worm. Nineteen tons of iron ballast were stowed instead of the customary forty-five; Bligh reckoned that the eighteen months of stores he was carrying would make up the balance.
The Bounty’s rating as a cutter also determined the establishment she would carry. There would be no commissioned officers apart from Bligh; the warrant officers would include a master, boatswain, carpenter, gunner and surgeon. In the interest of economy, and as was not uncommon, the role of purser had been dispensed with. A purser, the purveyor of all official stores, in effect purchased provisions from the Navy Board at the outset of a voyage, and sold back what had not been used on his return. Because he was expected to supplement his lowly salary by profits received, he had strong self-interest to stint on provisions, for which reason he was generally regarded by the sailors with suspicion and contempt. On the Bounty, the duties of this office were to be fulfilled by the commanding officer – Lieutenant Bligh.
Bligh’s commission had commenced on 16 August, and was followed only days later by the appointment of the first warrant officers. John Fryer, the Bounty’s new master, was slightly older than Bligh; with his rather refined features and pensive air, he called to mind a dignified school headmaster. Fryer had been assigned the small cabin opposite Bligh’s, on the other side of the aft hatchway.
Only weeks before he joined the Bounty, Fryer, a widower, had married a ‘Spinster’ named Mary Tinkler, from Wells-next-the-Sea, in Norfolk, where he too had been born. This marriage held some consequence for the voyage. Fryer, using his modest interest, had secured a position for his brother-in-law, Robert Tinkler, nominally as an AB, or able seaman, with the understanding that he was to be considered a young gentleman. Although Tinkler was entered on the ship’s muster as being seventeen years of age, he was in fact only twelve.
Fryer had entered the navy only seven years earlier. As was common for a master, he had transferred from the merchant service, where he had seen some excitement; around 1776, he had been mate on a vessel captured by French privateers and had spent over a year and a half in prison. John Fryer’s role as master on the Bounty was the same as that played by Bligh on Cook’s Resolution. However, Bligh had been a precocious twenty-one-year-old lieutenant-in-waiting, while John Fryer was a thirty-five-year-old man who was unlikely to advance higher in nominal rank.
Bligh’s failure to gain promotion for this breadfruit voyage bore implications well beyond the fact that he would continue to be paid as a lieutenant, and nowhere were the consequences to become more overtly apparent than in his relationship with Master Fryer. While Bligh considered himself to be only a formality away from the coveted promotions that would secure him his captaincy, in the eyes of John Fryer, Mr Bligh was still merely a lieutenant. In theory, the master bore responsibility for the navigation of a ship; however, William Bligh was by now an expert navigator, trained under Captain Cook, and one of the few men in the British navy with experience in the South Seas. It was not then to be expected that he would surrender his own expertise on so critical a subject to the middle-of-the-road know-how of Master Fryer. Under William Bligh, the master was in fact redundant.
Thomas Huggan, an alcoholic surgeon, was the second warrant officer appointed. ‘My surgeon, I believe, may be a very capable man, but his indolence and corpulency render him rather unfit for the voyage,’ Bligh wrote as tactfully as he could to Sir Joseph Banks, whom he was careful to keep apprised of all developments. ‘I wish I may get him to change.’
Although this proved impossible, Banks did succeed in getting the Admiralty to agree to an assistant surgeon. Eventually this position was taken by Thomas Denman Ledward, a man in his late twenties from a distinguished family of apothecaries and physicians and the first cousin of Thomas Denman, destined to become Lord Chief Justice.
‘I am to enter as A.B.!’ Ledward wrote to his uncle shortly before sailing – the ever handy ‘able seaman’ designation being invoked to comply with the ship’s official numerical establishment. ‘But the Captain is almost certain that I shall get a first Mate’s pay, & shall stand a great chance of immediate promotion,’ and – a further agreeable incentive – ‘if the Surgeon dies (& he has the character of a drunkard) I shall have a Surgeon’s acting order.’ An additional inducement to take on what surely promised to be a thankless job was that Sir Joseph Banks had offered his ‘interest to any surgeon’s mate who would go out as able seaman.’
On the same day that Fryer and Huggan were appointed, Thomas Hayward also joined the Bounty, nominally as another AB but shortly to be promoted to one of the two coveted midshipman allotments. This nineteen-year-old officer had been recommended by one of Banks’s old and admired colleagues, William Wales, who had been the astronomer on Cook’s second voyage, and who was now mathematical master at Christ’s Hospital, that extraordinary charity school that educated, among other luminaries, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; indeed, some of the haunting ice imagery of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ comes from William Wales’s description of crossing into Antarctic waters on Cook’s voyage. Wales taught mathematics, astronomy, navigational skills and surveying at Christ’s Hospital, the object of his particular attention being that circle of boys destined for sea careers. Lamb, describing his old teacher, claimed that ‘all his systems were adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to encounter. Frequent and severe punishments, which were expected to be borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to be his only aim.’
Wales was also secretary to the Board of Longitude and had been responsible for publishing the scientific observations of Cook’s voyage – he was, then, a man for whom Banks had high regard.
‘I beg leave to trouble you with the Name of the Young Gentleman who is desirous of going with Capt. Bligh and whom I mentioned to you sometime since,’ Wales wrote to Banks on 8 August. ‘It is Mr. Thomas Hayward, Son of Mr. Hayward, a surgeon at Hackney.’ The young man who was the object of Wales’s interest was the eldest son of nine surviving children. Thomas Hayward had entered the navy’s books as a captain’s servant aboard the Halifax at the tender age of seven, where he served, on the books at least, for the next four years. From age eleven to fourteen, however, Hayward was not at sea, but was presumably being schooled. In 1782, he was back on the navy’s books and for the next five years served as able seaman or midshipman aboard a number of ships. He came to the Bounty from the 24-gun frigate Porcupine, which had been patrolling off the Irish coast. Possibly no other promising young gentleman in His Majesty’s Royal Navy was to endure such a spectacular run of bad professional fortune as Thomas Hayward.
Over the next weeks, the rest of the crew continued to trickle in, acquired from other ships, from former service with Bligh or from those with interest to get them their positions. A number of these deserted: the names John Cooper, George Armstrong, William Hudson, Samuel Sutton, marked ‘R’ for ‘Run’, are among those that appear on the Bounty muster only briefly before vanishing from this story. These desertions included the company’s only two pressed men, seamen forced against their will into the King’s service. Bligh claimed that it was only after leaving Tenerife that he ‘now made the ship’s company acquainted with the intent of the voyage’, but it is unlikely that the men had remained in ignorance until this time; the preparations themselves would have given much away. Thomas Ledward, the young assistant surgeon, reported excitedly to his uncle before the Bounty sailed that he had agreed to go ‘to Otaheite to transplant Bread fruit trees to Jamaica’, which would indicate there were no secrets here. It is a striking fact that, with the desertion of the pressed men, the Bounty carried an all-volunteer crew; surely her destination – Tahiti, the Pacific islands – was one reason.
Little is known of William Cole, the boatswain and another of the warrant officers, apart from the fact that this was the third naval ship on which he had served. A great deal is known, however, about the boatswain’s mate, James Morrison – fortunately, for he was to play an important role in the story of the Bounty. Morrison was a native of Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis off the western coast of Scotland. His family was descended from several generations of educated Lewismen and even local hereditary judges, while his father was a merchant and land entrepreneur of education and some means. As events would show, the twenty-seven-year-old Morrison was exceptionally – dangerously – well educated, and although almost certainly Gaelic speaking, fluent and literate in English, and with at least a passing knowledge of Latin. One of the ways in which Morrison was to exercise his superior intellect was by writing a narrative of the Bounty voyage, which included a lengthy and well-observed description of life on Tahiti, as well as the voyage and aftermath of the Pandora. It was written several years after the events described, while he was a prisoner on the Hector awaiting trial for his life, circumstances that very directly coloured some of his ‘recollections’.
At five foot eight, Morrison was of above-average height and of slender build, with sallow skin and long black hair; a musket wound on his arm was a memento of action seen in service. He had joined the navy at the age of eighteen, and had since served on several ships in an intriguing variety of capacities: as a clerk on the Suffolk, a midshipman on the Termagant, acting gunner on the Hind. In 1783, at twenty-three, Morrison passed his master gunner’s examination, having shown proficiency, according to the examiners, in ‘Vulgar and Decimal Arithmetic, the extraction of the Square and Cube Roots, and in practical Problems of Geometry and Plain Trigonometry.’ This success, however, did not provide any material advantage. Like many during those ‘weak, piping times of peace’, Morrison seems to have been without a ship. At any rate, he does not surface in any known naval records until he appears as a boatswain’s mate on the muster of the Bounty.
In this capacity, his duties were to assist William Cole in his continual inspection of sails, rigging and boats. It was also Morrison who would administer all floggings; on a ship of the line, the boatswain’s mate was said to be ‘the most vocal, and the most feared, of the petty officers.’ Still, boatswain’s mate was a step down from master gunner and one must suspect either an urgent need for employment or a passion to see something of the world in his willingness to sign on to the Bounty in this lower position.
William Peckover, the Bounty’s actual gunner, had sailed with Cook on every one of his voyages. He therefore knew Tahiti and was also known to Bligh from the third expedition. William Purcell, the carpenter, made up the complement of warrant officers; the Bounty was his first ship of naval service. All of these men were at least minimally educated, as the Admiralty regulations stated that no person could be placed in charge of stores ‘unless he can read and write, and is sufficiently skilled in arithmetic to keep an account of them correctly’; all warrant officers had responsibilities for stores of some kind. Importantly, too, no warrant officer could be flogged.
Joseph Coleman, the thirty-six-year-old armourer, had also sailed with Cook and Bligh, having been mustered as an AB on the Discovery in 1776. Another man from Cook’s third voyage was David Nelson, the gardener, who had originally been recommended to Banks by a Hammersmith nurseryman. Banks had personally selected him for the breadfruit voyage on respectable terms of £50 a year. According to a shipmate from the Discovery, Nelson was ‘one of the quietest fellows in nature’. His assistant, William Brown, aged twenty-three and from Leicester, had also been selected by Banks. Although now a gardener, Brown had formerly served as a midshipman, when he had seen fierce action against the French – how or why he had gone from the one profession to the other is not known. Both Nelson and Brown were practical, hands-on gardeners, not botanists; Banks was adamant that there be no competing interests to the sole object of caring for the shipment of plants.
The three men joining the Bounty who had sailed on Cook’s last voyage were old acquaintances of Bligh’s – they had all been paid off together in 1780, seven years before. A more substantial number of the crew, however, had sailed with Bligh more recently, and were joining the Bounty from the West Indian ships Bligh had commanded for Duncan Campbell. These men knew Bligh as a commanding officer: Lawrence Lebogue, age forty, the sailmaker from Nova Scotia; John Norton, a quartermaster, age thirty-four, from Liverpool; Thomas Ellison, able seaman, age fifteen, from Deptford, where the Bounty now lay; and Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate, aged twenty-three, cited on the muster as being from Whitehaven, in Cumberland.
According to Bligh, Fletcher Christian was ‘Dark & very swarthy’, with ‘Blackish or very dark brown’ hair. Standing about five foot nine, he was strongly built, although his ‘knees stands a little out and may be called a little bow legged’. Others would later describe his ‘bright, pleasing countenance, and tall, commanding figure’. While born in Cumberland, Christian had more recently been based on the Isle of Man, where his family had old, strong connections, and where Bligh had been living after his marriage.
Fletcher, it was said by his family, had ‘staid at school longer than young men generally do who enter into the navy’. His first sea experience had been as a midshipman on the Eurydice in 1783, when he was eighteen and a half years of age – remarkably late in the day for a young man with his sights set on a naval career. After six months spent at anchorage in Spithead, the Eurydice had sailed for India, and for the next twenty-one months, Christian had been exposed to some of the most exotic parts of the world: Madeira, Cape Town, Madras and the Malabar Coast. Christian’s biographer would conjure the steaming coastal settlements the new midshipman encountered on this first voyage: most notably, the British Fort Saint George at Madras, defiantly set to survey the sea and surrounded by the residences of the English traders and officials, the busy traffic of lumbering oxen and sweating palanquin bearers, the rowdy trade of fine cotton, spices and green doves. The Eurydice was a ship of war, with a complement of 140 men, including a unit of marines, and Christian had also experienced for the first time British naval life in all its coarseness – bad food, complete lack of privacy, irregular sleep and rough discipline. Yet he must have prospered, or at least shown promise, for the ship’s muster indicates that some seven months out from England, he had been promoted from midshipman to master’s mate.
Christian had returned from India in high spirits, telling a relative that ‘it was very easy to make one’s self beloved and respected on board a ship; one had only to be always ready to obey one’s superior officers, and to be kind to the common men.’ This promising start was somewhat derailed by the inconvenient peace, which had put so many ships out of commission and, like Bligh, Christian had turned his sights from naval service to the merchant trade. The decision to approach Bligh, then working for Duncan Campbell, had been prompted, as a relative advised, because ‘it would be very desirable for him to serve under so experienced a navigator as Captain Bligh, who had been Sailing-master to Captain Cook.’
To Christian’s request for a position, however, Bligh had returned the polite response that he already had all the officers he could carry. This was undoubtedly true, but the fact that Bligh did not stretch himself to accommodate the eager young man, as he was to do for so many young gentlemen on the Bounty, suggests that he was not in any way beholden to the Christian family; Fletcher had approached Bligh, it would appear, without benefit of interest.
Upon receiving this rebuff, Christian was undeterred; indeed, he rose to the occasion, volunteering to work before the mast until a vacancy arose among the officers.
‘Wages were no object, he only wished to learn his profession,’ he had told Bligh, adding, ‘we Mid-shipmen are gentlemen, we never pull at a rope; I should even be glad to go one voyage in that situation, for there may be occasions, when officers may be called upon to do the duties of a common man.’
To this honourable request Bligh had responded favourably. Christian was taken on board the Britannia as a seaman, and on his return from the West Indies, according to his brother, ‘spoke of Captain Bligh with great respect’. He had worked hard alongside the common sailors, but ‘the Captain had been kind to him’, instructing him in the art of navigation. At the same time Christian had observed ‘that Captain Bligh was very passionate; yet he seemed to pride himself in knowing how to humour him.’ On their second voyage Christian was entered as nominal ‘gunner’ but, as Bligh made clear, was to be treated as an officer. Christian, it would seem, had become Bligh’s protégé. Bligh had taken pains not only to instruct the ambitious young man, but to elevate him, regularly inviting him to join him and his officers at his table for dinner. Christian for his part must have passed muster with his captain, for Bligh was not one to suffer fools, and it was Bligh who recommended Christian to the Admiralty as midshipman on the Bounty. ‘As it was understood that great interest had been made to get Midshipmen sent out in this ship,’ Fletcher’s brother would write, ‘Christian’s friends thought this recommendation…a very great obligation.’ On the return from the South Seas, Fletcher could expect to be promoted to lieutenant.
This promising naval career had not been in the Christian family’s original plans for its second-youngest son; and as the family itself was to play a significant part in the shaping of the events ahead, it is well to introduce its members here. Fletcher Christian was born on 25 September 1764, in his parents’ home in Cumberland, and had been baptized that same day, in Brigham Church, some two miles distant. Baptism on the day of birth was unusual, and implies that the newborn child was not expected to live. His parents, Charles and Ann, had already lost two infants.
Charles Christian came from an old Manx family that had been settled on the English mainland since the seventeenth century. At the age of twenty-two he had married Ann Dixon, the daughter of a dyer and a member of the local gentry well connected with other important north-country families. Ann’s mother was a Fletcher, another old and established Cumberland family. It was after his grandmother’s family that Fletcher Christian was named.
Charles had grown up in the Christians’ ancestral home, Ewanrigg, a forty-two-bedroomed mansion with crenellated battlements overlooking the sea. Reputedly, the property had been won by the Christians from the Bishop of Sodor and Man in a card game. Charles’s mother, Bridget Senhouse, could trace her ancestry back fourteen generations to King Edward I. Such distinctions bore little practical weight, however, and as a younger son (and one of eleven children), Charles inherited only his name and some shares in various family interests. Like all but the eldest son, he was expected to make his own way, which he did as an attorney-at-law, and later as coroner for Cumberland. The main boost to his fortune was his marriage – Ann brought with her a small but respectable property called Moorland Close, just outside Cockermouth, described locally as ‘a quadrangular pile of buildings, in the style of the mediæval manor house, half castle and half farmstead.’ The surrounding wall, originally built to rebuff Scottish border raiders, during Fletcher’s boyhood benignly enclosed an orchard and gardens, while the former guard stand had been converted into a little summer house.
Ten children were born to the young couple, six of whom survived infancy. Fletcher was the fifth surviving child, born twelve years after his eldest brother, John. Although Fletcher was raised in a large family, with cousins and relatives nearby in every direction, his childhood was made precarious by the early death of his father, who passed away in 1768. A month before he died, Charles Christian had written his will declaring himself ‘weak of body’, which suggests a protracted illness.
Ann Christian was now left to raise six children on her own. Fletcher was not yet four; his elder brothers, John, Edward and Charles, were sixteen, ten and six, respectively; his sister, Mary, was eight, while little Humphrey was just three months old. Money was, and evidently had long been, a problem. As early as the year of his first son’s birth, Charles Christian senior had borrowed from his eldest brother, and family records indicate a series of other large ‘loans’ made in later years. Still, under Ann’s management, care was given to Fletcher’s education, and he was sent first to Brigham’s one-room parish school and then to the Cockermouth Free School, which he attended for seven years – and where a younger contemporary was William Wordsworth, the future Poet Laureate.
Cockermouth and Moorland Close stood on the edge of the Lake District, ‘the wildest, most barren and frightful’ landscape in England. Years later, Wordsworth would romanticize and memorialize the savage grandeur of fractured crags and sweeping valleys, scored with streams and dark tarns. Cockermouth, situated against the backdrop of Mt Skiddaw on the Derwent and Cocker Rivers, was by all accounts a pleasant market town, its two main streets lined with stout stone houses roofed with thatch and blue slate.
Little is known of Fletcher Christian’s Cumberland upbringing, but his schoolmate William Wordsworth never forgot the wild freedom this countryside gave his childhood:
Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child,
In a small mill-race severed from his stream,
Made one long bathing of a summer’s day;
Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again
Alternate, all a summer’s day, or scoured
The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves
Of yellow ragwort; or when rock and hill,
The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,
Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone
Beneath the sky, as if I had been born
On Indian plains, and from my mother’s hut
Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport,
A naked savage, in the thunder shower.
While Fletcher Christian rode back and forth between the orchards and gardens of Moorland Close to Cockermouth, his two oldest brothers, John and Edward, went off to Cambridge and to professions in law. It was Edward who, as a new Fellow of his college, handled his mother’s affairs when her finances finally and fatally bottomed out. The crisis occurred in 1779, although to judge from the size of her debts it had been building for years. Somehow, together with her eldest son, John, she had managed to accumulate debts to the tune of £6490 os. 11d. The family, it appears, had been living for years with no regard for reality, and now Ann Christian was faced with the humiliating prospect of debtor’s prison. John Christian, her husband’s wealthy brother and head of the family, once again bailed them out, but seems to have made it clear that he could not be counted upon to do so again. In partial compensation, John Christian assumed ownership of Moorland Close and all effects attached to it.
Through Edward’s special pleading and contributions from his own modest Fellowship, he succeeded in scraping together an annuity of forty guineas per annum for his mother, with which, as he observed, she would ‘be able to live comfortably any where, so that if she is not secure from arrests at Moorland Close, I should have now no objections to the family’s removing to the Isle of Man.’ In the course of these negotiations with his wealthy uncle, Edward indicated the hope that ‘in time perhaps some of us may be in such circumstances as to think it a desirable object to redeem the place of our nativity.’ This touching aspiration was never to be realized. In October 1779, an advertisement was run on the front page of the Cumberland Pacquet for ‘that large commodious House situated in the Market Place of Cockermouth’ formerly belonging to John Christian, Fletcher and Edward’s oldest brother. Edward briefly became headmaster of Hawkshead Grammar School in Cumberland, where one of his pupils was Wordsworth. After seeking a position as a naval surgeon, Charles junior, the third son, entered the West Yorkshire Militia Regiment, commanded by Sir George Savile, who wrote glancingly of him, noting that ‘Mr. Christian [is] well satisfied & happy I believe in his situation. Indeed he is very deserving,’ which suggests the special attention of an aristocratic patron with ‘interest’ in his new recruit. When the regiment disbanded, Charles Christian went to Edinburgh to study medicine, and then qualified as a surgeon aboard an East India vessel called the Middlesex.
The fact that Ann Christian, with her daughter, Mary, and young Humphrey, emigrated to the Isle of Man suggests that she was not, after all, ‘secure from arrest’: debts acquired on the mainland could not be pursued here, and the island had become a haven for financially distressed gentry. Fletcher, now about fifteen, attended St Bees School, close to Whitehaven in Cumberland, but would have been a summer visitor to the island between school terms, where he encountered another part of his heritage. Here, on the Isle of Man, the Christians were an ancient and distinguished family who could trace their lineage back in an unbroken line of male successors to 1408, the year in which John MacCrysten, deemster or judge of the island, had put his signature on a deed.
It was not, however, in the magnificent, castle-like Christian family home of Milntown, with its sixteenth-century gardens and doors reputedly made from the wreckage of the Spanish Armada, that Ann and her family had settled. Bound to live within the means of her modest annuity, Ann Christian had taken her family to Douglas, where she rented property. Facing the Irish Sea and backed by miles of rolling, sparsely inhabited countryside, Douglas was more isolated and more remote than Cockermouth. It was home to just under three thousand souls. Herring sheds, a small shipyard and a brewery represented local industry. Douglas society, according to a contemporary English diarist, was ‘not of the best kind, much like that in our common Country Towns.’ But life here was cheap: no taxes, a ‘good living House at £8 a year’, and port wine for ten pence a bottle.
Between Cumberland and the Isle of Man, then, young Fletcher Christian had lived within the shadow of family greatness, even if the shadow was not cast by his own immediate kin. No evidence survives of how he passed the years between St Bees School and his sudden resurfacing in the muster roll of the Eurydice in 1783. The younger sons of Charles and Ann Christian would have been brought up to look forward to university and careers in law, following the paths of John and Edward; but the money had run out. Fletcher’s late coming to his profession, his staying ‘at school longer than young men generally do who enter into the navy’, may have been the result of family stalling, a hope that something ‘would come up’ to change their fortunes. Nevertheless, Fletcher’s proposal to Bligh – that ‘he would readily enter his ship as a Foremastman’ – indicates that the young man had accepted with great grace and optimistic courage this abrupt change of destinies.
Another of the Bounty’s newly recruited young gentlemen had a family background remarkably similar to that of Fletcher Christian. In fact, Peter Heywood was distantly related to the Christians: his great-aunt Elizabeth had married another John Christian of Douglas, and both the Christians and his mother’s family, the Speddings, had married into the ancient Cumberland family of Curwen. On his father’s side, Peter Heywood could trace his ancestry back to Piers E’Wood in 1164, who had settled after the Norman invasion near Heywood, Lancashire. A branch of the family eventually emigrated to the Isle of Man, of whom the most famous member had been Peter ‘Powderplot’ Heywood, who had apprehended Guy Fawkes and so forestalled the plot to blow up Parliament in 1605.
Peter was born on 5 June 1772, on the Isle of Man, in his father’s house, the Nunnery, a romantic former abbey set in extensive gardens about half a mile up the hill from Douglas, and the most imposing property in the area. Peter’s father, Peter John Heywood, like many of the Manx Christians before him, was a deemster of the island, and took a scholar’s interest in the Manx language, unusual for his time.
But while Heywood may have been a learned man, he appears not to have been highly practical. The next year, he was forced by debts to sell the Nunnery, surrender his position as deemster, and move to Whitehaven, close to where Fletcher Christian was to go to school.
Exactly how the Heywoods survived over the next few years remains unclear, but in 1781, Mr Heywood was offered the appointment as seneschal, or agent, of the Duke of Atholl’s estate and holdings on the Isle of Man. Young Peter had moved back to the island with his large family of ten brothers and sisters, and settled in Douglas, where Fletcher’s mother was now also residing, and where the presence of the Nunnery must have been a constant, bitter reminder of more prosperous days.
In July 1787, only a month before Bligh received his orders for the Bounty, Peter’s father was unceremoniously dismissed by the Duke of Atholl when it was discovered that he not only had been wildly mishandling the Duke’s estate, but had also pocketed several thousand pounds of his employer’s income. Confronted with his wrongdoing, Mr Heywood had responded with self-righteous hauteur; among other tactics, he pointed out that his family could be traced as far back as the Atholls. This inability to assume any responsibility, let alone culpability, for his actions so incensed his employer that the Duke felt compelled to offer a personal rebuke. For years, he observed to Mr Heywood, ‘you have been living in a Stile of profusion far beyond your fortune, and to the detriment of your own Children spending money belonging to another.’
Mr Heywood’s sudden loss of employment had brought disaster to his family, who were forced to move out of their house, which was the Duke’s property. On the other hand, the disgrace of Mr Heywood’s offence was studiously concealed and there is no whisper of any misdeed in all the Heywood papers down through the decades after this. Apparently unashamed, the children seemed to have passed through life with all their illusions of superior gentility intact.
Peter had been sent away to school at the age of eleven, first to Nantwich school in Cheshire and then, briefly, also to St Bees, at which establishments he would have received a gentleman’s usual diet of religious instruction and Latin. His teacher at Nantwich had published books on Livy and Tacitus, and so one may hazard that young Peter had his fill of these. Unlike Fletcher, however, a seagoing career of some kind had probably been on the cards for Peter, regardless of changed family circumstances; the number of naval and military careers in the Heywood pedigree suggests this was an honoured tradition. Peter’s first naval service had been aboard the Powerful, in 1786. The Powerful, however, had never left Plymouth Harbour. As this represented his only naval experience prior to joining the Bounty, he had not yet served at sea.
Peter’s position as a young gentleman and an AB on the Bounty came through the sympathetic and pitying offices of William Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, a friend of the Heywoods. ‘He is an ingenious young Lad & has always been a favorite of mine & indeed every body here,’ Betham wrote to Bligh from Douglas, thanking him for taking Peter under his wing. ‘And indeed the Reason of my insisting so strenuously upon his going the Voyage with you is that after I had mentioned the matter to Mrs Bligh, his Family have fallen into a great deal of Distress on account of their Father’s losing the Duke of Atholl’s Business, and I thought it would not appear well in me to drop this matter if it cou’d possibly be done without any prejudice to you, as this wou’d seem deserting them in their adversity, and I found they wou’d regard it as a great Disappointment.’ Betham did not apparently envisage young Peter’s duties as being particularly nautical. ‘I hope he will be of some Service to you, so far as he is able, in writing or looking after any necessary matters under your charge,’ Betham had added, vaguely.
In the summer of 1787, Mr Heywood accompanied his son from the Isle of Man to Liverpool. Here he bade Peter goodbye, entrusting him to the care of friends who were travelling to London by chaise along the long, rough road, each carrying a pair of loaded pistols as a guard against highwaymen. Once at Deptford, as another token of Bligh’s efforts for the young man, Peter stayed with Bligh and his wife at their lodgings while the Bounty was being equipped. Christian had relatives in London of his own to visit, including an uncle and his brother John, who had moved here after his bankruptcy. Given Christian’s already close association with Bligh, it would be incredible that he too did not visit the Bligh household at this time. ‘You have danced my children upon your knee,’ Bligh would remind the master’s mate at a later date.
Also joining the Bounty, rated as a nominal AB, was another fallen aristocrat of sorts, twenty-one-year-old Edward Young. Edward was the nephew of Sir George Young, a distinguished naval captain and future admiral who had served in both the Royal Navy and the East India Company. ‘As I do not know all his exploits,’ one memorialist offered breezily, ‘I can only state that he was employed…in several services requiring nautical skill and British courage.’ Since 1784, George Young had been an advocate, with Sir Joseph Banks, of establishing the New South Wales colony, which he envisaged would serve as a port of call for ships on the China trade and more unexpectedly a centre for the cultivation of flax. A paper outlining his proposal became a cornerstone of the government’s eventual establishment of a penal colony near Botany Bay. It is probable that it was through his connection with Banks that Young had approached Bligh about a position for Edward.
However, there is no family record of a nephew called Edward. On the Bounty muster, Edward is entered as coming from ‘St Kitt’s’, and a near contemporary reference mentions him as ‘half-caste’. He was described by Bligh as roughly five foot eight in height, with a dark complexion ‘and rather a bad look’. Young had dark brown hair, was ‘Strong Made’ and had ‘lost several of his Fore teeth, and those that remain are all Rotten; a Small Mole on the left Side of the throat.’ If Edward was indeed a nephew of Sir George, it is most likely that his father had been Robert Young, a younger brother who had died in 1781 on St Helena while captain of the East India Company’s Vansittart. Whereas other distinguished families associated with the Bounty would be loud in their opinions, news of the mutiny was met with a thundering silence by the Youngs. If Edward had been born on the wrong side of the blanket, there may have been relief when he vanished from the picture altogether.
Yet another young gentleman, George Stewart from the Orkney Islands, joined the Bounty as a midshipman, but was rerated AB before the ship sailed (the ship’s fixed allotment of two midshipman positions required judicious management on Bligh’s part). Bligh had met Stewart seven years earlier, when the Resolution had called at Stromness at the end of her long and harrowing voyage. In their home, the Whitehouse, overlooking the harbour and the bustling town with its inns and taverns, Alexander and Margaret Stewart, George’s parents, had entertained Bligh.
Like so many of the Bounty’s young gentlemen, George Stewart could trace an old and distinguished lineage. His father’s family could be traced back to King Robert II, in the thirteenth century; his mother could trace her descent back to Danes who had settled the Orkneys in the ninth century. Alexander Stewart had been born and lived on Ronaldsay in the Orkneys, but had moved to Stromness for his children’s schooling; he and his wife had eight children, of whom George was the eldest. Apparently, when word of the Bounty’s voyage reached them, the Stewarts had reminded Bligh of their former acquaintance; surely the stories the young master had told the Stewart family seven years earlier, upon his return from the Pacific had made George’s interest in this particular voyage especially keen.
When he came down to Deptford to join the Bounty, George Stewart was twenty-one years old and ‘five feet seven inches high’, according to Bligh, who continued with an unprepossessing description: ‘High, good Complexion, Dark Hair, Slender Made, Narrow chested, and long Neck, Small Face and Black Eyes.’
The last of the Bounty’s young gentlemen was fifteen-year-old John Hallett from London, the son of John Hallett, an architect, and his wife, Hannah. He had four younger brothers, all of whom would later be employed by the East India Company, and one half-sister, the ‘natural child’ of Mr Hallett. Midshipman Hallett’s father was a wealthy man, with a residence in Manchester Buildings, a gentlemen’s row of private houses situated just off the Thames, almost opposite Westminster Bridge and in strolling distance of St James’s Park. The Halletts, like the Haywards, belonged to the energetic, gentlemanly professional class possessed of actual skills – doctors and architects as opposed to seneschals or bankrupt country lawyers.
Hallett Senior moved in a distinguished circle of artists, including members of the Royal Academy. His niece had married into a prosperous family of merchants and shipbuilders, with a home in fashionable Tunbridge, where Mr Hallett was often found. From diarist Joseph Farington, who recorded a number of dinners and other social occasions at which Mr Hallett was present, we are given a glimpse of the Bounty midshipman’s circle: ‘Mr. Hallett spoke of several persons who from a low beginning had made great fortunes,’ Farington noted after a London dinner, going on to describe a leather breeches maker now established on Bond Street and said to be worth £150,000. War with Russia would only ruin Russia’s trade, as England could do without her goods. A neighbour recently died having ‘expended £50,000 it was not well known how’ – all good solid, middle-class, mercantile discussion.
Young John Hallett was already well on the road to a naval career when he joined the Bounty. He had been entered on the books as a lieutenant’s servant in 1777, at the age of five, and on the books of four subsequent ships as a captain’s servant. Prior to joining the Bounty, he had been on the Alarm, which had paid off in Port Royal, Jamaica, when the ship was taken out of commission. This had occurred four years previously, and one assumes young Hallett, at age eleven, was getting his schooling during the interim. John Hallett Sr appears to have been acquainted with Banks, and wrote to him thanking him for getting his son’s position. While the Bounty was swarming with young gentlemen – officers in training, midshipmen in waiting – the only two to hold the coveted midshipmen’s slots were Thomas Hayward and John Hallett, both protégés of Banks.
In early October, Bligh prepared the Bounty to leave the Thames for Spithead, Portsmouth, where he was to await official orders to sail. The ship, now copper-sheathed, had been completely refitted and was stuffed with supplies – not just the food stores, clothing or ‘slops’, fuel, water, rum and bulk necessities, but all the miscellaneous minutiae of the gardener’s trade, as inventoried on a list supplied by Banks: paper, pens, ink, India ink, ‘Colours of all kinds’, spade, pins, wire, fly traps, an insect box, bottles, knives, ‘Journal Books & other usefull Books’, guns and gunpowder, shot and flints, and ‘Trinkets for the Natives’, which included mirrors and eighty pounds of white, blue and red glass beads. Bligh had also been given sixty-one ducats and forty-five Spanish dollars for the purchase of plants. Eight hundred variously sized pots for the breadfruit plants had been stowed, but as David Nelson reported to Banks plaintively, ‘as I have only room for 600, the remainder may possibly be broken.’ The pots had been made extra deep for drainage by ‘Mr. Dalton, potter’, near Deptford Creek.
Every British naval seaman brought certain expectations to each ship he joined. He expected to endure hard labour in raw conditions, and was ever mindful that he was vulnerable to harsh and often arbitrary punishment at the hands of his officers. He expected to eat very specifically measured amounts of rank food, and to drink much liquor. Above all, he expected to exist for the duration of his service in stifling, unhygienic squalor. There would be no privacy. As the official naval allotment of fourteen inches sleeping space for each man suggests, space was always at a premium – but nowhere more so than on the little Bounty, now crammed with supplies for eighteen months’ voyaging and trade. Her fo’c’sle, an unventilated, windowless area of 22 by 36 feet, was shared by thirty-three men, while the maximum height between decks amidships was 5 feet 7 inches – the average height of the men she carried. The master’s mates, midshipmen, and young gentlemen – Fletcher Christian and a William Elphinstone, Hayward and Hallett, Peter Heywood, George Stewart, Edward Young and Robert Tinkler – were all quartered directly behind Bligh’s little pantry, separated, it is suggested, merely by canvas walls.
On deck, amid the piles of stores, were the Bounty’s three boats. The Navy Board had placed an order for these as early as June, but the usual supplier, swamped with other work, had been forced to cry off. The Board then turned to a private contractor to build a launch of 20 feet in length with copper fastenings, and to the Deal boatyard for a cutter and a jolly boat of 18 and 16 feet, respectively. For reasons known only to himself, Bligh requested of the Navy Board that the launch and cutter, which had already been supplied, be replaced with larger models. The Board complied, and thus was acquired one of the most historic craft in maritime history, the Bounty’s 23-foot-long, 2-foot-9-inch-deep launch.
On 9 October 1787, a drear, dull day, the pilot arrived to take the Bounty out of the Thames on the first leg of her voyage. In the Long Reach she received her gunner’s stores. Officially designated as an ‘Armed Vessel’, she was equipped with ‘four short four-pounder carriage guns and ten half-pounder swivel guns’, to quote the Admiralty’s directive – a laughably meagre firepower. Additionally, there were small arms, muskets, powder and bayonets, all locked in the arms chest, supposedly at all times under the key of the ship’s master, John Fryer.
The Bounty herself was in her glory – newly fitted out to the tune of thousands of pounds, sails set, piled with stores, guns gleaming and swarming with her men, the midshipmen in their smart blue coats, Bligh in his blue-and-white-piped lieutenant’s uniform with its bright gilt buttons, and the seamen in their long, baggy trousers and boxy jackets: Charles Churchill, with his disfigured hand showing ‘the Marks of a Severe Scald’; German-speaking Henry Hilbrant, strong and sandy-haired, but with ‘His Left Arm Shorter than the other having been broke’; Alexander Smith, ‘Very much pitted’ with smallpox, and bearing an axe scar on his right foot; John Sumner, slender, fair and with a ‘Scar upon the left Cheek’; William McCoy, scarred by a stab wound in the belly; William Brown, the gardener, also fair and slender, but bearing a ‘remarkable Scar on one of his Cheeks Which contracts the Eye Lid and runs down to his throat.’ With the knowledge of hindsight, they are a piratical-looking crew.
The Bounty lingered at Long Reach for nearly a week before receiving orders to proceed to Spithead, the naval anchorage outside Portsmouth Harbour. But ‘the winds and weather were so unfavorable’, in Bligh’s words, that the short journey down the Thames and around the coast took nearly three weeks to complete.
‘I have been very anxious to acquaint you of my arrival here, which I have now accomplished with some risk,’ Bligh wrote to Banks on 5 November from Spithead. ‘I anchored here last night, after being drove on the coast of France in a very heavy gale.’ His plan, as he now related, was to make as swiftly as possible for Cape Horn in order to squeak through a diminishing window of opportunity for rounding the tempestuous Cape so late in the season; as he observed to Banks, ‘if I get the least slant round the Cape I must make the most of it.’ Bligh was awaiting not only a break in the weather, but also his sailing orders, without which he could not sail. He did not, however, anticipate any difficulties, noting that ‘the Commissioner promises me every assistance, and I have no doubt but the trifles I have to do here will be soon accomplished.’
The days passed and the weather broke, and still Bligh’s sailing orders did not arrive. As the delay lengthened, his wife, Betsy, broke off nursing their youngest daughter, who was stricken with smallpox, and came down from their home in Wapping to take lodgings in Portsmouth. With impotent exasperation, Bligh watched other ships weigh anchor and slip serenely down the Channel, in the fair, fine weather. Each day that passed, as he knew, reduced the odds of a good passage around the Horn.
There had already been warning signs that the Bounty’s voyage, so beloved to Joseph Banks, did not stand quite so high in Admiralty eyes. Back in September, Bligh had received a distinguished visitor at the Deptford docks. Lord Selkirk, a Scottish earl, ostensibly came down to use his interest to find a position for his son’s tutor, William Lockhead, who was ‘an enthusiast in regard to Natural History’ and ‘most anxious to go round the World with Mr. Bligh’; Selkirk’s son, the Honourable Dunbar Douglas, was already set to join the Bounty as yet another gentleman ‘able seaman’. With his own son destined to sail with her, Selkirk took a closer look than most at the Bounty; alarmed at what he had seen, he wrote a frank and urgent report to Banks, drawing attention to ominous deficiencies.
The rating of Bligh’s vessel as a cutter, and not a sloop of war, was ‘highly improper for so long a voyage’, Selkirk wrote on 14 September, pointing out that the ship’s establishment did not include ‘a Lieutenant, or any Marines’. Marines essentially served the role of the commander’s security force, and Cook had never sailed on his Pacific voyages with fewer than twelve.
But perhaps most troubling to Lord Selkirk was the issue of Bligh’s own status: ‘I was sorry to find…Mr. Bligh himself is but very indifferently used, or rather I think realy ill used,’ Selkirk had written with some force. ‘It would have been scrimply Justice to him to have made him Master & Commander before sailing: nay considering that he was, I believe, the only person that was not in some way or other prefer’d at their return of all who went last out with Capt. Cook, it would be no unreasonable thing to make him Post Captain now.’ Cook, on his very first Pacific voyage, had also sailed as a lieutenant – but the prestige of that voyage had never been in question.
Although Selkirk did not disclose the fact, he was an old friend of Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, and it is probable that he had been leaned upon to communicate family concerns to Banks. These concerns were openly expressed in the farewell letter Betham himself wrote to Bligh a week later, offering his good wishes for the long voyage ahead: ‘I own I have a different Idea of [the voyage] from what I had conceived before I was acquainted with the Circumstances of the Vessel, & the manner in which it is fitted out,’ he told his son-in-law. ‘Government I think have gone too frugally to work: Both the Ship and the Complement of Men are too small in my opinion for such a voyage. Lord Howe may understand Navy matters very well, but I suppose mercantile Projects are treated by him with Contempt.’
‘Contempt’ is perhaps too strong a word; but the accumulation of troubling details – the miserably small ship, the determinedly lower rating, Bligh’s own status and the apparent lack of urgency in getting sailing orders – tend to suggest that collecting breadfruit in Tahiti was not at the top of the Admiralty’s list. Among other things, England seemed poised for yet another war, this time with Holland.
‘Every thing here wears the appearance of War being at hand,’ Duncan Campbell had written to a Jamaican colleague on 29 September. ‘Seaman’s Wages & every naval Store have of course risen to War prices.’ To an Admiralty intent on mobilizing ships and men, the Bounty’s breadfruit run to the Pacific was only a distraction. Three weeks would pass before Bligh received his sailing orders, by which time the fair conditions had changed.
On 28 November 1787, Bligh headed the Bounty out to sea, and got as far as St Helens on the Isle of Wight, an inconsequential distance, where he was forced to anchor. For the next twenty-four days, the Bounty bounced between Spithead and St Helens as each successive attempt to get down Channel failed in the teeth of contrary winds. Master Fryer and William Peckover, the gunner, were laid up by the bad weather with ‘rheumatic complaints’ and a number of his men had severe colds. Resentment and anxiety that had been mounting in Bligh for months rose to the fore.
‘If there is any punishment that ought to be inflicted on a set of Men for neglect I am sure it ought on the Admiralty for my three weeks detention at this place during a fine fair wind which carried all outward bound ships clear of the channel but me, who wanted it most,’ Bligh fumed in a letter to Duncan Campbell. It was 10 December, and he was back at St Helens, pinned in the cabin. This has made my task a very arduous one indeed for to get round Cape Horn at the time I shall be there. I know not how to promise myself any success and yet I must do it if the ship will stand it at all or I suppose my character will be at stake. Had Lord Howe sweetened this difficult task by giving me promotion I should have been satisfied.’
The question of promotion worried Bligh grievously. At the very least, as he had written to Banks, ‘that one step would make a material difference to Mrs. Bligh and her children in case of any accident to me.’ Moved by Bligh’s entreaties, Banks personally approached Lord Howe, the revered First Lord of the Admiralty, but without success, being told such advancement ‘was designed intirely as a reward to those who had engaged in the War equipment’; in other words, breadfruit expeditions did not count.
The hardship I make known I lay under, is that they took me from a state of affluence from your employ,’ Bligh continued, unburdening himself to Duncan Campbell, ‘with an income five hundred a Year to that of Lieut’s pay 4/- per day to perform a Voyage which few were acquainted with sufficiently to ensure it any degree of success.’
But interest had gone as far as it could. Meanwhile, if war was indeed at hand, this would be the occasion for promotions, although not for Lieutenant Bligh, off in the Pacific.
‘Poor fellow,’ Campbell would say of Bligh, somewhat later. Ignobly batted back and forth across the Channel entrance, Bligh, while not quite getting cold feet, was clearly assessing the risks of the voyage to which he was committed. Low pay was to have been compensated by promotion and the prestige of the undertaking; but there was no promotion and the prestige had already evaporated. Frustrated, demoralized, already tested by the weather, Bligh had not yet even left England.
‘It is wished to impress it strongly on your mind that the whole success of the undertaking depends ultimately upon your diligence and care,’ Banks wrote in an oppressively stern letter to the poor gardener David Nelson – but the warning applied equally to Bligh. ‘And that your future prospects in life will greatly depend upon your conduct on this occasion.’
One person on board, at least, benefited from the delay in the Bounty’s departure. Thanks to the rough weather, Fletcher Christian was able to meet his brother Charles, who had recently returned to England on the Middlesex, the East Indiaman on which he had been ship’s surgeon.
‘When the Middlesex returned from India, the Bounty lay near to where she was moored,’ Charles Christian recounted in an unpublished memoir many years later. ‘Fletcher came on Board coming up the River, and he and I and one of our Officers who had been in the Navy went on Shore, and spent the Evening and remained till next Day.’ There were family matters to discuss; their sister Mary had died in her twenty-sixth year, more than eighteen months before; their youngest brother, Humphrey, was soon to go to Africa. Doubtless, too, the brothers conferred over family finances. Things were looking up for Fletcher who, returned from the West Indies, could report that he was now off to Tahiti, with Cook’s sailing master.
But all of this was overshadowed by the news Charles Christian had to tell his younger brother. Certain events had transpired on the Middlesex that had shaken him to his core – indeed, they were eventually to lead to his mental breakdown. Two weeks before the arrival of the Middlesex in England, Charles Christian had been involved in a mutiny.
Trouble had begun as early as Fort Saint George, in Madras. David Fell, the second officer, claimed that he had been unlawfully confined on the ship, and that the governor of the fort had interceded and ordered him released. The Company’s surviving records tend to bear this out, showing that in July 1787 the Directors praised the governor for the ‘manner in which you interfered in the Disputes on board the Middlesex.’
The real trouble came to a head two months later, however, as the ship approached English shores. On 5 September, according to the log of Captain John Rogers, Mr Grece, seaman, was placed in irons ‘for Presenting a Loaded Pistol to my Breast with a threat that he would put the first Man to death who would offer to touch him.’ The first and second officers attempted to aid John William Grece and were dismissed ‘for aiding & assisting in the above Mutinous Conspiracy’ as well as ‘for Drunkeness, Insolent Language & striking at me on the Quarter Deck…The Surgeon also in the Conspiracy.’
Two days later, George Aitken, the dismissed first officer, came on deck when Captain Rogers was present, an action the captain interpreted as hostile. Calling on his other officers, Rogers had Aitken and David Fell confined below, ‘battened them both in their Cabbins,’ with a scuttle cut in the door for air. Twelve days later, the Middlesex reached the Downs, the sheltered anchorage between Dover and the Thames estuary.
The captain’s log, however, did not give the entire story. Upon return to England, the Middlesex officers and men sent a stream of furious and aggrieved letters to the East India Company’s Court of Directors, charging Captain John Rogers with brutal conduct.
‘I see myself bearing with Silence, insults, excessive severe to my Feelings, considering the Character I held,’ wrote seaman William Grece. Shortly before the fateful day of the mutiny, he claimed to have been ‘wantonly insulted’ by one of the passengers in the presence of the commander, who later ‘sent for me, Bent me, Ordered me to be Flogged to Death, and I believe, there was not much Hyperbole in this Order,’ Grece wrote, his rage still palpable in the fraught diction of his letter. ‘I am sure if He had dared, He would have done it, and ordered me in Irons, in which Situation, he treated me with inhumanity unparrelled, this every man in the Ship knows – all commanders of the Royal Navy allow Prisoners to do the necessary calls of Nature in another place than the small space, that they are confined in…
‘I think much Stress was laid with regard to the Pistol,’ poor Grece now ventured, knowing he was on thin ice: such an act in the navy would have meant his death. ‘I for a moment thought, to prevent myself being Seized, to be Flogged, but my conduct shews I had no intention of using it.’
The first and second officers leaped to Grece’s assistance, implicating themselves in the mutiny. They were joined by Charles Christian, whose own intervention resulted ‘from a sudden ebullition of passion springing from humane sympathy at seeing cruel usage exercised towards one who deserved far different treatment – on putting an ingenious, unoffending, insulted, oppressed, worthy young man into irons, by the capricious orders of tyranny influenced by a hollow sycophant,’ to quote Charles’s own, impassioned and inimitable account. Grece, Aitken and Fell were all roughly imprisoned, a punishment Charles escaped.
The Court of Directors deliberated, and handed out penalties all around. Captain Rogers was rebuked for not informing the Company of his actions towards his officers, and fined £500 and a year’s suspension for the unrelated offence of refusing passage to a Company seaman at Madras. Grece, Aitken, Fell and Christian were all handed suspensions – Grece for his lifetime, Charles Christian for two years.
But the incident did not end here. Although the final accounting would not be given until long after the Bounty had sailed, it has much bearing on Charles Christian’s credibility. The aggrieved parties brought civil suits against the captain.
‘I had to appear as the principal, the sole witness in their favour,’ Charles reported. ‘Lord Loughborough complimented me in court for the impartial and steady manner in which I gave my testimony.’ By juries’ verdicts, the plaintiffs were awarded £3000 in damages – an enormous sum, which must be taken as a reflection of the strength of their suit.
No doubt Charles Christian told the same story that had so impressed Lord Loughborough to his brother Fletcher, as they talked through the stormy night at the riverside inn. Charles’s friend First Officer George Aitken would have had his own heated version to relate of having been battened inside his cabin for his principled stand. But it seems that it was Charles who had been most affected by the events.
‘I went on board of this ship in hopes,’ he wrote, ‘as a tree in a state of pleasing promising blossom – full of life and active vigour. I returned as one withered with blight, palsy-struck, disappointed, dispirited, and full of heart-damping trouble.’ He was also impoverished. Before setting out he had borrowed £500 on credit for trade goods, but the ‘markets were glutted at Madras and at Canton in China, by the unusual number of ships sent out that season,’ and the money was lost.
For Fletcher Christian, these were unsettling stories to hear on the eve of departure, and he left his brother a broken man, with the judgement of the mutiny still hanging over him. In his turn, Charles’s last memory of Fletcher was more cheerful: ‘He was then full of professional Ambition and of Hope. He bared his Arm, and I was amazed at its Brawniness. “This,” says he, “has been acquired by hard labour.” He said “I delight to set the Men an Example. I not only can do every part of a common Sailor’s Duty, but am upon a par with a principal part of the Officers.”’
When the weather at last permitted the Bounty to sail on 23 December, both Bligh and Christian had much upon their minds – Bligh, demoralized and resentful; Christian, ambitious, but burdened with family matters, and shaken with the revelation of how a man could be broken by an oppressor’s tyranny. Both had everything to gain or lose on the Bounty voyage.
After many exertions on their behalf, neither Lord Selkirk’s son, the Honourable Dunbar Douglas, nor his eager tutor sailed with the Bounty. The tutor never obtained a position, and the young gentleman departed the ship just before she left Long Reach for the open sea. Perhaps his father had continued to mull over the ship’s troubling deficiencies – her improper size, Bligh’s lack of a single commissioned officer, the absence of marines to back his authority – and concluded that this was not, after all, an enterprise on which he cared for his own son to stake his life.
VOYAGE OUT (#ulink_10747413-f72e-591f-abf7-4f046df48f76)
On 23 December, the Bounty sailed at break of a boisterous, cloudy day. By night she was already battling heavy squalls. Near disaster occurred within the first twenty-four hours, when one of the sailors fell from the main topgallant sail, and narrowly saved himself by grabbing a stay. As rain and sleet drove down, Bligh ordered the sails close-reefed, the deadlights in and hatches battened. Heavy seas struck the ship, carrying away extra sails and a yard. By the evening of the twenty-fifth the weather had abated, which, as Bligh noted in his log, ‘allowed us to spend our Christmas pleasantly.’ Beef and plum pudding were served for dinner, washed down with an allowance of rum.
The well-timed respite was brief, and in the following days the heavy gales increased to a storm that piled up alarming, huge seas. Sleet and rain stung the men as they lurched and fumbled at their duties, and the Bounty herself was slammed with great waves that stove in all the boats, almost washing them overboard.
‘We were an entire Sea on Deck,’ Bligh recorded. The sham windows of the great cabin were also stove in, and water flooded inside. So severe was the wind that Bligh dared not attempt to turn his ship to lie to but, dangerously, was forced to scud ahead of the great following sea.
‘But the Ship scuds very well,’ he allowed – Bligh’s pride in the Bounty never flagged. When conditions allowed, he ordered fires lit to dry his men’s sodden gear. ‘Thick Rainy Weather’ continued, and belowdecks he found that casks of rum and stores of fish and bread had been damaged or destroyed by the thundering, incoming seas.
On 29 December, the weather diminished to a moderate gale. ‘Out all Reefs, Up Top G[allan]t Yards & set the sails,’ Bligh’s log sang out. Slowly the ship regrouped. Bligh ordered the men to wash all their dirty linen, and by noon shirts and breeches were hung all around the ship, fluttering in a fresh, drying breeze. Additional clothing and tobacco were given to the men, always a good move for restoring morale.
On 5 January, following a good run through the night, Tenerife was sighted, its landmark peak hidden in clouds. By break of the following day, the Bounty was safely moored off Santa Cruz. It was drizzling, but the winds were calm and the temperature pleasant, hovering just below 70 degrees.
Once anchored, Bligh detailed an officer to go ashore to pay respects to the governor. The officer in question is not named in Bligh’s log, but in a subsequent published narrative he pointedly reported that this was ‘Mr. Christian’. The delegation of the master’s mate for this vaguely prestigious function would suggest that at this early date Bligh regarded Christian as his de facto lieutenant. Christian had been instructed to request the governor’s permission to restock supplies and to repair the damaged ship. He was also to inform His Excellency that Lieutenant Bligh was willing to salute him provided that the salute was returned with the same number of guns; ‘but as his Excellency never returned the same Number but to persons equal in Rank to himself, this ceremony was laid aside.’ Still, Bligh was able to meet with the governor personally, thanking him ‘for his politeness and Civility’, and was later to dine with him.
While his ship was being prepared and stocked, Bligh toured Santa Cruz and made an informal survey of the harbour. He had been here before with Captain Cook, and this first port of call must have impressed upon him again the flattering thought that he was indeed following in his distinguished mentor’s footsteps. Although Santa Cruz was by now well-trodden ground, Bligh’s description of the town in his log is characteristically detailed and fulsome. In its barest form, a ship’s log was a record of daily weather, winds, mileage, position, and ‘Remarks’, which could be as spare as a simple notation of sails set and duties performed, or as descriptive as a proper journal, depending upon the nature of both the captain and his mission. Fortunately, Bligh was as meticulous in keeping his log as he was in performing all other aspects of nautical duty; by ‘Cloudy Weather,’ he observed in his preface, ‘is to be understood the Sun is not to be seen or but very seldom. Fair Weather or Open Cloudy Weather is when the Sun can be frequently seen…’ – nothing was left to chance. A log was also a legal document, a true and accurate account of daily proceedings, to be deposited with the Admiralty at voyage’s end. Bligh was to leave two logs of the Bounty voyage, one private and one official. Parts of each have been lost, but most of each survive, and when laid side by side they are identical in most respects. Where they do differ is enlightening; in general, Bligh was much freer with criticism of individuals, often named, in his private account, while such passages have been tactfully omitted in his official copy. Bligh’s logs of the Bounty are the only contemporary, running accounts of her voyage, written as events unfolded.
In the best expeditionary tradition, while at Santa Cruz Bligh had been careful to receive from the governor permission for David Nelson to do some botanizing in the surrounding hills. For his part, this time was mostly spent in overhauling his ship. His plan to replace damaged stores with fresh provisions, however, was disappointed, and in the end Santa Cruz supplied only 230 pounds of inferior beef, some pumpkins and potatoes. The Bounty had been victualled before departure with all the usual stores – biscuit, salt beef, pork, cheese, butter, malt, sauerkraut, peas, raisins, rum, spirits and beer, as well as the fairly innovative ‘portable soup’, slabs of dried bouillon intended as a defence against scurvy – calculated for approximately eighteen months of what would be at minimum a two-year voyage. Additional supplies, particularly fresh meat, greens and fruit, water and wood for fuel, were to be obtained en route at strategic ports of call, either by purchase or, where there were no settlements, by foraging.
Judging from the letters he wrote before leaving Tenerife, Bligh was in high spirits as he set out, despite his knowledge that the most problematic part of his journey – the rounding of Cape Horn – still lay ahead.
‘I have the happyness to tell you my little ship does wonderfully well,’ he wrote to Campbell. ‘I have her now the completest ship I believe that ever swam & she really looks like one fit to encounter difficulties…’ Before signing off, Bligh was pleased to inform him that a protégé of Campbell’s, young Tom Ellison, was ‘improving [and] will make a very good seaman.’ To Banks, Bligh reported that he and his men were ‘all in excellent spirits and I have still the greatest confidence of success in every part of the Voyage.’
On 11 January 1788, the Bounty fired a farewell salute and got under way. Only hours out to sea the ship was taken aback by rainy squalls. To ensure that his small crew would be as rested as possible for the almost certainly arduous passage ahead, Bligh ordered them into three watches, instead of the traditional two. In this manner, each watch was ensured a period of eight unbroken hours of sleep, instead of the traditional watch-and-watch – four hours on duty, four hours of sleep.
‘I have ever considered this among Seamen as Conducive to health,’ Bligh recorded in his log. ‘And not being Jaded by keeping on Deck every other four hours, it adds much to their Content and Cheerfulness.’ This was one of Cook’s innovations, and it undoubtedly was appreciated by Bligh’s men. In a decision that was to have unimagined consequences, Bligh designated Fletcher Christian, ‘one of the Mates’, as officer of the third watch.
As another measure against the uncertainties of the immediate passage ahead, Bligh mustered his company and announced that he was putting them on a ration of two-thirds allowance of bread or ship’s biscuit to ensure that it would last as long as possible. The sailors, respectful of what they knew the Horn could offer, understood this precaution, and according to James Morrison, it ‘was cheerfully received’.
The cloudy weather was soon cleared by fresh, light breezes. Four days out and the ship was actually becalmed, making only five miles in twenty-four hours. The men were kept busy airing bedding, drying bread, rechecking stores and sails. The light breezes returned and by 17 January the Bounty was ambling under clear skies through smooth seas.
‘Very pleasant Weather,’ Bligh logged. ‘All Sails set before the Wind.’ In these easygoing conditions he ordered the entire ship washed and then rinsed down with vinegar, which served as a disinfectant. This was to be a regular routine, as were his Sunday inspections of his mustered men, whose clothing and even fingernails he personally checked for cleanliness. Bligh’s model in this almost fetishistic concern for hygiene was Captain Cook. When Cook had found a man with dirty hands, he had stopped his grog. In an age in which more seamen were lost to disease than to naval wars, Cook had managed to return from voyages of several years’ duration with minimal fatalities. A diet of sauerkraut and sweet wort, or malt extract, the procuring of fresh produce wherever possible, the endless rigorous washings and inspections, the three watches – all these practices had been conscientiously noted by the young Bligh during his service to his formidable mentor and were now earnestly applied on his own little ship. Mandatory, and soon despised, dancing sessions were implemented under this same improving philosophy.
‘Sometime for relaxation and Mirth is absolutely necessary,’ Bligh had stated in his log, ‘and I have considered it so much so that after 4 O’Clock, the Evening is laid aside for their Amusement and dancing. I had great difficulty before I left England to get a Man to play the Violin and I prefered at last to take One two thirds Blind than come without one.’ This much-sought-after musician was the disagreeable Michael Byrn.
As the fair weather continued, the Bounty passed flying fish and porpoises, and occasionally spotted a shark. Towards the end of January, a fine moon shone on her as she sailed the dark night sea. Boobies, shearwaters and a man-of-war bird were seen, although far from land.
The pleasant and orderly passage was spoiled for Bligh by the discovery that his surgeon, the corpulent, lazy Thomas Huggan, was ‘a Drunken Sot’. Bligh was forced to record, ‘He is constantly in liquor, having a private Stock by him which I assured him shall be taken away if he does not desist from Making himself such a Beast.’ After all the effort and energy required to keep his ship clean scrubbed, his men in clean linen and clean habits, this was a bitter blow to Bligh. His worthy goal was to return his men as soundly as Cook would have done, and now the very individual he most required as an ally – his surgeon – had proved unfit. This meant increased vigilance of his men’s health and habits on Bligh’s part.
As the Bounty headed south, the weather thickened, becoming warmer – into the eighties – cloudier and wet. ‘Sultry & Hot,’ Bligh recorded on 26 January. ‘Got everything up from below & gave all the Air possible between Decks.’ The rainfall was never intense, but thunder and lightning often spread across the unbroken sky. Airing of the ship continued and on the last day of January, the Bounty was washed, yet again, with vinegar, so that ‘by the Evening the Ship was perfectly Sweet & refreshing.’ That same night, lightning played all around the heavens, while ‘a prodigious number of Porpoises’ swam with the ship through a sea aglow with luminous fish. The following evening as Bligh stood enjoying the spectacle of the Bounty’s long wake at the close of a fine, clear day, he was horrified to see ‘a dreadfull breaking shoal’ rising directly in their tracks. How had he and his sharp lookouts missed this? Staring again, Bligh saw the ‘shoal’ resolve itself into a school of porpoises, their backs breaking the waves as would a sandbar.
The close, occasionally thunderous weather continued and on 8 February, the Bounty crossed the equator. A somewhat modified version of the traditional ceremony for crossing the line was enacted, with the old hands presiding as King Neptune and his court. The twenty-seven officers and men, or over half the ship’s company, who had never crossed before now underwent the rough initiation – covered with tar, ‘shaved’ with the edge of an iron hoop, and compelled to give Neptune gifts of rum. The rum was in lieu of the most fearful part of the usual ceremony – ducking from the yardarm – which Bligh forbade, on the grounds that ‘of all the Customs it is the most brutal and inhuman.’
The day after the ceremony, a Sunday, Bligh ‘mustered the People and saw every thing Clean.’ Divine service was performed, by Bligh, and ‘every person attended with decorum & much decency.’ A few days later, a sail was seen in the early morning; next day they fell in with the British Queen, a whaler bound to the Cape of Good Hope. This fortuitous meeting allowed the Bounty to send letters via the Cape to England. To the Heywoods, Bligh wrote a ‘flattering’ account of young Peter’s progress. To Duncan Campbell, Bligh reported that the passage had been pleasant and that he had acquired some fine wine for Campbell, which he would present on his return.
‘My Men all active good fellows,’ Bligh wrote, ‘& what has given me much pleasure is that I have not yet been obliged to punish any one.’ Food and wine were good: ‘with fine Sour Krout, Pumpkins and dryed Greens and a fresh Meal five times a week I think is no bad living. My Men are not badly off either as they share in all but the Poultry, and with much content & chearfullness, dancing always from 4 untill eight at Night I am happy to hope I shall bring them all home well.’ Once again, Bligh ended with a note about Campbell’s protégé: Tom Ellison is a very good Boy and will do very well.’
To Joseph Banks, Bligh reported nothing but contentment. ‘I am happy and satisfyed in my little ship and we are now fit to go round half a score of worlds,’ he wrote – how different from the fretful, worried letters penned before departure! ‘Both Men & Officers tractable and well disposed & chearfulness & content in the countenance of every one. I am sure nothing is even more conducive to health. I have no cause to inflict punishments for I have no offenders and every thing turns out to my most sanguine expectations.’ This repeated reference to the fact that there had been no need for punishment – flogging – is revealing. It would seem that to Bligh, infliction of punishment was like sickness, and scurvy, something that had no place on a well-run ship. William Bligh had set out to make the perfect voyage.
To Banks, as to Campbell, Bligh concluded with an update on the progress of a protégé. ‘Young Hallet is very well and is a very fine young man,’ he informed Banks, ‘and I shall always attend to every thing that can be of service to him.’
Parting company with the British Queen, the Bounty continued south and days later ‘passed the limits of the Southern Tropic.’ Incrementally, the temperature began to drop. Vast numbers of seabirds were noted – shearwaters, albatross – as well as turtles and numerous whales; one afternoon a cloud of butterflies was blown past the ship. Then, on Sunday, March 2, after divine service and the usual inspection of his men, Bligh made an announcement ‘I now thought it for the Good of the Service to give Mr. Fletcher Christian an Acting Order as Lieut. I therefore Ordered it to be read to all hands.’ This was another clear indication of Bligh’s patronage, if not favouritism, of Christian; a long stint as acting lieutenant would in the normal course of things ensure the master’s mate of promotion on his return.
A week later, out of the blur of notations about butterflies and shearwaters, porpoises and whales, Bligh’s log records an event that returned him squarely to the world of his men: ‘Untill this Afternoon I had hopes I could have performed the Voyage without punishment to any One,’ Bligh wrote, with evident regret, ‘but I found it necessary to punish Mathew Quintal with 2 dozen lashes for Insolence and Contempt.’
In a subsequent published narrative, Bligh expanded on the event. ‘Upon a complaint made to me by the master, I found it necessary to punish Matthew Quintal, one of the seamen, with two dozen lashes, for insolence and mutinous behaviour. Before this, I had not had occasion to punish any person on board.’
Now began the whole grim ritual; the crew mustered to watch Quintal, aged twenty-two, from Cornwall, stripped to the waist and strapped, spread-eagled, by the wrists and ankles to an upright deck grating. With no marines to drum or pipe, this would have been a lacklustre ceremony, itself stripped down to its most pertinent and brutal elements. By all later reports, Quintal, of middle height and ‘strong made’, was a dangerously disaffected troublemaker. It does not appear from the manner in which the incident was logged, however, that Bligh himself had been witness to Quintal’s insubordination; no matter. Once his master logged the event and brought it to Bligh’s attention, Bligh was compelled to administer punishment, and his perfect record was now spoiled.
While the small crew stood formally mustered to witness the punishment in the damp, hazy weather, Boatswain’s Mate James Morrison – the literate diarist, with his smattering of classical education – administered the flogging. For Bligh, whose humane principles had forbidden men’s being ducked when crossing the line, the familiar ritual must have been a singularly unpleasant landmark on his voyage. The natural coarseness of men’s habits – their dirty clothes and fingernails, his surgeon’s ‘beastly’ drunkenness, their cruel and brutal pranks – all offended him. He had chosen a profession infamous for poor conditions and dirty habits, in which men counted on taking brutal poundings from their fellow men and from the sea. Yet Bligh expected his ship to be ‘perfectly sweet’ and scented with vinegar, hardened seamen to wear clean clothes and scrub their hands, cheerfulness to be seen on every countenance and merry dancing in the evening. There was no dirt or disease in Bligh’s vision of the perfect voyage, and no punishment. Busily intent on his many burdensome responsibilities, Bligh was unlikely to have taken note of his men’s practised and scrutinizing gazes. Did they perceive that it was their fastidious, bustling captain who avoided the lash?
The damp, hazy weather closed in and by the following day had become dense fog. The temperature continued to drop, and when the fog cleared the air was felt to be cold. In the afternoon, one of the men shot an albatross that fell dying into the ocean, and a boat was sent out to collect it. On board its wingspan was gravely measured. The superstition that the killing of an albatross brought bad luck was not yet prevalent; Coleridge had not yet written ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – this would follow later.
The Bounty was now as far south as the fortieth latitude, the ‘roaring forties’, and was drawing parallel with the coast of Patagonia. A wet, dense fog forbade sight of land, although south of Puerto Deseado the men ‘saw what was supposed to be the looming of it.’ Whales appeared in great numbers and seemed to enjoy lying in groups of two and three windward of the ship, expelling great blasts of spray over the men.
A strong gale arose on 20 March as the Bounty approached the Jasons, the northwesternmost of the Falkland Islands. Albatross, petrels and snowbirds flocked and hovered around the rigging, as if wishing to perch. The wind and sea became violent and Bligh was anxious to get south of the islands; he had by now given up his earlier plan of stopping here for wood and water. The weather was fast deteriorating and he could afford no delays.
Before dawn on 23 March, the goats and single dog on board began to agitate, and the men declared that the animals could smell land. Soon, in the moonlight, hills could be made out to the west, and when daylight broke the mountains of Tierra del Fuego could be seen, mostly free of snow.
‘I realy look upon the bad or Winter Weather not yet to be set in,’ Bligh wrote. ‘But as I must expect it hourly I have no right to loose a Moment…’
Skirting Le Maire Strait, they passed the desolate, mountainous country of Staten Island to the east. Now, at nearly the 55° latitude south, the Bounty was fast approaching the Horn. A hint of the weather they were in for hit the ship on 27 March, with the arrival of a strong gale and an ‘exceedingly High’ sea.
‘It would not be possible for a laboursome Ship to keep her Masts,’ Bligh observed. His ship, as he had often proudly noted, was not ‘laboursome’, but well behaved. Her hatches were all battened down, and although towering seas broke over her, so far the men kept ‘tolerably dry’. The temperature was now in the upper thirties, and the weather wet and raw.
‘I Ordered the People to have Wheat [porridge] served every day with Sugar & Butter to enable them to have a comfortable hot breakfast,’ Bligh logged. Hour after hour, his men were required to reef and hand the sails; then reset them; then reef again, up and down the perilous, pitching rigging in the menacing cold. The sea, Bligh wrote wonderingly, ‘exceeds any I have seen.’
When the gale moderated, Bligh ordered the belowdecks cleaned and dried. The sea was still so huge that he had difficulty taking sightings, as the mountainous waves swamped his horizon. Over the next few days the gales moderated, then increased, moderated, then ‘blew a Storm of Wind and the Snow fell so heavy that it was scarce possible to haul the sails up and furl them from the Weight and Stiffness.’ With the great sea running confused and contrary, sleet and hail began to fall.
‘At 6 In the Morning the Storm exceeded anything I had met with and a Sea higher than I had ever seen before,’ Bligh entered in his log. The ship was carrying only her staysails, all the canvas that could be risked.
‘My next business was to see after my People who had undergone some fatigue,’ Bligh wrote, his ship safe for the time being. A fire blazed continuously in the galley and someone was set to dry clothes around the clock. Bligh ordered large quantities of the ‘Portable Soup’ of which he was very proud, added to the men’s ‘Pease’, or pea pudding, ‘which made a Valuable and good dinner for them.’
Incredibly, the gales increased, carrying blasts of snow and sleet, the sharp winds piling the sea to windward ‘like a Wall’. Still, Bligh could note that blue petrels and pintados, ‘two beautiful kinds of birds,’ followed their wake. The Bounty was losing ground, being driven back the hard-won miles. At the close of 3 April, she was farther north than she had been six days before.
‘All I have to do now is to Nurse my people with care and attention,’ wrote Bligh, ‘and like Seamen look forward to a New Moon for a Change of Wind and Weather.’ The gale moderated in the early hours of the following morning, and although a cold rain fell, the men were able to check and service rigging as well as clean up and dry below. With fresh gales and mere squalls, the Bounty made headway, and over the next few days, under close-reefed sails, clawed her way to 60° 14’ south; this was to be the extreme limit of her southing. For ten days, Bligh pushed the Bounty and her men through squalls of sleet and hail, ‘dark wet nights’ and strong gales, through fog and high confused seas. At midnight on the thirteenth, the ship was hit by so severe a gale that the decks were ‘twice filled with the Sea.’ Now all pumps were worked every hour. Although the hatches were closed – and had been for close to three months – the belowdecks was awash and Bligh turned over his great cabin ‘to the Use of those poor fellows who had Wet Births.’ It is not noted if Bligh himself slept at all.
Despite all exertions – the constant fires, dry clothes, dry berths and hot food at every meal – the weeks since passing Staten Island had begun to take their toll. Huggan had his shoulder thrown out when the ship lurched, and in the midst of a ‘Very Severe’ gale and ‘a high breaking sea’, Thomas Hall, the cook, fell and broke a rib. William Peckover, the gunner, and Charles Norman, carpenter’s mate, were laid up with rheumatic complaints. Every man out of commission increased the burden of the remaining small crew.
‘I have now every reason to find Men and Ship Complaining, which Will the soonest determine this point,’ Bligh confided to his log.
That point soon came, and on 17 April, Bligh determined to abandon the Horn. Only shortly before his departure from England, almost as an afterthought, he had received (through the intercession of Joseph Banks) discretionary orders from the Admiralty to make for the Cape of Good Hope if the Horn proved impossible. This Bligh now determined to do. From there, he would approach the South Seas from the opposite side of the globe. The detour would add some ten thousand miles to the voyage, but there was nothing to be done. After twenty-five days of battle with the sea, the Bounty was, at 59° 05’ south, more or less where she had begun.
At eleven in the morning of the seventeenth, Bligh summoned all hands aft and publicly thanked them for attending to their duties throughout the trials of the last month. He then announced that he had decided to bear away for southern Africa. The General Joy in the Ship was very great on this Account,’ Bligh noted. His announcement was received with three hearty cheers.
It was, for Bligh, a bitter, difficult decision – so difficult that only days later when the weather took a moderate turn he was induced to make one last attempt, but this was quickly abandoned. Eight men were now on the sick list, mostly with ‘Rheumatick complaints’. This, as Bligh ruefully noted, was ‘much felt in the Watches, the Ropes being now Worked with much difficulty, from the Wet and Snow.’ The men aloft on whom fell the monstrous task of handling the sails were at times incapable of getting below in the face of the storm blasts, and when they did return they ‘sometimes for a While lost their Speech.’ Reconciling himself to defeat, Bligh ‘ordered the Helm to be put a Weather,’ and the Bounty headed for the Cape of Good Hope.
She arrived in False Bay, the preferred anchorage across the spit from Cape Town, on 24 May, after an uneventful passage. The sick men had recovered during the intervening four weeks, and refurbishment of the ship began almost at once. The day after mooring, Bligh administered a second punishment: six lashes for John Williams, a seaman from Guernsey, for neglect of duty ‘in heaving the lead’. In this case there was no expression of regret from Bligh.
The Bounty remained in False Bay for thirty-eight days, during which time she was overhauled from top to bottom, from her rigging to new ballast in her hold, as well as resupplied. Fresh meat, celery, leeks, onions, cabbages and – as a luxury – soft bread were brought on board for storage, while Bligh’s log daily notes ‘Fresh Meat & Greens’ served at dinner. This sojourn also allowed some pleasant diversions. In Colonel Robert Gordon, the half-Dutch, half-Scottish commander of the now considerable Dutch forces at this Dutch settlement, Bligh found an entertaining companion who shared a fondness for natural history and amateur exploration. Needless to say, Sir Joseph Banks had an associate out this way, botanizing at his behest. Francis Masson, once an under-gardener at Kew, had been at the Cape for a number of years, sending back specimens and seeds to Banks. From Masson’s collections would come plants familiar to generations of British gardeners – gladioli, geraniums and freesias.
A few days after mooring, Bligh set out for Cape Town proper to pay his respects to the governor. The twenty-five-mile journey was made by carriage along a partly treated, mostly sandy road that led across a central tableland skirted by mountains. Bligh was greeted warmly by Governor van der Graaff, who most gratifyingly expressed his wonderment that ‘any ship would have ventured to persist in a passage’ around Cape Horn.
Bligh’s record of his visit to Cape Town speaks only of his own impressions and it is not clear whether he made this short trip alone; but it is very possible that Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian accompanied him, for it was here at the Cape that Bligh advanced Christian money. Bligh’s attitude towards his personal finances was, and would be throughout most of his life, one of incessant anxiety and concern. Although securely a ‘gentleman’, William Bligh had from an early age been forced to make his own way in the world and, like many an officer on half pay, he had become accustomed to count and turn every penny. The road ahead offered no immediate source of improvement, and Bligh, as fastidious in his personal economy as in the running of his ship, was reconciled to a life of calculation, self-discipline and sacrifice; to the slow accumulation of security and comfort that would come only through a steady career. Unlike the Christians and Heywoods, whose anciently established sense of entitlement allowed them unblushingly to pile up debts amounting to thousands of pounds beyond any possibility of repayment, Bligh expected to balance his books. Worries about money had beset him as he departed Spithead, since, as he had noted to everyone, taking the commission had resulted in a calamitous drop in pay. Bligh’s loan to Christian, then, amounted to a significant act of friendship – one wonders whether Christian fully appreciated the compromise and anxiety this must have entailed. For his part, although freely given, this was not a gift that Bligh allowed himself or Christian to forget.
Some three weeks after the Bounty came to anchor, the Dublin, an East Indiaman, arrived in False Bay carrying part of the Seventy-seventh Regiment, under Colonel Balfour, saluting Bounty with eleven guns, she was returned with nine. A few days later, Bligh, Colonel Gordon, botanist Masson and a Mr Van Carman were invited on board for dinner.
‘We had a very merry Day of it and a great deal of dancing with the Ladies in the Evening to fine Moon light,’ one officer who was present recorded in his diary; it is gratifying to imagine Lieutenant Bligh indulging in a little social levity. Colonel Gordon entertained the company with stories of his remarkable travels into the interior and, to the astonishment of his fellow diners, even managed a Gaelic song.
In these agreeable circumstances, amidst the sympathetic company of fellow seamen from around the world who well knew the dangers of the southern ocean, Bligh reflected on what he had accomplished. ‘A Dutch Ship came in to day having buried 30 Men & many are sent to the Hospital,’ he wrote to Campbell, ‘altho they have only been out since the last of January.’ He, Bligh, had been out since the end of December. This is a credit I hope will be given to me,’ Bligh continued, confessional as always to Campbell. ‘Indeed had I not been very conversant in these matters I believe poor Fellows they would scarce ever have got here’; Bligh was referring to his own men, for whose lives he took full credit.
‘Upon the whole no People could live better,’ he exclaimed to Campbell, embarking on a description of his nutritious hot breakfasts and portable soups. ‘I assure you I have not acted the Purser with them,’ he let Campbell know, ‘for profits was trifling to me while I had so much at Stake.’
It was not only in his private correspondence that Bligh enlarged upon this flattering theme of his own successful man-management. His official log offered a short dissertation on the subject: ‘Perhaps a Voyage of five Months which I have now performed without touching at any one place but at Tenarif, has never been accomplished with so few accidents, and such health among Seamen in a like continuance of bad Weather,’ he began, not mincing words. ‘And as such a fortunate event may be supposed to have been derived from some peculiar Mode of Management it is proper I should point out what I think has been the cause of it.’
The mode of management was, needless to say, hot breakfasts, clean dry clothes, clean hammocks and a clean ship (‘in cleaning Ship all dark holes and Corners the common receptacles of all filth were the first places attended to’), dancing, infusions of malt, portable soup and sauerkraut. Once again, it is evident that in Bligh’s eyes, his small ship and forty-six-member company were embarked upon a historic enterprise.
‘Seamen will seldom attend to themselves in any particular and simply to give directions…is of little avail,’ Bligh added, echoing the sentiments of many a captain. ‘They must be watched like Children.’
Bligh was not the only man to take advantage of the layover to send reports to England. Thomas Ledward, the assistant surgeon who had joined the Bounty at the eleventh hour, wrote to his uncle describing ‘a continual series of the most violent and distressing weather that ever was experienced.’ The ship was in danger of becoming unfit from her exertions, he reported, continuing that he had no doubt the captain ‘will gain much credit by his resolution & perseverance & by the extreme care he took of the Ship’s company.’
Ledward had been in the habit of keeping a diary, but had just learned that all such private documents would have to be turned over to the Admiralty at journey’s end. While Ledward might not have known it, this had become standard practice since Cook’s first voyage, the purpose being to ensure that any officially sanctioned publication was not undercut by a private, competing work. Once the official account was out – in this case, to be written by Lieutenant Bligh – other accounts were usually permitted.
In the face of this new knowledge, Ledward determined, as he informed his uncle, to drop his diary. Other of his shipmates, however, were less circumspect. Someone, probably Charles Churchill, the master-at-arms, wrote an elegant memoir to the Reverend John Hampson, with the hint that he was ‘very desirous to have [it] publish’d and beg you will cause it to be inserted in the Public Papers as soon as possible.’ The report commenced with a brief essay on the breadfruit and references to Cook’s voyages and then briefly sketched the tempestuous voyage to Tenerife, the crossing of the ‘Equinoctial Line’, which he stated was celebrated with ‘the usual Ceremonies of Shaving and Ablution’ – no self-respecting seaman would confess that ducking, or ‘ablution’, had been prohibited.
Meanwhile, in the north of England, there appeared in the Cumberland Pacquet an ‘extract of a letter from a midshipman (aged sixteen) on board his Majesty’s ship “Bounty”’; this could only be from Peter Heywood. Either he too had requested publication, or his proud family felt the letter relating his adventures must be shared; they had already sent copies to various relations. Heywood’s report was mostly concerned with the attempted passage around Cape Horn, which had been ‘one continued gale as it seldom ceased for four hours together.’ But, echoing his captain’s sentiments, Heywood allowed that ‘the Bounty is as fine a sea boat as ever swam.’
All known firsthand contemporary accounts of the first five months of the Bounty’s outward voyage, then, indicate that after a passage of unprecedented severity, the Bounty’s crew were in good health, good spirits, forward-looking and, if anything, proud of what had so far been accomplished. There were not, judging from these letters, complaints worth writing home about.
The Bounty dropped anchor in Adventure Bay off the southern coast of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, seven weeks after departing the Cape. The passage had seen ferocious weather and much severe lightning; once the Bounty had been pitched almost on her beam ends, but as Bligh logged, ‘no damage was done but the overturning [of] some Tubs with Plants I had brought from the Cape.’ The plants were intended as useful gifts for the Tahitians.
With his ship safely anchored, Bligh set out by boat to scout the surroundings. The largely mountainous land appeared unchanged from when he, along with Nelson, Peckover and Coleman, had been here with Cook. Among the stands of massive trees that overlooked the island-studded bay, Bligh examined stumps that had been cut for the Resolution, eleven years previously. Later, Thomas Hayward pointed out to Bligh a tree trunk carved with a date from Cook’s second expedition, ‘as distinct as if it had not been cut a Month, even the very slips of the Knife were as discernable as at the first Moment.’ There was much Bligh encountered at Adventure Bay to put him in mind of his own voyage with Cook; ‘I cannot therefore help paying this humble tribute to Captn. Cook’s memory,’ he reflected in his log, ‘as his remarkable circumspection in many other things has shown how little he has been wrong.’
The following morning, Bligh divided his men into different parties, and sent them out on various duties. He had determined to work from Cook’s old base, where a gully disgorged water conveniently close to the chosen landing. One man was detailed to wash all dirty linen, while Nelson and his assistant, William Brown, set out to explore the country. Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian and William Peckover, the experienced and reliable gunner, were put in charge of the parties detailed to cask water and fell wood.
The weather blew squally, then fair, then squally with rain and rapid, racing clouds throughout the following days. The watering party rolled casks of water along the beach, loading them with difficulty into the waiting boats. The surf was troublesome enough to require the wood party, under Christian, to raft the timber out in bundles. In off-hours, some of the men went shooting and fishing with mostly disappointing results, although two black oystercatchers, largish black-and-white birds with long red bills, were shot by Mr Christian. All the men kept an inquisitive lookout for local people, but it was some days before any turned up. Dressed in little but kangaroo skins and with painted faces, they appeared to the Bounty men as ‘the most miserable creatures on the face of the Earth,’ as James Morrison bluntly put it.
On 23 August, there was the first unequivocal sign of trouble. Going onshore to inspect the various work parties, Bligh found William Purcell, the carpenter, cutting crude, unwieldy billets of wood. When Bligh complained that the billets were too long, Purcell accused his captain of coming onshore ‘on purpose to find fault’. Words were exchanged, Purcell became insolent and Bligh lost his temper and sent the carpenter back to the ship.
Now Bligh was made to feel the consequences of his inconveniently small company. He had no commissioned officer to turn to for authority and moral support – and no marines to back him up. Under the Articles of War, Purcell’s refusal to obey Bligh’s commands – let alone insolently talk back to him – was an offence punishable by court-martial. Yet, the prospect of holding a court-martial was well over a year away.
‘I could not bear the loss of an able Working and healthy Man,’ Bligh logged; ‘otherwise I should have committed him to close confinement untill I could have tryed him.’ As a warrant officer, the carpenter could not be flogged, and Bligh could find no recourse but to order him back to the ship to assist Fryer in other duties. Purcell seems to have had a keen appreciation of Bligh’s dilemma, for three days later Bligh was forced to log a second, lengthy complaint against him for disobeying Fryer’s orders to help load water.
Fryer informed Bligh of Purcell’s disobedience when Bligh returned to the ship with other members of the shore parties, who would have watched the encounter closely. Facing the broad Pacific and backed by a mountainous land so remote that only four ships from the outside world had ever previously touched it, Bligh had only his own authority with which to confront the carpenter.
‘My directions and presence had as little effect,’ Bligh recorded ominously. Purcell had refused to back down. Confinement of Purcell until such time as he could be brought to court-martial would rob Bligh of the carpenter’s skills and, in theory, other able-bodied work. Or so Bligh himself reasoned as he matter-of-factly devised a novel form of punishment: ‘I therefore Ordered the different Persons evidence to be drawn out and attested, and then gave Orders that untill he Worked he should have no provisions, and promised faithfully a severe Punishment to any Man that dared to Assist him.’
Bligh was satisfied with the result of this action, ‘which immediatly brought [him] to his senses…It was for the good of the Voyage that I should not make him or any Man a prisoner,’ Bligh concluded his account of the event. ‘The few I have even in the good State of health I keep them, are but barely sufficient to carry on the duty of the Ship.’
James Morrison gives an oblique, deliberately evasive reference to the confrontation, from which it is impossible to cull hard facts. But a single statement is unambiguous: here, says Morrison, in Adventure Bay ‘were sown seeds of eternal discord between Lieut. Bligh & the Carpenter, and it will be no more than true to say, with all the Officers in general.’ Fryer was probably one of these other officers; Bligh’s observation that he had to repeat his orders to the master (‘I repeated my injunctions to the Comm’g Officer Mr. Fryer’) is subtly troubling. Christian was in charge of the wood party, whose task of rafting timber through heavy surf seems to have been particularly difficult; now under personal obligation to Bligh, had he too been found lacking?
Bligh’s log ticked on, with descriptions of native encounters, lists of shrubs and herbaceous plants, and careful surveys of adjacent land. For him, the crisis with the carpenter had been satisfactorily addressed and the incident was closed.
The Bounty left the wooded shores of Adventure Bay on 5 September and headed into more wet, misty weather. A few days out, the southern lights, ‘as Red as blood’, inflamed the clouded sky. At night, phosphorescent medusae, long-tentacled jellyfish, glowed from beneath the sea. South of New Zealand, the ship unexpectedly came upon ‘a parcell of Rocky Islands’, devoid of all greenery, but patched with late snow – a discovery. Their position was duly laid down by Bligh and logged. ‘I have called them the Bountys Isles,’ he recorded solemnly.
The Bounty ploughed onward through often dark, cloudy weather and thick fogs, punctuated with gales of rain. Bligh’s log checked off each day’s consumed miles: 177, 175, 141. From England to Tahiti, the Bounty would eventually log 28,086 miles. Between his duties on deck, Bligh retired amid the pots to his cabin, and there, while his ship thrummed through the Pacific swells, carefully wrote up his log, made his natural history observations, and refined his charts and sketches. The odds and ends of plants he had collected at the Cape for Tahiti held majestic sway over the great cabin, where he checked them approvingly from time to time. There are few more touching images in his ship’s saga than this, the industrious lieutenant conscientiously acting the role of Captain Cook in his own miniature ship.
Crowded in their own quarters, the Bounty’s men stoked the galley stove that both dried their wet clothing and filled the air with choking smoke. The entire company was again on two-thirds rations of bread, or unpalatable hardtack, sensibly so, as the remainder of the voyage was unpredictable. In accordance with naval regulations, the men would receive monetary compensation for such reductions on return to England.
Now nine months out, friendships and factions had been formed. Among the young gentlemen, Peter Heywood and George Stewart had become firm friends. Fletcher Christian and young Heywood also had so much in common it was natural they too sought each other out, and Christian appears to have taken Heywood under his wing, helping him, Heywood claimed, with his mathematical and classical studies. Heywood was greatly admiring of his older friend, who had impressed the entire company with his athletic feats: Christian could balance a musket on the palm of his outstretched arm and could make a standing jump from inside one barrel to another. Of the first ship on which he had served, the Eurydice, it had been reported to Christian’s family that the young man had ruled over his inferiors ‘in a superior pleasant Manner’, that he had made ‘Toil a pleasure’; Christian’s stint before the mast under Bligh in the West Indies may have enhanced his instinctive, easy dealings with the lower deck, and all evidence suggests he was well liked on the Bounty.
In accordance with naval custom, and as Cook had done in turn for him, Bligh had his young gentlemen and other officers join him in rotation at his table. The habit was to be somewhat revised on this last leg.
‘During this passage Mr. Bligh and His Mess mates the Master & Surgeon fell out, and seperated,’ wrote Morrison, with his infallible eye for trouble, ‘each taking his part of the stock, & retiring to live in their own Cabbins, after which they had several disputes & seldom spoke but on duty; and even then with much apperant reserve.’ When Bligh invited his young gentlemen to dine, they joined his solitude.
The causes of the disputes with Fryer and the disagreeable Huggan are described at length by Bligh in his private and official logs. On the morning of 9 October, as the Bounty cut through a rare smooth sea, Bligh sent the ship’s several expense books to Fryer for the master’s usual bimonthly inspection and signature. The books were shortly returned to Bligh accompanied by a certificate drafted by Fryer, ‘the Purport of which,’ Bligh recorded, ‘was that he had done nothing amiss during his time on board.’ Unless Bligh signed the certificate, Fryer would not sign the books.
Summoning the master, Bligh informed him that he ‘did not approve of his doing his duty conditionally,’ at which Fryer abruptly left. This time, Bligh’s instincts were sure and his reaction swift. Ordering all hands on deck, he read the Articles of War, ‘with particular parts of the Instructions relative to the Matter.’ Fryer was instructed to sign the books or ‘express his reasons [for not complying] at full length at the bottom of the Page.’
‘I sign in obedience to your Orders, but this may be Cancelled hereafter,’ Morrison reported that Fryer intoned as he signed. Morrison’s sly suggestion was that Bligh had been caught fiddling the books, which if true would have cost him his career. But his very public actions defy this interpretation: Bligh was not about to countenance a furtive quid pro quo with his Master. ‘This troublesome Man saw his error & before the whole Ships Company signed the Books’ was Bligh’s report.
There are indications that Fryer might have had reason for concern about his performance as master – Bligh’s glancing reference to his need to repeat orders about Purcell at Adventure Bay being one. More immediately, Fryer may have had in mind the events of just three days earlier – events Bligh described with shock and anger in his private log but omitted in the official log he presented to the Admiralty.
On this day, William Elphinstone, one of the master’s mates, came to Bligh with wholly unexpected news: James Valentine, a twenty-eight-year-old able seaman, had incurred a bad infection after being bled by surgeon Huggan for an ailment contracted at Adventure Bay. Bligh was informed that Valentine was delirious ‘and had every appearance of being in a dying state.’
‘This shock was scarce equal to my astonishment,’ Bligh almost gasped, ‘as the Surgeon had told me he was getting better, and had never expressed the least uneasyness about him.’ When summoned, Huggan explained that, oh yes – he had meant to tell Bligh the night before at dinner, only Bligh had a guest (the officer of the watch) and he had not thought it proper to say anything at the time, but, yes, it was true: James Valentine had only hours to live.
Where was the ship’s master? Where was the acting lieutenant? Above all, where was the assistant surgeon? How had it transpired that Bligh had only learned, belatedly and almost by happenstance, of so serious a development? Bligh immediately visited the stricken man, who was ‘seized with a violent hollow Cough and spit much.’ He had been treated by Huggan with blisters, applied to his breast, for what the surgeon had diagnosed as an asthmatic complaint.
On 10 October, the day after the altercation with Master Fryer, Bligh recorded the death of Seaman Valentine in his official log.
‘This poor man was one of the most robust People on board,’ he reflected, ‘and therefore the Surprize and shock was the greater to me.’ Forgoing the customary auction of the deceased man’s effects, Bligh directed that his meagre possessions be given to the two men who had cared for him on his deathbed ‘with great care and Affection.’ On the following day, as the ship progressed under light breezes and fine rain, Valentine’s remains were committed to the deep.
Bligh’s perfect record of health was now irrevocably spoiled, and it had been spoiled by his beastly sot of a surgeon, aided by the apparent indifference of his officers. Four days after Valentine’s death, three of the older seamen who had formerly complained of ‘the Rheumatism’ were diagnosed with symptoms of scurvy. Bligh was beside himself with frustration and disbelief; had he himself not written in his dissertation on the healthful ‘Mode of Management’ that ‘the Scurvy is realy a disgrace to a ship’?
Bligh embarked upon a frantic application of his most trusted defences – portable soup and essence of malt, the latter served at a ratio of three tablespoons to a quart of water, ‘this being the Surgeons opinion was sufficient’; despite his misgivings and distaste for Huggan, Bligh was still dependent on his professional opinion, such as it was.
Was it scurvy, or was it something else? Throughout the rest of the voyage, all the way to Tahiti, the question hounded Bligh, who returned to it again and again in his log. On 17 October, he dosed up the three men who had complained of rheumatism with malt, sauerkraut, and less usefully, vinegar and mustard – everything, it would seem, that he could think of. The next day he examined other men ‘who the Doctor supposed had a taint of the Scurvy’ but found only the symptoms of prickly heat. The Bounty was now back up to the twenty-fifth parallel, after all, and temperatures had risen well into the seventies.
On the afternoon of the nineteenth, as the ship ambled along in fair but windless weather, John Mills, the forty-year-old gunner’s mate from Aberdeen, and William Brown, the assistant gardener, refused to participate in the mandatory evening dancing. Perhaps the higher temperature was taking a toll, or perhaps the men were just fed up with what they regarded as tedious nonsense. On being informed, Bligh’s response was to stop the offenders’ grog, ‘with a promise of further punishment on a Second Refusal’; the stopping of grog had been one of Cook’s stratagems.
‘I have always directed the Evenings from 5 to 8’ O’Clock to be spent in dancing,’ Bligh registered with a tone of aggrieved self-righteousness in his log, ‘& that every Man should be Obliged to dance as I considered it conducive to their Health.’
Only hours later, Bligh had to log a second entry about the incident: ‘Wm Brown complaining of some Rheumatic Complaints which he has had these three Weeks past, the Doctor insists upon it that it is Scurvey.’ So Brown, it seems, had turned to the doctor for moral support. Bligh himself, however, could discover no such symptoms. Determinedly, he pushed forward with his ‘decoctions’ of essence of malt, noting, ‘I have Ordered the Doctor to issue it himself.’
‘If able,’ he had added in the original entry of his private log, which also noted that Huggan had been ‘constantly drunk these last four days.’ Towards the end of this frustrating Sunday, all hands were mustered for the usual inspection.
‘I think I never saw a more healthy set of Men and so decent looking in my life,’ Bligh exclaimed in exasperation to his log. Bligh knew what scurvy looked like and could find no symptoms – no ‘eruptions or swellings’, no bleeding gums or loose teeth. Yet the real interest in this protracted incident, of course, has less to do with whether or not there was scurvy on the Bounty than whether or not Bligh was being toyed with. Was Huggan getting back at Bligh for his anger over Valentine’s death with a vindictive but unassailable diagnosis of the disease Bligh most feared – a gambit instantly appreciated and exploited by the appreciative and all-knowing seamen?
On 23 October, Huggan sent Bligh an updated sick list, with his own name on it under the complaint ‘Rheumatism’. Twenty-four hours later, he issued a revised list that gave his complaint as ‘Paralytic Affection’. Later in the same day, however, as Bligh noted, Huggan was ‘discovered to be able to get out of bed and look for liquor,’ his paralysis notwithstanding. With this, Bligh’s patience snapped and he gave orders for the surgeon’s filthy cabin to be searched and all liquor removed, an ‘operation that was not only troublesome but offensive in the highest degree.’ Successfully deprived of alcohol, Huggan made a shaky appearance on deck the next day, tenuously sober. The timing of his recovery was excellent, as the Bounty was less than a day away from Matavai Bay and only hours away from sighting land. Bligh urgently wished his surgeon to perform one important medical office before landfall. Ever since the first European ship had arrived at Tahiti, sailors had infected the islanders with ‘the venereals’; the French claimed the English were responsible for the devastation the disease had wrought, while the English pointed out that the Tahitians themselves had implicated the French. Bligh wanted Huggan ‘to examine very particularly every Man and Officer’ for any sign of the disease before arriving at the island. Huggan did so and, to the universal joy of the company, declared ‘every person totally free from the Venereal complaint.’
The next day brought the Bounty to Tahiti.
TAHITI (#ulink_20ad43d4-594a-5516-aeaf-d9970d27eb0f)
Beneath the island’s volcanic pinnacles, the Bounty passed around the surf-pounded reef beyond Point Venus. Already she was hailed by throngs of canoes; and when Bligh called out that he had come from Britain, or ‘Pretanee’, the delighted islanders swarmed onto the ship, ‘and in ten Minutes,’ wrote Bligh, ‘I could scarce find my own people.’ The old-timers – Nelson, the gardener, William Peckover, the gunner, armourer Joseph Coleman and Bligh himself – greeted and were greeted with warm recognition. The remainder of the crew now learned that the stories that had filled their ears throughout the long, hard outward voyage – about the island’s beauty, its sexually uninhibited women, its welcoming people – were not tall tales, or sailors’ fantasy. Beyond the ship, its undulating slopes and valleys, gullies and dramatic peaks casting shifting green-blue shadows in the morning sun, rose the vision of Tahiti. Below, the blue sea around them was clogged with cheerful canoes that had come laden with gifts of plantains, coconuts and hogs. And filling the deck, milling and laughing around them, were the tall, clean-limbed, smooth-skinned Tahitians. The Bounty men – bowlegged, pockmarked, scarred and misshapen, toothless and, despite Bligh’s best efforts, very dirty – regarded the improbably handsome, dark-haired. islanders with both appetite and awe. Their brown skin gleaming with perfumed oil, garlanded with flowers, and flashing smiles with strong white teeth such as few Englishmen had ever seen, these superior men and women were also friendly and accessible. Significantly, all cases of scurvy were quickly cured; even Morrison allowed ‘that in a few days of arrival there was no appearance of sickness or disorder in the ship.’
The following day, 27 October, manoeuvring around canoes and people, Bligh successfully worked the Bounty into Matavai Bay, and dropped anchor. Under the escort of a chief named Poeno, Bligh was taken to Point Venus, the peninsula that formed the northeast point of Matavai Bay, from where in 1769 Cook had observed the transit of Venus. Standing under the graceful and now familiar coconut palms, the surf breaking against the lava-black beach, Bligh seems to have drawn a deep breath of happiness.
It had been Bligh’s original plan to conceal Captain Cook’s death from the Tahitians; Cook was held in such high esteem that a portrait of him, left as a gift eleven years earlier, was still in good repair. But some three months before the Bounty’s arrival, another foreign ship – apparently the first since Cook’s departure – had brought news of his terrible death at the hands of the Sandwich Islanders. Nonetheless, David Nelson – with or without Bligh’s prompting is unclear – introduced Bligh as ‘Cook’s son’ to the local dignitaries; they are reported to have received this news with much satisfaction, although subsequent interactions suggest this was not perhaps taken by them as a literal truth.
On 1 November, Bligh set out on a scouting trip to Oparre, a district to the west of Matavai. In order to uproot and carry off the large number of breadfruit he sought, he needed the permission of all the various chiefs with jurisdiction over the areas in which he would be working. A visit to pay his respects to the Ari’i Rahi, the six-year-old king of Oparre, took him inland towards the hills, ‘through the delightful breadfruit flats of Oparre,’ which were cut by a serpentine river. In the course of the day, the two parties entertained each other, the Tahitians offering an impromptu heiva, or dancing festival, Bligh a demonstration of his pocket pistol.
Before returning to his ship, Bligh contemplated the scenes of the day – the sparkling streams and green glades of the interior, and the dramatic sweep of the palm-rimmed lava beach of Matavai Bay. ‘These two places,’ he reflected, ‘are certainly the Paradise of the World, and if happiness could result from situation and convenience, here it is to be found in the highest perfection. I have seen many parts of the World,’ he continued in this remarkably personal entry, ‘but Otaheite is capable of being preferable to them all.’
Tynah, the paramount chief of Matavai and the adjoining region, soon became the local dignitary with whom Bligh and his men had the most communion. He and his outgoing wife, Iddeeah, were both large, impressive persons, Tynah standing over six foot three and weighing some twenty-one stones. Now around thirty-seven years old, Tynah had been known to Cook and Bligh previously as ‘Otoo’. Adroitly, Bligh conveyed to Tynah and the other lesser chiefs that the gift his sovereign, King George of Pretanee, would most welcome in exchange for the gifts his ship carried was the breadfruit tree. Delighted that King George could be so easily satisfied, the chiefs readily gave their assent, and Bligh, much relieved, began to organize his land base.
The Admiralty’s delay in getting Bligh his orders had ensured that the Bounty arrived in Tahiti near the outset of the western monsoon season, which ran from November to April, a period of rain and gales avoided by sailors. Additionally, as he had been directed to return by the Endeavour Straits, Bligh knew he had to await the eastern monsoon, which would begin at the end of April or early May; in short, the Bounty would not be departing Tahiti until April, five months away, and several months longer than had originally been planned.
On 2 November, Bligh sent a party to Point Venus that included William Peckover, Peter Heywood, four of the able seamen, as well as Nelson the gardener and his assistant William Brown, all under the command of Fletcher Christian. It was their job to establish and maintain the camp for the gardeners’ work. Eventually, two tents and a shed, built of bamboo poles and thatched with palm branches, were erected on Cook’s old site and a boundary line drawn, ‘within which none of the Natives were to enter without permission and all were cautioned against it.’ The compound was to serve as a nursery where the transplanted breadfruit could be closely supervised before being transported to the Bounty. Here, in the shade of the coconuts and breadfruit that rolled down to the dark shore, as palm fronds clattered and rustled in the sea breezes far above their heads, Christian and the rest of his small land party were to live and work for the next few months. Their less fortunate companions were expected to spend the night on board their ship.
Bligh himself divided his time between an anxious monitoring of his plants, and careful, if enjoyable, diplomacy. The success of his breadfruit operation depended upon the continued goodwill of such powerful friends as Poeno and Tynah (the father of the boy king), both of whom he knew from his former visit. Based upon his earlier experience, there was little reason to imagine this goodwill would in fact waver, but there was reason to fear the curiosity and acquisitiveness of the common man. So far, as Bligh had noted, the thefts the Bounty had suffered had been insignificant, but he was keenly aware that this situation could quickly change. He had already had to administer the third flogging of the voyage, in this case twelve lashes to Alexander Smith, able seaman, ‘for suffering the Gudgeon of the large Cutter to be drawn out without knowing it.’ The flogging had horrified the watching Tahitians – especially the women, who, according to Bligh, ‘showed every degree of Sympathy which marked them to be the most humane and affectionate creatures in the World.’
The temptation for Bligh to take personal advantage of his circumstances, to strike out on short expeditions, making discoveries and taking the surveys in which he was so expert, all to his own greater glory, must have been very great. But Bligh had virtually promised Banks a successful outcome to the voyage, and Banks had made it patently clear that he cared about nothing but breadfruit. The nursery, therefore, and everything that concerned the nursery, were to be the sole objects of his attention. Bligh could not risk some fatal lapse of discipline; nor, as it appears, could he trust his officers or men.
This was most apparent in Bligh’s attempt to regulate the ongoing torrent of trade between his ship and his island hosts. The establishment of a fixed market, as opposed to a free-for-all run by the sailors’ whim, was of immediate advantage to his own ship, as well as to future British vessels. As Cook had done – and based closely on Cook’s own rules – Bligh drafted a set of injunctions intended to govern his men’s conduct among the Tahitians:
1st. At the Society or Friendly Islands, no person whatever is to intimate that Captain Cook was killed by Indians or that he is dead.
2nd. No person is ever to speak, or give the least hint, that we have come on purpose to get the breadfruit plant, until I have made my plan known to the chiefs.
3rd. Every person is to study to gain the good will and esteem of the natives; to treat them with all kindness; and not to take from them, by violent means, any thing that they may have stolen; and no one is ever to fire, but in defence of his life.
4th. Every person employed on service, is to take care that no arms or implements of any kind under their charge, are stolen; the value of such thing, being lost, shall be charged against their wages.
5th. No man is to embezzle, or offer to sale, directly, or indirectly, any part of the King’s stores, of what nature soever.
6th. A proper person or persons will be appointed to regulate trade, and barter with the natives; and no officer or seaman, or other person belonging to the ship, is to trade for any kind of provisions, or curiosities; but if such officer or seaman wishes to purchase any particular thing, he is to apply to the provider to do it for him. By this means a regular market will be carried on, and all disputes, which otherwise may happen with the natives will be avoided. All boats are to have every thing handed out of them at sun-set.
These orders were nailed to the mizzenmast immediately upon anchoring – so Morrison reports, citing a garbled version of only item number six on Bligh’s list. Bligh’s orders, Morrison recalled, prohibited ‘the Purchase of Curiosities or any thing except Provisions,’ adding that ‘there were few or no instances of the order being disobeyd, as no curiosity struck the seamen so forcibly as a roasted pig…’
Nonetheless, it was this last order that appears to have been responsible for the only complaints worth recording during the twenty-three weeks spent on Tahiti. Bligh’s directive aimed to avoid the disputes that would inevitably arise if trade were conducted by forty-five individuals following no particular rules, and to ensure that, as commanding officer and purser, he could reliably provision his ship.
Captain Cook himself, who in the course of his long career had seen many a promising market ruined, had been very clear on this point: ‘Thus, was the fine prospect we had of geting a plentifull supply of refreshments of these people frustrated,’ Cook had lamented, after one of his men had volunteered a quantity of rare red feathers for a pig, inadvertently establishing red feathers as the currency for all future pigs. ‘And which will ever be the case so long as every one is allowed to make exchanges for what he pleaseth and in what manner he please’s.’
Morrison undoubtedly understood Bligh’s motivation for the directive, and John Fryer, as master, most certainly did. Yet Morrison complained that when the trade in hogs began to slacken, ‘Mr. Bligh seized on all that came to the ship big & small Dead or alive, taking them as his property, and serving them as the ship’s allowance at one pound per Man per Day.’ According to Morrison, Fryer also complained to Bligh, apparently publicly, that his property was being taken. The site designated for trade was one of the tents at the nursery compound, where the boundary marker kept crowds at bay. William Peckover had been placed in charge, a sensible choice given his knowledge of Tahitian language and customs picked up in the course of several visits he had made to the island with Cook. Nonetheless, the sailors continued to encourage their Tahitian friends to come to the ship surreptitiously.
‘The Natives observing that the Hogs were seized as soon as they Came on board…became very shy of bringing a hog in sight of Lieut. Bligh,’ Morrison reported, and he went on to describe with relish the ways in which the sailors and islanders conspired to trick their commanding officer. The Tahitians ‘watched all opportunity when he was on shore to bring provisions to their friends.’ Not for the first time – and certainly not for the last – Bligh must have wished for the support of even a small party of marines, armed sentinels who would have stood apart from the fraternity of seamen, and whose loyalty to his commands he could have counted on when his back was turned.
Despite Morrison’s lengthy complaint, time passed pleasantly enough for the seamen who were entrusted with minimal duties and allowed onshore regularly ‘for refreshment’. Joseph Coleman set up a forge to make and repair goods for the ship and islanders alike. The usual wooding parties were sent off to cut timber, while others prepared puncheons of salted pork for the return journey. The great cabin was refitted for the pots waiting in the land nursery, only, as Bligh logged, ‘the Carpenter running a Nail through his Knee very little was done.’ Charles Norman, a carpenter’s mate, had been ill for several days with a complaint diagnosed by Huggan variously as rheumatism and ‘Peripneumonianotha’, and the quartermaster’s mate, George Simpson, also according to Huggan, had ‘Cholera Morbus’. Bligh bought a milch goat for Norman, believing its milk would help the patient’s chronic diarrhoea. The men recovered and Bligh was able to report a clean sick list, save that the ‘Venereal list is increased to four’; sadly, the European disease was now endemic.
Bligh met almost every day with Tynah and his family and retinue, and each day he logged some new discovery about his hosts’ culture. Along with the ship’s officers, he was entertained by lascivious heivas, in which the women, ‘according to the horrid custom,’ distorted their faces into obscene expressions. He discussed the tradition of infanticide among the flamboyant arioi, and he recorded the recipe for a delicious pudding made from a turnip-like root. One day, Bligh engaged in long theological enquiry, in which he was questioned closely about his own beliefs: who was the son and who was the wife of his God? Who was his father and mother? Who was before your God and where is he? Is he in the winds or in the sun?
When asked about childbirth in his country, Bligh answered as well as he was able, and enquired in turn how this was done in Tahiti. Queen Iddeeah replied by mimicking a woman in labour, squatting comfortably on her heels between the protective arms of a male attendant who stroked her belly. Iddeeah was vastly amused on learning of the difficulties of Pretanee’s women.
‘Let them do this & not fear,’ she told Bligh, who appears to have been persuaded by this tender pantomime.
In the evenings, Bligh entertained his hosts on board the Bounty, which none seemed to tire of visiting. As Tynah’s royal status forbade him to put food or drink into his own mouth, Bligh himself sometimes served as cupbearer if attendants were unavailable; Iddeeah, according to custom, ate apart from the men. After the meals, the company lounged lazily around the small deck area, enjoying the offshore breezes, and the muffled pounding of the surf on shore and reef, and the lap of the waves below. Not infrequently, Bligh’s guests stayed the night on board the Bounty, loth to depart.
How Bligh passed his time at Tahiti can be followed, day by day, event by event, as recorded in his fulsome log. What is not known with any clarity is how time was passed onshore. All midshipmen were required to keep up their own logs, to be produced at such time as they applied to pass for lieutenant, and one would give much to have Fletcher Christian’s. As it is, life at Point Venus can be sketched only in broad outline. Every evening, when the work of the shore party was winding down, the Tahitians gathered at ‘the Post’ before sunset. Almost all of the Bounty men had found taios, or protective friends, who took them into their homes and families. At least two of the men, George Stewart from the Orkneys and, perhaps less predictably, the critical James Morrison, had women friends to whom they were particularly attached, while all the men seemed to have enjoyed regular sexual partners; whether or not Fletcher Christian had formed an attachment to any one woman was to become a hotly contested question – at the very least, he, like young Peter Heywood, had to be treated for ‘venereals’. The women of Tahiti, as Bligh would later famously write, were ‘handsome, mild and cheerful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved.’ They were also by European standards not only very beautiful, but sexually uninhibited and experienced in ways that amazed and delighted their English visitors.
‘Even the mouths of Women are not exempt from the polution, and many other as uncommon ways have they of gratifying their beastly inclinations,’ as Bligh had observed, aghast. Famously, favours of the Tahitian women could be purchased for mere nails. Both on ship and at the camp, Bligh allowed female guests to stay the night, at the same time trying, through Ledward, his assistant surgeon, to keep track of the venereal diseases. When dusk came, the shore party were left more or less to their own devices. The sundown gatherings brought entertainments – wrestling matches, dances and games, feasts, martial competitions – but also a sexual privacy, even a domesticity, not allowed to the men still on board ship. From the curving arm of Point Venus, Christian and his companions could look back towards Matavai Bay, past the Bounty riding gently at anchor, to the darkening abundance of trees that seemed to cascade from the grave, unassailable heights of the island.
As the weeks passed, the potted plants began to fill the nursery tent, and by the end of November, some six hundred were ‘in a very fine way’. Meanwhile, other ship duties were intermittently carried out. Bligh ordered the sails brought onshore, where they were aired and dried under Christian’s supervision. The large cutter was found to have a wormy bottom and had to be cleaned and repainted, under the shade of a large awning that Bligh had made to protect the workmen from the sun.
These duties were accompanied by the usual problems. Mathew Thompson was flogged with a dozen lashes ‘for insolence and disobedience of Orders’. Also, Bligh logged, ‘by the remissness of my Officers & People at the Tent,’ a rudder was stolen, the only theft, as Bligh observed, so far, of any consequence; the officer in charge of the tent was of course Fletcher Christian. There is no record of punishment.
Most seriously, Purcell once again had begun to balk at his orders. When asked to make a whetstone for one of the Tahitian men, he refused point-blank, claiming that to do so would spoil his tools. On this occasion, at last, Bligh punished the carpenter with confinement to his cabin – although, as he recorded, he did ‘not intend to lose the use of him but to remitt him to his duty to Morrow.’
Towards the end of November, strong winds began to accompany what had become daily showers of rain, and by early December the dark weather brought an unfamiliar, heavy swell. The Bounty rolled uncomfortably at her anchorage, while the surf breaking on Dolphin Bank, the outlying reef, had become violent. On 6 December, Bligh described a scene ‘of Wind and Weather which I never supposed could have been met with in this place.’ From midnight until well into the morning, amid torrents of rain, a foaming sea agitated the ship ‘in a most tremendous manner’. Onshore, Christian’s party was cut off by the swelling of the nearby river and an alarming influx of the sea. In the morning, Tynah and Iddeeah fought their way to the Bounty in canoes through a sea so high that, as Bligh wrote, ‘I could not have supposed any Boat could have existed a moment.’ On board, the couple offered their tearful greetings, saying they had believed the ship lost in the night. The rainy season, which Europeans had never experienced before, had commenced, and it was at once clear that Matavai Bay was no longer a feasible anchorage. The plants had been threatened by salt spray as the winds and high sea raged, and Bligh was determined to move them to safer ground as soon as he was able. On Nelson’s advice, he delayed an immediate departure until plants in an apparently dormant state showed signs of being alive and healthy.
Some days after the storm, Huggan, the quondam surgeon, at last succumbed to his ‘drunkenness and indolence’.
‘Exercise was a thing he could not bear an Idea of,’ Bligh wrote by way of an epitaph. Since his death had been projected even before the Bounty departed Deptford Dockyard, Huggan had a good run for his money. He was buried the following day to the east of Point Venus, across the river that cut the point and not far from the sea.
‘There the Sun rises,’ Tynah said as the grave was being dug, ‘and there it sets, and here you may bury Terronnoo, for so he was called.’ Joining Huggan’s shipmates for the funeral were all the chiefs of the region and a great many other people, respectful and solemn for the surgeon’s perhaps undeservedly dignified rites. Huggan was only the second European to be buried on the island.
It was Christmas by the time the dormant plants had put forth the desired shoots, and the men began the cumbersome task of moving camp. A reef harbour at Oparre, to the west of Matavai, had been chosen as the Bounty’s new anchorage. With a watchful eye on the weather, which had continued to be troubled, Bligh ordered the Bounty readied for her short journey, and had his 774 potted breadfruit plants carefully carried on board. At half past ten in the morning, the ship weighed anchor and cautiously set out to follow the launch, which was carrying the tents and which Bligh had sent ahead as a pilot.
The second camp, according to Bligh, was ‘a delightful situation in every respect.’ The ship lay in sheltered, smooth water, where the tide lapped at the beach and no surf broke. Dense stands of trees shaded the new nursery, which was established along the same lines as the Matavai camp with the addition of a hut supplied by Tynah. Tynah, who had lobbied hard not to lose the Bounty and all the amusements and lucrative trade she brought, was delighted with the relocation, as he also had jurisdiction of Oparre. Taios left behind were still close enough to visit, and the easy social routine that had been enjoyed at Matavai was soon resumed, with people promenading along the beach opposite the ship ‘every fair Evening’. Bligh directed the ship ‘to be laid up and everything put below’ in part so as to avoid more thefts, but this was also a sign that the men on board could look forward to only perfunctory duties.
Nonetheless, the very day the plants and ship were safely reestablished, Bligh had William Muspratt, the cook’s assistant, flogged with a dozen lashes for ‘neglect of duty’. Two days later Robert Lamb, the butcher, was also flogged with a dozen ‘for suffering his Cleaver to be Stolen’. This now brought the total number of men punished up to six.
Although the temperature remained warm, this new season brought torrential rain and squalls, and skies so dense with sodden clouds that for an entire month Bligh was unable to take a single celestial observation. It was on one of these dark, impenetrable nights that three of the Bounty’s men deserted. When the watch was relieved at four in the morning of 5 January 1789, Charles Churchill, the master-at-arms, John Millward, able seaman, and William Muspratt, who had only recently been flogged, were found missing. Gone with them were the small cutter along with eight stands of arms and cartouches of ammunition.
Bligh responded to the news with an icy resolve that he had hitherto not displayed. To his Tahitian friends, he stated in very clear, straightforward and polite language that he expected the men returned. Laughing nervously, they asked Bligh if he would hold them hostage on board his ship, as Cook had done. This was an unexpected and revealing question. In 1769, during his first visit to Tahiti, Cook had lost two marines to desertion and had retaliated by holding the chiefs hostage, his rationale being that his men could not survive on the island without the complicity of the islanders. That Bligh’s friends raised this concern twenty years after the event suggests that Cook’s actions had left a deep impression.
Bligh reassured his friends that he would not resort to such a stratagem, adding, in his log, that he had ‘never shown any Violence or Anger’ at any of the petty thefts that had occurred and had enjoyed such mutual goodwill that he knew his friends had confidence in him, and that he had ‘therefore no doubt but they will bring the Deserters back’ – but, if they should not, he would ‘make the whole Country Suffer for it.’ Having issued his warnings, there was little Bligh could do but wait, relying on local intelligence to flush out the fugitives.
That some of his men would try to desert probably did not take Bligh completely by surprise; again, he had his experience with Cook to draw upon. Cook had suffered desertions on Tahiti during all three of his expeditions. Recognizing that the inducements to leave ship were many, Cook had summoned his crew and lectured them at length on the ‘spirit of Desertion’, informing them that ‘they Might run off if they pleased,’ as one of the company later recorded, ‘but they might Depend upon it he would Recover them again.’ Stern as it was, the speech did not deter other, also futile attempts. Some years later, on learning of the Bounty’s fate, James Matra, a midshipman on Cook’s first journey, would report to Banks the astonishing news that a mass desertion had been planned by ‘most of the People’ and some of the gentlemen of the Endeavour. Mr Midshipman Matra had been instrumental in dissuading them, so he would claim, his principal line of argument being that the men could be certain of ‘dying rotten’ of the pox if they were to live out their lives on the island.
Within his own company, Bligh must have seen evidence that his officers and people were settling down into Tahitian life and adopting local customs, most visibly in their passion for being tattooed. The first tattoos had arrived in England with sailors returning from the Americas or the Pacific, and especially from the Endeavour (with Joseph Banks) at the end of Cook’s first voyage, when they had become tokens of great prestige. The Bounty’s company’s tastes were varied, some sticking conservatively to English iconography. James Morrison, of all people, for reasons only to be guessed at, had had himself tattooed with the Order of the Garter around his leg and the Knights of the Garter’s motto: ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – ‘Shame on him who evil thinks.’ Thomas Ellison wore simply his name and ‘October 25th 1788’ on his right arm – the date he had first sighted Otaheite.
But several of the men had undergone traditional Tahitian tattooing over large parts of their body, particularly on their buttocks. In Tahitian tradition, a man was not eligible to marry unless he had undergone the lengthy and painful operation of having his entire backside blacked over. Bligh left descriptions only of the mutineers, and with one exception (John Mills, the Scottish gunner’s mate) every one of them was tattooed, and usually ‘very much tatowed’ or ‘tatowed in several places’. Peter Heywood was in this company, being ‘very much tattowed’, among other things with the three-legged emblem of the Isle of Man. Those who had received the elaborate tattoos of Tahitian manhood included George Stewart, Matthew Quintal and Fletcher Christian.
Still, Bligh himself had encouraged friendly relations with the Tahitians, and his men’s enthusiasm for the more eye-catching aspects of their culture was not something to be readily, or fruitfully, legislated. But now, as he conducted his own grim investigation of the events, he made other discoveries. On examination of the men’s personal effects for clues, a piece of paper was found inside Charles Churchill’s chest on which he had written his own name and the names of three of the shore party. The deserters would later say darkly that ‘many others intended to remain among the islands,’ and making a list of men committed to an illegal act such as desertion – or mutiny – was an old trick. When Captain Edward Edwards, back in his happier days before he captained the Pandora, had thwarted the mutinous plot on board his ship Narcissus, a list of names of the men involved in the plot had been discovered on one of the would-be mutineers; perhaps the rash act of committing a name to paper was perceived as a kind of security that bound the man in question to one’s cause.
Some years later, in personal correspondence, Bligh reported that ‘this List had Christian, Heywood and several other Names in it,’ and that he had approached his protégé ‘not conceiving Christian could be guilty of such a thing, and who, when I showed it to him, laughed as well as myself.’ To a man, the shore party professed their innocence to Bligh, and ‘denyd it so firmly, that He was inclined from Circumstances to believe them and said no more to them about it,’ according to Morrison. In the official log no mention is made of this mysterious list; Bligh’s personal log, in which he would have been most expected to have made some remarks about the event, ends on 23 October, and does not resume until 5 April 1789; a comprehensive index, in Bligh’s own handwriting, is all that can be found of the missing portion. The official log, submitted to the Admiralty, makes no mention of his suspicions whatsoever and shows Bligh’s professionalism at its best. If the men had convinced him of their innocence, then he was bound to ‘say no more about it.’ Or was the incident omitted for more self-serving reasons – because later events proved he had been duped? At least ‘three of the Party on shore’ would remain among the mutineers: Peter Heywood, William Brown and Fletcher Christian.
One curious and generally unremarked incident occurred four days after Churchill and his companions deserted. As Bligh reported, ‘one of my officers on shore’ cut a branch of an oil-nut tree growing at a marae, or sacred site, and, ‘accidently bringing it into the dwelling where my people are at, all the Natives both Men and Women suddenly left.’ The branch had tabooed the shore hut; no Tahitian would set foot here until the appropriate ceremony lifted the taboo. Curiously, however, as Bligh noted, ‘when I came on shore I found a branch of this Tree tyed to one of the Posts, altho they saw the effect it had of keeping the Natives from the House.’ Is it significant that in the immediate aftermath of the desertion one of the officers – Christian or Heywood – tabooed the house in which three men implicated on Churchill’s list happened to live? Was this a sign to Tahitian taios and allies to stay away, perhaps in the wake of an aborted plot? A whimsical amulet to ward off further trouble? Or, as Bligh clearly believed, mere happenstance?
Bligh seems to have accepted that the outcome to this adventure did not lie in his hands, and he returned his company to their former routine while awaiting whatever news his Tahitian friends brought him of the deserters. His own time was once again divided between the nursery and enquiry into local customs, and he observed with delight ‘the swarms of little Children which are in every part of the Country,’ flying kites, playing cat’s cradle, and skipping rope, the latter game, as he noted being ‘common with the Boys in England.’ While onshore on 16 January, he received a message from Fryer that a man known to have given conveyance to the deserters was on board the Bounty: did Bligh want Fryer to detain him? Incredulous, Bligh returned to the ship to find the informant had escaped by diving overboard and that no attempt had been made to follow him.
‘As he knew perfectly my determination in punishing this Man if ever he could be caught, it was an unnecessary delay in confining him,’ Bligh wrote of Fryer. The following day, he had even greater cause for anger. Spare sails that Bligh had ordered to be taken out of storage and aired were found to be mildewed and rotting.
‘If I had any Officers to supercede the Master and Boatswain, or was capable of doing without them, considering them as common Seamen, they should no longer occupy their respective Stations,’ Bligh fumed. ‘Scarce any neglect of duty can equal the criminality of this, for it appears that altho the Sails have been taken out twice since I have been in the Island, which I thought fully sufficient and I had trusted to their reports, Yet these New Sails never were brought out.’ Bligh had the sails washed in the sea, then hung to dry ‘to be ready for repairing’, a laborious task. The Bounty’s voyage was only half over; an estimated ten months of sailing lay ahead.
Almost three weeks passed before word was brought that the deserters had been located in Tettahah, some five miles distant. Bligh at once set out to apprehend them, although darkness was coming and it was a rainy, windy night. Surprised by Bligh where they had taken shelter, the three men resignedly surrendered without resistance. Once back at the ship, Bligh read the Articles of War and administered punishment: twelve lashes for Charles Churchill, two dozen each for William Muspratt and John Millward – to be repeated at a later date. In between the floggings, the men were confined in irons and found time to write Bligh an extraordinary letter:
Sir,
We should think ourselves wholly inexcusable if we omitted taking this earliest opportunity of returning our thanks for your goodness in delivering us from a trial by Court-Martial, the fatal consequences of which are obvious; and although we cannot possibly lay any claim to so great a favour, yet we humbly beg you will be pleased to remit any farther punishment; and we trust our future conduct will fully demonstrate our deep sense of your clemency, and our stedfast resolution to behave better hereafter.
We are,
Sir,
Your most obedient, most humble servants, C. Churchill, Wm. Muspratt, John Millward.
If the men believed that a submissive, honey-toned letter would charm their captain into dropping the second part of the punishment, they were proved mistaken when, eleven days later, the second round was indeed administered. Why Charles Churchill should have received a lesser punishment than his fellows is unclear. The punishment as a whole was, in any case, lenient; convicted deserters – with good service and character taken into consideration – could expect to receive 100 to 150 lashes. Bligh’s leniency had been carefully considered. As he wrote in his log, ‘this affair was solely caused by the neglect of the Officers who had the Watch.’ The officer in question, identified by Morrison as Midshipman Thomas Hayward, had been asleep at his station, a crime under the Articles of War no less serious than desertion. (‘No Person in or belonging to the Fleet shall sleep upon his Watch, or negligently perform the Duty imposed on him, or forsake his Station, upon Pain of Death…’) Bligh disrated the officer, turning him before the mast. According to an approving Morrison, he had also been clapped in irons until the runaways were returned.
‘I was induced to give them all a lecture on this occasion,’ Bligh continued, referring to his other officers, ‘and endeavored to show them that however exempt they were at present from the like punishment, yet they were equally subject by the Articles of War to a condign one.’ In other words, although his officers were exempt ‘at present’ from being flogged, they were liable to ‘a severe and well-deserved’ punishment. It is within this remarkable lecture that the tensions so fatal to the voyage can be discerned most transparently.
‘An Officer with Men under his care is at all times in some degree responsible for their conduct,’ Bligh wrote in his log, paraphrasing his lecture, ‘but when from his neglect Men are brought to punishment while he only meets with a reprimand, because a publick conviction by Tryal will bring both into a more severe and dangerous situation, an alternative often laid aside through lenity, and sometimes necessity, as it now is in both cases; it is an unpleasant thing to remark that no feelings of honor, or sense of shame is to be Observed in such an Offender.’
The list of his officers’ transgressions while in Tahiti, quite apart from incidents in the earlier part of the voyage, is impressive: when moving from Matavai to Oparre, Fryer had allowed the ship to run aground; a midshipman had slept on his watch and allowed three men to desert; the sails had been allowed to rot; on returning from capturing the deserters, Bligh had discovered that the ship’s timekeeper, critical to accurate navigation, had been allowed to run down; the ship’s rudder had been stolen from the camp; and in early March, an azimuth compass had been taken from under the noses of the men onshore, for which, according to Morrison, ‘Mr. Bligh…went on shore and rebuked the Officers at the tent for neglecting their duty.’ In addition, there are two enigmatic entries in the index Bligh composed to his missing personal log that refer to ‘Mr. Hallet’s contumacy’ and ‘Mr. Hallet’s behaviour.’
No wonder, then, that Bligh had raged after learning of the desertion that ‘such neglectfull and worthless petty Officers I believe never was in a Ship as are in this. No Orders for a few hours together are Obeyed by them, and their conduct in general is so bad, that no confidence or trust can be reposed in them, in short,’ he concluded ominously, ‘they have drove me to every thing but Corporal punishment and that must follow if they do not improve.’ The tenor of these occasional outbursts suggests that many more aggravations had passed unrecorded. It is a striking fact that, with one exception, Fryer and Purcell are the only officers named by Bligh in his official log. The names of Hallett, Hayward, Christian – other known offenders – have all been edited out, perhaps along with others of his young gentlemen. Bligh was later, privately, to refer to Edward Young, for example, as ‘a worthless wretch’, which at the very least suggests dereliction of some duties; and yet Young’s name is never mentioned in the Admiralty’s log. All of these young gentlemen were friends of the friends and patrons Bligh would have to rub shoulders with once back in England.
On 4 February, two nights after the second part of the deserters’ punishment was meted out under cover of heavy rain, the cable of the Bounty’s bower anchor was cut, an act that could have brought the ship to disaster by allowing it to drift upon the reef. No explanation for what Bligh termed ‘this Malicious act’ could be made; indeed, the mystery would be cleared up only much later, when the mutineers returned to Tahiti and learned that the agent had been the taio of Midshipman Hayward. His object had been to wreck the ship so as to ensure that his friend never left Tahiti. More alarming, he declared that he had watched as the deserters were flogged and vowed that if a lash were laid on Hayward, he would kill Bligh for it. But now, perplexed and affronted, Bligh threatened ‘instant revenge’ unless the perpetrator was produced. To underscore his displeasure, Bligh held aloof from Tynah and Iddeeah for two days, approaching them only to reiterate his anger. But for all his efforts, the unhappy chief was unable to produce the villain, and at length burst into tears.
‘I could no longer keep these people under an Idea that I mistrusted them,’ Bligh wrote, already repentant ‘Our reconciliation therefore took place, and they came on board with me at Noon to dine.’
February and March, the last two months the Bounty was to be in Tahiti, were spent readying the ship for departure. Under the great lowering cloud banks that filled the sky with violent colour and claimed the island heights, the Bounty’s men worked through the daily fits of rain that ranged from light to torrential. Their very visible activities – caulking, repairing sails, mending iron fittings, stowing provisions and all the bustle preparatory to a long voyage – caused consternation among the Tahitians, now faced with the imminent certainty of losing their friends. Tynah began an unsuccessful bid to persuade Bligh to carry himself and Iddeeah to England. This period also saw an increase in the number of thefts, as many Tahitians saw their last chance for a little profit fading. As Bligh wrote, ‘it is to be expected when a ship is near the time of Sailing,’ adding that he attached no blame to the Tahitians, because he was ‘perfectly certain that had the Ship been lying in the River Thames, a hundred times as much would have been Stolen.’ Nonetheless, when, thanks to Tynah’s efforts, the thief of the azimuth compass was found, Bligh felt the time had come to deter all such future acts with a demonstration of Pretanee’s might
‘Kill him,’ said Tynah, committed to demonstrating his unwavering good faith. Bligh was not inclined to do so, but instead administered the most severe punishment of his voyage: one hundred lashes to the thief, who was then confined in irons until the departure of the ship.
‘His back became very much swelled,’ Bligh recorded with a kind of wonderment, ‘but only the last stroke broke the Skin.’ The incident is also recorded by Morrison, who administered the flogging and makes no adverse comments on it, only remarking that Bligh had gone ‘in a passion’ to Tynah when the theft was first discovered.
Still the rains continued, and on the dawn watch of a day and night that had seen ‘much Rain’, the mate of the watch heard a splash over the side of the ship, which on investigation turned out to be the sound of the confined thief diving overboard to his freedom. The thief’s escape – according to Morrison, he had picked his lock – elicited a last strenuous outburst from Bligh.
‘I have such a neglectfull set about me,’ he wrote, after castigating the mate of the watch, whom, exceptionally, he named as George Stewart (it is worth noting he had not come to Bligh through a patron), ‘that I beleive nothing but condign punishment can alter their conduct’ – this was the second occasion Bligh had adverted to the possibility of ‘condign’ punishment of his officers. ‘Verbal orders in the course of a Month were so forgot that they would impudently assert no such thing or directions were given, and I have been at last under the necessity to trouble myself with writing what by decent Young Officers would be complied with as the common Rules of Service.’
As preparations for departure continued, it is likely that at least some of the Bounty’s men looked up from their work on the ship, through the rain and its steaming aftermath, across the water to the rustling skirt of palms and the dense canopies of fragrant trees they now knew so well…and dreaded the day of departure. Not just a life of ease, but friends, lovers, common-law wives, in some cases their future children would be left behind. William Bligh, on the other hand, for all the praise he showered on the island and for all his ease and professed friendships with his hosts, had always had his eye on the homeward run. His outbursts at his officers significantly increased in the final months of the Tahitian sojourn. Whether this was simply because Bligh had reached the limit of tolerance for their irresponsible behaviour, or because he responded to the increased pressures of the approaching departure by lashing out at those next in pecking order, is impossible to know. Certainly Bligh had much to think about even without the worry over unreliable officers. His ship and everything in her had to be overhauled and provisioned for the long voyage still ahead; he had to take final surveys of the coast and harbour, which would be submitted to the Admiralty for the use of future navigators; he had to rerate the ship’s timekeeper, and keep a clear head for the Endeavour Straits. Relationships with Tynah and all local dignitaries had to be massaged until the last moment, so that future British vessels would receive as much goodwill as had the Bounty. And he had to nurse the 1015 breadfruit and other miscellaneous plants through the vicissitudes of a twelve-thousand-mile voyage home.
‘One day, or even one hours negligence may at any period be the means of destroying all the Trees and Plants which may have been collected,’ Banks had written in his final orders to Nelson with characteristic directness, noting earlier, ‘You will take care to remind Lieutenant Bligh of that circumstance.’
On 27 March, Bligh ordered all cats and the two dogs disembarked in preparation for bringing the plants on board, an operation that he characterized as ‘tedious’. Now firmly rooted in boxes, tubs and pots, they had all to be sorted by size and arranged in their appropriate holdings.
‘Thus far I have accomplished the Object of my Voyage,’ Bligh wrote, days later, when the operation was finished. Complacently surveying his flourishing plants neatly arrayed in the great cabin, he noted he had managed to stow 309 additional breadfruit to what had originally been planned; he was, then, safely covered for any losses.
With the ship crammed – ‘lumbered’, to borrow Morrison’s term – with gifts of coconuts, yams and plantains, the men made their goodbyes. Tynah and Iddeeah wept bitterly, begging Bligh to spend one last night in Matavai, but this he gently declined. He had grave misgivings about leaving his friends, knowing, as did they, that once the protection of the Bounty
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Caroline Alexander
The bestselling author of The Endurance reveals the startling truth behind the legend of the Mutiny on the Bounty – the most famous sea story of all time.More than two centuries have passed since Fletcher Christian mutinied against Lt. Bligh on a small armed transport vessel called Bounty. Why the details of this obscure adventure at the end of the world remain vivid and enthralling is as intriguing as the truth behind the legend. Caroline Alexander focusses on the court martial of the ten mutineers captured in Tahiti and brought to justice in Portsmouth. Each figure emerges as a richly drawn character caught up in a drama that may well end on the gallows. With enormous scholarship and exquisitely drawn characters, The Bounty is a tour de force.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
The Bounty
The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
Caroline Alexander
TO SMOKEY
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ua900d155-b7c1-534b-a7c9-5e7770abd314)
Title Page (#ua4e52288-e070-5de9-9baa-b177b6db47e1)
Dedication (#u56a7a4d8-c08d-522d-8d9f-fa985237e125)
Ship’s Company (#u0dc8ce5a-ba10-5392-b012-974d92d80aa7)
Author’s Note (#ue1b9eb38-1a30-51f1-9d2a-48b413c67f74)
PRELUDE (#u61f7baca-df0b-5e94-bfc3-20185ce993a6)
PANDORA (#u5e384970-2ddf-5d27-b3a4-95bc06d8482a)
BOUNTY (#u7ab6f18c-41d3-596c-944c-642289cc176e)
VOYAGE OUT (#u8650769f-7f45-573b-9de6-554d7778daa0)
TAHITI (#ucee6dd6d-b709-5290-a77b-9014a29a9e65)
MUTINY (#litres_trial_promo)
RETURN (#litres_trial_promo)
PORTSMOUTH (#litres_trial_promo)
COURT-MARTIAL (#litres_trial_promo)
DEFENCE (#litres_trial_promo)
SENTENCE (#litres_trial_promo)
JUDGEMENT (#litres_trial_promo)
LATITUDE 25° S, LONGITUDE 130° W (#litres_trial_promo)
HOME IS THE SAILOR (#litres_trial_promo)
A Note on Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Caroline Alexander (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
SHIP’S COMPANY (#ulink_86e2ed7e-7593-5649-9996-a9153988e265)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_2a6920ff-18b0-5ef4-a6b7-a6c8784da91d)
Every attempt has been made to use and quote from firsthand source material wherever available. In such quotations, the original and often erratic spelling, punctuation, grammar and typographical conventions (e.g., liberal use of uppercase initial letters) have been retained. In the case of John Fryer’s ‘Narrative’ alone, punctuation has on occasion been added for more straightforward reading. Similarly, a few abbreviations common in the era (‘wr.’ for ‘weather’, ‘larbd.’ for ‘larboard’) but now unfamiliar have been spelled out so as not to cause unnecessary stumbling over sense.
Personal names are particularly variable, and I have attempted to use the form the individual in question used where this can be ascertained, rather than to rely on Bounty story conventions. In the case of the ten mutineers brought to court-martial, this is not difficult to establish, as each of the ten defendants left a deposition signed with his signature: thus ‘Burkett’, not ‘Burkitt’; ‘Byrn’, not ‘Byrne’; although the alternate forms occur frequently in the language of second parties. In other cases, problematic names were established by correspondence, wills or similar personal documentation. Midshipman John Hallett’s father signed his correspondence ‘Hallett’ – not, as Bligh and others wrote, ‘Hallet’ – and so forth. There is strong evidence to suggest that Matthew Quintal, one of the mutineers, regarded himself as Matthew ‘Quintrell’, but here deference is made to the spelling adopted by his present-day descendants. Geographical places are referred to by their names at the time, with the modern equivalent in parentheses on first mention: Coupang (Kupang), Endeavour Strait (Torres Strait).
A nautical day began and ended at noon, with the noon sighting, not at midnight as in civil time. Thus the mutiny on the Bounty occurred on the morning of 28 April 1789, in both sea and civil time; some four hours later, however, it was April 29 by nautical reckoning. There is occasional awkwardness when the two systems collide, as when a returning ship comes into port, and a running commentary begun at sea resumes on land. No attempt has been made to convert sea to civil time; dates of events recorded at sea are given as stated in the ship’s log.
All mileage figures for distances at sea are given in nautical miles. A nautical mile consisted at the time of 6,116 feet, or one degree of latitude; a statute mile consists of 5,280 feet. All temperatures cited in the ship’s log are in degrees Fahrenheit.
One pound sterling (£1) comprised twenty shillings (20s.); a guinea equalled £1 plus IS. The valuation of currency of this time can be gauged by certain standard-of-living indicators. Fletcher Christian’s mother expected to live comfortably on 40 guineas a year. A post-captain of a first-rate ship received £28 os. od. (28 pounds, o shillings, o pence) a month in pay; a lieutenant, £7 os. od. (7 pounds, o shillings, o pence); an able seaman, £1 4s. od. (1 pound, 4 shillings, o pence) – less deductions!
PRELUDE (#ulink_ca12efda-f6d3-5414-9b27-e95eacd0421b)
Spithead, winter 1787
His small vessel pitching in the squally winter sea, a young British naval lieutenant waited restlessly to embark upon the most important and daunting voyage of his still young but highly promising career. William Bligh, aged thirty-three, had been selected by His Majesty’s government to collect breadfruit plants from the South Pacific island of Tahiti and to transport them to the plantations of the West Indies. Like most of the Pacific, Tahiti – Otaheite – was little known; in all the centuries of maritime travel, fewer than a dozen European ships had anchored in her waters. Bligh himself had been on one of these early voyages, ten years previously, when he had sailed under the command of the great Captain Cook. Now he was to lead his own expedition in a single small vessel called Bounty.
With his ship mustered and provisioned for eighteen months, Bligh had anxiously been awaiting the Admiralty’s final orders, which would allow him to sail, since his arrival at Spithead in early November. A journey of some sixteen thousand miles lay ahead, including a passage around Cape Horn, some of the most tempestuous sailing in the world. Any further delay, Bligh knew, would ensure that he approached the Horn at the height of its worst weather. By the time the orders arrived in late November, the weather at Spithead itself had also deteriorated to the extent that Bligh had been able to advance no further than the Isle of Wight, from where he wrote a frustrated letter to his uncle-in-law and mentor, Duncan Campbell.
‘If there is any punishment that ought to be inflicted on a set of Men for neglect I am sure it ought on the Admiralty,’ he wrote irascibly on 10 December 1787, ‘for my three weeks detention at this place during a fine fair wind which carried all outward bound ships dear of the channel but me, who wanted it most.’
Nearly two weeks later, he had retreated back to Spithead, still riding out bad weather.
‘It is impossible to say what may be the result,’ Bligh wrote to Campbell, his anxiety mounting. ‘I shall endeavor to get round [the Horn]; but with heavy Gales, should it be accompanied with sleet & snow my people will not be able to stand it…Indeed I feel my voyage a very arduous one, and have only to hope in return that whatever the event may be my poor little Family may be provided for. I have this comfort,’ he continued with some complacency, ‘that my health is good and I know of nothing that can scarce happen but I have some resource for – My little Ship is in the best of order and my Men & officers all good & feel happy under my directions.’
At last, on 23 December 1787, the Bounty departed England and after a rough passage arrived at Santa Cruz, in Tenerife. Here, fresh provisions were acquired and repairs made, for the ship had been mauled by severe storms.
‘The first sea that struck us carryed away all my spare yards and some spars,’ Bligh reported, writing again to Campbell; ‘– the second broke the Boats chocks & stove them & I was buryed in the Sea with my poor little crew…’
Despite the exasperating delay of his departure, the tumultuous passage and the untold miles that still lay ahead, Bligh’s spirits were now high – manifestly higher than when he had first set out. On 17 February 1788, off Tenerife, he took advantage of a passing British whaler, the Queen of London, to drop a line to Sir Joseph Banks, his patron and the man most responsible for the breadfruit venture.
‘I am happy and satisfyed in my little Ship and we are now fit to go round half a score of worlds,’ Bligh wrote, ‘both Men & Officers tractable and well disposed & cheerfulness & content in the countenance of every one. I am sure nothing is even more conducive to health. – I have no cause to inflict punishments for I have no offenders and every thing turns out to my most sanguine expectations.’
‘My Officers and Young Gentlemen are all tractable and well disposed,’ he continued in the same vein to Campbell, ‘and we now understand each other so well that we shall remain so the whole voyage…’
Bligh fully expected these to be his last communications on the outward voyage. But monstrous weather off Cape Horn surpassed even his worst expectations. After battling contrary storms and gales for a full month, he conceded defeat and reversed his course for the Cape of Good Hope. He would approach Tahiti by way of the Indian Ocean and Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), a detour that would add well over ten thousand miles to his original voyage.
‘I arrived here yesterday,’ he wrote to Campbell on 25 May from the southernmost tip of Africa, ‘after experiencing the worst of weather off Cape Horn for 30 Days…I thought I had seen the worst of every thing that could be met with at Sea, yet I have never seen such violent winds or such mountainous Seas.’ A Dutch ship, he could not resist adding, had also arrived at the Cape with thirty men having died on board and many more gravely ill; Bligh had brought his entire company through, safe and sound.
The Bounty passed a month at the Cape recovering, and was ready to sail at the end of June. A still arduous journey lay ahead but Bligh’s confidence was now much greater than when he had embarked; indeed, in this respect he had shown himself to be the ideal commander, one whose courage, spirits and enthusiasm were rallied, not daunted, by difficulties and delays. Along with his ship and men, he had weathered the worst travails he could reasonably expect to face.
The long-anticipated silence followed; but when over a year later it was suddenly broken, Bligh’s correspondence came not from the Cape, nor any other port of call on the expected route home, but from Coupang (Kupang) in the Dutch East Indies. The news he reported in letters to Duncan Campbell, to Joseph Banks and above all to his wife, Elizabeth, was so wholly unexpected, so unconnected to the stream of determined and complacent letters of the year before as to be almost incomprehensible.
‘My Dear Dear Betsy,’ Bligh wrote with palpable exhaustion to his wife on 19 August 1789, ‘I am now in a part of the world that I never expected, it is however a place that has afforded me relief and saved my life…
‘Know then my own Dear Betsy, I have lost the Bounty…’
PANDORA (#ulink_824bb355-dc27-5fdd-a31c-c284080b0b23)
Tahiti, 1791
At daylight on a fine, fair, breezy day in March, a young man in his late teens said goodbye to his wife and stepped out of his neat cottage picturesquely set amid citrus trees at the foot of a hill for an excursion to the mountains. Darkly tanned and heavily tattooed with the traditional patterns of manhood across his backside, the youth could have passed for one of the Tahitians who met him outside. Peter Heywood, however, was an Englishman, not an ‘Indian’, and close observation would have revealed that one of the tattoos inked on his leg was not native, but the symbol of the Isle of Man. Young Heywood had been living here, in his idyllic garden home just beyond Matavai Bay, since September 1789, when the Bounty, under the command of Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian, had deposited him and fifteen other shipmates at Tahiti – and then vanished in the night, never to be seen again.
Peter Heywood, former midshipman on the Bounty, had been only a few weeks short of seventeen on the morning the mutiny had broken out and his close friend and distant relative Fletcher Christian had taken the ship. At Christian’s command, Lieutenant Bligh and eighteen loyalists had been compelled to go overboard into one of the Bounty’s small boats, where they had been left, bobbing in the wide Pacific, to certain death.
Fletcher Christian’s control of the mutineers was to last no more than five months. When he eventually directed the Bounty back to Tahiti for what would be her final visit, he had done so because his company had disintegrated into factions. The majority of his people wished to bail out and take their chances at Tahiti even though, as they knew, a British naval ship would eventually come looking for them; some of these men had been loyal to Bligh, but had been held against their will on board the Bounty.
Peter Heywood had been one of the last men to take his farewell of Christian, whom he still regarded with affectionate sympathy. Then, when the Bounty had departed for good, he had turned back from the beach to set about the business of building a new life. Now, on this fresh March day, a year and a half after Christian’s departure, Peter was setting out for the mountains with friends. He had gone no more than a hundred yards from his home when a man came hurrying after him to announce that there was a ship in sight.
Running to the hill behind his house, with its convenient lookout over the sea, he spotted the ship lying to only a few miles distant. Peter would later claim that he had seen this sight ‘with the utmost Joy’, but it is probable that his emotions were somewhat more complicated. Racing down the hill, he went to the nearby home of his close friend Midshipman George Stewart with the news. By the time he and Stewart had splashed their way out to the ship, another man, Joseph Coleman, the Bounty’s armourer, was already on board. On introducing themselves as formerly of the Bounty, Heywood and Stewart had been placed under arrest and led away for confinement. The ship, Pandora, had been specifically commissioned to apprehend the mutineers and bring them to justice in England. These morning hours of 23 March 1791 were the last Peter Heywood would spend on Tahiti.
The news of the mutiny on board His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty had reached England almost exactly a year before. How the news arrived was even more extraordinary than the mutiny – for the messenger had been none other than Lieutenant William Bligh himself. After Fletcher Christian had put him and the loyalists into the Bounty’s launch off the island of Tofua, Bligh, against all imaginable odds, had navigated the little 23-foot-long craft 3618 miles over a period of forty-eight days to Timor, in the Dutch East Indies. Here, his starving and distressed company had been humanely received by the incredulous Dutch authorities. Eventually, passages had been found home for him and his men, and Bligh had arrived in England in a blaze of triumph and white-hot anger on 13 March 1790.
Notice of the mutiny and a description of the mutineers were swiftly dispatched to British and Dutch ports. In Botany Bay the news inspired seventeen convicts to escape in an attempt to join the ‘pirates’ in Tahiti. Although it was at first supposed that two Spanish men-of-war already in the Pacific might have apprehended the Bounty, the Admiralty took no chances and began to mobilize an expedition to hunt down the mutineers. The expense and responsibility of sending yet another ship to the Pacific was not appealing: England seemed poised on the verge of a new war with Spain, and all available men and ships were being pressed into service. However, putting a British naval officer overboard in the middle of the Pacific and running away with His Majesty’s property were outrages that could not go unpunished. Eventually, a 24-gun frigate named Pandora was dispatched under the command of Captain Edward Edwards to hunt the mutineers.
Departing in early November 1790, the Pandora made a swift and uneventful passage to Tahiti, avoiding the horrendous storms that had afflicted the Bounty three years before. Whereas the Bounty had carried a complement of 46 men, the Pandora bore 140. The Pandora’s commander, Captain Edwards, had suffered a near mutiny of his own nine years earlier, when in command of the Narcissus off the northeast coast of America. Eventually, five of the would-be mutineers in this thwarted plot had been hanged, and two more sentenced to floggings of two hundred and five hundred lashes, respectively, while the leader of the mutiny had been hanged in chains. As events would show, Captain Edwards never forgot that he, the near victim of a mutiny, was now in pursuit of actual mutineers.
Also on the Pandora, newly promoted to third lieutenant, was Thomas Hayward, a Bounty midshipman who had accompanied Bligh on his epic open-boat journey. With memories of the thirst, near starvation, exposure and sheer horror of that voyage still fresh in his mind, Hayward was eager to assist in running to ground those responsible for his ordeal. His familiarity with Tahitian waters and people would assist navigation and island diplomacy; his familiarity with his old shipmates would identify the mutineers.
So it was that in March 1791, under cloudless skies and mild breezes, the Pandora sighted the lush, dramatic peaks of Tahiti. Closer in, and the mountain cascades, the graceful palms, and the sparkling volcanic black beaches could be seen beyond thundering breakers and surf. The few ships that had anchored here had all attempted to describe the vision-like beauty of the first sight of this island rising into view from the blue Pacific. Bligh had called Tahiti ‘the Paradise of the World’.
Now, as the Pandora cruised serenely through the clear blue waters, bearing justice and vengeance, she was greeted by men canoeing or swimming towards her.
‘Before we Anchored,’ wrote Edwards in his official report to the Admiralty, ‘Joseph Coleman Armourer of the Bounty and several of the Natives came on board.’ Coleman was one of four men whom Bligh had specifically identified as being innocent of the mutiny and detained against his will. Once on board, Coleman immediately volunteered what had become of the different factions. Of the sixteen men left by Christian on Tahiti, two had already been responsible for each other’s deaths. Charles Churchill, the master-at-arms and the man described as ‘the most murderous’ of the mutineers, had in fact been murdered by his messmate Mathew Thompson, an able seaman from the Isle of Wight. Churchill’s death had in turn been avenged by his Tahitian friends, who had murdered Thompson and then offered him ‘as a Sacrifice to their Gods’, as Edwards dispassionately reported.
Meanwhile, on his way to the anchored ship, Peter Heywood had learned from another Tahitian friend that his former shipmate Thomas Hayward was on board. The result of this friendly enquiry, as Peter reported in a long letter he wrote to his mother, was not what he had ingenuously expected.
‘We ask’d for him, supposing he might prove our Assertions,’ Peter wrote; ‘but he like all other Worldlings when raised a little in Life received us very coolly & pretended Ignorance of our Affairs…So that Appearances being so much against us, we were order’d in Irons & look’d upon – infernal Words! – as piratical Villains.’
As the Pandora’s company moved in, inexorably bent upon their mission, it became clear that no distinction would be made among the captured men. Coleman, noted as innocent by Bligh himself and the first man to surrender voluntarily, was clapped in irons along with the indignant midshipman. Edwards had determined that his job was simply to take hold of everyone he could, indiscriminately, and let the court-martial sort them out once back in England.
From the Tahitians who crowded curiously on board, Edwards quickly ascertained the likely whereabouts of the other eleven fugitives. Some were still around Matavai, others had by coincidence sailed only the day before, in a thirty-foot-long decked schooner they themselves had built, with much effort and ingenuity, for Papara, a region on the south coast where the remainder of the Bounty men had settled. With the zealous assistance of the local authorities, the roundup began and by three o’clock of the second day, Richard Skinner, able seaman of the Bounty, was on board Pandora.
A party under the command of Lieutenants Robert Corner and Hayward was now dispatched to intercept the remaining men. Aiding them in their search was one John Brown, an Englishman deposited on Tahiti the year before by another ship, the Mercury, on account of his troublesome ways, which had included carving up the face of a shipmate with a knife. The Mercury had departed Tahiti only weeks before Christian’s final return with the boat – she had even seen fires burning on the island of Tubuai, where the mutineers had first settled, but decided not to investigate. Brown, it became clear, had not been on terms of friendship with his compatriots.
At Papara, Edwards’s men discovered that the mutineers, hearing of their approach, had abandoned their schooner and fled to the mountain forest.
‘Under cover of night they had taken shelter in a hut in the woods,’ wrote the Pandora’s surgeon, George Hamilton, in his account of this adventure, ‘but were discovered by Brown, who creeping up to the place where they were asleep, distinguished them from the natives by feeling their toes.’ British toes apparently lacked the telltale spread of unshod Tahitians’.
‘Tuesday, March 29th,’ Edwards recorded in the Pandora’s log. ‘At 9 the Launch returned with James Morrison, Charles Norman and Thomas Ellison belonging to His Majesty’s Ship Bounty – prisoners.’ Also taken in tow was the mutineers’ schooner, the Resolution, an object for them of great pride and now requisitioned by the Pandora as a tender, or service vessel.
The three newcomers were at first housed under the half-deck, and kept under around-the-clock sentry. Meanwhile, the ship’s carpenters were busy constructing a proper prison, a kind of low hut to the rear of the quarterdeck, where the prisoners would be placed, as Edwards reported to the Admiralty, ‘for their more effectual security airy & healthy situation.’ The prisoners in their turn assessed their circumstances somewhat differently, referring sardonically to the shallow, cramped structure, with its narrow scuttle, as ‘Pandora’s Box’.
At some point during the pursuit of James Morrison and the men on the Resolution, Michael Byrn, the almost blind fiddler of the Bounty, either was captured or came on board of his own accord. Insignificant at every juncture of the Bounty saga, Byrn, alone of the fugitives, arrived on the Pandora unrecorded. Eight men had now been apprehended and were firmly held in irons; six men remained at large, reported to have taken flight in the hill country around Papara.
Over the next week and a half, while searches were made for the fugitives under the guidance of the ever helpful Brown, Captain Edwards and his officers got a taste of life in Tahiti. Their immediate host was Tynah, the stately king, whose girth was proportionate to his outstanding nearly six-foot-four-inch height. Around forty years of age, he could remember William Bligh from his visit to the island in 1777, with Captain Cook, as well as his return eleven years later with the Bounty. Upon the Pandora’s arrival, Edwards and his men had been greeted by the islanders with their characteristic generosity, with streams of gifts, food, feasts, dances and offers of their women.
‘The English are allowed by the rest of the world…to be a generous, charitable people,’ observed Dr Hamilton. ‘But the Otaheiteans could not help bestowing the most contemptuous word in their language upon us, which is, Peery, Peery, or Stingy.’
Generous, loyal, sensual, uninhibited – the handsome people of Tahiti had won over most who visited them. By now the Bounty men were no longer strangers, but had lived among them, taken wives, had children…
‘Sure Friendship’s there, & Gratitude, & Love,’ young Peter Heywood would later write, exhibiting a poetic bent:
Sure Friendship’s there, & Gratitude, & Love,
Such as ne’er reigns in European Blood
In these degen’rate Days; tho’ from above
WePrecepts have, & know what’s right and good…
Now, sitting shackled in the sweltering heat of Pandora’s Box, Heywood and his shipmates had more than usual cause, and time, to contemplate this disparity of cultures.
On Saturday, the last fugitives began to trickle in. Henry Hilbrant, an able seaman from Hanover, Germany, and Thomas McIntosh, a young carpenter’s mate from the north of England, were delivered on board; as predicted, they had been captured in the hill country above Papara. By the following evening, the roundup was complete. Able seamen Thomas Burkett, John Millward and John Sumner, and William Muspratt, the cook’s assistant, were brought in, also from Papara.
As the ‘pirates’ were led into Pandora’s Box, ship activities bustled around them. Carpenters and sailmakers were busy making repairs for the next stage of their long voyage and routine disciplinary activities continued. On Sunday, the ship’s company was assembled for the weekly reading of the Articles of War: ‘Article XIX: If any Person in or belonging to the Fleet shall make or endeavour to make any mutinous Assembly upon any Pretence whatsoever, every Person offending herein, and being convicted thereof by the Sentence of the Court-martial, shall suffer Death.’ After the reading, three seamen were punished with a dozen lashes each ‘for theft and drunkenness’. It was a cloudy evening and had rained the day before. This was the last the Bounty men would see of Pacific skies for several months.
Fourteen men were now crowded into the eleven-by-eighteen-foot space that was their prison. Onshore, they had kept themselves in different factions and were by no means all on good terms with one another. Strikingly, both Thomas McIntosh and Charles Norman, who had been among those who fled from the Pandora’s men, had been exonerated by Bligh. Perhaps family attachments on the island had made them think twice about leaving; or it may be, less trusting than Coleman who had so quickly surrendered, they did not believe that innocence would count for much in the Admiralty’s eyes.
Within the box, the prisoners wallowed in their own sweat and vermin.
‘What I have suffer’d I have not power to describe,’ wrote Heywood to his mother; he had characterized himself to her as one ‘long inured to the Frowns of Fortune’ and now waxed philosophical about his situation.
‘I am young in years, but old in what the World calls Adversity,’ he wrote; Peter Heywood was not quite nineteen. ‘It has made me acquainted with three Things, which are little known,’ he continued, doggedly. ‘First, the Villainy & Censoriousness of Mankind – second, the Futility of all human Hopes, – & third, the Enjoyment of being content in whatever station it pleases Providence to place me in.’
Among the possessions confiscated from the mutineers were journals kept by Stewart and Heywood in their sea chests, and from these Edwards was able to piece together the history of the Bounty following the mutiny, up to her final return to Tahiti. Two days after Bligh and his loyalists had been left in the Pacific, Fletcher Christian and his men had cut up the ship’s topsails to make jackets for the entire company – they were well aware of the impression made by a uniformed crew.
Soon all the breadfruit – 1015 little pots and tubs of carefully nurtured seedlings, all, as Bligh had wistfully reported, ‘in the most flourishing state’ – were thrown overboard. More sails were cut up for uniform jackets, and the possessions of those who had been forced into the boat with Bligh were divided by lot among the ship’s company. But in a telling report made by James Morrison, the Bounty boatswain’s mate and the mastermind behind the ambitious Resolution, ‘it always happend that Mr. Christians party were always better served than these who were thought to be disaffected.’
Tensions among the men already threatened to undermine Christian’s tenuous control. In this state of affairs, the Bounty made for Tubuai, an island lying some 350 miles south of Tahiti, and anchored there on May 24, nearly a month after the mutiny.
‘Notwithstanding they met with some opposition from the Natives they intended to settle on this Island,’ Edwards wrote in his official report, gleaning the diaries of Heywood and Stewart. ‘But after some time they perceived they were in want of several things Necessary for a settlement & which was the cause of disagreements & quarrels amongst themselves.’ One of the things they most quarrelled about was women.
Consequently, only a week after landing at Tubuai, the Bounty sailed back to Tahiti, where they had lived and loved for five memorable months while gathering Bligh’s breadfruit. Here, as the men knew, their loyal friends would give them all they required. The story they prepared was that they had fallen in with the great Captain Cook (in reality long dead), who was planning to found a settlement on the island of Whytootackee (Aitutaki), and that Bligh had remained with his old commander and delegated Christian to sail with the Bounty for supplies. The Tahitians, ever generous and overjoyed at the news that Cook, whom they regarded with worshipful esteem, would be so close to them, gave freely of hogs, goats, chickens, a variety of plants, cats and dogs. More important, nine women, eight men, seven boys and one young girl left with the Bounty when she returned to Tubuai.
For three months the mutineers struggled to make a settlement on the tiny island. Construction was begun on a defensive fort that measured some fifty yards square, surrounded by a kind of dry moat or ditch. A drawbridge was planned for the entrance facing the beach, while the walls were surmounted by the Bounty’s four-pounder cannons and swivel guns. Patriotically, the mutineers had christened their fortress Fort George, after their king.
Again, there were early signs that this would not be a successful experiment.
‘On 5th July Some of the people began to be mutinous,’ according to an extract made by Edwards from Peter Heywood’s journal. ‘& on 6th 2 of the Men were put in Irons by a Majority of Votes – & drunkenness, fighting & threatening each other’s life was so common that those abaft were obliged to arm themselves with Pistols.’ The following day, an attempt was made to heal the growing breach and ‘Articles were drawn up by Christian and Churchill specifying a mutual forgiveness of all past grievances which every Man was obliged to swear to & sign,’ according to an extract from Stewart’s journal. ‘Mathew Thompson excepted who refused to comply.’ Despite this gesture, an inner circle evolved around Christian. When John Sumner and Matthew Quintal spent the night onshore without leave, declaring that they were now their own masters and would do as they pleased, Christian clapped the pistol he now always carried to the head of one, and had both placed in leg irons.
Violence also escalated without as well as within this fractious company, erupting as the Bounty men fought with the Tubuaians over property and women. In one particularly bloody encounter, Thomas Burkett was stabbed in the side by a spear and Christian wounded himself on his own bayonet. When the dust settled, sixty-six Tubuaians were dead, including six women, and the Bounty men were masters of the field. One of the gentle Tahitian youths who had journeyed to Tubuai with his English friends, according to James Morrison, ‘desired leave to cut out the jaw bones of the kill’d to hang round the quarters of the Ship as Trophies,’ and was much displeased when this request was denied.
In September, in recognition that the different factions could not coexist, a collective decision was made to return once more to Tahiti. Here, the ship’s company would divide. Those who chose to remain on the island could do so; the rest would depart with Christian, taking to sea once again in the Bounty. Each man remaining onshore was given a musket, a pistol, a cutlass, a bayonet, a box of cartridges and seventeen pounds of powder from the ship’s arms and lead for ball – everyone save Michael Byrn, that is, who, as Morrison stated, ‘being blind and of a very troublesome disposition it was thought that arms put into his hands would be only helping him to do some mischief.’
On anchoring for the third and final time in Matavai Bay, Christian and many of the eight men who had cast their lots with him did not even bother to go ashore. Arriving on 21 September 1789, they departed secretly the same night, quietly cutting the Bounty’s anchor cable. Joseph Coleman, the most relentless loyalist, had been once again held against his will for his skills as an armourer; but as the ship slipped away, he dived overboard and swam to land. At dawn, the sixteen men deposited onshore saw their ship hovering off Point Venus; by midmorning she was gone.
When here with Bligh, each man had acquired a taio, or special protector and friend, and to these each now turned. Soon, the fugitives had settled down, either with their taios’ families or, like Heywood and Stewart, in cottages of their own. They took wives and some had children, and so a year and a half had passed, until the day the Pandora loomed out of the early morning to drag them back to England.
Now captured and pinned inside Pandora’s Box, the Bounty prisoners listened in anguish as their wives and friends wailed and grieved under the Pandora’s stern. Standing in canoes around the ship, the women enacted their terrible rites of mourning, hammering at their heads with sharp shells until the blood ran. As the day of departure approached, more canoes came from across the island, filling the harbour around the ship. Men and women stripped their clothes and cut their heads in grief, and as the blood fell, cut again and cried aloud. Tynah came on board and, with tears streaming down his cheeks, begged to be remembered to his friend, the King of England.
‘This I believe was the first time that an Englishman got up his anchor, at the remotest part of the globe, with a heavy heart, to go home to his own country,’ wrote Dr Hamilton – an astonishing admission from a naval official who had come in search of deserting mutineers.
On 8 May 1791, under pleasant breezes, the Pandora, recaulked and overhauled, left Tahiti with the mutineers’ schooner, Resolution, in tow. Edwards’s commission was far from fulfilled. Still missing was His Majesty’s stolen ship as well as the ringleader of the mutiny and his most hard-core followers.
‘Christian had been frequently heard to declare that he would search for an unknown or an uninhabited Island in which there was no harbour for Shipping, would run the Ship ashore, and get from her such things as would be useful to him and settle there,’ Edwards recorded in his official report to the Admiralty, continuing with admirable understatement, ‘but this information was too vague to be follow’d in an immense Ocean strew’d with an almost innumerable number of known and unknown Islands.’ Specifically, the Pacific contains more than twenty thousand islands scattered over some 64 million square miles. Christian and the Bounty had departed Tahiti in September 1789 – a twenty-month head start, long enough to have taken the Bounty not only as far as North or South America, but, in theory, around the globe.
Edwards’s instructions from the Admiralty offered some guidance: If no knowledge of the mutineers had been gained at Tahiti, he was to venture west to Whytootackee (Aitutaki), ‘calling, in your way, at Huaheine and Uliatea.’ If nothing was found here, he was to make a circuit of the neighbouring islands. If nothing here, he was to continue west to the Friendly Islands (Tonga), ‘and, having succeeded, or failed,’ to return to England, through the Endeavour Strait (Torres Strait) separating New Guinea from New Holland (Australia). Be mindful of prevailing winds, the Admiralty admonished, ‘there being no dependence (of which we have any certain knowledge) of passing the Strait after the month of September…’
For roughly the next three months Edwards doggedly followed the Admiralty’s prescribed itinerary in a desultory chase from island to island. At each landfall, a uniformed officer was disembarked and in the cloying heat tramped along the beach, offering presents and seeking information. Anchored offshore, the Pandora received the now customary canoe-loads of eager visitors. Spears, clubs and other curios were collected, differences among the islanders, who appeared ‘ruder’ and less civilized as the Pandora progressed, were duly noted, but no hint of the Bounty’s whereabouts emerged.
A week out from Tahiti, Hilbrant, one of the mutineers, volunteered that Christian had spoken to him on the day before his departure of his intention to make for an uninhabited island that he knew from earlier accounts to be ‘situated to the Westward of the Islands of Danger.’ This description seemed to refer to Duke of York Island (Atafu) but was to prove to be another dead end. En route, however, Edwards stopped off at Palmerston Island (Avarau) and sent his boats ashore to search that isle’s bays and inlets. Two of these returned in the late afternoon full of coconuts, and nothing more. But that night the tender arrived with hopeful news: it had discovered some spars and a yard marked ‘Bounty’s Driver Yard’ embossed with the Admiralty’s broad arrow mark.
Over the next two days, all the ship’s craft – a cutter, two yawls and the mutineers’ schooner – were dispatched to examine the island as well as islets and even reefs in the vicinity. The belief that the mutineers might be at large nearby caused everyone to move with great circumspection. One party camping overnight on the island were woken abruptly when a coconut they had placed on their campfire exploded. ‘Expecting muskets to be fired at them from every bush,’ Dr Hamilton explained, ‘they all jumped up, seized their arms, and were some time before they could undeceive themselves, that they were really not attacked.’
As the various small craft tacked to and fro around the island, Edwards remained with Pandora, cruising offshore and making the occasional coconut run. On the afternoon of 24 May, one of the midshipmen, John Sival, returned in the cutter with several striking painted canoes; but after these were examined and admired, he was sent back to complete his orders. Shortly after he left, thick weather dosed in, obscuring the little craft as she bobbed dutifully back to shore, and was followed by an ugly squall that did not lift for four days. When the weather cleared on the twenty-eighth, the cutter had disappeared. Neither she nor her company of five men was ever seen again.
‘It may be difficult to surmise what has been the fate of these unfortunate men,’ Dr. Hamilton wrote, adding hopefully that they ‘had a piece of salt-beef thrown into the boat to them on leaving the ship; and it rained a good deal that night and the following day, which might satiate their thirst.’
By now, too, it was realized that the tantalizing clues of the Bounty’s presence were only flotsam.
‘The yard and these things lay upon the beach at high water Mark & were all eaten by the Sea Worm which is a strong presumption they were drifted there by the Waves,’ Edwards reported. It was concluded that they had drifted from Tubuai, where the mutineers had reported that the Bounty had lost most of her spars. These few odds and ends of worm-eaten wood were all that were ever found by Pandora of His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty.
The fruitless search apart, morale on board had been further lowered by the discovery, as Dr Hamilton put it, ‘that the ladies of Otaheite had left us many warm tokens of their affection.’ The men confined within Pandora’s Box were also far from well. Their irons chafed them badly, so much so that while they were still at Matavai Bay, Joseph Coleman’s legs had swollen alarmingly and the arms of McIntosh and Ellison had become badly ‘galled’. To the complaint that the irons were causing their wrists to swell, Lieutenant John Larkan had replied that ‘they were not intended to fit like Gloves!’ Edwards had an obsessive fear that the mutineers might ‘taint’ his crew and, under threat of severe punishment, had forbidden any communication between the parties whatsoever; but from rough memos he made, it seems he was unsuccessful. ‘Great difficulty created in keeping the Mutineers from conversing with the crew,’ Edwards had jotted down, elsewhere noting that one of his lieutenants suspected that the prisoners had ‘carried on a correspondence with some of our people by Letter.’
From Duke of York Island down to the rest of the Union Islands (Tokelau), thence to the Samoas, the Pandora continued her futile search. To aid them in making rough landfalls, Lieutenants Corner and Hayward donned cork jackets and plunged boldly into the surf ahead of the landing boats. Parakeets were purchased on one island, splendid birds resembling peacocks on another, and on others still the use of the islands’ women. Striking sights were enjoyed – the large skeleton of a whale, for example, and a deserted shrine with an altar piled with white shells. They had even discovered whole islands, whose newly bestowed names would form a satisfying addition to the report Edwards would eventually turn over to the Admiralty. In short, the Pandora had discovered a great deal – but nothing at all that pertained to the missing mutineers and the Bounty.
Thousands of miles from England, adrift in one of the most unknown regions of the earth, Hamilton, who seems to have enjoyed this meandering sojourn, mused tellingly on the strange peoples he had seen and their distance from civilized life: ‘And although that unfortunate man Christian has, in a rash unguarded moment, been tempted to swerve from his duty to his king and country, as he is in other respects of an amiable character, and respectable abilities, should he elude the hand of justice, it may be hoped he will employ his talents in humanizing the rude savages,’ he wrote, in an astonishing wave of sympathy for that elusive mutineer who had, after all, consigned his captain and eighteen shipmates to what he had thought was certain death.
‘So that, at some future period, a British Ilion may blaze forth in the south,’ Hamilton continued, working to a crescendo of sentiment, ‘with all the characteristic virtues of the English nation, and complete the great prophecy, by propagating the Christian knowledge amongst the infidels.’ Even here, at the early stage of the Bounty saga, the figure of Christian himself represented a powerful, charismatic force; already there is the striking simplistic tendency to blur the mutineer’s name – Christian – with a Christian cause.
In the third week of June, while in the Samoas, Edwards was forced to report yet another misfortune: ‘Between 5 & 6 o’clock of the Evening of the 22nd of June lost sight of our Tender in a thick Shower of Rain,’ he noted tersely. Edwards had now lost two vessels, this one with nine men. Food and water that were meant to have been loaded onto the tender were still piled on the Pandora’s deck. Anamooka (Nomuka), in the Friendly Islands, was the last designated point of rendezvous in the event of a separation, and here the Pandora now hastened.
The people of Anamooka are the most daring set of robbers in the South Seas,’ Hamilton noted matter-of-factly. Onshore, parties who disembarked to wood and water the ship were harassed as they had not been elsewhere. Edwards’s servant was stripped naked by an acquisitive crowd and forced to cover himself with his one remaining shoe. ‘We soon discovered the great Irishman,’ Hamilton reported, ‘with his shoe full in one hand, and a bayonet in the other, naked and foaming mad.’ While overseeing parties foraging for wood and water, Lieutenant Corner was momentarily stunned on the back of his neck by a club-wielding islander, whom the officer, recovering, shot dead in the back.
There was no sign of the tender.
Leaving a letter for the missing boat in the event that it turned up, Edwards pressed on to Tofua, the one island on which Bligh, Thomas Hayward and the loyalists in the open launch had briefly landed. One of Bligh’s party had been stoned to death here, and some of the men responsible for this were disconcerted to recognize Hayward.
From Tofua, the Pandora continued her cruising before returning to Anamooka, where there was still no word of the missing tender.
It was now early August. Edwards’s laconic report reveals nothing of his state of mind, but with two boats and fourteen men lost, uncowed mutineers on board and a recent physical attack on the most able of his crew, it is safe to hazard that he was anxious to return home. His own cabin had been broken into and books and other possessions taken as improbable prizes (James Morrison, with discernible satisfaction, had earlier reported that ‘a new Uniform Jacket belonging to Mr. Hayward’ had been taken and, as a parting insult, donned by the thief in his canoe while in sight of the ship). Now, ‘thinking it time to return to England,’ Edwards struck north to Wallis Island, then west for the long run to the Endeavour Strait, the route laid down by the Admiralty out of the Pacific – homeward bound.
The Pandora reached the Great Barrier Reef towards the end of August, and from this point on Edwards’s report is closely concerned with putting on record his persistent and conscientious depth soundings and vigilant lookout for reefs, bars and shoals. The Pandora was now outside the straits, the uncharted, shoal-strewn divide between Papua New Guinea and the northeastern tip of Australia. From the masthead of the Pandora, no route through the Barrier Reef could be seen, and Edwards turned aside to patrol its southern fringe, seeking an entrance.
After two days had been spent in this survey, a promising channel was at last spotted, and Lieutenant Corner was dispatched in the yawl to investigate. It was approaching dusk when he signalled that his reconnaissance was successful and started to return to the ship. Despite the reports of a number of eyewitnesses, it is difficult to determine exactly how subsequent events unfolded; a remark made by Dr Hamilton suggests that Edwards may have been incautiously sailing in the dark. Previous depth soundings had failed to find bottom at 110 fathoms but now, as the ship prepared to lay to, the soundings abruptly showed 50 fathoms; and then, even before sails could be trimmed, 3 fathoms on the starboard side.
‘On the evening of the 29th August the Pandora went on a Reef,’ Morrison wrote bluntly, adding meaningfully, ‘I might say how, but it would be to no purpose’; Morrison had prefaced his report with a classical flourish, ‘Vidi et Scio’ – I saw and I know. In short, despite soundings, despite advance reconnaissance, despite both his fear and his precautions, Edwards had run his ship aground.
‘The ship struck so violently on the Reef that the carpenters reported that she made 18 Inches of water in 5 Minutes,’ the captain was compelled to write in his Admiralty report. ‘In 5 minutes after there was 4 feet of water in the hold.’ Still chained fast in the darkness of Pandora’s Box, the fourteen prisoners could only listen as sounds of imminent disaster broke around them – cries, running feet, the heavy, confused splash of a sail warped under the broken hull in an attempt to hold the leak, the ineffectual working of the pumps and more cries that spread the news that there was now nine feet of water in the hold. Coleman, McIntosh and Norman – three of the men Bligh had singled out as being innocent – were summarily released from the prison to help work the pumps, while at the same time the ship’s boats were readied.
In the darkness of their box, the remaining prisoners followed the sounds with growing horror; seasoned sailors, they knew the implication of each command and each failed outcome. The release of the exonerated men added to their sense that ultimate disaster was imminent, and in the strength of their terror they managed to break free of their irons. Crying through the scuttle to be released, the prisoners only drew attention to their broken bonds; and when Edwards was informed, he ordered the irons to be replaced. As the armourer left, the mutineers watched in incredulity as the scuttle was bolted shut behind him. Sentinels were placed over the box, with the instructions to shoot if there were any stirring within.
‘In this miserable situation, with an expected Death before our Eyes, without the least Hope of relief & in the most trying state of suspense, we spent the Night,’ Peter Heywood wrote to his mother. The water had now risen to the coamings, or hatch borders, while feet tramped overhead across the prison roof.
‘I’ll be damned if they shall go without us,’ someone on deck was heard to say, speaking, as it seemed to the prisoners, of the officers who were heading to the boats. The ship’s booms were being cut loose to make a raft, and a topmast thundered onto the deck, killing a man. High broken surf around the ship hampered all movement, and compelled the lifeboats in the black water to stay well clear.
The confusion continued until dawn, when the prisoners were able to observe through the scuttle armed officers making their way across the top of their prison to the stern ladders, where the boats now awaited. Perhaps drawn at last by the prisoners’ cries, the armourer’s mate, Joseph Hodges, suddenly appeared at the prison entrance to remove their fetters. Once down in the box, Hodges freed Muspratt and Skinner, who immediately scrambled out through the scuttle, along with Byrn who had not been in irons; in his haste to break out, Skinner left with his handcuffs still on.
From above, some unseen hand suddenly closed and barred the scuttle again. Trapped with the prisoners, Hodges continued to work, striking off the irons in rapid succession, while the confined men renewed their pleas for mercy.
‘I beg’d of the Master at Arms to leave the Scuttle open,’ Morrison wrote; ‘he answered “Never fear my boys we’ll all go to Hell together.”’
As he spoke, the Pandora made a fatal sally, rolling to port and spilling the master-at-arms and the sentinels into the water. The boats had already left, and Morrison claims he could see Edwards swimming towards his pinnace. Nowhere in his long report of the wreck and abandonment of his ship does Edwards make any mention of the prisoners.
With the ship under water as far as the mainmast, Pandora’s Box began to fill. Hen coops, spars, booms – anything that would float had been cut loose and flung overboard as a possible lifesaver. Passing over the top of the prison roof on his way into the water, William Moulter, the boatswain’s mate, heard the trapped men’s cries, and his last action before he went overboard was to draw the bolt and hurl the scuttle away.
Scrambling inside the box, the men fought their way towards the light and air. Peter Heywood was one of the last to get out, and when he emerged in the sea he could see nothing above the water but the Pandora’s crosstrees. All around him, men floundered and called for help, lurching to take hold of anything afloat. A gangway floated up with Muspratt riding on one end. Coleman, Burkett and Lieutenant Corner were perched on top of the old prison. Heywood, stripped stark naked, had grasped a floating plank.
‘The cries of the men drowning in the water was at first awful in the extreme,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘but as they sunk, and became faint, it died away by degrees.’
Slowly the lifeboats circled the wreckage, gathering up distressed men as they found them. After an hour and a half in the water, Morrison was picked up by the master’s mate, and found Peter Heywood already on board. One by one, the boats made their way to a sandy key, some three miles distant, and here when a muster was held it was discovered that eighty-nine of the ship’s company and ten prisoners were accounted for; thirty-one of the company and four prisoners had drowned – but, as Morrison pointedly noted, ‘all the Officers were Saved.’ Of the prisoners, Richard Skinner had gone down while still in handcuffs, along with John Sumner and Peter’s closest friend, George Stewart, both of whom had been struck and killed by a falling gangway; Henry Hilbrant, also still in irons, had never made it out of Pandora’s Box.
On the day following the disaster, a boat was sent back to what remained of the Pandora, to see what could be salvaged. Nothing much was gained, and the boat returned with the head of the topgallant mast, some rigging, the chain of the lightning conductor – and the ship’s cat, who had made his way to the crosstrees.
As the blazing Pacific sun rose over the sandy key, Edwards took a survey of his new situation. An assessment was made of the supplies that had been saved, which were now spread out along the sand to dry. Somehow, with the whole of the night to prepare for certain disaster, no orders seem to have been given for the salvaging of provisions.
‘Providentially a small barrel of water, a cag [keg] of wine, some biscuit, and a few muskets and cartouch boxes, had been thrown into the boat,’ Hamilton wrote, suggesting that what little supplies there were had been saved by chance. A daily ration was determined of three ounces of bread, two small glasses of water and one of wine, with the occasional addition of an ounce of portable soup, or cakes of dried soup, and half an ounce of essence of malt. Edwards’s plan was to sail for the Dutch East Indies settlement of Coupang, in Timor, the same port that had received Bligh and his company at the end of their ordeal in the Bounty’s launch. The irony that the Pandora’s boats were to replicate part of Bligh’s famous voyage is unlikely to have escaped anyone – least of all poor Thomas Hayward, who had been with Bligh and was thus about to embark on his second Pacific open-boat journey in a little more than two years. A voyage of some eleven hundred miles lay ahead.
On 31 August the third day after the Pandora had struck the reef, the little squadron set sail, with Captain Edwards leading the way in his pinnace, followed by the red and blue yawls and the launch. The prisoners had been carefully apportioned among the vessels. Peter Heywood, in the launch under the sympathetic Lieutenant Corner, had drawn what was probably the happiest boat, while James Morrison, as he reported, ‘had the good or evil fortune, call it which you please to go in the Pinnace with Capt. Edwards.’
Proceeding northwest, the little squadron now at last passed through the reef by way of a channel that, as Edwards reported to the Admiralty, was ‘better than any hitherto known’ – a discovery that had come rather late in the day. In the morning of the following day, they came to the desolate, treeless coast of New Holland. Here, the parched men had the rare good fortune to find a spring rushing onto the beach. The prisoners in particular were tortured by the sun; their skin, pale and tender after five months of confinement, had quickly burned and blistered. Peter wrote, ‘We appeared as if dipped in large tubs of boiling water.’
The company passed the night off a small island, where they were awakened by the howling of dingoes, which they mistook for wolves. On the afternoon of 2 September, they passed a series of distinctive islands that were recognized from Bligh’s account and a chart made during his boat voyage. By the evening, the boats were in sight of Cape York, the northernmost tip of New Holland, and the end of the strait. Ahead was the Indian Ocean and a one-thousand-mile run to Timor.
‘It is unnecessary to relate our particular sufferings in the Boats during our run to Timor,’ wrote Edwards, with his usual literary sangfroid, ‘and is sufficient to observe that we suffered more from heat & thirst than from hunger.’ The weather, at least, was good and the overloaded boats made satisfying progress. At dawn on the sixteenth the Dutch fort at Coupang, Timor, was at last hailed. Edwards had lost no men on this leg of the journey, although they had been reduced to drinking the blood of captured birds and their own urine.
Backed by gentle, verdant, wooded hills, the small settlement of Coupang was built at the head of a deep natural harbour. It consisted of little more than a fort and a handful of houses, a church, a hospital and company stores serving a population of Dutch officials, Chinese merchants and Malay slaves. A European ship at anchor amid other small craft offered a comfortingly familiar sight. The Pandora’s four boats hailed the fort, and the men were welcomed ashore.
While the Pandora’s officers and men were dispersed in different houses around the settlement, the prisoners were taken to the fort itself and put in the stocks. Again, Edwards’s report makes no mention of the prisoners at all during this sojourn, but Morrison’s account is graphic: ‘Immediately on our landing Provisions were procured which now began to move our bodys and we were forced to ease Nature where we lay.’ Most of the men had not moved their bowels for the duration of the journey, and some were now administered enemas through a syringe.
‘The Surgeon of the Place who visited us could not enter the place till it had been washed by Slaves,’ Morrison continued. ‘We had laid 6 Days in this situation…’ A compassionate Dutch officer of the fort, clearly appalled at the prisoners’ treatment, arranged to have the men released from the stocks and placed in leg irons, manacled two by two, but otherwise at liberty to walk about. The prisoners were still almost naked, but with ‘some of the leaves of the Brab Tree…set to work to make hats’, a skill undoubtedly learned in those faraway days in Tahiti. These hats the enterprising prisoners then sold and with the little money earned bought tobacco.
As it turned out, the Pandora’s company were not the only distressed British sailors at Coupang. Some months earlier, seven men, a woman and two children had arrived at the fort in a small six-oared cutter with the story that they were part of the crew and passengers of a wrecked brig called Neptune. They too had been treated with great compassion by the Dutch authorities. And when Edwards and his men came ashore, the kind Dutchmen had hastened to their guests to bring them the good news that their captain had arrived.
‘What Captain! dam’me, we have no Captain,’ Hamilton reports one of them had unwisely exclaimed. The small party, it turned out, had not been shipwrecked, but were convicts who had made a daring escape from Botany Bay (‘they were discovered to be Cheats,’ as Morrison noted self-righteously).
On 6 October having recovered strength, Edwards led his entire company to sea again, this time as passengers on a Dutch East Indiaman, the Rembang. Their destination was the Dutch settlement of Batavia, on Java, from where Edwards expected to get passages to Cape Town. Here, there would be other company ships bound for Europe.
This short passage from Timor to Batavia proved to be as eventful as any in the men’s now protracted travels. On the sixth day out, while they were off the coast of Flores, a tremendous storm erupted. According to Dr Hamilton, within a few minutes ‘every sail of the ship was shivered to pieces…This storm was attended with the most dreadful thunder and lightning we had ever experienced.’
At the height of this crisis, when the ship was in imminent danger of being driven onto the lee shore, the Dutch seamen, Hamilton reported, ‘went below; and the ship was preserved from destruction by the manly exertion of our English tars, whose souls seemed to catch redoubled ardour from the tempest’s rage.’ This appears to have been no exaggeration. Morrison himself, hardly one to volunteer praise for his captors, stated matter-of-factly that the ship was ‘badly found and Worse Managed and if Captain Edwards had not taken the Command and set his Men to work she would never have reached Batavia.’
On 30 October, the Rembang limped into Semarang, on the north coast of Java. The prisoners had been let out of irons during the battle with the storm to take turns at the pumps but had discovered they no longer had strength for this routine duty. But the spirits of the whole company were raised by an entirely unexpected and welcome surprise: the Pandora’s little schooner, Resolution, awaited them, safely anchored in the harbour. After having lost sight of Pandora in the gale four months earlier, the Resolution’s men set out from the Samoas to the Friendly Islands, skirted the southernmost of the Fiji group, made northwest for the Endeavour Strait, struck out for the Indonesian islands and came, through the Strait of Bali to Surabaya, on the north coast of Java. Their navigational equipment had consisted of two quadrants, a volume of Robertson’s Elements of Navigation and an edition of Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar, but no charts.
At Surabaya, the vessel’s young commander, Master’s Mate William Oliver, had presented himself to the Dutch authorities. All Dutch settlements, however, had been alerted to the fate of the Bounty; and as David Renouard, one of the Pandora’s midshipmen, said, it was ‘a singular coincidence that the mutineers who quitted Otaheite in the Bounty corresponded with ourselves both in rank and numbers.’ The Resolution, built in fact by mutineers, was moreover hand-hewn from Otaheitan wood. Distrustful of Oliver’s story, the Dutch authorities politely detained the small company for a month. At length, Oliver persuaded them to let him make for Batavia, by way of Semarang, where by another uncanny coincidence the Resolution had arrived on 29 October, the day before the Rembang. Between Bounty, Pandora, Resolution and the boat from Botany Bay, four epic voyages had been accomplished within a two-and-a-half-year period; the Dutch authorities, ever picking up the wreckage, must have wondered if the British had a penchant for this kind of business.
The Rembang and the Resolution proceeded together to Batavia, the principal port of the Dutch East Indies. Founded in 1618, it was now a spacious town set at the head of a deep bay half a mile from the sea, its streets cut, Dutch style, by tree-lined connecting canals. Picturesque from afar, it was also reckoned to be one of the most fever-ridden and pestilential places on earth. Out of the surrounding swamp and stagnant canals, malarial mosquitoes spread like miasma. A ‘painted sepulchre, this golgotha of Europe,’ Dr Hamilton described the city. Dead bodies floating into the sea from the canals had struck their ship on arrival, which, as Hamilton noted, ‘had a very disagreeable effect on the minds of our brave fellows.’ Two years earlier, four of Bligh’s men had died of fever here, after successfully weathering their great boat journey, and Bligh himself had fallen gravely ill.
On arrival, Edwards arranged for his men to be housed on board a Dutch East India Company ship then in the road, or anchorage, outside the harbour. Thirty of his sick were borne to a hospital – a number of these were men from the Resolution who had suffered badly in the course of their impromptu journey.
In the nearly seven weeks they were detained at Batavia, the majority of the prisoners were allowed on deck only twice, although once again Coleman, Norman and McIntosh enjoyed more freedom. But it may be that the confinement afforded the men some protection from the mosquitoes. ‘Here we enjoyed our Health,’ Morrison stated, noting with satisfaction that ‘the Pandora’s people fell sick and died apace.’
Edwards had negotiated an arrangement with the Dutch authorities to divide the Pandora’s complement among four ships bound for Holland by way of the Cape, ‘at no expense to Government further than for the Officers and Prisoners,’ as he somewhat nervously informed the Admiralty. A disaster such as the loss of a ship did not allow a captain of His Majesty’s Navy carte blanche in extricating himself from the disaster. All accounts for the £724 8s. od. in expenses incurred between Coupang and Batavia would have to be meticulously itemized and justified on return.
Edwards also used the sojourn at Batavia to write up his report to the Admiralty relating all that had transpired subsequent to 6 January 1791, the date of his last dispatch from Rio. Edwards’s report, in his own hand, filled thirty-two large, closely written pages and ranged over all his adventures – the capture of the mutineers, the fruitless search for Christian and the Bounty, the wreck of the Pandora, and the voyage to Timor. The events are narrated in strict chronological order, like a story, with discursive material about the customs and country of the islands visited and anecdotal asides (‘I took this opportunity to show the Chief what Execution the Canon and Carronades would do by firing a six pound shot on shore…’), so that their lordships of the Admiralty would have had no clue until page twenty-six that the Pandora had in fact been lost. Boldly noting that he was enclosing ‘Latitudes & Longitudes of several Islands, & ca discovered during our Voyage,’ with his report, Edwards then offered a tentative conclusion:
‘Although I have not had the good fortune fully to accomplish the Object of my Voyage,’ he ventured, ‘…I hope it will be thought…that of my Orders which I have been able to fulfil, with the discoveries that have been made will be some compensation for the disappointment & misfortunes that have attended us’; and, with a last rally of optimism:
Should their Lordships upon the whole think that the Voyage will be profitable to our Country it will be a great consolation to,
Sir,
Your most obedient humble servant,
Edw. Edwards.
Also before leaving Batavia, Edwards presented the mutineers’ schooner, Resolution, to the governor of Timor as a gift of gratitude for his kindness. Morrison watched this transaction closely. He had been the architect of the plan to build the schooner and although she was the handiwork of many, he had placed the greatest stake in her. Her timbers had been hewn from Tahitian hibiscus, and both her planking and the bark gum used as pitch had come from that versatile and fateful tree, the breadfruit.
On Christmas Day 1791, the Dutch Indiaman Vreedenburg, Captain Christiaan, weighed anchor and sailed out of the straits at the harbour’s entrance carrying a cargo of coffee beans, rice and arrack, a liquor distilled from coconut milk. On board as passengers were Captain Edwards, twenty-seven officers and men of the Pandora, twenty-six Chinese and the ten mutineers. The remainder of the Pandora’s company, including the Botany Bay prisoners, were divided among two other ships. Lieutenant Larkan and a party of twenty had departed a month earlier on the Zwan. Edwards had also taken on board a distressed English seaman from the Supply. In turn, he had been forced to leave in the deadly hospital one of his own men, who was too ill to be moved. All in all, Edwards lost fifteen men to the Batavian fever, one being young William Oliver, the twenty-year-old master’s mate who had commanded the Resolution with such leadership and skill on her unexpected voyage.
A few days from the Cape of Good Hope, nearly three months out on what had been a slow passage, the mutineers were released from their irons and allowed to walk the deck. Here, testing the wind, Morrison noted that the men ‘now found the weather Sharp and Cutting’. The balmy Pacific lay far behind.
On 18 March, the Vreedenburg anchored in Table Bay, at the Cape of Good Hope. Close by the harbour was the fortress that safeguarded the Dutch East India Company stores, and indeed the whole town had been established solely to serve the Company. Here ships could break the long journey between Europe and the East Indies, restock and refit and, if coming from Batavia, offload their sick at the Cape Hospital.
The Vreedenburg joined other sail at anchor, including to the universal joy of the Pandora’s company, a British man-of-war, the Gorgon, Captain John Parker. This 44-gun frigate had arrived from Port Jackson in New South Wales, where she had dropped off much anticipated and desperately needed supplies, including livestock and thirty new convicts. Seeing an opportunity to return directly to England, instead of by way of Holland where the Dutch Indiamen were bound, Edwards arranged passages for part of his mixed company on the Gorgon.
Thus, two days after arrival, Edwards added himself, the Botany Bay convicts and the Bounty mutineers to the Gorgon’s company, joining other passengers that included a detachment of marine privates and their families leaving Port Jackson, and fifteen distressed British seamen picked up at the Cape. Among the mixed cargo, boxes of dispatches for the colonial office were probably the most important. More burdensome were the sixty tubs and boxes of plants destined for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, under the direction of the great naturalist and president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks. Specimens of New South Wales timber cramming the main and quarter decks were for the Navy Board, while a dingo was a gift for the Prince of Wales. Similarly, two kangaroos and opossums were also gifts for Joseph Banks, whose tentacles of influence stretched to the remotest corner of all parts of the globe; it was Banks who had been the driving force behind the Bounty’s breadfruit venture.
The arrival of the mutineers was noted offhandedly in the Gorgon’s log, along with the more important additions: ‘Recd Wine fresh Meat; Bread for Ships Company; also Water. Caulkers Caulking within and without board. Carpenters as necessary. Armourer at his forge; Sent to Sick quarters 1 Supernumerary Marine. Came on board from the Dutch Ship Vreedenburgh 10 Pirates belonging to His Majesty’s Ship Bounty…’
At four in the afternoon of 5 April 1792, the Gorgon at last set sail for England, exchanging salutes with the fort as she passed. Blessed with fine weather and ‘a charming Breeze’, as one of the marines, Lieutenant Ralph Clark, noted in his private journal, the Gorgon passed the island of St Helena in under two weeks. Five days later they anchored at Ascension Island, primarily to refresh their food stock with local turtles. Although each passing mile brought the prisoners closer to their day of reckoning, they enjoyed the return to familiar British naval routine. Their confinement had been made less rigorous than under Edwards, and as Morrison noted, they had begun to regain their health and strength.
May 1 brought an extraordinary diversion: two sharks were caught and in the belly of one was found a prayer book, ‘quite fresh,’ according to Lieutenant Clark, ‘not a leaf of it defaced.’ The book was inscribed ‘Francis Carthy, cast for death in the Year 1786 and Repreaved the Same day at four oClock in the afternoon.’ The book was subsequently confirmed as having belonged to a convict who had sailed to Botany Bay in 1788 with the first fleet of prisoners consigned to transportation.
In the early rainy hours of 6 May died Charlotte Bryant, the child of Mary Bryant, the escaped convict who had sailed so boldly into Coupang before the arrival of the Pandora. Amid the mixed humanity that the Gorgon carried, it was not the pirates of the Bounty who appear to have stood out, but the young widow from Cornwall, age twenty-seven, ‘height 5′4″, grey eyes, brown hair, sallow complexion,’ as the register of Newgate Prison records, who had been sentenced to transportation for stealing a cloak. By coincidence, Marine Captain Watkin Tench, returning from Botany Bay, had gone out with Mary five years before, and recalled that she and her husband-to-be ‘had both of them been always distinguished for good behaviour.’ Now, he got from her the details of her extraordinary 3254-mile voyage, coasting the shores of New Holland, harassed by the ‘Indians’ when attempting to land, foraging for food and water – this story, which surely circulated around the ship, was one every sailing man on board would appreciate.
On 19 June, the Gorgon completed her long voyage and on an overcast day anchored at Spithead off Portsmouth alongside three of His Majesty’s ships, the Duke, Brunswick and Edgar, three frigates and a sloop of war. Captain Parker immediately notified Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, the port’s commander on duty, of his ship’s arrival and awaited further instructions. Meanwhile, his crew busied themselves with the numerous tedious and chaotic duties that awaited the end of a long voyage. The officers and men of the Portsmouth and Plymouth Divisions were disembarked, and water and victuals were brought onboard. The carpenter made his customary report, noting that the ship’s ‘works in general is very weak from carying large quantities of water and hay & tubs of Plants.’
Captain Edwards, a passenger, had nothing to do with these transactions. Most of his men were still behind him, on the other Dutch ships, and the pirates and convicts would now be turned over to the proper authorities. Disembarking early at the Isle of Wight, he was safe in Portsmouth by the time the Gorgon came to anchor. At some point in their wanderings, most probably during the sultry, sickly sojourn at Batavia, an anonymous member of the Pandora’s crew had immortalized their journey, and their captain, with a long doggerel poem:
Brave Edwards then with freindly Care
for men and boat began to fear…
by hard fatigue Our men were Spent,
the Ship keel’d Over and Down She went
An Equel Chance Our Captain Gave
to All Alike their Lives to Save…
Edwards’s last semi-official duty had been to accompany the captain’s wife, Mary Ann Parker, to shore, a journey that, perhaps predictably, turned into a four-hour ordeal, as she noted, ‘rowing against the wind’. Once onshore, nothing remained for Edwards but to await his own court-martial; like Bligh, he had returned without his ship.
On the day after the Gorgon’s arrival, Captain Hamond informed Captain Parker that their lordships of the Admiralty had directed that ‘the ten Prisoners belonging to the Bounty be sent to the security of one of the port guardships. The following day, a longboat, manned and armed, was sent from the Hector, Captain George Montagu, to collect the mutineers. Put over the side of the Gorgon in chains into the waiting boat, the prisoners were able to enjoy the sights of the busy, lively anchorage in the course of their short journey. The cloudy weather had briefly cleared and showed breezy and fair – an English summer day. Their arrival on board was mentioned briefly in the Hector’s log: ‘Post-noon received the above Prisoners, Wm Muspratt, James Morrison, Jn Milward, Peter Heywood, Thomas Ellison, Michl Burn, Thos Burkett, Josh Coleman, Thos. McIntosh & Charles Norman…and secured them in the Gun Room.’ A sergeant’s guard of marines was sent over to provide additional security. For Thomas Burkett, at least, the Hector was familiar territory: he had served as an able seaman on this same ship, six years previously.
Peter Heywood had brought away a single possession from his long ordeal, a Book of Common Prayer, which he had carried in his teeth as he swam from the wreck of the Pandora. On the flyleaves, he had made some notations of events and dates important to him: ‘Sept. 22 1789, Mya TOOBOOAI mye; Mar. 25 1791, We ta Pahee Pandora…We tow te Vredenberg tea…Pahee HECTOR’ – the most striking thing about Peter’s entries is that he had written them in Tahitian.
Back in Tahiti, the Bounty men who had cast their lot in with the islanders were remembered largely with affection. Less than eight months after the Pandora left Matavai Bay, Captain George Vancouver arrived with his two ships, Discovery and Chatham. Through conversations with the Tahitians, he and his men learned a great deal about the mutineers’ lives on the island: they had built a schooner; they had each taken a wife and treated their women well; Stewart and Heywood had laid out gardens that were still in a flourishing state; these two had conformed to Tahitian manners to such an extent that they ceremonially uncovered their upper bodies when in the presence of King Tynah, as was the local custom.
One day the Chatham’s men were ‘surpized at seeing alongside in a double Canoe, three women all dress’d in White Linen Shirts, and having each a fine young child in their arms, perfectly white,’ as Edward Bell, a young clerk on the Chatham, reported in his journal. These were the women who had lived with the Bounty’s mutineers, and their children.
‘One call’d herself Peggy Stewart, after Mr. Stewart, one of the Bounty’s midshipmen, and her child which was very beautiful was called Charlotte,’ wrote Bell. ‘Another’s name was Mary MacIntosh and the other’s Mary Bocket [Burkett].’
Following this first meeting, Peggy Stewart frequently came to visit, often bringing small gifts and always enquiring after her husband. At length, it was time for the ships to depart, and she came to make her affectionate and tearful farewell.
‘Just before she went away, she came into my Cabbin,’ wrote Bell, ‘and ask’d me the same question she had often done, whether I thought Stewart would be hung.’ Deeply moved, he replied that he didn’t know – perhaps not.
‘She then said “If he is alive when you return, tell him that you saw his Peggy and his little Charlotte, and that they were both well, and tell him to come to Otaheite, and live with them, or they will be unhappy.” She then burst into Tears and with the deepest regret forced herself into her Canoe and as long as we could see her she kept waving her hand.’ The next ship that came from Tahiti brought word that Peggy had pined away and died of a broken heart.
BOUNTY (#ulink_5c7879e2-558c-52d9-98fc-6b21fd2ace22)
England, 1787
The passion for exploration and discovery, the hunger to learn all things about all aspects of the physical world, the great and preposterous optimism that held that such truths were in fact discoverable – these remarkable traits that so characterized the British eighteenth century were embodied by one remarkable eighteenth-century man, the admired, envied and uniquely influential Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was forty-four years old in 1787 and already a national treasure, as powerful in his way as any member of government. And it was the interest of Banks, more than any other consideration, that ensured that the government undertook the Bounty’s breadfruit mission to the South Seas.
Banks had been born in 1743, to a prosperous and well-connected landowning family. Somehow he had managed to be educated at both Eton and Harrow and at Oxford, although under a tutor he had privately hired from Cambridge. He was only eighteen when his father died and he had inherited the first of his estates, and from this time, for the remainder of his life, Banks was the master of his own destiny. From an early age he had shown a passion for natural history, above all botany, and this he now pursued. At the age of twenty-one, having established himself in London society, where he quickly became the friend of distinguished men some decades his senior, Banks set out for a summer of botanizing along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Returning with a professionally compiled collection of novel specimens never before seen in Europe, and the basis of what would become his world-famous herbarium, he was, at twenty-three, elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Still restless, still implausibly young, Banks then decided that his next venture in gentlemanly enquiry would be with Lieutenant James Cook in the Pacific.
The first of what would be Cook’s three magnificent voyages left England in the Endeavour in August 1768. The primary objective was to enable British astronomers to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti, but after accomplishing such observations, the expedition was to proceed in search of the fabled Southern continent, surveying New Zealand and other islands en route. Banks was footing the bill for his own passage as well as that of his considerable entourage – his colleague and employee Dr Daniel Solander, a distinguished Swedish naturalist and disciple of Linnaeus, two artists to make records of what was seen, his secretary, four servants and his two greyhounds. It was popularly rumoured that Banks’s expenses for the trip had cost him some ten thousand pounds.
Cook’s first voyage made discoveries in New Zealand, Australia (where Botany Bay was named for Banks’s botanizing) and a multitude of new islands, but it was the visit to Tahiti that became most memorably etched in the English imagination. Tahiti had been ‘discovered’ before Cook – Captain Samuel Wallis of the Dolphin had touched here, on what he called ‘King George III Island’, in 1767 – but it did not become a subject of popular and fashionable fascination until the return of the Endeavour in 1771.
And at least one reason for the fascination was Joseph Banks. He had not just returned to England with thousands of unknown and expertly preserved botanical specimens, professional botanical drawings and watercolours (as well as landscapes and ethnological studies) from his artists; Banks had also returned as the subject of romantic, even titillating stories. With his zeal for new experiences, he had thrown himself into Tahitian life, learning its language, attending burials and sacrifices and dances, endearing himself to its people, even having himself discreetly tattooed. The happy promiscuity of the Tahitian women was already well known from Wallis’s reports and Banks’s adventures on this front provided additional spice. Outstanding among the stories that made the rounds of London social circles was the tale of the theft of Mr Banks’s fine waistcoat with its splendid silver frogging, stolen, along with his shoes and pistol, while he lay sleeping with his ‘old Freind Oberea’ in her canoe:
Didst thou not, crafty, subtle sunburnt strum
Steal the silk breeches from his tawny bum?
Calls’t thouself a Queen? and thus couldst use
And rob thy Swain of breeches and his shoes?
The romance of Banks and Queen Oberea, broadcast in facetious verse and ‘letters’, helped ensure that the most-talked-about phenomenon to emerge from Cook’s long, exotic voyage was Joseph Banks. To paraphrase one historian, Banks had no need to return to London with a lion or tiger – he was the lion of London. A few years after his return, he would make one more far-flung journey of discovery, this time a self-financed expedition to Iceland. In the course of his three rather eccentrically determined voyages, he had pursued natural history from Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, from extreme northern to extreme southern latitudes – a range unmatched by any naturalist of his day.
With these travels behind him, Banks purchased a London town house in fashionable Soho Square and settled into the sedate but stimulating routine he was to maintain until the end of his life. In 1778, he was elected president of the Royal Society – and would be re-elected annually for the next forty-two years – and he was raised to a baronetcy as ‘Sir Joseph’ in 1779. On his return from the South Seas, he had been introduced to King George, who also shared Banks’s enthusiasm for natural history; Banks had been appointed botanical adviser to the King, and the two men became enduring friends. From their conversational strolls together were laid the plans for what would become the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, an enterprise made successful by Banks’s energetic enthusiasm and dazzling connections with botanists and collectors throughout the world. This dedication would continue from his appointment in 1775 until his death. Banks’s nearby villa, Spring Grove, and its extensive land became a model of experimental farming, another interest he shared with the King. The stud stock of Spanish merino sheep, which he had acquired with much difficulty and bred at Spring Grove, was, with the royal stud, which he also managed, the foundation for the growth of the British export wool trade in the next century.
But mostly what occupied Banks, apart from his duties at the Royal Society, was his correspondence. In his town house, with his fine library and unique collection of specimens, beautifully mounted in cabinets of his own design, he was furnished with much of what he required for his further researches. The rest came to him from the eager outside world. Reports of the prodigious appetite of a cuckoo raised by hand, and of the tonal qualities of Tahitian wind instruments; descriptions of battles between spiders and flies; introductions to promising students of botany and natural history; queries about prospective African expeditions, proper methods of raising ships from riverbeds, the correct authorship of ‘God Save the King’; reports of unicorn sightings, of the later years of the famous German Wild Boy and his fondness for gingerbread; descriptions of destruction done to wall fruit by insects, the superiority of olives to other oil-producing trees; gifts of newly published treatises, specimens of seed, of insects, of fighting flies and remains of the spiders they had conquered – all streamed into 32 Soho Square. The kangaroos, opossums and plants that would so inconvenience the Gorgon in 1792 were all destined for Joseph Banks.
His correspondence, most of it now lost, is estimated to have comprised anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 letters. His correspondents included great names such as William Pitt the Younger, Lord Nelson, Benjamin Franklin and distinguished scholars of many nations. But there were also captains who offered interesting specimens from their travels, farmers and a letter forwarded from a schoolmaster giving testimony that he had seen a mermaid.
Anywhere in the world, everywhere in the British Isles, people noted curious phenomena, came up with curious questions, observations or theories and thought, ‘I’ll write to Joseph Banks.’ When Samuel Taylor Coleridge wanted ‘hashish’, he contacted Banks. Without straying far from London and his well-managed Lincolnshire estates, Banks knew everyone, and everything. Studiously apolitical, he was respected and trusted by most parties. Few British expeditions of discovery of any kind, whether to Africa or Iceland, were mounted without consultation with Sir Joseph Banks. In Banks’s correspondence is mirrored the British eighteenth century, with all its energetic, questing optimism, its dazzling sophistication and its occasional startling innocence; an age in which geographical and scientific discoveries surpassed anything previously dreamt of, and yet an age in which it was still, just barely, possible to believe in mermaids and unicorns.
Amid this flood of gloriously mixed correspondence came an insistent trickle from those with interest in the plantations of the West Indies, with the suggestion that the importation of exotic fruit-bearing trees would be useful to the islands. As early as 1772, Valentine Morris, a planter who would later be governor of St Vincent, had approached Banks regarding the ‘possibility of procuring the bread tree, either in seed or plant so as to introduce that most valuable tree into our American Islands.’
The virtues of the Artocarpus incisa – the handsome, broad-leafed tropical tree that bore fruit the size of a man’s head – had been related by early explorers, who gave accounts of the fruit’s tastiness and uncanny similarity to bread. Lord Anson’s account of his circumnavigation of the world, published in 1748, told how on the Pacific island of Tinian, where his scurvy-stricken crew had fortuitously washed up, the breadfruit had been ‘constantly eaten by us instead of bread: and so universally preferred that no ship’s bread was expended in that whole interval.’
Such reports by Anson, Cook and others were taken very seriously by the West India Committee, which was composed of merchants and property owners with island interests. At a meeting in February 1775, a letter was read to the chairman ‘relative to the introduction into England of the Bread-fruit tree and Mangostan from the East Indies, in order for their being sent over and propagated in the West Indies.’ A month later, a resolution was passed offering a hundred pounds to ‘the captain of an East India ship, or any other person’ who brought ‘the true Bread-fruit tree in a thriving vegetation’ to England. The matter dragged on over the years, the subject of various letters, treatises and resolutions put forth by the committee. And thus things might have remained indefinitely, with a vague and rather lowly bounty offered to any willing taker, if the enterprise had not caught the interest of Joseph Banks.
Banks had privately discussed the possibility with several eager planters and botanists: needless to say, he had himself tasted the fruit on Tahiti, but had personally preferred plantains, finding that breadfruit ‘sometimes griped us’. By 1785, Matthew Wallen, a botanist living in Jamaica to whom Banks had sent various exotic seeds for experimental planting, wrote to Banks with the bold observation that the ‘King ought to send a Man of War, a Botanist & Gardener for the Plants we want,’ adding he would not then ‘want the Example of the King of France who sends Duplicates & Triplicates of all valuable Plants to his Colonies.’ Banks was in agreement that a proper government-sponsored expedition was desirable; it was also the case that he lacked breadfruit specimens of his own for Kew. That the British had fallen behind the French on this front provided useful leverage, and in February 1787, a breadfruit expedition was formally announced to the West India Committee by Prime Minister Pitt.
Simultaneous with these proposals for the breadfruit expedition were the plans, now well under way, for the transportation of the first convicts from England to Botany Bay in New South Wales. Banks, who was instrumental to both ventures, had originally intended to combine the two, and had at first proposed an ambitious itinerary: a single vessel would carry the convicts to New South Wales, deposit them and then continue on to collect breadfruit in Tahiti. It did not take long, however, for Banks to awake to the fact that the two enterprises, although destined for roughly the same part of the globe, had wholly distinct requirements. An expedition devoted solely to the breadfruit was, he allowed in March 1787, ‘more likely to be successful’.
Thus some months later, Lord Sydney, a principal secretary of state, informed Banks that the Admiralty had ‘purchased a Vessel for the purpose of conveying the Bread-Fruit Tree and other useful productions from the South Sea Islands to His Majesty’s West India Possessions.’ The ship, formerly named Bethia, was one Banks had approved, and it had been purchased by the Admiralty for the sum of £1950. She was to be commissioned within a few days, according to Sydney, and was ‘to be called The Bounty, and to be commanded by Lieutenant Bligh.’
Exactly how, or through whose recommendation, William Bligh came to receive the command of the Bounty is not known. It does not appear to be the case that Banks knew Bligh personally, although he had undoubtedly heard of him, since Bligh had served as sailing master of the Resolution on Cook’s last expedition, which had departed England eleven years before, in 1776. It is possible that Banks had made a recommendation that the breadfruit expedition was best entrusted to one of Cook’s men. William Bligh, on the other hand, had certainly heard of Joseph Banks, and in his mind there was no question of to whom he was indebted.
‘Sir, I arrived yesterday from Jamaica,’ Bligh wrote to Banks on 6 August, with an outflowing of gratitude. ‘…I have heard the flattering news of your great goodness to me, intending to honor me with the command of the vessel which you propose to go to the South Seas, for which, after offering you my most grateful thanks, I can only assure you I shall endeavour, and I hope succeed, in deserving such a trust’
William Bligh had been christened on 9 September 1754, in the great naval town of Plymouth, where his father, Francis Bligh, was chief of customs. The Blighs were originally from Cornwall, and could claim such distinguished men as Admiral Sir Richard Rodney Bligh and the Earls of Darnley. Bligh’s mother, Jane Pearce, had been a widow when she married Francis Bligh, and had died before her son was sixteen. William Bligh appears to have been the only child of this union. Francis Bligh married twice again after the death of his wife, and had himself passed away at the age of fifty-nine in December 1780 – three months after his son’s return to England from Cook’s third Pacific voyage.
Bligh first appears in naval records in 1762, as a captain’s servant on the Monmouth, when he would have been all of seven years old. This should not be taken to mean that young William had actually gone to sea; more likely, he had been entered on the books of an accommodating captain. This well-established, if strictly improper, tradition enabled a captain to draw extra rations and the child to enjoy some early friendly patronage and ‘sea time’. Widespread as the practice was, it was only extended to families with some degree of ‘interest’, or influential connections. In Bligh’s case this appears to have come through a relative of his mother, although his father undoubtedly had connections through the customs office. Bligh’s name does not appear again in naval records until 1770, shortly after his mother’s death, when he was entered on the muster of the Hunter as an ‘able seaman’, a common, temporary classification for ‘young gentlemen’, or potential officers in training who found themselves on ships where the official quota of midshipmen was already filled. And indeed, six months after signing on, a midshipman position did open up and Bligh was duly promoted.
Bligh was to serve on his next ship, the Crescent, for three years as a midshipman, or from the age of seventeen to a few weeks short of twenty. This period, which saw tours to Tenerife and the West Indies, was undoubtedly a formative period of his professional life. Paid off in 1774, Bligh next joined the Ranger – not as a midshipman, but once again, initially, as an able seaman; such was the expected fickleness of a naval career. The Ranger’s principal duty was hunting smugglers, and she had been based where smuggling was known to be particularly egregious, across the Irish Sea at Douglas, on the Isle of Man. Manx men and women were to figure heavily in Bligh’s later life.
Then, at the age of twenty-one, Bligh received the news that would represent a turning point in his life: he had been chosen to join Captain Cook on his third expedition as master of the Resolution. Again, how or by whom he had been singled out for this prestigious commission is not known. Cook himself had stated that the young officers under his direction ‘could be usefully employed in constructing charts, in taking views of the coasts and headlands near which we should pass, and in drawing plans of the bays and harbours in which we should anchor.’ Given Bligh’s later proven abilities, it may be that even at the age of twenty-one a reputation for these skills had preceded him and recommended him to Cook. To work side by side, in this capacity, with the greatest navigator of the age was for Bligh both a great honour and an unparalleled opportunity.
It was also, however, strictly speaking, if not a step backward in the command hierarchy of his profession, at least a step sideways. For a young man of Bligh’s background and aspirations, the desired position following a successful midshipman apprenticeship was that of lieutenant, which would put him securely on the promotional ladder leading to the post of captain. A master, on the other hand, for all the rigour of his responsibilities, received his appointment not as a commission from the Admiralty, but by a warrant from the Naval Board. These were important distinctions, professionally and socially. And while it was not unusual for a young man to bide his time by serving as a master until a lieutenancy was offered, there was the danger of proving too useful in that rank and advancing no further. Most masters had not been young gentlemen and were not destined for the captain’s list. In Bligh’s case the risk seemed justified. If he did his job well, he could count on the ‘interest’ and recommendation of Captain Cook, the most highly regarded royal naval officer of his day as a cartographer and explorer.
With Cook’s expedition, Bligh sailed to Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand, Tahiti, and the Pacific islands. He patrolled the west coast of North America and searched for the Northwest Passage. Cook was justly famous for maintaining the health of his crew on his long, demanding voyages, and Bligh’s own later practices would reveal that he had closely observed and learned from his mentor’s innovations in diet and ship management.
From Cook’s own log, one catches only glimpses of the earnest young sailing master, usually being sent ahead of the ship in a reconnaissance boat to make a careful survey of some ticklish coast or bay. After Cook himself, Bligh was responsible for most of the charts and surveys made in the course of this last expedition, and had thus honed his already exceptional abilities.
Most unforgettably, Bligh had been present at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, when on 14 February 1779, James Cook was murdered by the island natives. The events that led to this shocking tragedy would be long disputed; dispassionate reading of the numerous, often conflicting accounts suggests that Cook behaved with uncharacteristic rashness and provocation to the islanders – but that at the moment of crisis he had been betrayed by the disorder and panic of the armed marines whose duty had been to protect him. In the horrified and frightened aftermath of their loss, Cook’s officers assembled an account of the events at Kealakekua Bay that vindicated most and made a scapegoat of only one man, a Lieutenant Rickinson. Some years later, William Bligh would record his disgust with this closing of the ranks in marginal annotations made in a copy of the official publication of the voyage: ‘A most infamous lie’; ‘The whole affair from the Opening to the end did not last 10 Minutes, nor was their a spark of courage or conduct shown in the whole busyness’; ‘a most Hypocritical expression’; ‘A pretty Old Woman Story’.
In Bligh’s opinion, the principal cause of the tragedy at Kealakekua Bay lay with the marines: they had failed to do their duty. After firing a first panicked volley, they had fallen back from the menacing crowd of islanders in fear, splashing and flailing to their waiting boat. ‘The Marines fir’d & ran which occasioned all that followed for had they fixed their bayonets & not have run, so frightened as they were, they might have drove all before them.’ The person most responsible for the marines’ disorder was their commander, Lieutenant Molesworth Phillips, characterized by Bligh as a ‘person, who never was of any real service the whole Voyage, or did anything but eat and Sleep.’
Bligh was at least in some position to pass judgement, for the day following Cook’s murder he had been sent onshore to oversee a party of men repairing the Resolution’s damaged mast. Shortly after landing, Bligh had found himself faced with a menacing crowd and had ordered his men to stand and fire; and he had held this position until joined by reinforcements from the ship.
The shock and tragedy apart, Cook’s death deprived Bligh of the valuable interest he had counted on at the expedition’s end, and which it would appear by this time he otherwise lacked; his own modest connections had been sufficient to secure him a young gentleman’s entry to naval service, but do not appear to have been extensive enough to have advanced him further. In both the subsequent flurry of promotions and the published account of the voyage, Bligh found himself somewhat marginalized; whether this was because he had made known his highly impolitic views of the expedition cannot be determined. But to his intense annoyance and mortification, the carefully drawn charts he had made throughout the voyage were published under another’s name.
Following his return to England, Bligh had indulged in a rare holiday and returned to the Isle of Man, with, as subsequent events would suggest, a determined objective; only months after his return, in February 1781, William Bligh was married to Elizabeth Betham, the pretty, twenty-seven-year-old daughter of well-to-do and exceptionally well-educated parents. Richard Betham, Elizabeth’s father, was the receiver general, or collector of customs, in Douglas, and the friend of such distinguished men as philosopher David Hume and economist Adam Smith, with whom he had been a student at university. William Bligh, prudent, diligent and ambitious, would have had much to recommend him as a husband. For Elizabeth Betham, intelligent and brought up in a family of enlightened thinkers, Bligh’s participation in a high-profile expedition of discovery and exploration was also an attraction, evidence that the young officer was a cut above the usual naval man. By now Bligh had not only served with, and been deeply affected by, the most progressive sea captain of his age, but also, as his ship logs would reveal, he shared Cook’s unflagging interest in recording not only the coasts and harbours but also the people and places he encountered. As Elizabeth Bligh had undoubtedly appreciated, William Bligh not only was ambitious in the naval line, but also possessed the diligent, enquiring curiosity that might destine him for association with the ‘scientifically’ minded men of the Royal Society.
Following his marriage, Bligh had served as a fifth or sixth lieutenant in a series of short commissions during the winding down of the American War of Independence. By 1782, the navy had begun to scale back and reverted to offering the meagre fare of peacetime – two shillings a day and no opportunity for prize money from enemy ships. William Bligh, newly married and now with a young daughter to support, had at first lain low in the Isle of Man, where life was famously cheap, and where, as he told a relative, he could at least get plenty of books and ‘improve’ himself by reading. But these circumstances were tolerable for only so long, and by the middle of 1783, Bligh had received permission from the Admiralty to take mercantile employment abroad; so for four years, until his appointment to the Bounty, Bligh had plied the rum and sugar trade from England to the West Indies for his wife’s wealthy merchant uncle, Duncan Campbell.
Bligh was of average to below-average height. His hair was black, his skin ‘of an ivory or marble whiteness’; in later years, it would be remarked of him that ‘his face, though it had been exposed to all climates, and to the roughest weather, was, even as years began to tell upon him, far from appearing weather-beaten, or coarse.’ He did not, then, have the look of a rough ‘salt’. Nonetheless, he was widely experienced, having served in time of war, in voyages of discovery and in the merchant trade, from the Pacific to the West Indies. Other considerations are likely to have recommended him in Admiralty eyes. While it was the often expressed opinion of Joseph Banks that the Bounty voyage was now exclusively about breadfruit transportation, the Admiralty had one other, highly regarded objective, as was clear from the sailing orders Bligh eventually received: after leaving Tahiti, his orders instructed him, ‘you are to proceed from thence through Endeavour Streights (which separate New Holland from New Guinea).’ The navigation and survey of this important, little-known and dangerous passage – where Cook himself had run aground – was of great interest to the Admiralty, and there were few naval men better qualified, or available, to undertake this than Captain Cook’s able sailing master.
For William Bligh, now not quite thirty-three years old and a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Navy, the command of Sir Joseph Banks’s prestigious breadfruit journey implied more than a return to naval service from the obscurity of the sugar trade – it put Bligh squarely in Cook’s footsteps.
The object of all the former voyages to the South Seas,’ Bligh himself wrote, ‘has been the advancement of science, and the increase of knowledge. This voyage may be reckoned the first, the intention of which has been to derive benefit from those distant discoveries.’
The vessel that Bligh would refer to with habitual affection as ‘my little ship’ awaited him at Deptford Dockyard, on the Thames. The Bounty was a beautiful craft, lying solid and low in the water like the full-bodied merchant ship she was, blunt-nosed and square-sterned, surmounted by her three spirelike masts. Fixed under her bowsprit was the painted figurehead of a lady dressed in a riding habit. But for all the neatness of her lines, Bligh could have been forgiven for a momentary loss of heart at his first sight. Resolution and Discovery, the two ships carefully chosen by Captain Cook for his last expedition, had been 462 and 295 tons, respectively – and Discovery, as a consort, was markedly smaller than any of Cook’s previous ships, which averaged around 350 tons burthen. The Bounty was of 220 tons. At 85 feet 1
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inches long, and with a beam of 24 feet 4 inches, she was rated as only a cutter. Of more consequence to Bligh, a cutter did not rate a captain as her commanding officer, or even a commander (the rank Cook had held on his second voyage). William Bligh would therefore not be promoted as he had optimistically hoped, but would sail as a lieutenant; if he were addressed as ‘Captain Bligh’, it would be only out of courtesy. Given that he was to be gone for at least two years, this was an acute disappointment; at the very least, it meant two years more on a lieutenant’s pay.
It was Banks who, in consultation with David Nelson, the gardener chosen for the voyage, had made the final selection of the vessel from the few candidates the Admiralty had deemed suitable. A merchantman had been chosen, since carrying capacity was the main object. Banks had very definite ideas about how exploration vessels should be fitted out – so definite that they had cost him a place on Cook’s second expedition of 1772. At that time, it had been assumed by everyone, including Banks, that he would participate in this next grand adventure. But after the ship selected by Cook had been completely reconfigured under Banks’s supervision to accommodate his entourage – heightened, redecked, fitted with a new raised poop to compensate for the scientists’ quarters – the ship had proved too top-heavy to sail. She was restored to her original state, and Banks withdrew from the enterprise in pique.
Fifteen years later, Banks’s ideas on how botanical expeditions were to be conducted were still adamantly precise. ‘As the sole object of Government in Chartering this Vessel in our Service at a very considerable expense is to furnish the West Indian Islands with the Bread-Fruit & other valuable productions of the East,’ Banks wrote in a draft of his instructions in early 1787, ‘the Master & Crew of her must not think it a grievance to give up the best part of her accommodations for that purpose.’ There were to be no dogs, cats, monkeys, parrots, goats or any of the other animals traditionally found on ships, excepting those kept in coops for food. Arsenic must be kept out for cockroaches and rats and ‘the Crew must not complain if some of them who may die in the ceiling make an unpleasant smell.’ Banks had estimated that ‘a Brig of less than 200 Tons Burthen would be fully sufficient.’ He also wanted a small crew – ‘no more than 30 Souls’, including the gardener – so as not to take up space that could be used by plants. An astronomer had also sought to go along ‘to observe the expected comet’, but Banks refused; in his eyes, the Bounty’s voyage had one object only – breadfruit.
This was made clear to Bligh personally from the moment he first looked over his new ship. Descending the companionway from the upper deck, Bligh entered the great cabin, the captain’s private quarters that encompassed the breadth of the vessel and extended from the transom almost to the mainmast. Paned windows at the stern and quarter windows flooded the spacious area with light. This was where the captain could retire for privacy and rest, where he could invite his officers and young gentlemen. For a navigator and draftsman like Bligh, it was also his library, where he could spread out his charts and drawings, and store his collection of books.
But the Bounty’s great cabin was not destined for the personal use of Lieutenant Bligh – it was to be converted into a nursery for the plants. Fitted with skylights and air scuttles, it would contain staging cut with holes for 629 pots; it also had a stove to ensure that the plants would be warm in cold weather. An ingenious drainage system provided a catchment for surplus water, which could be recycled. Bligh’s quarters would be improvised immediately forward of the nursery, to the starboard side of the companionway. A windowless cabin measuring eight by seven feet would form his sleeping area. Adjoining it was a small pantry where he would take his meals; if he wished to invite others to his table, they would meet him here, in this cramped, undignified space. Cook, too, on his first voyage, had shared his day cabin with Banks and his scientist and draftsman, but on that occasion the usurpation of the captain’s space into a kind of gentleman’s working library had not resulted in any symbolic loss of dignity. Unlike Cook, Bligh was not to enjoy an active and collegial engagement with his partner in this enterprise. Shunted into his cramped, dark solitude by the pots of Joseph Banks, he was effectively relegated to the role of botanical courier.
With the interior refinements out of his hands, Bligh spent the months of August and September making his ship as seaworthy as possible for her long, dangerous voyage. Her masts were shortened so as to make her more stable, and her wooden hull was sheathed with copper against the ravages of ship worm. Nineteen tons of iron ballast were stowed instead of the customary forty-five; Bligh reckoned that the eighteen months of stores he was carrying would make up the balance.
The Bounty’s rating as a cutter also determined the establishment she would carry. There would be no commissioned officers apart from Bligh; the warrant officers would include a master, boatswain, carpenter, gunner and surgeon. In the interest of economy, and as was not uncommon, the role of purser had been dispensed with. A purser, the purveyor of all official stores, in effect purchased provisions from the Navy Board at the outset of a voyage, and sold back what had not been used on his return. Because he was expected to supplement his lowly salary by profits received, he had strong self-interest to stint on provisions, for which reason he was generally regarded by the sailors with suspicion and contempt. On the Bounty, the duties of this office were to be fulfilled by the commanding officer – Lieutenant Bligh.
Bligh’s commission had commenced on 16 August, and was followed only days later by the appointment of the first warrant officers. John Fryer, the Bounty’s new master, was slightly older than Bligh; with his rather refined features and pensive air, he called to mind a dignified school headmaster. Fryer had been assigned the small cabin opposite Bligh’s, on the other side of the aft hatchway.
Only weeks before he joined the Bounty, Fryer, a widower, had married a ‘Spinster’ named Mary Tinkler, from Wells-next-the-Sea, in Norfolk, where he too had been born. This marriage held some consequence for the voyage. Fryer, using his modest interest, had secured a position for his brother-in-law, Robert Tinkler, nominally as an AB, or able seaman, with the understanding that he was to be considered a young gentleman. Although Tinkler was entered on the ship’s muster as being seventeen years of age, he was in fact only twelve.
Fryer had entered the navy only seven years earlier. As was common for a master, he had transferred from the merchant service, where he had seen some excitement; around 1776, he had been mate on a vessel captured by French privateers and had spent over a year and a half in prison. John Fryer’s role as master on the Bounty was the same as that played by Bligh on Cook’s Resolution. However, Bligh had been a precocious twenty-one-year-old lieutenant-in-waiting, while John Fryer was a thirty-five-year-old man who was unlikely to advance higher in nominal rank.
Bligh’s failure to gain promotion for this breadfruit voyage bore implications well beyond the fact that he would continue to be paid as a lieutenant, and nowhere were the consequences to become more overtly apparent than in his relationship with Master Fryer. While Bligh considered himself to be only a formality away from the coveted promotions that would secure him his captaincy, in the eyes of John Fryer, Mr Bligh was still merely a lieutenant. In theory, the master bore responsibility for the navigation of a ship; however, William Bligh was by now an expert navigator, trained under Captain Cook, and one of the few men in the British navy with experience in the South Seas. It was not then to be expected that he would surrender his own expertise on so critical a subject to the middle-of-the-road know-how of Master Fryer. Under William Bligh, the master was in fact redundant.
Thomas Huggan, an alcoholic surgeon, was the second warrant officer appointed. ‘My surgeon, I believe, may be a very capable man, but his indolence and corpulency render him rather unfit for the voyage,’ Bligh wrote as tactfully as he could to Sir Joseph Banks, whom he was careful to keep apprised of all developments. ‘I wish I may get him to change.’
Although this proved impossible, Banks did succeed in getting the Admiralty to agree to an assistant surgeon. Eventually this position was taken by Thomas Denman Ledward, a man in his late twenties from a distinguished family of apothecaries and physicians and the first cousin of Thomas Denman, destined to become Lord Chief Justice.
‘I am to enter as A.B.!’ Ledward wrote to his uncle shortly before sailing – the ever handy ‘able seaman’ designation being invoked to comply with the ship’s official numerical establishment. ‘But the Captain is almost certain that I shall get a first Mate’s pay, & shall stand a great chance of immediate promotion,’ and – a further agreeable incentive – ‘if the Surgeon dies (& he has the character of a drunkard) I shall have a Surgeon’s acting order.’ An additional inducement to take on what surely promised to be a thankless job was that Sir Joseph Banks had offered his ‘interest to any surgeon’s mate who would go out as able seaman.’
On the same day that Fryer and Huggan were appointed, Thomas Hayward also joined the Bounty, nominally as another AB but shortly to be promoted to one of the two coveted midshipman allotments. This nineteen-year-old officer had been recommended by one of Banks’s old and admired colleagues, William Wales, who had been the astronomer on Cook’s second voyage, and who was now mathematical master at Christ’s Hospital, that extraordinary charity school that educated, among other luminaries, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; indeed, some of the haunting ice imagery of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ comes from William Wales’s description of crossing into Antarctic waters on Cook’s voyage. Wales taught mathematics, astronomy, navigational skills and surveying at Christ’s Hospital, the object of his particular attention being that circle of boys destined for sea careers. Lamb, describing his old teacher, claimed that ‘all his systems were adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to encounter. Frequent and severe punishments, which were expected to be borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to be his only aim.’
Wales was also secretary to the Board of Longitude and had been responsible for publishing the scientific observations of Cook’s voyage – he was, then, a man for whom Banks had high regard.
‘I beg leave to trouble you with the Name of the Young Gentleman who is desirous of going with Capt. Bligh and whom I mentioned to you sometime since,’ Wales wrote to Banks on 8 August. ‘It is Mr. Thomas Hayward, Son of Mr. Hayward, a surgeon at Hackney.’ The young man who was the object of Wales’s interest was the eldest son of nine surviving children. Thomas Hayward had entered the navy’s books as a captain’s servant aboard the Halifax at the tender age of seven, where he served, on the books at least, for the next four years. From age eleven to fourteen, however, Hayward was not at sea, but was presumably being schooled. In 1782, he was back on the navy’s books and for the next five years served as able seaman or midshipman aboard a number of ships. He came to the Bounty from the 24-gun frigate Porcupine, which had been patrolling off the Irish coast. Possibly no other promising young gentleman in His Majesty’s Royal Navy was to endure such a spectacular run of bad professional fortune as Thomas Hayward.
Over the next weeks, the rest of the crew continued to trickle in, acquired from other ships, from former service with Bligh or from those with interest to get them their positions. A number of these deserted: the names John Cooper, George Armstrong, William Hudson, Samuel Sutton, marked ‘R’ for ‘Run’, are among those that appear on the Bounty muster only briefly before vanishing from this story. These desertions included the company’s only two pressed men, seamen forced against their will into the King’s service. Bligh claimed that it was only after leaving Tenerife that he ‘now made the ship’s company acquainted with the intent of the voyage’, but it is unlikely that the men had remained in ignorance until this time; the preparations themselves would have given much away. Thomas Ledward, the young assistant surgeon, reported excitedly to his uncle before the Bounty sailed that he had agreed to go ‘to Otaheite to transplant Bread fruit trees to Jamaica’, which would indicate there were no secrets here. It is a striking fact that, with the desertion of the pressed men, the Bounty carried an all-volunteer crew; surely her destination – Tahiti, the Pacific islands – was one reason.
Little is known of William Cole, the boatswain and another of the warrant officers, apart from the fact that this was the third naval ship on which he had served. A great deal is known, however, about the boatswain’s mate, James Morrison – fortunately, for he was to play an important role in the story of the Bounty. Morrison was a native of Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis off the western coast of Scotland. His family was descended from several generations of educated Lewismen and even local hereditary judges, while his father was a merchant and land entrepreneur of education and some means. As events would show, the twenty-seven-year-old Morrison was exceptionally – dangerously – well educated, and although almost certainly Gaelic speaking, fluent and literate in English, and with at least a passing knowledge of Latin. One of the ways in which Morrison was to exercise his superior intellect was by writing a narrative of the Bounty voyage, which included a lengthy and well-observed description of life on Tahiti, as well as the voyage and aftermath of the Pandora. It was written several years after the events described, while he was a prisoner on the Hector awaiting trial for his life, circumstances that very directly coloured some of his ‘recollections’.
At five foot eight, Morrison was of above-average height and of slender build, with sallow skin and long black hair; a musket wound on his arm was a memento of action seen in service. He had joined the navy at the age of eighteen, and had since served on several ships in an intriguing variety of capacities: as a clerk on the Suffolk, a midshipman on the Termagant, acting gunner on the Hind. In 1783, at twenty-three, Morrison passed his master gunner’s examination, having shown proficiency, according to the examiners, in ‘Vulgar and Decimal Arithmetic, the extraction of the Square and Cube Roots, and in practical Problems of Geometry and Plain Trigonometry.’ This success, however, did not provide any material advantage. Like many during those ‘weak, piping times of peace’, Morrison seems to have been without a ship. At any rate, he does not surface in any known naval records until he appears as a boatswain’s mate on the muster of the Bounty.
In this capacity, his duties were to assist William Cole in his continual inspection of sails, rigging and boats. It was also Morrison who would administer all floggings; on a ship of the line, the boatswain’s mate was said to be ‘the most vocal, and the most feared, of the petty officers.’ Still, boatswain’s mate was a step down from master gunner and one must suspect either an urgent need for employment or a passion to see something of the world in his willingness to sign on to the Bounty in this lower position.
William Peckover, the Bounty’s actual gunner, had sailed with Cook on every one of his voyages. He therefore knew Tahiti and was also known to Bligh from the third expedition. William Purcell, the carpenter, made up the complement of warrant officers; the Bounty was his first ship of naval service. All of these men were at least minimally educated, as the Admiralty regulations stated that no person could be placed in charge of stores ‘unless he can read and write, and is sufficiently skilled in arithmetic to keep an account of them correctly’; all warrant officers had responsibilities for stores of some kind. Importantly, too, no warrant officer could be flogged.
Joseph Coleman, the thirty-six-year-old armourer, had also sailed with Cook and Bligh, having been mustered as an AB on the Discovery in 1776. Another man from Cook’s third voyage was David Nelson, the gardener, who had originally been recommended to Banks by a Hammersmith nurseryman. Banks had personally selected him for the breadfruit voyage on respectable terms of £50 a year. According to a shipmate from the Discovery, Nelson was ‘one of the quietest fellows in nature’. His assistant, William Brown, aged twenty-three and from Leicester, had also been selected by Banks. Although now a gardener, Brown had formerly served as a midshipman, when he had seen fierce action against the French – how or why he had gone from the one profession to the other is not known. Both Nelson and Brown were practical, hands-on gardeners, not botanists; Banks was adamant that there be no competing interests to the sole object of caring for the shipment of plants.
The three men joining the Bounty who had sailed on Cook’s last voyage were old acquaintances of Bligh’s – they had all been paid off together in 1780, seven years before. A more substantial number of the crew, however, had sailed with Bligh more recently, and were joining the Bounty from the West Indian ships Bligh had commanded for Duncan Campbell. These men knew Bligh as a commanding officer: Lawrence Lebogue, age forty, the sailmaker from Nova Scotia; John Norton, a quartermaster, age thirty-four, from Liverpool; Thomas Ellison, able seaman, age fifteen, from Deptford, where the Bounty now lay; and Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate, aged twenty-three, cited on the muster as being from Whitehaven, in Cumberland.
According to Bligh, Fletcher Christian was ‘Dark & very swarthy’, with ‘Blackish or very dark brown’ hair. Standing about five foot nine, he was strongly built, although his ‘knees stands a little out and may be called a little bow legged’. Others would later describe his ‘bright, pleasing countenance, and tall, commanding figure’. While born in Cumberland, Christian had more recently been based on the Isle of Man, where his family had old, strong connections, and where Bligh had been living after his marriage.
Fletcher, it was said by his family, had ‘staid at school longer than young men generally do who enter into the navy’. His first sea experience had been as a midshipman on the Eurydice in 1783, when he was eighteen and a half years of age – remarkably late in the day for a young man with his sights set on a naval career. After six months spent at anchorage in Spithead, the Eurydice had sailed for India, and for the next twenty-one months, Christian had been exposed to some of the most exotic parts of the world: Madeira, Cape Town, Madras and the Malabar Coast. Christian’s biographer would conjure the steaming coastal settlements the new midshipman encountered on this first voyage: most notably, the British Fort Saint George at Madras, defiantly set to survey the sea and surrounded by the residences of the English traders and officials, the busy traffic of lumbering oxen and sweating palanquin bearers, the rowdy trade of fine cotton, spices and green doves. The Eurydice was a ship of war, with a complement of 140 men, including a unit of marines, and Christian had also experienced for the first time British naval life in all its coarseness – bad food, complete lack of privacy, irregular sleep and rough discipline. Yet he must have prospered, or at least shown promise, for the ship’s muster indicates that some seven months out from England, he had been promoted from midshipman to master’s mate.
Christian had returned from India in high spirits, telling a relative that ‘it was very easy to make one’s self beloved and respected on board a ship; one had only to be always ready to obey one’s superior officers, and to be kind to the common men.’ This promising start was somewhat derailed by the inconvenient peace, which had put so many ships out of commission and, like Bligh, Christian had turned his sights from naval service to the merchant trade. The decision to approach Bligh, then working for Duncan Campbell, had been prompted, as a relative advised, because ‘it would be very desirable for him to serve under so experienced a navigator as Captain Bligh, who had been Sailing-master to Captain Cook.’
To Christian’s request for a position, however, Bligh had returned the polite response that he already had all the officers he could carry. This was undoubtedly true, but the fact that Bligh did not stretch himself to accommodate the eager young man, as he was to do for so many young gentlemen on the Bounty, suggests that he was not in any way beholden to the Christian family; Fletcher had approached Bligh, it would appear, without benefit of interest.
Upon receiving this rebuff, Christian was undeterred; indeed, he rose to the occasion, volunteering to work before the mast until a vacancy arose among the officers.
‘Wages were no object, he only wished to learn his profession,’ he had told Bligh, adding, ‘we Mid-shipmen are gentlemen, we never pull at a rope; I should even be glad to go one voyage in that situation, for there may be occasions, when officers may be called upon to do the duties of a common man.’
To this honourable request Bligh had responded favourably. Christian was taken on board the Britannia as a seaman, and on his return from the West Indies, according to his brother, ‘spoke of Captain Bligh with great respect’. He had worked hard alongside the common sailors, but ‘the Captain had been kind to him’, instructing him in the art of navigation. At the same time Christian had observed ‘that Captain Bligh was very passionate; yet he seemed to pride himself in knowing how to humour him.’ On their second voyage Christian was entered as nominal ‘gunner’ but, as Bligh made clear, was to be treated as an officer. Christian, it would seem, had become Bligh’s protégé. Bligh had taken pains not only to instruct the ambitious young man, but to elevate him, regularly inviting him to join him and his officers at his table for dinner. Christian for his part must have passed muster with his captain, for Bligh was not one to suffer fools, and it was Bligh who recommended Christian to the Admiralty as midshipman on the Bounty. ‘As it was understood that great interest had been made to get Midshipmen sent out in this ship,’ Fletcher’s brother would write, ‘Christian’s friends thought this recommendation…a very great obligation.’ On the return from the South Seas, Fletcher could expect to be promoted to lieutenant.
This promising naval career had not been in the Christian family’s original plans for its second-youngest son; and as the family itself was to play a significant part in the shaping of the events ahead, it is well to introduce its members here. Fletcher Christian was born on 25 September 1764, in his parents’ home in Cumberland, and had been baptized that same day, in Brigham Church, some two miles distant. Baptism on the day of birth was unusual, and implies that the newborn child was not expected to live. His parents, Charles and Ann, had already lost two infants.
Charles Christian came from an old Manx family that had been settled on the English mainland since the seventeenth century. At the age of twenty-two he had married Ann Dixon, the daughter of a dyer and a member of the local gentry well connected with other important north-country families. Ann’s mother was a Fletcher, another old and established Cumberland family. It was after his grandmother’s family that Fletcher Christian was named.
Charles had grown up in the Christians’ ancestral home, Ewanrigg, a forty-two-bedroomed mansion with crenellated battlements overlooking the sea. Reputedly, the property had been won by the Christians from the Bishop of Sodor and Man in a card game. Charles’s mother, Bridget Senhouse, could trace her ancestry back fourteen generations to King Edward I. Such distinctions bore little practical weight, however, and as a younger son (and one of eleven children), Charles inherited only his name and some shares in various family interests. Like all but the eldest son, he was expected to make his own way, which he did as an attorney-at-law, and later as coroner for Cumberland. The main boost to his fortune was his marriage – Ann brought with her a small but respectable property called Moorland Close, just outside Cockermouth, described locally as ‘a quadrangular pile of buildings, in the style of the mediæval manor house, half castle and half farmstead.’ The surrounding wall, originally built to rebuff Scottish border raiders, during Fletcher’s boyhood benignly enclosed an orchard and gardens, while the former guard stand had been converted into a little summer house.
Ten children were born to the young couple, six of whom survived infancy. Fletcher was the fifth surviving child, born twelve years after his eldest brother, John. Although Fletcher was raised in a large family, with cousins and relatives nearby in every direction, his childhood was made precarious by the early death of his father, who passed away in 1768. A month before he died, Charles Christian had written his will declaring himself ‘weak of body’, which suggests a protracted illness.
Ann Christian was now left to raise six children on her own. Fletcher was not yet four; his elder brothers, John, Edward and Charles, were sixteen, ten and six, respectively; his sister, Mary, was eight, while little Humphrey was just three months old. Money was, and evidently had long been, a problem. As early as the year of his first son’s birth, Charles Christian senior had borrowed from his eldest brother, and family records indicate a series of other large ‘loans’ made in later years. Still, under Ann’s management, care was given to Fletcher’s education, and he was sent first to Brigham’s one-room parish school and then to the Cockermouth Free School, which he attended for seven years – and where a younger contemporary was William Wordsworth, the future Poet Laureate.
Cockermouth and Moorland Close stood on the edge of the Lake District, ‘the wildest, most barren and frightful’ landscape in England. Years later, Wordsworth would romanticize and memorialize the savage grandeur of fractured crags and sweeping valleys, scored with streams and dark tarns. Cockermouth, situated against the backdrop of Mt Skiddaw on the Derwent and Cocker Rivers, was by all accounts a pleasant market town, its two main streets lined with stout stone houses roofed with thatch and blue slate.
Little is known of Fletcher Christian’s Cumberland upbringing, but his schoolmate William Wordsworth never forgot the wild freedom this countryside gave his childhood:
Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child,
In a small mill-race severed from his stream,
Made one long bathing of a summer’s day;
Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again
Alternate, all a summer’s day, or scoured
The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves
Of yellow ragwort; or when rock and hill,
The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,
Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone
Beneath the sky, as if I had been born
On Indian plains, and from my mother’s hut
Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport,
A naked savage, in the thunder shower.
While Fletcher Christian rode back and forth between the orchards and gardens of Moorland Close to Cockermouth, his two oldest brothers, John and Edward, went off to Cambridge and to professions in law. It was Edward who, as a new Fellow of his college, handled his mother’s affairs when her finances finally and fatally bottomed out. The crisis occurred in 1779, although to judge from the size of her debts it had been building for years. Somehow, together with her eldest son, John, she had managed to accumulate debts to the tune of £6490 os. 11d. The family, it appears, had been living for years with no regard for reality, and now Ann Christian was faced with the humiliating prospect of debtor’s prison. John Christian, her husband’s wealthy brother and head of the family, once again bailed them out, but seems to have made it clear that he could not be counted upon to do so again. In partial compensation, John Christian assumed ownership of Moorland Close and all effects attached to it.
Through Edward’s special pleading and contributions from his own modest Fellowship, he succeeded in scraping together an annuity of forty guineas per annum for his mother, with which, as he observed, she would ‘be able to live comfortably any where, so that if she is not secure from arrests at Moorland Close, I should have now no objections to the family’s removing to the Isle of Man.’ In the course of these negotiations with his wealthy uncle, Edward indicated the hope that ‘in time perhaps some of us may be in such circumstances as to think it a desirable object to redeem the place of our nativity.’ This touching aspiration was never to be realized. In October 1779, an advertisement was run on the front page of the Cumberland Pacquet for ‘that large commodious House situated in the Market Place of Cockermouth’ formerly belonging to John Christian, Fletcher and Edward’s oldest brother. Edward briefly became headmaster of Hawkshead Grammar School in Cumberland, where one of his pupils was Wordsworth. After seeking a position as a naval surgeon, Charles junior, the third son, entered the West Yorkshire Militia Regiment, commanded by Sir George Savile, who wrote glancingly of him, noting that ‘Mr. Christian [is] well satisfied & happy I believe in his situation. Indeed he is very deserving,’ which suggests the special attention of an aristocratic patron with ‘interest’ in his new recruit. When the regiment disbanded, Charles Christian went to Edinburgh to study medicine, and then qualified as a surgeon aboard an East India vessel called the Middlesex.
The fact that Ann Christian, with her daughter, Mary, and young Humphrey, emigrated to the Isle of Man suggests that she was not, after all, ‘secure from arrest’: debts acquired on the mainland could not be pursued here, and the island had become a haven for financially distressed gentry. Fletcher, now about fifteen, attended St Bees School, close to Whitehaven in Cumberland, but would have been a summer visitor to the island between school terms, where he encountered another part of his heritage. Here, on the Isle of Man, the Christians were an ancient and distinguished family who could trace their lineage back in an unbroken line of male successors to 1408, the year in which John MacCrysten, deemster or judge of the island, had put his signature on a deed.
It was not, however, in the magnificent, castle-like Christian family home of Milntown, with its sixteenth-century gardens and doors reputedly made from the wreckage of the Spanish Armada, that Ann and her family had settled. Bound to live within the means of her modest annuity, Ann Christian had taken her family to Douglas, where she rented property. Facing the Irish Sea and backed by miles of rolling, sparsely inhabited countryside, Douglas was more isolated and more remote than Cockermouth. It was home to just under three thousand souls. Herring sheds, a small shipyard and a brewery represented local industry. Douglas society, according to a contemporary English diarist, was ‘not of the best kind, much like that in our common Country Towns.’ But life here was cheap: no taxes, a ‘good living House at £8 a year’, and port wine for ten pence a bottle.
Between Cumberland and the Isle of Man, then, young Fletcher Christian had lived within the shadow of family greatness, even if the shadow was not cast by his own immediate kin. No evidence survives of how he passed the years between St Bees School and his sudden resurfacing in the muster roll of the Eurydice in 1783. The younger sons of Charles and Ann Christian would have been brought up to look forward to university and careers in law, following the paths of John and Edward; but the money had run out. Fletcher’s late coming to his profession, his staying ‘at school longer than young men generally do who enter into the navy’, may have been the result of family stalling, a hope that something ‘would come up’ to change their fortunes. Nevertheless, Fletcher’s proposal to Bligh – that ‘he would readily enter his ship as a Foremastman’ – indicates that the young man had accepted with great grace and optimistic courage this abrupt change of destinies.
Another of the Bounty’s newly recruited young gentlemen had a family background remarkably similar to that of Fletcher Christian. In fact, Peter Heywood was distantly related to the Christians: his great-aunt Elizabeth had married another John Christian of Douglas, and both the Christians and his mother’s family, the Speddings, had married into the ancient Cumberland family of Curwen. On his father’s side, Peter Heywood could trace his ancestry back to Piers E’Wood in 1164, who had settled after the Norman invasion near Heywood, Lancashire. A branch of the family eventually emigrated to the Isle of Man, of whom the most famous member had been Peter ‘Powderplot’ Heywood, who had apprehended Guy Fawkes and so forestalled the plot to blow up Parliament in 1605.
Peter was born on 5 June 1772, on the Isle of Man, in his father’s house, the Nunnery, a romantic former abbey set in extensive gardens about half a mile up the hill from Douglas, and the most imposing property in the area. Peter’s father, Peter John Heywood, like many of the Manx Christians before him, was a deemster of the island, and took a scholar’s interest in the Manx language, unusual for his time.
But while Heywood may have been a learned man, he appears not to have been highly practical. The next year, he was forced by debts to sell the Nunnery, surrender his position as deemster, and move to Whitehaven, close to where Fletcher Christian was to go to school.
Exactly how the Heywoods survived over the next few years remains unclear, but in 1781, Mr Heywood was offered the appointment as seneschal, or agent, of the Duke of Atholl’s estate and holdings on the Isle of Man. Young Peter had moved back to the island with his large family of ten brothers and sisters, and settled in Douglas, where Fletcher’s mother was now also residing, and where the presence of the Nunnery must have been a constant, bitter reminder of more prosperous days.
In July 1787, only a month before Bligh received his orders for the Bounty, Peter’s father was unceremoniously dismissed by the Duke of Atholl when it was discovered that he not only had been wildly mishandling the Duke’s estate, but had also pocketed several thousand pounds of his employer’s income. Confronted with his wrongdoing, Mr Heywood had responded with self-righteous hauteur; among other tactics, he pointed out that his family could be traced as far back as the Atholls. This inability to assume any responsibility, let alone culpability, for his actions so incensed his employer that the Duke felt compelled to offer a personal rebuke. For years, he observed to Mr Heywood, ‘you have been living in a Stile of profusion far beyond your fortune, and to the detriment of your own Children spending money belonging to another.’
Mr Heywood’s sudden loss of employment had brought disaster to his family, who were forced to move out of their house, which was the Duke’s property. On the other hand, the disgrace of Mr Heywood’s offence was studiously concealed and there is no whisper of any misdeed in all the Heywood papers down through the decades after this. Apparently unashamed, the children seemed to have passed through life with all their illusions of superior gentility intact.
Peter had been sent away to school at the age of eleven, first to Nantwich school in Cheshire and then, briefly, also to St Bees, at which establishments he would have received a gentleman’s usual diet of religious instruction and Latin. His teacher at Nantwich had published books on Livy and Tacitus, and so one may hazard that young Peter had his fill of these. Unlike Fletcher, however, a seagoing career of some kind had probably been on the cards for Peter, regardless of changed family circumstances; the number of naval and military careers in the Heywood pedigree suggests this was an honoured tradition. Peter’s first naval service had been aboard the Powerful, in 1786. The Powerful, however, had never left Plymouth Harbour. As this represented his only naval experience prior to joining the Bounty, he had not yet served at sea.
Peter’s position as a young gentleman and an AB on the Bounty came through the sympathetic and pitying offices of William Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, a friend of the Heywoods. ‘He is an ingenious young Lad & has always been a favorite of mine & indeed every body here,’ Betham wrote to Bligh from Douglas, thanking him for taking Peter under his wing. ‘And indeed the Reason of my insisting so strenuously upon his going the Voyage with you is that after I had mentioned the matter to Mrs Bligh, his Family have fallen into a great deal of Distress on account of their Father’s losing the Duke of Atholl’s Business, and I thought it would not appear well in me to drop this matter if it cou’d possibly be done without any prejudice to you, as this wou’d seem deserting them in their adversity, and I found they wou’d regard it as a great Disappointment.’ Betham did not apparently envisage young Peter’s duties as being particularly nautical. ‘I hope he will be of some Service to you, so far as he is able, in writing or looking after any necessary matters under your charge,’ Betham had added, vaguely.
In the summer of 1787, Mr Heywood accompanied his son from the Isle of Man to Liverpool. Here he bade Peter goodbye, entrusting him to the care of friends who were travelling to London by chaise along the long, rough road, each carrying a pair of loaded pistols as a guard against highwaymen. Once at Deptford, as another token of Bligh’s efforts for the young man, Peter stayed with Bligh and his wife at their lodgings while the Bounty was being equipped. Christian had relatives in London of his own to visit, including an uncle and his brother John, who had moved here after his bankruptcy. Given Christian’s already close association with Bligh, it would be incredible that he too did not visit the Bligh household at this time. ‘You have danced my children upon your knee,’ Bligh would remind the master’s mate at a later date.
Also joining the Bounty, rated as a nominal AB, was another fallen aristocrat of sorts, twenty-one-year-old Edward Young. Edward was the nephew of Sir George Young, a distinguished naval captain and future admiral who had served in both the Royal Navy and the East India Company. ‘As I do not know all his exploits,’ one memorialist offered breezily, ‘I can only state that he was employed…in several services requiring nautical skill and British courage.’ Since 1784, George Young had been an advocate, with Sir Joseph Banks, of establishing the New South Wales colony, which he envisaged would serve as a port of call for ships on the China trade and more unexpectedly a centre for the cultivation of flax. A paper outlining his proposal became a cornerstone of the government’s eventual establishment of a penal colony near Botany Bay. It is probable that it was through his connection with Banks that Young had approached Bligh about a position for Edward.
However, there is no family record of a nephew called Edward. On the Bounty muster, Edward is entered as coming from ‘St Kitt’s’, and a near contemporary reference mentions him as ‘half-caste’. He was described by Bligh as roughly five foot eight in height, with a dark complexion ‘and rather a bad look’. Young had dark brown hair, was ‘Strong Made’ and had ‘lost several of his Fore teeth, and those that remain are all Rotten; a Small Mole on the left Side of the throat.’ If Edward was indeed a nephew of Sir George, it is most likely that his father had been Robert Young, a younger brother who had died in 1781 on St Helena while captain of the East India Company’s Vansittart. Whereas other distinguished families associated with the Bounty would be loud in their opinions, news of the mutiny was met with a thundering silence by the Youngs. If Edward had been born on the wrong side of the blanket, there may have been relief when he vanished from the picture altogether.
Yet another young gentleman, George Stewart from the Orkney Islands, joined the Bounty as a midshipman, but was rerated AB before the ship sailed (the ship’s fixed allotment of two midshipman positions required judicious management on Bligh’s part). Bligh had met Stewart seven years earlier, when the Resolution had called at Stromness at the end of her long and harrowing voyage. In their home, the Whitehouse, overlooking the harbour and the bustling town with its inns and taverns, Alexander and Margaret Stewart, George’s parents, had entertained Bligh.
Like so many of the Bounty’s young gentlemen, George Stewart could trace an old and distinguished lineage. His father’s family could be traced back to King Robert II, in the thirteenth century; his mother could trace her descent back to Danes who had settled the Orkneys in the ninth century. Alexander Stewart had been born and lived on Ronaldsay in the Orkneys, but had moved to Stromness for his children’s schooling; he and his wife had eight children, of whom George was the eldest. Apparently, when word of the Bounty’s voyage reached them, the Stewarts had reminded Bligh of their former acquaintance; surely the stories the young master had told the Stewart family seven years earlier, upon his return from the Pacific had made George’s interest in this particular voyage especially keen.
When he came down to Deptford to join the Bounty, George Stewart was twenty-one years old and ‘five feet seven inches high’, according to Bligh, who continued with an unprepossessing description: ‘High, good Complexion, Dark Hair, Slender Made, Narrow chested, and long Neck, Small Face and Black Eyes.’
The last of the Bounty’s young gentlemen was fifteen-year-old John Hallett from London, the son of John Hallett, an architect, and his wife, Hannah. He had four younger brothers, all of whom would later be employed by the East India Company, and one half-sister, the ‘natural child’ of Mr Hallett. Midshipman Hallett’s father was a wealthy man, with a residence in Manchester Buildings, a gentlemen’s row of private houses situated just off the Thames, almost opposite Westminster Bridge and in strolling distance of St James’s Park. The Halletts, like the Haywards, belonged to the energetic, gentlemanly professional class possessed of actual skills – doctors and architects as opposed to seneschals or bankrupt country lawyers.
Hallett Senior moved in a distinguished circle of artists, including members of the Royal Academy. His niece had married into a prosperous family of merchants and shipbuilders, with a home in fashionable Tunbridge, where Mr Hallett was often found. From diarist Joseph Farington, who recorded a number of dinners and other social occasions at which Mr Hallett was present, we are given a glimpse of the Bounty midshipman’s circle: ‘Mr. Hallett spoke of several persons who from a low beginning had made great fortunes,’ Farington noted after a London dinner, going on to describe a leather breeches maker now established on Bond Street and said to be worth £150,000. War with Russia would only ruin Russia’s trade, as England could do without her goods. A neighbour recently died having ‘expended £50,000 it was not well known how’ – all good solid, middle-class, mercantile discussion.
Young John Hallett was already well on the road to a naval career when he joined the Bounty. He had been entered on the books as a lieutenant’s servant in 1777, at the age of five, and on the books of four subsequent ships as a captain’s servant. Prior to joining the Bounty, he had been on the Alarm, which had paid off in Port Royal, Jamaica, when the ship was taken out of commission. This had occurred four years previously, and one assumes young Hallett, at age eleven, was getting his schooling during the interim. John Hallett Sr appears to have been acquainted with Banks, and wrote to him thanking him for getting his son’s position. While the Bounty was swarming with young gentlemen – officers in training, midshipmen in waiting – the only two to hold the coveted midshipmen’s slots were Thomas Hayward and John Hallett, both protégés of Banks.
In early October, Bligh prepared the Bounty to leave the Thames for Spithead, Portsmouth, where he was to await official orders to sail. The ship, now copper-sheathed, had been completely refitted and was stuffed with supplies – not just the food stores, clothing or ‘slops’, fuel, water, rum and bulk necessities, but all the miscellaneous minutiae of the gardener’s trade, as inventoried on a list supplied by Banks: paper, pens, ink, India ink, ‘Colours of all kinds’, spade, pins, wire, fly traps, an insect box, bottles, knives, ‘Journal Books & other usefull Books’, guns and gunpowder, shot and flints, and ‘Trinkets for the Natives’, which included mirrors and eighty pounds of white, blue and red glass beads. Bligh had also been given sixty-one ducats and forty-five Spanish dollars for the purchase of plants. Eight hundred variously sized pots for the breadfruit plants had been stowed, but as David Nelson reported to Banks plaintively, ‘as I have only room for 600, the remainder may possibly be broken.’ The pots had been made extra deep for drainage by ‘Mr. Dalton, potter’, near Deptford Creek.
Every British naval seaman brought certain expectations to each ship he joined. He expected to endure hard labour in raw conditions, and was ever mindful that he was vulnerable to harsh and often arbitrary punishment at the hands of his officers. He expected to eat very specifically measured amounts of rank food, and to drink much liquor. Above all, he expected to exist for the duration of his service in stifling, unhygienic squalor. There would be no privacy. As the official naval allotment of fourteen inches sleeping space for each man suggests, space was always at a premium – but nowhere more so than on the little Bounty, now crammed with supplies for eighteen months’ voyaging and trade. Her fo’c’sle, an unventilated, windowless area of 22 by 36 feet, was shared by thirty-three men, while the maximum height between decks amidships was 5 feet 7 inches – the average height of the men she carried. The master’s mates, midshipmen, and young gentlemen – Fletcher Christian and a William Elphinstone, Hayward and Hallett, Peter Heywood, George Stewart, Edward Young and Robert Tinkler – were all quartered directly behind Bligh’s little pantry, separated, it is suggested, merely by canvas walls.
On deck, amid the piles of stores, were the Bounty’s three boats. The Navy Board had placed an order for these as early as June, but the usual supplier, swamped with other work, had been forced to cry off. The Board then turned to a private contractor to build a launch of 20 feet in length with copper fastenings, and to the Deal boatyard for a cutter and a jolly boat of 18 and 16 feet, respectively. For reasons known only to himself, Bligh requested of the Navy Board that the launch and cutter, which had already been supplied, be replaced with larger models. The Board complied, and thus was acquired one of the most historic craft in maritime history, the Bounty’s 23-foot-long, 2-foot-9-inch-deep launch.
On 9 October 1787, a drear, dull day, the pilot arrived to take the Bounty out of the Thames on the first leg of her voyage. In the Long Reach she received her gunner’s stores. Officially designated as an ‘Armed Vessel’, she was equipped with ‘four short four-pounder carriage guns and ten half-pounder swivel guns’, to quote the Admiralty’s directive – a laughably meagre firepower. Additionally, there were small arms, muskets, powder and bayonets, all locked in the arms chest, supposedly at all times under the key of the ship’s master, John Fryer.
The Bounty herself was in her glory – newly fitted out to the tune of thousands of pounds, sails set, piled with stores, guns gleaming and swarming with her men, the midshipmen in their smart blue coats, Bligh in his blue-and-white-piped lieutenant’s uniform with its bright gilt buttons, and the seamen in their long, baggy trousers and boxy jackets: Charles Churchill, with his disfigured hand showing ‘the Marks of a Severe Scald’; German-speaking Henry Hilbrant, strong and sandy-haired, but with ‘His Left Arm Shorter than the other having been broke’; Alexander Smith, ‘Very much pitted’ with smallpox, and bearing an axe scar on his right foot; John Sumner, slender, fair and with a ‘Scar upon the left Cheek’; William McCoy, scarred by a stab wound in the belly; William Brown, the gardener, also fair and slender, but bearing a ‘remarkable Scar on one of his Cheeks Which contracts the Eye Lid and runs down to his throat.’ With the knowledge of hindsight, they are a piratical-looking crew.
The Bounty lingered at Long Reach for nearly a week before receiving orders to proceed to Spithead, the naval anchorage outside Portsmouth Harbour. But ‘the winds and weather were so unfavorable’, in Bligh’s words, that the short journey down the Thames and around the coast took nearly three weeks to complete.
‘I have been very anxious to acquaint you of my arrival here, which I have now accomplished with some risk,’ Bligh wrote to Banks on 5 November from Spithead. ‘I anchored here last night, after being drove on the coast of France in a very heavy gale.’ His plan, as he now related, was to make as swiftly as possible for Cape Horn in order to squeak through a diminishing window of opportunity for rounding the tempestuous Cape so late in the season; as he observed to Banks, ‘if I get the least slant round the Cape I must make the most of it.’ Bligh was awaiting not only a break in the weather, but also his sailing orders, without which he could not sail. He did not, however, anticipate any difficulties, noting that ‘the Commissioner promises me every assistance, and I have no doubt but the trifles I have to do here will be soon accomplished.’
The days passed and the weather broke, and still Bligh’s sailing orders did not arrive. As the delay lengthened, his wife, Betsy, broke off nursing their youngest daughter, who was stricken with smallpox, and came down from their home in Wapping to take lodgings in Portsmouth. With impotent exasperation, Bligh watched other ships weigh anchor and slip serenely down the Channel, in the fair, fine weather. Each day that passed, as he knew, reduced the odds of a good passage around the Horn.
There had already been warning signs that the Bounty’s voyage, so beloved to Joseph Banks, did not stand quite so high in Admiralty eyes. Back in September, Bligh had received a distinguished visitor at the Deptford docks. Lord Selkirk, a Scottish earl, ostensibly came down to use his interest to find a position for his son’s tutor, William Lockhead, who was ‘an enthusiast in regard to Natural History’ and ‘most anxious to go round the World with Mr. Bligh’; Selkirk’s son, the Honourable Dunbar Douglas, was already set to join the Bounty as yet another gentleman ‘able seaman’. With his own son destined to sail with her, Selkirk took a closer look than most at the Bounty; alarmed at what he had seen, he wrote a frank and urgent report to Banks, drawing attention to ominous deficiencies.
The rating of Bligh’s vessel as a cutter, and not a sloop of war, was ‘highly improper for so long a voyage’, Selkirk wrote on 14 September, pointing out that the ship’s establishment did not include ‘a Lieutenant, or any Marines’. Marines essentially served the role of the commander’s security force, and Cook had never sailed on his Pacific voyages with fewer than twelve.
But perhaps most troubling to Lord Selkirk was the issue of Bligh’s own status: ‘I was sorry to find…Mr. Bligh himself is but very indifferently used, or rather I think realy ill used,’ Selkirk had written with some force. ‘It would have been scrimply Justice to him to have made him Master & Commander before sailing: nay considering that he was, I believe, the only person that was not in some way or other prefer’d at their return of all who went last out with Capt. Cook, it would be no unreasonable thing to make him Post Captain now.’ Cook, on his very first Pacific voyage, had also sailed as a lieutenant – but the prestige of that voyage had never been in question.
Although Selkirk did not disclose the fact, he was an old friend of Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, and it is probable that he had been leaned upon to communicate family concerns to Banks. These concerns were openly expressed in the farewell letter Betham himself wrote to Bligh a week later, offering his good wishes for the long voyage ahead: ‘I own I have a different Idea of [the voyage] from what I had conceived before I was acquainted with the Circumstances of the Vessel, & the manner in which it is fitted out,’ he told his son-in-law. ‘Government I think have gone too frugally to work: Both the Ship and the Complement of Men are too small in my opinion for such a voyage. Lord Howe may understand Navy matters very well, but I suppose mercantile Projects are treated by him with Contempt.’
‘Contempt’ is perhaps too strong a word; but the accumulation of troubling details – the miserably small ship, the determinedly lower rating, Bligh’s own status and the apparent lack of urgency in getting sailing orders – tend to suggest that collecting breadfruit in Tahiti was not at the top of the Admiralty’s list. Among other things, England seemed poised for yet another war, this time with Holland.
‘Every thing here wears the appearance of War being at hand,’ Duncan Campbell had written to a Jamaican colleague on 29 September. ‘Seaman’s Wages & every naval Store have of course risen to War prices.’ To an Admiralty intent on mobilizing ships and men, the Bounty’s breadfruit run to the Pacific was only a distraction. Three weeks would pass before Bligh received his sailing orders, by which time the fair conditions had changed.
On 28 November 1787, Bligh headed the Bounty out to sea, and got as far as St Helens on the Isle of Wight, an inconsequential distance, where he was forced to anchor. For the next twenty-four days, the Bounty bounced between Spithead and St Helens as each successive attempt to get down Channel failed in the teeth of contrary winds. Master Fryer and William Peckover, the gunner, were laid up by the bad weather with ‘rheumatic complaints’ and a number of his men had severe colds. Resentment and anxiety that had been mounting in Bligh for months rose to the fore.
‘If there is any punishment that ought to be inflicted on a set of Men for neglect I am sure it ought on the Admiralty for my three weeks detention at this place during a fine fair wind which carried all outward bound ships clear of the channel but me, who wanted it most,’ Bligh fumed in a letter to Duncan Campbell. It was 10 December, and he was back at St Helens, pinned in the cabin. This has made my task a very arduous one indeed for to get round Cape Horn at the time I shall be there. I know not how to promise myself any success and yet I must do it if the ship will stand it at all or I suppose my character will be at stake. Had Lord Howe sweetened this difficult task by giving me promotion I should have been satisfied.’
The question of promotion worried Bligh grievously. At the very least, as he had written to Banks, ‘that one step would make a material difference to Mrs. Bligh and her children in case of any accident to me.’ Moved by Bligh’s entreaties, Banks personally approached Lord Howe, the revered First Lord of the Admiralty, but without success, being told such advancement ‘was designed intirely as a reward to those who had engaged in the War equipment’; in other words, breadfruit expeditions did not count.
The hardship I make known I lay under, is that they took me from a state of affluence from your employ,’ Bligh continued, unburdening himself to Duncan Campbell, ‘with an income five hundred a Year to that of Lieut’s pay 4/- per day to perform a Voyage which few were acquainted with sufficiently to ensure it any degree of success.’
But interest had gone as far as it could. Meanwhile, if war was indeed at hand, this would be the occasion for promotions, although not for Lieutenant Bligh, off in the Pacific.
‘Poor fellow,’ Campbell would say of Bligh, somewhat later. Ignobly batted back and forth across the Channel entrance, Bligh, while not quite getting cold feet, was clearly assessing the risks of the voyage to which he was committed. Low pay was to have been compensated by promotion and the prestige of the undertaking; but there was no promotion and the prestige had already evaporated. Frustrated, demoralized, already tested by the weather, Bligh had not yet even left England.
‘It is wished to impress it strongly on your mind that the whole success of the undertaking depends ultimately upon your diligence and care,’ Banks wrote in an oppressively stern letter to the poor gardener David Nelson – but the warning applied equally to Bligh. ‘And that your future prospects in life will greatly depend upon your conduct on this occasion.’
One person on board, at least, benefited from the delay in the Bounty’s departure. Thanks to the rough weather, Fletcher Christian was able to meet his brother Charles, who had recently returned to England on the Middlesex, the East Indiaman on which he had been ship’s surgeon.
‘When the Middlesex returned from India, the Bounty lay near to where she was moored,’ Charles Christian recounted in an unpublished memoir many years later. ‘Fletcher came on Board coming up the River, and he and I and one of our Officers who had been in the Navy went on Shore, and spent the Evening and remained till next Day.’ There were family matters to discuss; their sister Mary had died in her twenty-sixth year, more than eighteen months before; their youngest brother, Humphrey, was soon to go to Africa. Doubtless, too, the brothers conferred over family finances. Things were looking up for Fletcher who, returned from the West Indies, could report that he was now off to Tahiti, with Cook’s sailing master.
But all of this was overshadowed by the news Charles Christian had to tell his younger brother. Certain events had transpired on the Middlesex that had shaken him to his core – indeed, they were eventually to lead to his mental breakdown. Two weeks before the arrival of the Middlesex in England, Charles Christian had been involved in a mutiny.
Trouble had begun as early as Fort Saint George, in Madras. David Fell, the second officer, claimed that he had been unlawfully confined on the ship, and that the governor of the fort had interceded and ordered him released. The Company’s surviving records tend to bear this out, showing that in July 1787 the Directors praised the governor for the ‘manner in which you interfered in the Disputes on board the Middlesex.’
The real trouble came to a head two months later, however, as the ship approached English shores. On 5 September, according to the log of Captain John Rogers, Mr Grece, seaman, was placed in irons ‘for Presenting a Loaded Pistol to my Breast with a threat that he would put the first Man to death who would offer to touch him.’ The first and second officers attempted to aid John William Grece and were dismissed ‘for aiding & assisting in the above Mutinous Conspiracy’ as well as ‘for Drunkeness, Insolent Language & striking at me on the Quarter Deck…The Surgeon also in the Conspiracy.’
Two days later, George Aitken, the dismissed first officer, came on deck when Captain Rogers was present, an action the captain interpreted as hostile. Calling on his other officers, Rogers had Aitken and David Fell confined below, ‘battened them both in their Cabbins,’ with a scuttle cut in the door for air. Twelve days later, the Middlesex reached the Downs, the sheltered anchorage between Dover and the Thames estuary.
The captain’s log, however, did not give the entire story. Upon return to England, the Middlesex officers and men sent a stream of furious and aggrieved letters to the East India Company’s Court of Directors, charging Captain John Rogers with brutal conduct.
‘I see myself bearing with Silence, insults, excessive severe to my Feelings, considering the Character I held,’ wrote seaman William Grece. Shortly before the fateful day of the mutiny, he claimed to have been ‘wantonly insulted’ by one of the passengers in the presence of the commander, who later ‘sent for me, Bent me, Ordered me to be Flogged to Death, and I believe, there was not much Hyperbole in this Order,’ Grece wrote, his rage still palpable in the fraught diction of his letter. ‘I am sure if He had dared, He would have done it, and ordered me in Irons, in which Situation, he treated me with inhumanity unparrelled, this every man in the Ship knows – all commanders of the Royal Navy allow Prisoners to do the necessary calls of Nature in another place than the small space, that they are confined in…
‘I think much Stress was laid with regard to the Pistol,’ poor Grece now ventured, knowing he was on thin ice: such an act in the navy would have meant his death. ‘I for a moment thought, to prevent myself being Seized, to be Flogged, but my conduct shews I had no intention of using it.’
The first and second officers leaped to Grece’s assistance, implicating themselves in the mutiny. They were joined by Charles Christian, whose own intervention resulted ‘from a sudden ebullition of passion springing from humane sympathy at seeing cruel usage exercised towards one who deserved far different treatment – on putting an ingenious, unoffending, insulted, oppressed, worthy young man into irons, by the capricious orders of tyranny influenced by a hollow sycophant,’ to quote Charles’s own, impassioned and inimitable account. Grece, Aitken and Fell were all roughly imprisoned, a punishment Charles escaped.
The Court of Directors deliberated, and handed out penalties all around. Captain Rogers was rebuked for not informing the Company of his actions towards his officers, and fined £500 and a year’s suspension for the unrelated offence of refusing passage to a Company seaman at Madras. Grece, Aitken, Fell and Christian were all handed suspensions – Grece for his lifetime, Charles Christian for two years.
But the incident did not end here. Although the final accounting would not be given until long after the Bounty had sailed, it has much bearing on Charles Christian’s credibility. The aggrieved parties brought civil suits against the captain.
‘I had to appear as the principal, the sole witness in their favour,’ Charles reported. ‘Lord Loughborough complimented me in court for the impartial and steady manner in which I gave my testimony.’ By juries’ verdicts, the plaintiffs were awarded £3000 in damages – an enormous sum, which must be taken as a reflection of the strength of their suit.
No doubt Charles Christian told the same story that had so impressed Lord Loughborough to his brother Fletcher, as they talked through the stormy night at the riverside inn. Charles’s friend First Officer George Aitken would have had his own heated version to relate of having been battened inside his cabin for his principled stand. But it seems that it was Charles who had been most affected by the events.
‘I went on board of this ship in hopes,’ he wrote, ‘as a tree in a state of pleasing promising blossom – full of life and active vigour. I returned as one withered with blight, palsy-struck, disappointed, dispirited, and full of heart-damping trouble.’ He was also impoverished. Before setting out he had borrowed £500 on credit for trade goods, but the ‘markets were glutted at Madras and at Canton in China, by the unusual number of ships sent out that season,’ and the money was lost.
For Fletcher Christian, these were unsettling stories to hear on the eve of departure, and he left his brother a broken man, with the judgement of the mutiny still hanging over him. In his turn, Charles’s last memory of Fletcher was more cheerful: ‘He was then full of professional Ambition and of Hope. He bared his Arm, and I was amazed at its Brawniness. “This,” says he, “has been acquired by hard labour.” He said “I delight to set the Men an Example. I not only can do every part of a common Sailor’s Duty, but am upon a par with a principal part of the Officers.”’
When the weather at last permitted the Bounty to sail on 23 December, both Bligh and Christian had much upon their minds – Bligh, demoralized and resentful; Christian, ambitious, but burdened with family matters, and shaken with the revelation of how a man could be broken by an oppressor’s tyranny. Both had everything to gain or lose on the Bounty voyage.
After many exertions on their behalf, neither Lord Selkirk’s son, the Honourable Dunbar Douglas, nor his eager tutor sailed with the Bounty. The tutor never obtained a position, and the young gentleman departed the ship just before she left Long Reach for the open sea. Perhaps his father had continued to mull over the ship’s troubling deficiencies – her improper size, Bligh’s lack of a single commissioned officer, the absence of marines to back his authority – and concluded that this was not, after all, an enterprise on which he cared for his own son to stake his life.
VOYAGE OUT (#ulink_10747413-f72e-591f-abf7-4f046df48f76)
On 23 December, the Bounty sailed at break of a boisterous, cloudy day. By night she was already battling heavy squalls. Near disaster occurred within the first twenty-four hours, when one of the sailors fell from the main topgallant sail, and narrowly saved himself by grabbing a stay. As rain and sleet drove down, Bligh ordered the sails close-reefed, the deadlights in and hatches battened. Heavy seas struck the ship, carrying away extra sails and a yard. By the evening of the twenty-fifth the weather had abated, which, as Bligh noted in his log, ‘allowed us to spend our Christmas pleasantly.’ Beef and plum pudding were served for dinner, washed down with an allowance of rum.
The well-timed respite was brief, and in the following days the heavy gales increased to a storm that piled up alarming, huge seas. Sleet and rain stung the men as they lurched and fumbled at their duties, and the Bounty herself was slammed with great waves that stove in all the boats, almost washing them overboard.
‘We were an entire Sea on Deck,’ Bligh recorded. The sham windows of the great cabin were also stove in, and water flooded inside. So severe was the wind that Bligh dared not attempt to turn his ship to lie to but, dangerously, was forced to scud ahead of the great following sea.
‘But the Ship scuds very well,’ he allowed – Bligh’s pride in the Bounty never flagged. When conditions allowed, he ordered fires lit to dry his men’s sodden gear. ‘Thick Rainy Weather’ continued, and belowdecks he found that casks of rum and stores of fish and bread had been damaged or destroyed by the thundering, incoming seas.
On 29 December, the weather diminished to a moderate gale. ‘Out all Reefs, Up Top G[allan]t Yards & set the sails,’ Bligh’s log sang out. Slowly the ship regrouped. Bligh ordered the men to wash all their dirty linen, and by noon shirts and breeches were hung all around the ship, fluttering in a fresh, drying breeze. Additional clothing and tobacco were given to the men, always a good move for restoring morale.
On 5 January, following a good run through the night, Tenerife was sighted, its landmark peak hidden in clouds. By break of the following day, the Bounty was safely moored off Santa Cruz. It was drizzling, but the winds were calm and the temperature pleasant, hovering just below 70 degrees.
Once anchored, Bligh detailed an officer to go ashore to pay respects to the governor. The officer in question is not named in Bligh’s log, but in a subsequent published narrative he pointedly reported that this was ‘Mr. Christian’. The delegation of the master’s mate for this vaguely prestigious function would suggest that at this early date Bligh regarded Christian as his de facto lieutenant. Christian had been instructed to request the governor’s permission to restock supplies and to repair the damaged ship. He was also to inform His Excellency that Lieutenant Bligh was willing to salute him provided that the salute was returned with the same number of guns; ‘but as his Excellency never returned the same Number but to persons equal in Rank to himself, this ceremony was laid aside.’ Still, Bligh was able to meet with the governor personally, thanking him ‘for his politeness and Civility’, and was later to dine with him.
While his ship was being prepared and stocked, Bligh toured Santa Cruz and made an informal survey of the harbour. He had been here before with Captain Cook, and this first port of call must have impressed upon him again the flattering thought that he was indeed following in his distinguished mentor’s footsteps. Although Santa Cruz was by now well-trodden ground, Bligh’s description of the town in his log is characteristically detailed and fulsome. In its barest form, a ship’s log was a record of daily weather, winds, mileage, position, and ‘Remarks’, which could be as spare as a simple notation of sails set and duties performed, or as descriptive as a proper journal, depending upon the nature of both the captain and his mission. Fortunately, Bligh was as meticulous in keeping his log as he was in performing all other aspects of nautical duty; by ‘Cloudy Weather,’ he observed in his preface, ‘is to be understood the Sun is not to be seen or but very seldom. Fair Weather or Open Cloudy Weather is when the Sun can be frequently seen…’ – nothing was left to chance. A log was also a legal document, a true and accurate account of daily proceedings, to be deposited with the Admiralty at voyage’s end. Bligh was to leave two logs of the Bounty voyage, one private and one official. Parts of each have been lost, but most of each survive, and when laid side by side they are identical in most respects. Where they do differ is enlightening; in general, Bligh was much freer with criticism of individuals, often named, in his private account, while such passages have been tactfully omitted in his official copy. Bligh’s logs of the Bounty are the only contemporary, running accounts of her voyage, written as events unfolded.
In the best expeditionary tradition, while at Santa Cruz Bligh had been careful to receive from the governor permission for David Nelson to do some botanizing in the surrounding hills. For his part, this time was mostly spent in overhauling his ship. His plan to replace damaged stores with fresh provisions, however, was disappointed, and in the end Santa Cruz supplied only 230 pounds of inferior beef, some pumpkins and potatoes. The Bounty had been victualled before departure with all the usual stores – biscuit, salt beef, pork, cheese, butter, malt, sauerkraut, peas, raisins, rum, spirits and beer, as well as the fairly innovative ‘portable soup’, slabs of dried bouillon intended as a defence against scurvy – calculated for approximately eighteen months of what would be at minimum a two-year voyage. Additional supplies, particularly fresh meat, greens and fruit, water and wood for fuel, were to be obtained en route at strategic ports of call, either by purchase or, where there were no settlements, by foraging.
Judging from the letters he wrote before leaving Tenerife, Bligh was in high spirits as he set out, despite his knowledge that the most problematic part of his journey – the rounding of Cape Horn – still lay ahead.
‘I have the happyness to tell you my little ship does wonderfully well,’ he wrote to Campbell. ‘I have her now the completest ship I believe that ever swam & she really looks like one fit to encounter difficulties…’ Before signing off, Bligh was pleased to inform him that a protégé of Campbell’s, young Tom Ellison, was ‘improving [and] will make a very good seaman.’ To Banks, Bligh reported that he and his men were ‘all in excellent spirits and I have still the greatest confidence of success in every part of the Voyage.’
On 11 January 1788, the Bounty fired a farewell salute and got under way. Only hours out to sea the ship was taken aback by rainy squalls. To ensure that his small crew would be as rested as possible for the almost certainly arduous passage ahead, Bligh ordered them into three watches, instead of the traditional two. In this manner, each watch was ensured a period of eight unbroken hours of sleep, instead of the traditional watch-and-watch – four hours on duty, four hours of sleep.
‘I have ever considered this among Seamen as Conducive to health,’ Bligh recorded in his log. ‘And not being Jaded by keeping on Deck every other four hours, it adds much to their Content and Cheerfulness.’ This was one of Cook’s innovations, and it undoubtedly was appreciated by Bligh’s men. In a decision that was to have unimagined consequences, Bligh designated Fletcher Christian, ‘one of the Mates’, as officer of the third watch.
As another measure against the uncertainties of the immediate passage ahead, Bligh mustered his company and announced that he was putting them on a ration of two-thirds allowance of bread or ship’s biscuit to ensure that it would last as long as possible. The sailors, respectful of what they knew the Horn could offer, understood this precaution, and according to James Morrison, it ‘was cheerfully received’.
The cloudy weather was soon cleared by fresh, light breezes. Four days out and the ship was actually becalmed, making only five miles in twenty-four hours. The men were kept busy airing bedding, drying bread, rechecking stores and sails. The light breezes returned and by 17 January the Bounty was ambling under clear skies through smooth seas.
‘Very pleasant Weather,’ Bligh logged. ‘All Sails set before the Wind.’ In these easygoing conditions he ordered the entire ship washed and then rinsed down with vinegar, which served as a disinfectant. This was to be a regular routine, as were his Sunday inspections of his mustered men, whose clothing and even fingernails he personally checked for cleanliness. Bligh’s model in this almost fetishistic concern for hygiene was Captain Cook. When Cook had found a man with dirty hands, he had stopped his grog. In an age in which more seamen were lost to disease than to naval wars, Cook had managed to return from voyages of several years’ duration with minimal fatalities. A diet of sauerkraut and sweet wort, or malt extract, the procuring of fresh produce wherever possible, the endless rigorous washings and inspections, the three watches – all these practices had been conscientiously noted by the young Bligh during his service to his formidable mentor and were now earnestly applied on his own little ship. Mandatory, and soon despised, dancing sessions were implemented under this same improving philosophy.
‘Sometime for relaxation and Mirth is absolutely necessary,’ Bligh had stated in his log, ‘and I have considered it so much so that after 4 O’Clock, the Evening is laid aside for their Amusement and dancing. I had great difficulty before I left England to get a Man to play the Violin and I prefered at last to take One two thirds Blind than come without one.’ This much-sought-after musician was the disagreeable Michael Byrn.
As the fair weather continued, the Bounty passed flying fish and porpoises, and occasionally spotted a shark. Towards the end of January, a fine moon shone on her as she sailed the dark night sea. Boobies, shearwaters and a man-of-war bird were seen, although far from land.
The pleasant and orderly passage was spoiled for Bligh by the discovery that his surgeon, the corpulent, lazy Thomas Huggan, was ‘a Drunken Sot’. Bligh was forced to record, ‘He is constantly in liquor, having a private Stock by him which I assured him shall be taken away if he does not desist from Making himself such a Beast.’ After all the effort and energy required to keep his ship clean scrubbed, his men in clean linen and clean habits, this was a bitter blow to Bligh. His worthy goal was to return his men as soundly as Cook would have done, and now the very individual he most required as an ally – his surgeon – had proved unfit. This meant increased vigilance of his men’s health and habits on Bligh’s part.
As the Bounty headed south, the weather thickened, becoming warmer – into the eighties – cloudier and wet. ‘Sultry & Hot,’ Bligh recorded on 26 January. ‘Got everything up from below & gave all the Air possible between Decks.’ The rainfall was never intense, but thunder and lightning often spread across the unbroken sky. Airing of the ship continued and on the last day of January, the Bounty was washed, yet again, with vinegar, so that ‘by the Evening the Ship was perfectly Sweet & refreshing.’ That same night, lightning played all around the heavens, while ‘a prodigious number of Porpoises’ swam with the ship through a sea aglow with luminous fish. The following evening as Bligh stood enjoying the spectacle of the Bounty’s long wake at the close of a fine, clear day, he was horrified to see ‘a dreadfull breaking shoal’ rising directly in their tracks. How had he and his sharp lookouts missed this? Staring again, Bligh saw the ‘shoal’ resolve itself into a school of porpoises, their backs breaking the waves as would a sandbar.
The close, occasionally thunderous weather continued and on 8 February, the Bounty crossed the equator. A somewhat modified version of the traditional ceremony for crossing the line was enacted, with the old hands presiding as King Neptune and his court. The twenty-seven officers and men, or over half the ship’s company, who had never crossed before now underwent the rough initiation – covered with tar, ‘shaved’ with the edge of an iron hoop, and compelled to give Neptune gifts of rum. The rum was in lieu of the most fearful part of the usual ceremony – ducking from the yardarm – which Bligh forbade, on the grounds that ‘of all the Customs it is the most brutal and inhuman.’
The day after the ceremony, a Sunday, Bligh ‘mustered the People and saw every thing Clean.’ Divine service was performed, by Bligh, and ‘every person attended with decorum & much decency.’ A few days later, a sail was seen in the early morning; next day they fell in with the British Queen, a whaler bound to the Cape of Good Hope. This fortuitous meeting allowed the Bounty to send letters via the Cape to England. To the Heywoods, Bligh wrote a ‘flattering’ account of young Peter’s progress. To Duncan Campbell, Bligh reported that the passage had been pleasant and that he had acquired some fine wine for Campbell, which he would present on his return.
‘My Men all active good fellows,’ Bligh wrote, ‘& what has given me much pleasure is that I have not yet been obliged to punish any one.’ Food and wine were good: ‘with fine Sour Krout, Pumpkins and dryed Greens and a fresh Meal five times a week I think is no bad living. My Men are not badly off either as they share in all but the Poultry, and with much content & chearfullness, dancing always from 4 untill eight at Night I am happy to hope I shall bring them all home well.’ Once again, Bligh ended with a note about Campbell’s protégé: Tom Ellison is a very good Boy and will do very well.’
To Joseph Banks, Bligh reported nothing but contentment. ‘I am happy and satisfyed in my little ship and we are now fit to go round half a score of worlds,’ he wrote – how different from the fretful, worried letters penned before departure! ‘Both Men & Officers tractable and well disposed & chearfulness & content in the countenance of every one. I am sure nothing is even more conducive to health. I have no cause to inflict punishments for I have no offenders and every thing turns out to my most sanguine expectations.’ This repeated reference to the fact that there had been no need for punishment – flogging – is revealing. It would seem that to Bligh, infliction of punishment was like sickness, and scurvy, something that had no place on a well-run ship. William Bligh had set out to make the perfect voyage.
To Banks, as to Campbell, Bligh concluded with an update on the progress of a protégé. ‘Young Hallet is very well and is a very fine young man,’ he informed Banks, ‘and I shall always attend to every thing that can be of service to him.’
Parting company with the British Queen, the Bounty continued south and days later ‘passed the limits of the Southern Tropic.’ Incrementally, the temperature began to drop. Vast numbers of seabirds were noted – shearwaters, albatross – as well as turtles and numerous whales; one afternoon a cloud of butterflies was blown past the ship. Then, on Sunday, March 2, after divine service and the usual inspection of his men, Bligh made an announcement ‘I now thought it for the Good of the Service to give Mr. Fletcher Christian an Acting Order as Lieut. I therefore Ordered it to be read to all hands.’ This was another clear indication of Bligh’s patronage, if not favouritism, of Christian; a long stint as acting lieutenant would in the normal course of things ensure the master’s mate of promotion on his return.
A week later, out of the blur of notations about butterflies and shearwaters, porpoises and whales, Bligh’s log records an event that returned him squarely to the world of his men: ‘Untill this Afternoon I had hopes I could have performed the Voyage without punishment to any One,’ Bligh wrote, with evident regret, ‘but I found it necessary to punish Mathew Quintal with 2 dozen lashes for Insolence and Contempt.’
In a subsequent published narrative, Bligh expanded on the event. ‘Upon a complaint made to me by the master, I found it necessary to punish Matthew Quintal, one of the seamen, with two dozen lashes, for insolence and mutinous behaviour. Before this, I had not had occasion to punish any person on board.’
Now began the whole grim ritual; the crew mustered to watch Quintal, aged twenty-two, from Cornwall, stripped to the waist and strapped, spread-eagled, by the wrists and ankles to an upright deck grating. With no marines to drum or pipe, this would have been a lacklustre ceremony, itself stripped down to its most pertinent and brutal elements. By all later reports, Quintal, of middle height and ‘strong made’, was a dangerously disaffected troublemaker. It does not appear from the manner in which the incident was logged, however, that Bligh himself had been witness to Quintal’s insubordination; no matter. Once his master logged the event and brought it to Bligh’s attention, Bligh was compelled to administer punishment, and his perfect record was now spoiled.
While the small crew stood formally mustered to witness the punishment in the damp, hazy weather, Boatswain’s Mate James Morrison – the literate diarist, with his smattering of classical education – administered the flogging. For Bligh, whose humane principles had forbidden men’s being ducked when crossing the line, the familiar ritual must have been a singularly unpleasant landmark on his voyage. The natural coarseness of men’s habits – their dirty clothes and fingernails, his surgeon’s ‘beastly’ drunkenness, their cruel and brutal pranks – all offended him. He had chosen a profession infamous for poor conditions and dirty habits, in which men counted on taking brutal poundings from their fellow men and from the sea. Yet Bligh expected his ship to be ‘perfectly sweet’ and scented with vinegar, hardened seamen to wear clean clothes and scrub their hands, cheerfulness to be seen on every countenance and merry dancing in the evening. There was no dirt or disease in Bligh’s vision of the perfect voyage, and no punishment. Busily intent on his many burdensome responsibilities, Bligh was unlikely to have taken note of his men’s practised and scrutinizing gazes. Did they perceive that it was their fastidious, bustling captain who avoided the lash?
The damp, hazy weather closed in and by the following day had become dense fog. The temperature continued to drop, and when the fog cleared the air was felt to be cold. In the afternoon, one of the men shot an albatross that fell dying into the ocean, and a boat was sent out to collect it. On board its wingspan was gravely measured. The superstition that the killing of an albatross brought bad luck was not yet prevalent; Coleridge had not yet written ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – this would follow later.
The Bounty was now as far south as the fortieth latitude, the ‘roaring forties’, and was drawing parallel with the coast of Patagonia. A wet, dense fog forbade sight of land, although south of Puerto Deseado the men ‘saw what was supposed to be the looming of it.’ Whales appeared in great numbers and seemed to enjoy lying in groups of two and three windward of the ship, expelling great blasts of spray over the men.
A strong gale arose on 20 March as the Bounty approached the Jasons, the northwesternmost of the Falkland Islands. Albatross, petrels and snowbirds flocked and hovered around the rigging, as if wishing to perch. The wind and sea became violent and Bligh was anxious to get south of the islands; he had by now given up his earlier plan of stopping here for wood and water. The weather was fast deteriorating and he could afford no delays.
Before dawn on 23 March, the goats and single dog on board began to agitate, and the men declared that the animals could smell land. Soon, in the moonlight, hills could be made out to the west, and when daylight broke the mountains of Tierra del Fuego could be seen, mostly free of snow.
‘I realy look upon the bad or Winter Weather not yet to be set in,’ Bligh wrote. ‘But as I must expect it hourly I have no right to loose a Moment…’
Skirting Le Maire Strait, they passed the desolate, mountainous country of Staten Island to the east. Now, at nearly the 55° latitude south, the Bounty was fast approaching the Horn. A hint of the weather they were in for hit the ship on 27 March, with the arrival of a strong gale and an ‘exceedingly High’ sea.
‘It would not be possible for a laboursome Ship to keep her Masts,’ Bligh observed. His ship, as he had often proudly noted, was not ‘laboursome’, but well behaved. Her hatches were all battened down, and although towering seas broke over her, so far the men kept ‘tolerably dry’. The temperature was now in the upper thirties, and the weather wet and raw.
‘I Ordered the People to have Wheat [porridge] served every day with Sugar & Butter to enable them to have a comfortable hot breakfast,’ Bligh logged. Hour after hour, his men were required to reef and hand the sails; then reset them; then reef again, up and down the perilous, pitching rigging in the menacing cold. The sea, Bligh wrote wonderingly, ‘exceeds any I have seen.’
When the gale moderated, Bligh ordered the belowdecks cleaned and dried. The sea was still so huge that he had difficulty taking sightings, as the mountainous waves swamped his horizon. Over the next few days the gales moderated, then increased, moderated, then ‘blew a Storm of Wind and the Snow fell so heavy that it was scarce possible to haul the sails up and furl them from the Weight and Stiffness.’ With the great sea running confused and contrary, sleet and hail began to fall.
‘At 6 In the Morning the Storm exceeded anything I had met with and a Sea higher than I had ever seen before,’ Bligh entered in his log. The ship was carrying only her staysails, all the canvas that could be risked.
‘My next business was to see after my People who had undergone some fatigue,’ Bligh wrote, his ship safe for the time being. A fire blazed continuously in the galley and someone was set to dry clothes around the clock. Bligh ordered large quantities of the ‘Portable Soup’ of which he was very proud, added to the men’s ‘Pease’, or pea pudding, ‘which made a Valuable and good dinner for them.’
Incredibly, the gales increased, carrying blasts of snow and sleet, the sharp winds piling the sea to windward ‘like a Wall’. Still, Bligh could note that blue petrels and pintados, ‘two beautiful kinds of birds,’ followed their wake. The Bounty was losing ground, being driven back the hard-won miles. At the close of 3 April, she was farther north than she had been six days before.
‘All I have to do now is to Nurse my people with care and attention,’ wrote Bligh, ‘and like Seamen look forward to a New Moon for a Change of Wind and Weather.’ The gale moderated in the early hours of the following morning, and although a cold rain fell, the men were able to check and service rigging as well as clean up and dry below. With fresh gales and mere squalls, the Bounty made headway, and over the next few days, under close-reefed sails, clawed her way to 60° 14’ south; this was to be the extreme limit of her southing. For ten days, Bligh pushed the Bounty and her men through squalls of sleet and hail, ‘dark wet nights’ and strong gales, through fog and high confused seas. At midnight on the thirteenth, the ship was hit by so severe a gale that the decks were ‘twice filled with the Sea.’ Now all pumps were worked every hour. Although the hatches were closed – and had been for close to three months – the belowdecks was awash and Bligh turned over his great cabin ‘to the Use of those poor fellows who had Wet Births.’ It is not noted if Bligh himself slept at all.
Despite all exertions – the constant fires, dry clothes, dry berths and hot food at every meal – the weeks since passing Staten Island had begun to take their toll. Huggan had his shoulder thrown out when the ship lurched, and in the midst of a ‘Very Severe’ gale and ‘a high breaking sea’, Thomas Hall, the cook, fell and broke a rib. William Peckover, the gunner, and Charles Norman, carpenter’s mate, were laid up with rheumatic complaints. Every man out of commission increased the burden of the remaining small crew.
‘I have now every reason to find Men and Ship Complaining, which Will the soonest determine this point,’ Bligh confided to his log.
That point soon came, and on 17 April, Bligh determined to abandon the Horn. Only shortly before his departure from England, almost as an afterthought, he had received (through the intercession of Joseph Banks) discretionary orders from the Admiralty to make for the Cape of Good Hope if the Horn proved impossible. This Bligh now determined to do. From there, he would approach the South Seas from the opposite side of the globe. The detour would add some ten thousand miles to the voyage, but there was nothing to be done. After twenty-five days of battle with the sea, the Bounty was, at 59° 05’ south, more or less where she had begun.
At eleven in the morning of the seventeenth, Bligh summoned all hands aft and publicly thanked them for attending to their duties throughout the trials of the last month. He then announced that he had decided to bear away for southern Africa. The General Joy in the Ship was very great on this Account,’ Bligh noted. His announcement was received with three hearty cheers.
It was, for Bligh, a bitter, difficult decision – so difficult that only days later when the weather took a moderate turn he was induced to make one last attempt, but this was quickly abandoned. Eight men were now on the sick list, mostly with ‘Rheumatick complaints’. This, as Bligh ruefully noted, was ‘much felt in the Watches, the Ropes being now Worked with much difficulty, from the Wet and Snow.’ The men aloft on whom fell the monstrous task of handling the sails were at times incapable of getting below in the face of the storm blasts, and when they did return they ‘sometimes for a While lost their Speech.’ Reconciling himself to defeat, Bligh ‘ordered the Helm to be put a Weather,’ and the Bounty headed for the Cape of Good Hope.
She arrived in False Bay, the preferred anchorage across the spit from Cape Town, on 24 May, after an uneventful passage. The sick men had recovered during the intervening four weeks, and refurbishment of the ship began almost at once. The day after mooring, Bligh administered a second punishment: six lashes for John Williams, a seaman from Guernsey, for neglect of duty ‘in heaving the lead’. In this case there was no expression of regret from Bligh.
The Bounty remained in False Bay for thirty-eight days, during which time she was overhauled from top to bottom, from her rigging to new ballast in her hold, as well as resupplied. Fresh meat, celery, leeks, onions, cabbages and – as a luxury – soft bread were brought on board for storage, while Bligh’s log daily notes ‘Fresh Meat & Greens’ served at dinner. This sojourn also allowed some pleasant diversions. In Colonel Robert Gordon, the half-Dutch, half-Scottish commander of the now considerable Dutch forces at this Dutch settlement, Bligh found an entertaining companion who shared a fondness for natural history and amateur exploration. Needless to say, Sir Joseph Banks had an associate out this way, botanizing at his behest. Francis Masson, once an under-gardener at Kew, had been at the Cape for a number of years, sending back specimens and seeds to Banks. From Masson’s collections would come plants familiar to generations of British gardeners – gladioli, geraniums and freesias.
A few days after mooring, Bligh set out for Cape Town proper to pay his respects to the governor. The twenty-five-mile journey was made by carriage along a partly treated, mostly sandy road that led across a central tableland skirted by mountains. Bligh was greeted warmly by Governor van der Graaff, who most gratifyingly expressed his wonderment that ‘any ship would have ventured to persist in a passage’ around Cape Horn.
Bligh’s record of his visit to Cape Town speaks only of his own impressions and it is not clear whether he made this short trip alone; but it is very possible that Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian accompanied him, for it was here at the Cape that Bligh advanced Christian money. Bligh’s attitude towards his personal finances was, and would be throughout most of his life, one of incessant anxiety and concern. Although securely a ‘gentleman’, William Bligh had from an early age been forced to make his own way in the world and, like many an officer on half pay, he had become accustomed to count and turn every penny. The road ahead offered no immediate source of improvement, and Bligh, as fastidious in his personal economy as in the running of his ship, was reconciled to a life of calculation, self-discipline and sacrifice; to the slow accumulation of security and comfort that would come only through a steady career. Unlike the Christians and Heywoods, whose anciently established sense of entitlement allowed them unblushingly to pile up debts amounting to thousands of pounds beyond any possibility of repayment, Bligh expected to balance his books. Worries about money had beset him as he departed Spithead, since, as he had noted to everyone, taking the commission had resulted in a calamitous drop in pay. Bligh’s loan to Christian, then, amounted to a significant act of friendship – one wonders whether Christian fully appreciated the compromise and anxiety this must have entailed. For his part, although freely given, this was not a gift that Bligh allowed himself or Christian to forget.
Some three weeks after the Bounty came to anchor, the Dublin, an East Indiaman, arrived in False Bay carrying part of the Seventy-seventh Regiment, under Colonel Balfour, saluting Bounty with eleven guns, she was returned with nine. A few days later, Bligh, Colonel Gordon, botanist Masson and a Mr Van Carman were invited on board for dinner.
‘We had a very merry Day of it and a great deal of dancing with the Ladies in the Evening to fine Moon light,’ one officer who was present recorded in his diary; it is gratifying to imagine Lieutenant Bligh indulging in a little social levity. Colonel Gordon entertained the company with stories of his remarkable travels into the interior and, to the astonishment of his fellow diners, even managed a Gaelic song.
In these agreeable circumstances, amidst the sympathetic company of fellow seamen from around the world who well knew the dangers of the southern ocean, Bligh reflected on what he had accomplished. ‘A Dutch Ship came in to day having buried 30 Men & many are sent to the Hospital,’ he wrote to Campbell, ‘altho they have only been out since the last of January.’ He, Bligh, had been out since the end of December. This is a credit I hope will be given to me,’ Bligh continued, confessional as always to Campbell. ‘Indeed had I not been very conversant in these matters I believe poor Fellows they would scarce ever have got here’; Bligh was referring to his own men, for whose lives he took full credit.
‘Upon the whole no People could live better,’ he exclaimed to Campbell, embarking on a description of his nutritious hot breakfasts and portable soups. ‘I assure you I have not acted the Purser with them,’ he let Campbell know, ‘for profits was trifling to me while I had so much at Stake.’
It was not only in his private correspondence that Bligh enlarged upon this flattering theme of his own successful man-management. His official log offered a short dissertation on the subject: ‘Perhaps a Voyage of five Months which I have now performed without touching at any one place but at Tenarif, has never been accomplished with so few accidents, and such health among Seamen in a like continuance of bad Weather,’ he began, not mincing words. ‘And as such a fortunate event may be supposed to have been derived from some peculiar Mode of Management it is proper I should point out what I think has been the cause of it.’
The mode of management was, needless to say, hot breakfasts, clean dry clothes, clean hammocks and a clean ship (‘in cleaning Ship all dark holes and Corners the common receptacles of all filth were the first places attended to’), dancing, infusions of malt, portable soup and sauerkraut. Once again, it is evident that in Bligh’s eyes, his small ship and forty-six-member company were embarked upon a historic enterprise.
‘Seamen will seldom attend to themselves in any particular and simply to give directions…is of little avail,’ Bligh added, echoing the sentiments of many a captain. ‘They must be watched like Children.’
Bligh was not the only man to take advantage of the layover to send reports to England. Thomas Ledward, the assistant surgeon who had joined the Bounty at the eleventh hour, wrote to his uncle describing ‘a continual series of the most violent and distressing weather that ever was experienced.’ The ship was in danger of becoming unfit from her exertions, he reported, continuing that he had no doubt the captain ‘will gain much credit by his resolution & perseverance & by the extreme care he took of the Ship’s company.’
Ledward had been in the habit of keeping a diary, but had just learned that all such private documents would have to be turned over to the Admiralty at journey’s end. While Ledward might not have known it, this had become standard practice since Cook’s first voyage, the purpose being to ensure that any officially sanctioned publication was not undercut by a private, competing work. Once the official account was out – in this case, to be written by Lieutenant Bligh – other accounts were usually permitted.
In the face of this new knowledge, Ledward determined, as he informed his uncle, to drop his diary. Other of his shipmates, however, were less circumspect. Someone, probably Charles Churchill, the master-at-arms, wrote an elegant memoir to the Reverend John Hampson, with the hint that he was ‘very desirous to have [it] publish’d and beg you will cause it to be inserted in the Public Papers as soon as possible.’ The report commenced with a brief essay on the breadfruit and references to Cook’s voyages and then briefly sketched the tempestuous voyage to Tenerife, the crossing of the ‘Equinoctial Line’, which he stated was celebrated with ‘the usual Ceremonies of Shaving and Ablution’ – no self-respecting seaman would confess that ducking, or ‘ablution’, had been prohibited.
Meanwhile, in the north of England, there appeared in the Cumberland Pacquet an ‘extract of a letter from a midshipman (aged sixteen) on board his Majesty’s ship “Bounty”’; this could only be from Peter Heywood. Either he too had requested publication, or his proud family felt the letter relating his adventures must be shared; they had already sent copies to various relations. Heywood’s report was mostly concerned with the attempted passage around Cape Horn, which had been ‘one continued gale as it seldom ceased for four hours together.’ But, echoing his captain’s sentiments, Heywood allowed that ‘the Bounty is as fine a sea boat as ever swam.’
All known firsthand contemporary accounts of the first five months of the Bounty’s outward voyage, then, indicate that after a passage of unprecedented severity, the Bounty’s crew were in good health, good spirits, forward-looking and, if anything, proud of what had so far been accomplished. There were not, judging from these letters, complaints worth writing home about.
The Bounty dropped anchor in Adventure Bay off the southern coast of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, seven weeks after departing the Cape. The passage had seen ferocious weather and much severe lightning; once the Bounty had been pitched almost on her beam ends, but as Bligh logged, ‘no damage was done but the overturning [of] some Tubs with Plants I had brought from the Cape.’ The plants were intended as useful gifts for the Tahitians.
With his ship safely anchored, Bligh set out by boat to scout the surroundings. The largely mountainous land appeared unchanged from when he, along with Nelson, Peckover and Coleman, had been here with Cook. Among the stands of massive trees that overlooked the island-studded bay, Bligh examined stumps that had been cut for the Resolution, eleven years previously. Later, Thomas Hayward pointed out to Bligh a tree trunk carved with a date from Cook’s second expedition, ‘as distinct as if it had not been cut a Month, even the very slips of the Knife were as discernable as at the first Moment.’ There was much Bligh encountered at Adventure Bay to put him in mind of his own voyage with Cook; ‘I cannot therefore help paying this humble tribute to Captn. Cook’s memory,’ he reflected in his log, ‘as his remarkable circumspection in many other things has shown how little he has been wrong.’
The following morning, Bligh divided his men into different parties, and sent them out on various duties. He had determined to work from Cook’s old base, where a gully disgorged water conveniently close to the chosen landing. One man was detailed to wash all dirty linen, while Nelson and his assistant, William Brown, set out to explore the country. Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian and William Peckover, the experienced and reliable gunner, were put in charge of the parties detailed to cask water and fell wood.
The weather blew squally, then fair, then squally with rain and rapid, racing clouds throughout the following days. The watering party rolled casks of water along the beach, loading them with difficulty into the waiting boats. The surf was troublesome enough to require the wood party, under Christian, to raft the timber out in bundles. In off-hours, some of the men went shooting and fishing with mostly disappointing results, although two black oystercatchers, largish black-and-white birds with long red bills, were shot by Mr Christian. All the men kept an inquisitive lookout for local people, but it was some days before any turned up. Dressed in little but kangaroo skins and with painted faces, they appeared to the Bounty men as ‘the most miserable creatures on the face of the Earth,’ as James Morrison bluntly put it.
On 23 August, there was the first unequivocal sign of trouble. Going onshore to inspect the various work parties, Bligh found William Purcell, the carpenter, cutting crude, unwieldy billets of wood. When Bligh complained that the billets were too long, Purcell accused his captain of coming onshore ‘on purpose to find fault’. Words were exchanged, Purcell became insolent and Bligh lost his temper and sent the carpenter back to the ship.
Now Bligh was made to feel the consequences of his inconveniently small company. He had no commissioned officer to turn to for authority and moral support – and no marines to back him up. Under the Articles of War, Purcell’s refusal to obey Bligh’s commands – let alone insolently talk back to him – was an offence punishable by court-martial. Yet, the prospect of holding a court-martial was well over a year away.
‘I could not bear the loss of an able Working and healthy Man,’ Bligh logged; ‘otherwise I should have committed him to close confinement untill I could have tryed him.’ As a warrant officer, the carpenter could not be flogged, and Bligh could find no recourse but to order him back to the ship to assist Fryer in other duties. Purcell seems to have had a keen appreciation of Bligh’s dilemma, for three days later Bligh was forced to log a second, lengthy complaint against him for disobeying Fryer’s orders to help load water.
Fryer informed Bligh of Purcell’s disobedience when Bligh returned to the ship with other members of the shore parties, who would have watched the encounter closely. Facing the broad Pacific and backed by a mountainous land so remote that only four ships from the outside world had ever previously touched it, Bligh had only his own authority with which to confront the carpenter.
‘My directions and presence had as little effect,’ Bligh recorded ominously. Purcell had refused to back down. Confinement of Purcell until such time as he could be brought to court-martial would rob Bligh of the carpenter’s skills and, in theory, other able-bodied work. Or so Bligh himself reasoned as he matter-of-factly devised a novel form of punishment: ‘I therefore Ordered the different Persons evidence to be drawn out and attested, and then gave Orders that untill he Worked he should have no provisions, and promised faithfully a severe Punishment to any Man that dared to Assist him.’
Bligh was satisfied with the result of this action, ‘which immediatly brought [him] to his senses…It was for the good of the Voyage that I should not make him or any Man a prisoner,’ Bligh concluded his account of the event. ‘The few I have even in the good State of health I keep them, are but barely sufficient to carry on the duty of the Ship.’
James Morrison gives an oblique, deliberately evasive reference to the confrontation, from which it is impossible to cull hard facts. But a single statement is unambiguous: here, says Morrison, in Adventure Bay ‘were sown seeds of eternal discord between Lieut. Bligh & the Carpenter, and it will be no more than true to say, with all the Officers in general.’ Fryer was probably one of these other officers; Bligh’s observation that he had to repeat his orders to the master (‘I repeated my injunctions to the Comm’g Officer Mr. Fryer’) is subtly troubling. Christian was in charge of the wood party, whose task of rafting timber through heavy surf seems to have been particularly difficult; now under personal obligation to Bligh, had he too been found lacking?
Bligh’s log ticked on, with descriptions of native encounters, lists of shrubs and herbaceous plants, and careful surveys of adjacent land. For him, the crisis with the carpenter had been satisfactorily addressed and the incident was closed.
The Bounty left the wooded shores of Adventure Bay on 5 September and headed into more wet, misty weather. A few days out, the southern lights, ‘as Red as blood’, inflamed the clouded sky. At night, phosphorescent medusae, long-tentacled jellyfish, glowed from beneath the sea. South of New Zealand, the ship unexpectedly came upon ‘a parcell of Rocky Islands’, devoid of all greenery, but patched with late snow – a discovery. Their position was duly laid down by Bligh and logged. ‘I have called them the Bountys Isles,’ he recorded solemnly.
The Bounty ploughed onward through often dark, cloudy weather and thick fogs, punctuated with gales of rain. Bligh’s log checked off each day’s consumed miles: 177, 175, 141. From England to Tahiti, the Bounty would eventually log 28,086 miles. Between his duties on deck, Bligh retired amid the pots to his cabin, and there, while his ship thrummed through the Pacific swells, carefully wrote up his log, made his natural history observations, and refined his charts and sketches. The odds and ends of plants he had collected at the Cape for Tahiti held majestic sway over the great cabin, where he checked them approvingly from time to time. There are few more touching images in his ship’s saga than this, the industrious lieutenant conscientiously acting the role of Captain Cook in his own miniature ship.
Crowded in their own quarters, the Bounty’s men stoked the galley stove that both dried their wet clothing and filled the air with choking smoke. The entire company was again on two-thirds rations of bread, or unpalatable hardtack, sensibly so, as the remainder of the voyage was unpredictable. In accordance with naval regulations, the men would receive monetary compensation for such reductions on return to England.
Now nine months out, friendships and factions had been formed. Among the young gentlemen, Peter Heywood and George Stewart had become firm friends. Fletcher Christian and young Heywood also had so much in common it was natural they too sought each other out, and Christian appears to have taken Heywood under his wing, helping him, Heywood claimed, with his mathematical and classical studies. Heywood was greatly admiring of his older friend, who had impressed the entire company with his athletic feats: Christian could balance a musket on the palm of his outstretched arm and could make a standing jump from inside one barrel to another. Of the first ship on which he had served, the Eurydice, it had been reported to Christian’s family that the young man had ruled over his inferiors ‘in a superior pleasant Manner’, that he had made ‘Toil a pleasure’; Christian’s stint before the mast under Bligh in the West Indies may have enhanced his instinctive, easy dealings with the lower deck, and all evidence suggests he was well liked on the Bounty.
In accordance with naval custom, and as Cook had done in turn for him, Bligh had his young gentlemen and other officers join him in rotation at his table. The habit was to be somewhat revised on this last leg.
‘During this passage Mr. Bligh and His Mess mates the Master & Surgeon fell out, and seperated,’ wrote Morrison, with his infallible eye for trouble, ‘each taking his part of the stock, & retiring to live in their own Cabbins, after which they had several disputes & seldom spoke but on duty; and even then with much apperant reserve.’ When Bligh invited his young gentlemen to dine, they joined his solitude.
The causes of the disputes with Fryer and the disagreeable Huggan are described at length by Bligh in his private and official logs. On the morning of 9 October, as the Bounty cut through a rare smooth sea, Bligh sent the ship’s several expense books to Fryer for the master’s usual bimonthly inspection and signature. The books were shortly returned to Bligh accompanied by a certificate drafted by Fryer, ‘the Purport of which,’ Bligh recorded, ‘was that he had done nothing amiss during his time on board.’ Unless Bligh signed the certificate, Fryer would not sign the books.
Summoning the master, Bligh informed him that he ‘did not approve of his doing his duty conditionally,’ at which Fryer abruptly left. This time, Bligh’s instincts were sure and his reaction swift. Ordering all hands on deck, he read the Articles of War, ‘with particular parts of the Instructions relative to the Matter.’ Fryer was instructed to sign the books or ‘express his reasons [for not complying] at full length at the bottom of the Page.’
‘I sign in obedience to your Orders, but this may be Cancelled hereafter,’ Morrison reported that Fryer intoned as he signed. Morrison’s sly suggestion was that Bligh had been caught fiddling the books, which if true would have cost him his career. But his very public actions defy this interpretation: Bligh was not about to countenance a furtive quid pro quo with his Master. ‘This troublesome Man saw his error & before the whole Ships Company signed the Books’ was Bligh’s report.
There are indications that Fryer might have had reason for concern about his performance as master – Bligh’s glancing reference to his need to repeat orders about Purcell at Adventure Bay being one. More immediately, Fryer may have had in mind the events of just three days earlier – events Bligh described with shock and anger in his private log but omitted in the official log he presented to the Admiralty.
On this day, William Elphinstone, one of the master’s mates, came to Bligh with wholly unexpected news: James Valentine, a twenty-eight-year-old able seaman, had incurred a bad infection after being bled by surgeon Huggan for an ailment contracted at Adventure Bay. Bligh was informed that Valentine was delirious ‘and had every appearance of being in a dying state.’
‘This shock was scarce equal to my astonishment,’ Bligh almost gasped, ‘as the Surgeon had told me he was getting better, and had never expressed the least uneasyness about him.’ When summoned, Huggan explained that, oh yes – he had meant to tell Bligh the night before at dinner, only Bligh had a guest (the officer of the watch) and he had not thought it proper to say anything at the time, but, yes, it was true: James Valentine had only hours to live.
Where was the ship’s master? Where was the acting lieutenant? Above all, where was the assistant surgeon? How had it transpired that Bligh had only learned, belatedly and almost by happenstance, of so serious a development? Bligh immediately visited the stricken man, who was ‘seized with a violent hollow Cough and spit much.’ He had been treated by Huggan with blisters, applied to his breast, for what the surgeon had diagnosed as an asthmatic complaint.
On 10 October, the day after the altercation with Master Fryer, Bligh recorded the death of Seaman Valentine in his official log.
‘This poor man was one of the most robust People on board,’ he reflected, ‘and therefore the Surprize and shock was the greater to me.’ Forgoing the customary auction of the deceased man’s effects, Bligh directed that his meagre possessions be given to the two men who had cared for him on his deathbed ‘with great care and Affection.’ On the following day, as the ship progressed under light breezes and fine rain, Valentine’s remains were committed to the deep.
Bligh’s perfect record of health was now irrevocably spoiled, and it had been spoiled by his beastly sot of a surgeon, aided by the apparent indifference of his officers. Four days after Valentine’s death, three of the older seamen who had formerly complained of ‘the Rheumatism’ were diagnosed with symptoms of scurvy. Bligh was beside himself with frustration and disbelief; had he himself not written in his dissertation on the healthful ‘Mode of Management’ that ‘the Scurvy is realy a disgrace to a ship’?
Bligh embarked upon a frantic application of his most trusted defences – portable soup and essence of malt, the latter served at a ratio of three tablespoons to a quart of water, ‘this being the Surgeons opinion was sufficient’; despite his misgivings and distaste for Huggan, Bligh was still dependent on his professional opinion, such as it was.
Was it scurvy, or was it something else? Throughout the rest of the voyage, all the way to Tahiti, the question hounded Bligh, who returned to it again and again in his log. On 17 October, he dosed up the three men who had complained of rheumatism with malt, sauerkraut, and less usefully, vinegar and mustard – everything, it would seem, that he could think of. The next day he examined other men ‘who the Doctor supposed had a taint of the Scurvy’ but found only the symptoms of prickly heat. The Bounty was now back up to the twenty-fifth parallel, after all, and temperatures had risen well into the seventies.
On the afternoon of the nineteenth, as the ship ambled along in fair but windless weather, John Mills, the forty-year-old gunner’s mate from Aberdeen, and William Brown, the assistant gardener, refused to participate in the mandatory evening dancing. Perhaps the higher temperature was taking a toll, or perhaps the men were just fed up with what they regarded as tedious nonsense. On being informed, Bligh’s response was to stop the offenders’ grog, ‘with a promise of further punishment on a Second Refusal’; the stopping of grog had been one of Cook’s stratagems.
‘I have always directed the Evenings from 5 to 8’ O’Clock to be spent in dancing,’ Bligh registered with a tone of aggrieved self-righteousness in his log, ‘& that every Man should be Obliged to dance as I considered it conducive to their Health.’
Only hours later, Bligh had to log a second entry about the incident: ‘Wm Brown complaining of some Rheumatic Complaints which he has had these three Weeks past, the Doctor insists upon it that it is Scurvey.’ So Brown, it seems, had turned to the doctor for moral support. Bligh himself, however, could discover no such symptoms. Determinedly, he pushed forward with his ‘decoctions’ of essence of malt, noting, ‘I have Ordered the Doctor to issue it himself.’
‘If able,’ he had added in the original entry of his private log, which also noted that Huggan had been ‘constantly drunk these last four days.’ Towards the end of this frustrating Sunday, all hands were mustered for the usual inspection.
‘I think I never saw a more healthy set of Men and so decent looking in my life,’ Bligh exclaimed in exasperation to his log. Bligh knew what scurvy looked like and could find no symptoms – no ‘eruptions or swellings’, no bleeding gums or loose teeth. Yet the real interest in this protracted incident, of course, has less to do with whether or not there was scurvy on the Bounty than whether or not Bligh was being toyed with. Was Huggan getting back at Bligh for his anger over Valentine’s death with a vindictive but unassailable diagnosis of the disease Bligh most feared – a gambit instantly appreciated and exploited by the appreciative and all-knowing seamen?
On 23 October, Huggan sent Bligh an updated sick list, with his own name on it under the complaint ‘Rheumatism’. Twenty-four hours later, he issued a revised list that gave his complaint as ‘Paralytic Affection’. Later in the same day, however, as Bligh noted, Huggan was ‘discovered to be able to get out of bed and look for liquor,’ his paralysis notwithstanding. With this, Bligh’s patience snapped and he gave orders for the surgeon’s filthy cabin to be searched and all liquor removed, an ‘operation that was not only troublesome but offensive in the highest degree.’ Successfully deprived of alcohol, Huggan made a shaky appearance on deck the next day, tenuously sober. The timing of his recovery was excellent, as the Bounty was less than a day away from Matavai Bay and only hours away from sighting land. Bligh urgently wished his surgeon to perform one important medical office before landfall. Ever since the first European ship had arrived at Tahiti, sailors had infected the islanders with ‘the venereals’; the French claimed the English were responsible for the devastation the disease had wrought, while the English pointed out that the Tahitians themselves had implicated the French. Bligh wanted Huggan ‘to examine very particularly every Man and Officer’ for any sign of the disease before arriving at the island. Huggan did so and, to the universal joy of the company, declared ‘every person totally free from the Venereal complaint.’
The next day brought the Bounty to Tahiti.
TAHITI (#ulink_20ad43d4-594a-5516-aeaf-d9970d27eb0f)
Beneath the island’s volcanic pinnacles, the Bounty passed around the surf-pounded reef beyond Point Venus. Already she was hailed by throngs of canoes; and when Bligh called out that he had come from Britain, or ‘Pretanee’, the delighted islanders swarmed onto the ship, ‘and in ten Minutes,’ wrote Bligh, ‘I could scarce find my own people.’ The old-timers – Nelson, the gardener, William Peckover, the gunner, armourer Joseph Coleman and Bligh himself – greeted and were greeted with warm recognition. The remainder of the crew now learned that the stories that had filled their ears throughout the long, hard outward voyage – about the island’s beauty, its sexually uninhibited women, its welcoming people – were not tall tales, or sailors’ fantasy. Beyond the ship, its undulating slopes and valleys, gullies and dramatic peaks casting shifting green-blue shadows in the morning sun, rose the vision of Tahiti. Below, the blue sea around them was clogged with cheerful canoes that had come laden with gifts of plantains, coconuts and hogs. And filling the deck, milling and laughing around them, were the tall, clean-limbed, smooth-skinned Tahitians. The Bounty men – bowlegged, pockmarked, scarred and misshapen, toothless and, despite Bligh’s best efforts, very dirty – regarded the improbably handsome, dark-haired. islanders with both appetite and awe. Their brown skin gleaming with perfumed oil, garlanded with flowers, and flashing smiles with strong white teeth such as few Englishmen had ever seen, these superior men and women were also friendly and accessible. Significantly, all cases of scurvy were quickly cured; even Morrison allowed ‘that in a few days of arrival there was no appearance of sickness or disorder in the ship.’
The following day, 27 October, manoeuvring around canoes and people, Bligh successfully worked the Bounty into Matavai Bay, and dropped anchor. Under the escort of a chief named Poeno, Bligh was taken to Point Venus, the peninsula that formed the northeast point of Matavai Bay, from where in 1769 Cook had observed the transit of Venus. Standing under the graceful and now familiar coconut palms, the surf breaking against the lava-black beach, Bligh seems to have drawn a deep breath of happiness.
It had been Bligh’s original plan to conceal Captain Cook’s death from the Tahitians; Cook was held in such high esteem that a portrait of him, left as a gift eleven years earlier, was still in good repair. But some three months before the Bounty’s arrival, another foreign ship – apparently the first since Cook’s departure – had brought news of his terrible death at the hands of the Sandwich Islanders. Nonetheless, David Nelson – with or without Bligh’s prompting is unclear – introduced Bligh as ‘Cook’s son’ to the local dignitaries; they are reported to have received this news with much satisfaction, although subsequent interactions suggest this was not perhaps taken by them as a literal truth.
On 1 November, Bligh set out on a scouting trip to Oparre, a district to the west of Matavai. In order to uproot and carry off the large number of breadfruit he sought, he needed the permission of all the various chiefs with jurisdiction over the areas in which he would be working. A visit to pay his respects to the Ari’i Rahi, the six-year-old king of Oparre, took him inland towards the hills, ‘through the delightful breadfruit flats of Oparre,’ which were cut by a serpentine river. In the course of the day, the two parties entertained each other, the Tahitians offering an impromptu heiva, or dancing festival, Bligh a demonstration of his pocket pistol.
Before returning to his ship, Bligh contemplated the scenes of the day – the sparkling streams and green glades of the interior, and the dramatic sweep of the palm-rimmed lava beach of Matavai Bay. ‘These two places,’ he reflected, ‘are certainly the Paradise of the World, and if happiness could result from situation and convenience, here it is to be found in the highest perfection. I have seen many parts of the World,’ he continued in this remarkably personal entry, ‘but Otaheite is capable of being preferable to them all.’
Tynah, the paramount chief of Matavai and the adjoining region, soon became the local dignitary with whom Bligh and his men had the most communion. He and his outgoing wife, Iddeeah, were both large, impressive persons, Tynah standing over six foot three and weighing some twenty-one stones. Now around thirty-seven years old, Tynah had been known to Cook and Bligh previously as ‘Otoo’. Adroitly, Bligh conveyed to Tynah and the other lesser chiefs that the gift his sovereign, King George of Pretanee, would most welcome in exchange for the gifts his ship carried was the breadfruit tree. Delighted that King George could be so easily satisfied, the chiefs readily gave their assent, and Bligh, much relieved, began to organize his land base.
The Admiralty’s delay in getting Bligh his orders had ensured that the Bounty arrived in Tahiti near the outset of the western monsoon season, which ran from November to April, a period of rain and gales avoided by sailors. Additionally, as he had been directed to return by the Endeavour Straits, Bligh knew he had to await the eastern monsoon, which would begin at the end of April or early May; in short, the Bounty would not be departing Tahiti until April, five months away, and several months longer than had originally been planned.
On 2 November, Bligh sent a party to Point Venus that included William Peckover, Peter Heywood, four of the able seamen, as well as Nelson the gardener and his assistant William Brown, all under the command of Fletcher Christian. It was their job to establish and maintain the camp for the gardeners’ work. Eventually, two tents and a shed, built of bamboo poles and thatched with palm branches, were erected on Cook’s old site and a boundary line drawn, ‘within which none of the Natives were to enter without permission and all were cautioned against it.’ The compound was to serve as a nursery where the transplanted breadfruit could be closely supervised before being transported to the Bounty. Here, in the shade of the coconuts and breadfruit that rolled down to the dark shore, as palm fronds clattered and rustled in the sea breezes far above their heads, Christian and the rest of his small land party were to live and work for the next few months. Their less fortunate companions were expected to spend the night on board their ship.
Bligh himself divided his time between an anxious monitoring of his plants, and careful, if enjoyable, diplomacy. The success of his breadfruit operation depended upon the continued goodwill of such powerful friends as Poeno and Tynah (the father of the boy king), both of whom he knew from his former visit. Based upon his earlier experience, there was little reason to imagine this goodwill would in fact waver, but there was reason to fear the curiosity and acquisitiveness of the common man. So far, as Bligh had noted, the thefts the Bounty had suffered had been insignificant, but he was keenly aware that this situation could quickly change. He had already had to administer the third flogging of the voyage, in this case twelve lashes to Alexander Smith, able seaman, ‘for suffering the Gudgeon of the large Cutter to be drawn out without knowing it.’ The flogging had horrified the watching Tahitians – especially the women, who, according to Bligh, ‘showed every degree of Sympathy which marked them to be the most humane and affectionate creatures in the World.’
The temptation for Bligh to take personal advantage of his circumstances, to strike out on short expeditions, making discoveries and taking the surveys in which he was so expert, all to his own greater glory, must have been very great. But Bligh had virtually promised Banks a successful outcome to the voyage, and Banks had made it patently clear that he cared about nothing but breadfruit. The nursery, therefore, and everything that concerned the nursery, were to be the sole objects of his attention. Bligh could not risk some fatal lapse of discipline; nor, as it appears, could he trust his officers or men.
This was most apparent in Bligh’s attempt to regulate the ongoing torrent of trade between his ship and his island hosts. The establishment of a fixed market, as opposed to a free-for-all run by the sailors’ whim, was of immediate advantage to his own ship, as well as to future British vessels. As Cook had done – and based closely on Cook’s own rules – Bligh drafted a set of injunctions intended to govern his men’s conduct among the Tahitians:
1st. At the Society or Friendly Islands, no person whatever is to intimate that Captain Cook was killed by Indians or that he is dead.
2nd. No person is ever to speak, or give the least hint, that we have come on purpose to get the breadfruit plant, until I have made my plan known to the chiefs.
3rd. Every person is to study to gain the good will and esteem of the natives; to treat them with all kindness; and not to take from them, by violent means, any thing that they may have stolen; and no one is ever to fire, but in defence of his life.
4th. Every person employed on service, is to take care that no arms or implements of any kind under their charge, are stolen; the value of such thing, being lost, shall be charged against their wages.
5th. No man is to embezzle, or offer to sale, directly, or indirectly, any part of the King’s stores, of what nature soever.
6th. A proper person or persons will be appointed to regulate trade, and barter with the natives; and no officer or seaman, or other person belonging to the ship, is to trade for any kind of provisions, or curiosities; but if such officer or seaman wishes to purchase any particular thing, he is to apply to the provider to do it for him. By this means a regular market will be carried on, and all disputes, which otherwise may happen with the natives will be avoided. All boats are to have every thing handed out of them at sun-set.
These orders were nailed to the mizzenmast immediately upon anchoring – so Morrison reports, citing a garbled version of only item number six on Bligh’s list. Bligh’s orders, Morrison recalled, prohibited ‘the Purchase of Curiosities or any thing except Provisions,’ adding that ‘there were few or no instances of the order being disobeyd, as no curiosity struck the seamen so forcibly as a roasted pig…’
Nonetheless, it was this last order that appears to have been responsible for the only complaints worth recording during the twenty-three weeks spent on Tahiti. Bligh’s directive aimed to avoid the disputes that would inevitably arise if trade were conducted by forty-five individuals following no particular rules, and to ensure that, as commanding officer and purser, he could reliably provision his ship.
Captain Cook himself, who in the course of his long career had seen many a promising market ruined, had been very clear on this point: ‘Thus, was the fine prospect we had of geting a plentifull supply of refreshments of these people frustrated,’ Cook had lamented, after one of his men had volunteered a quantity of rare red feathers for a pig, inadvertently establishing red feathers as the currency for all future pigs. ‘And which will ever be the case so long as every one is allowed to make exchanges for what he pleaseth and in what manner he please’s.’
Morrison undoubtedly understood Bligh’s motivation for the directive, and John Fryer, as master, most certainly did. Yet Morrison complained that when the trade in hogs began to slacken, ‘Mr. Bligh seized on all that came to the ship big & small Dead or alive, taking them as his property, and serving them as the ship’s allowance at one pound per Man per Day.’ According to Morrison, Fryer also complained to Bligh, apparently publicly, that his property was being taken. The site designated for trade was one of the tents at the nursery compound, where the boundary marker kept crowds at bay. William Peckover had been placed in charge, a sensible choice given his knowledge of Tahitian language and customs picked up in the course of several visits he had made to the island with Cook. Nonetheless, the sailors continued to encourage their Tahitian friends to come to the ship surreptitiously.
‘The Natives observing that the Hogs were seized as soon as they Came on board…became very shy of bringing a hog in sight of Lieut. Bligh,’ Morrison reported, and he went on to describe with relish the ways in which the sailors and islanders conspired to trick their commanding officer. The Tahitians ‘watched all opportunity when he was on shore to bring provisions to their friends.’ Not for the first time – and certainly not for the last – Bligh must have wished for the support of even a small party of marines, armed sentinels who would have stood apart from the fraternity of seamen, and whose loyalty to his commands he could have counted on when his back was turned.
Despite Morrison’s lengthy complaint, time passed pleasantly enough for the seamen who were entrusted with minimal duties and allowed onshore regularly ‘for refreshment’. Joseph Coleman set up a forge to make and repair goods for the ship and islanders alike. The usual wooding parties were sent off to cut timber, while others prepared puncheons of salted pork for the return journey. The great cabin was refitted for the pots waiting in the land nursery, only, as Bligh logged, ‘the Carpenter running a Nail through his Knee very little was done.’ Charles Norman, a carpenter’s mate, had been ill for several days with a complaint diagnosed by Huggan variously as rheumatism and ‘Peripneumonianotha’, and the quartermaster’s mate, George Simpson, also according to Huggan, had ‘Cholera Morbus’. Bligh bought a milch goat for Norman, believing its milk would help the patient’s chronic diarrhoea. The men recovered and Bligh was able to report a clean sick list, save that the ‘Venereal list is increased to four’; sadly, the European disease was now endemic.
Bligh met almost every day with Tynah and his family and retinue, and each day he logged some new discovery about his hosts’ culture. Along with the ship’s officers, he was entertained by lascivious heivas, in which the women, ‘according to the horrid custom,’ distorted their faces into obscene expressions. He discussed the tradition of infanticide among the flamboyant arioi, and he recorded the recipe for a delicious pudding made from a turnip-like root. One day, Bligh engaged in long theological enquiry, in which he was questioned closely about his own beliefs: who was the son and who was the wife of his God? Who was his father and mother? Who was before your God and where is he? Is he in the winds or in the sun?
When asked about childbirth in his country, Bligh answered as well as he was able, and enquired in turn how this was done in Tahiti. Queen Iddeeah replied by mimicking a woman in labour, squatting comfortably on her heels between the protective arms of a male attendant who stroked her belly. Iddeeah was vastly amused on learning of the difficulties of Pretanee’s women.
‘Let them do this & not fear,’ she told Bligh, who appears to have been persuaded by this tender pantomime.
In the evenings, Bligh entertained his hosts on board the Bounty, which none seemed to tire of visiting. As Tynah’s royal status forbade him to put food or drink into his own mouth, Bligh himself sometimes served as cupbearer if attendants were unavailable; Iddeeah, according to custom, ate apart from the men. After the meals, the company lounged lazily around the small deck area, enjoying the offshore breezes, and the muffled pounding of the surf on shore and reef, and the lap of the waves below. Not infrequently, Bligh’s guests stayed the night on board the Bounty, loth to depart.
How Bligh passed his time at Tahiti can be followed, day by day, event by event, as recorded in his fulsome log. What is not known with any clarity is how time was passed onshore. All midshipmen were required to keep up their own logs, to be produced at such time as they applied to pass for lieutenant, and one would give much to have Fletcher Christian’s. As it is, life at Point Venus can be sketched only in broad outline. Every evening, when the work of the shore party was winding down, the Tahitians gathered at ‘the Post’ before sunset. Almost all of the Bounty men had found taios, or protective friends, who took them into their homes and families. At least two of the men, George Stewart from the Orkneys and, perhaps less predictably, the critical James Morrison, had women friends to whom they were particularly attached, while all the men seemed to have enjoyed regular sexual partners; whether or not Fletcher Christian had formed an attachment to any one woman was to become a hotly contested question – at the very least, he, like young Peter Heywood, had to be treated for ‘venereals’. The women of Tahiti, as Bligh would later famously write, were ‘handsome, mild and cheerful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved.’ They were also by European standards not only very beautiful, but sexually uninhibited and experienced in ways that amazed and delighted their English visitors.
‘Even the mouths of Women are not exempt from the polution, and many other as uncommon ways have they of gratifying their beastly inclinations,’ as Bligh had observed, aghast. Famously, favours of the Tahitian women could be purchased for mere nails. Both on ship and at the camp, Bligh allowed female guests to stay the night, at the same time trying, through Ledward, his assistant surgeon, to keep track of the venereal diseases. When dusk came, the shore party were left more or less to their own devices. The sundown gatherings brought entertainments – wrestling matches, dances and games, feasts, martial competitions – but also a sexual privacy, even a domesticity, not allowed to the men still on board ship. From the curving arm of Point Venus, Christian and his companions could look back towards Matavai Bay, past the Bounty riding gently at anchor, to the darkening abundance of trees that seemed to cascade from the grave, unassailable heights of the island.
As the weeks passed, the potted plants began to fill the nursery tent, and by the end of November, some six hundred were ‘in a very fine way’. Meanwhile, other ship duties were intermittently carried out. Bligh ordered the sails brought onshore, where they were aired and dried under Christian’s supervision. The large cutter was found to have a wormy bottom and had to be cleaned and repainted, under the shade of a large awning that Bligh had made to protect the workmen from the sun.
These duties were accompanied by the usual problems. Mathew Thompson was flogged with a dozen lashes ‘for insolence and disobedience of Orders’. Also, Bligh logged, ‘by the remissness of my Officers & People at the Tent,’ a rudder was stolen, the only theft, as Bligh observed, so far, of any consequence; the officer in charge of the tent was of course Fletcher Christian. There is no record of punishment.
Most seriously, Purcell once again had begun to balk at his orders. When asked to make a whetstone for one of the Tahitian men, he refused point-blank, claiming that to do so would spoil his tools. On this occasion, at last, Bligh punished the carpenter with confinement to his cabin – although, as he recorded, he did ‘not intend to lose the use of him but to remitt him to his duty to Morrow.’
Towards the end of November, strong winds began to accompany what had become daily showers of rain, and by early December the dark weather brought an unfamiliar, heavy swell. The Bounty rolled uncomfortably at her anchorage, while the surf breaking on Dolphin Bank, the outlying reef, had become violent. On 6 December, Bligh described a scene ‘of Wind and Weather which I never supposed could have been met with in this place.’ From midnight until well into the morning, amid torrents of rain, a foaming sea agitated the ship ‘in a most tremendous manner’. Onshore, Christian’s party was cut off by the swelling of the nearby river and an alarming influx of the sea. In the morning, Tynah and Iddeeah fought their way to the Bounty in canoes through a sea so high that, as Bligh wrote, ‘I could not have supposed any Boat could have existed a moment.’ On board, the couple offered their tearful greetings, saying they had believed the ship lost in the night. The rainy season, which Europeans had never experienced before, had commenced, and it was at once clear that Matavai Bay was no longer a feasible anchorage. The plants had been threatened by salt spray as the winds and high sea raged, and Bligh was determined to move them to safer ground as soon as he was able. On Nelson’s advice, he delayed an immediate departure until plants in an apparently dormant state showed signs of being alive and healthy.
Some days after the storm, Huggan, the quondam surgeon, at last succumbed to his ‘drunkenness and indolence’.
‘Exercise was a thing he could not bear an Idea of,’ Bligh wrote by way of an epitaph. Since his death had been projected even before the Bounty departed Deptford Dockyard, Huggan had a good run for his money. He was buried the following day to the east of Point Venus, across the river that cut the point and not far from the sea.
‘There the Sun rises,’ Tynah said as the grave was being dug, ‘and there it sets, and here you may bury Terronnoo, for so he was called.’ Joining Huggan’s shipmates for the funeral were all the chiefs of the region and a great many other people, respectful and solemn for the surgeon’s perhaps undeservedly dignified rites. Huggan was only the second European to be buried on the island.
It was Christmas by the time the dormant plants had put forth the desired shoots, and the men began the cumbersome task of moving camp. A reef harbour at Oparre, to the west of Matavai, had been chosen as the Bounty’s new anchorage. With a watchful eye on the weather, which had continued to be troubled, Bligh ordered the Bounty readied for her short journey, and had his 774 potted breadfruit plants carefully carried on board. At half past ten in the morning, the ship weighed anchor and cautiously set out to follow the launch, which was carrying the tents and which Bligh had sent ahead as a pilot.
The second camp, according to Bligh, was ‘a delightful situation in every respect.’ The ship lay in sheltered, smooth water, where the tide lapped at the beach and no surf broke. Dense stands of trees shaded the new nursery, which was established along the same lines as the Matavai camp with the addition of a hut supplied by Tynah. Tynah, who had lobbied hard not to lose the Bounty and all the amusements and lucrative trade she brought, was delighted with the relocation, as he also had jurisdiction of Oparre. Taios left behind were still close enough to visit, and the easy social routine that had been enjoyed at Matavai was soon resumed, with people promenading along the beach opposite the ship ‘every fair Evening’. Bligh directed the ship ‘to be laid up and everything put below’ in part so as to avoid more thefts, but this was also a sign that the men on board could look forward to only perfunctory duties.
Nonetheless, the very day the plants and ship were safely reestablished, Bligh had William Muspratt, the cook’s assistant, flogged with a dozen lashes for ‘neglect of duty’. Two days later Robert Lamb, the butcher, was also flogged with a dozen ‘for suffering his Cleaver to be Stolen’. This now brought the total number of men punished up to six.
Although the temperature remained warm, this new season brought torrential rain and squalls, and skies so dense with sodden clouds that for an entire month Bligh was unable to take a single celestial observation. It was on one of these dark, impenetrable nights that three of the Bounty’s men deserted. When the watch was relieved at four in the morning of 5 January 1789, Charles Churchill, the master-at-arms, John Millward, able seaman, and William Muspratt, who had only recently been flogged, were found missing. Gone with them were the small cutter along with eight stands of arms and cartouches of ammunition.
Bligh responded to the news with an icy resolve that he had hitherto not displayed. To his Tahitian friends, he stated in very clear, straightforward and polite language that he expected the men returned. Laughing nervously, they asked Bligh if he would hold them hostage on board his ship, as Cook had done. This was an unexpected and revealing question. In 1769, during his first visit to Tahiti, Cook had lost two marines to desertion and had retaliated by holding the chiefs hostage, his rationale being that his men could not survive on the island without the complicity of the islanders. That Bligh’s friends raised this concern twenty years after the event suggests that Cook’s actions had left a deep impression.
Bligh reassured his friends that he would not resort to such a stratagem, adding, in his log, that he had ‘never shown any Violence or Anger’ at any of the petty thefts that had occurred and had enjoyed such mutual goodwill that he knew his friends had confidence in him, and that he had ‘therefore no doubt but they will bring the Deserters back’ – but, if they should not, he would ‘make the whole Country Suffer for it.’ Having issued his warnings, there was little Bligh could do but wait, relying on local intelligence to flush out the fugitives.
That some of his men would try to desert probably did not take Bligh completely by surprise; again, he had his experience with Cook to draw upon. Cook had suffered desertions on Tahiti during all three of his expeditions. Recognizing that the inducements to leave ship were many, Cook had summoned his crew and lectured them at length on the ‘spirit of Desertion’, informing them that ‘they Might run off if they pleased,’ as one of the company later recorded, ‘but they might Depend upon it he would Recover them again.’ Stern as it was, the speech did not deter other, also futile attempts. Some years later, on learning of the Bounty’s fate, James Matra, a midshipman on Cook’s first journey, would report to Banks the astonishing news that a mass desertion had been planned by ‘most of the People’ and some of the gentlemen of the Endeavour. Mr Midshipman Matra had been instrumental in dissuading them, so he would claim, his principal line of argument being that the men could be certain of ‘dying rotten’ of the pox if they were to live out their lives on the island.
Within his own company, Bligh must have seen evidence that his officers and people were settling down into Tahitian life and adopting local customs, most visibly in their passion for being tattooed. The first tattoos had arrived in England with sailors returning from the Americas or the Pacific, and especially from the Endeavour (with Joseph Banks) at the end of Cook’s first voyage, when they had become tokens of great prestige. The Bounty’s company’s tastes were varied, some sticking conservatively to English iconography. James Morrison, of all people, for reasons only to be guessed at, had had himself tattooed with the Order of the Garter around his leg and the Knights of the Garter’s motto: ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – ‘Shame on him who evil thinks.’ Thomas Ellison wore simply his name and ‘October 25th 1788’ on his right arm – the date he had first sighted Otaheite.
But several of the men had undergone traditional Tahitian tattooing over large parts of their body, particularly on their buttocks. In Tahitian tradition, a man was not eligible to marry unless he had undergone the lengthy and painful operation of having his entire backside blacked over. Bligh left descriptions only of the mutineers, and with one exception (John Mills, the Scottish gunner’s mate) every one of them was tattooed, and usually ‘very much tatowed’ or ‘tatowed in several places’. Peter Heywood was in this company, being ‘very much tattowed’, among other things with the three-legged emblem of the Isle of Man. Those who had received the elaborate tattoos of Tahitian manhood included George Stewart, Matthew Quintal and Fletcher Christian.
Still, Bligh himself had encouraged friendly relations with the Tahitians, and his men’s enthusiasm for the more eye-catching aspects of their culture was not something to be readily, or fruitfully, legislated. But now, as he conducted his own grim investigation of the events, he made other discoveries. On examination of the men’s personal effects for clues, a piece of paper was found inside Charles Churchill’s chest on which he had written his own name and the names of three of the shore party. The deserters would later say darkly that ‘many others intended to remain among the islands,’ and making a list of men committed to an illegal act such as desertion – or mutiny – was an old trick. When Captain Edward Edwards, back in his happier days before he captained the Pandora, had thwarted the mutinous plot on board his ship Narcissus, a list of names of the men involved in the plot had been discovered on one of the would-be mutineers; perhaps the rash act of committing a name to paper was perceived as a kind of security that bound the man in question to one’s cause.
Some years later, in personal correspondence, Bligh reported that ‘this List had Christian, Heywood and several other Names in it,’ and that he had approached his protégé ‘not conceiving Christian could be guilty of such a thing, and who, when I showed it to him, laughed as well as myself.’ To a man, the shore party professed their innocence to Bligh, and ‘denyd it so firmly, that He was inclined from Circumstances to believe them and said no more to them about it,’ according to Morrison. In the official log no mention is made of this mysterious list; Bligh’s personal log, in which he would have been most expected to have made some remarks about the event, ends on 23 October, and does not resume until 5 April 1789; a comprehensive index, in Bligh’s own handwriting, is all that can be found of the missing portion. The official log, submitted to the Admiralty, makes no mention of his suspicions whatsoever and shows Bligh’s professionalism at its best. If the men had convinced him of their innocence, then he was bound to ‘say no more about it.’ Or was the incident omitted for more self-serving reasons – because later events proved he had been duped? At least ‘three of the Party on shore’ would remain among the mutineers: Peter Heywood, William Brown and Fletcher Christian.
One curious and generally unremarked incident occurred four days after Churchill and his companions deserted. As Bligh reported, ‘one of my officers on shore’ cut a branch of an oil-nut tree growing at a marae, or sacred site, and, ‘accidently bringing it into the dwelling where my people are at, all the Natives both Men and Women suddenly left.’ The branch had tabooed the shore hut; no Tahitian would set foot here until the appropriate ceremony lifted the taboo. Curiously, however, as Bligh noted, ‘when I came on shore I found a branch of this Tree tyed to one of the Posts, altho they saw the effect it had of keeping the Natives from the House.’ Is it significant that in the immediate aftermath of the desertion one of the officers – Christian or Heywood – tabooed the house in which three men implicated on Churchill’s list happened to live? Was this a sign to Tahitian taios and allies to stay away, perhaps in the wake of an aborted plot? A whimsical amulet to ward off further trouble? Or, as Bligh clearly believed, mere happenstance?
Bligh seems to have accepted that the outcome to this adventure did not lie in his hands, and he returned his company to their former routine while awaiting whatever news his Tahitian friends brought him of the deserters. His own time was once again divided between the nursery and enquiry into local customs, and he observed with delight ‘the swarms of little Children which are in every part of the Country,’ flying kites, playing cat’s cradle, and skipping rope, the latter game, as he noted being ‘common with the Boys in England.’ While onshore on 16 January, he received a message from Fryer that a man known to have given conveyance to the deserters was on board the Bounty: did Bligh want Fryer to detain him? Incredulous, Bligh returned to the ship to find the informant had escaped by diving overboard and that no attempt had been made to follow him.
‘As he knew perfectly my determination in punishing this Man if ever he could be caught, it was an unnecessary delay in confining him,’ Bligh wrote of Fryer. The following day, he had even greater cause for anger. Spare sails that Bligh had ordered to be taken out of storage and aired were found to be mildewed and rotting.
‘If I had any Officers to supercede the Master and Boatswain, or was capable of doing without them, considering them as common Seamen, they should no longer occupy their respective Stations,’ Bligh fumed. ‘Scarce any neglect of duty can equal the criminality of this, for it appears that altho the Sails have been taken out twice since I have been in the Island, which I thought fully sufficient and I had trusted to their reports, Yet these New Sails never were brought out.’ Bligh had the sails washed in the sea, then hung to dry ‘to be ready for repairing’, a laborious task. The Bounty’s voyage was only half over; an estimated ten months of sailing lay ahead.
Almost three weeks passed before word was brought that the deserters had been located in Tettahah, some five miles distant. Bligh at once set out to apprehend them, although darkness was coming and it was a rainy, windy night. Surprised by Bligh where they had taken shelter, the three men resignedly surrendered without resistance. Once back at the ship, Bligh read the Articles of War and administered punishment: twelve lashes for Charles Churchill, two dozen each for William Muspratt and John Millward – to be repeated at a later date. In between the floggings, the men were confined in irons and found time to write Bligh an extraordinary letter:
Sir,
We should think ourselves wholly inexcusable if we omitted taking this earliest opportunity of returning our thanks for your goodness in delivering us from a trial by Court-Martial, the fatal consequences of which are obvious; and although we cannot possibly lay any claim to so great a favour, yet we humbly beg you will be pleased to remit any farther punishment; and we trust our future conduct will fully demonstrate our deep sense of your clemency, and our stedfast resolution to behave better hereafter.
We are,
Sir,
Your most obedient, most humble servants, C. Churchill, Wm. Muspratt, John Millward.
If the men believed that a submissive, honey-toned letter would charm their captain into dropping the second part of the punishment, they were proved mistaken when, eleven days later, the second round was indeed administered. Why Charles Churchill should have received a lesser punishment than his fellows is unclear. The punishment as a whole was, in any case, lenient; convicted deserters – with good service and character taken into consideration – could expect to receive 100 to 150 lashes. Bligh’s leniency had been carefully considered. As he wrote in his log, ‘this affair was solely caused by the neglect of the Officers who had the Watch.’ The officer in question, identified by Morrison as Midshipman Thomas Hayward, had been asleep at his station, a crime under the Articles of War no less serious than desertion. (‘No Person in or belonging to the Fleet shall sleep upon his Watch, or negligently perform the Duty imposed on him, or forsake his Station, upon Pain of Death…’) Bligh disrated the officer, turning him before the mast. According to an approving Morrison, he had also been clapped in irons until the runaways were returned.
‘I was induced to give them all a lecture on this occasion,’ Bligh continued, referring to his other officers, ‘and endeavored to show them that however exempt they were at present from the like punishment, yet they were equally subject by the Articles of War to a condign one.’ In other words, although his officers were exempt ‘at present’ from being flogged, they were liable to ‘a severe and well-deserved’ punishment. It is within this remarkable lecture that the tensions so fatal to the voyage can be discerned most transparently.
‘An Officer with Men under his care is at all times in some degree responsible for their conduct,’ Bligh wrote in his log, paraphrasing his lecture, ‘but when from his neglect Men are brought to punishment while he only meets with a reprimand, because a publick conviction by Tryal will bring both into a more severe and dangerous situation, an alternative often laid aside through lenity, and sometimes necessity, as it now is in both cases; it is an unpleasant thing to remark that no feelings of honor, or sense of shame is to be Observed in such an Offender.’
The list of his officers’ transgressions while in Tahiti, quite apart from incidents in the earlier part of the voyage, is impressive: when moving from Matavai to Oparre, Fryer had allowed the ship to run aground; a midshipman had slept on his watch and allowed three men to desert; the sails had been allowed to rot; on returning from capturing the deserters, Bligh had discovered that the ship’s timekeeper, critical to accurate navigation, had been allowed to run down; the ship’s rudder had been stolen from the camp; and in early March, an azimuth compass had been taken from under the noses of the men onshore, for which, according to Morrison, ‘Mr. Bligh…went on shore and rebuked the Officers at the tent for neglecting their duty.’ In addition, there are two enigmatic entries in the index Bligh composed to his missing personal log that refer to ‘Mr. Hallet’s contumacy’ and ‘Mr. Hallet’s behaviour.’
No wonder, then, that Bligh had raged after learning of the desertion that ‘such neglectfull and worthless petty Officers I believe never was in a Ship as are in this. No Orders for a few hours together are Obeyed by them, and their conduct in general is so bad, that no confidence or trust can be reposed in them, in short,’ he concluded ominously, ‘they have drove me to every thing but Corporal punishment and that must follow if they do not improve.’ The tenor of these occasional outbursts suggests that many more aggravations had passed unrecorded. It is a striking fact that, with one exception, Fryer and Purcell are the only officers named by Bligh in his official log. The names of Hallett, Hayward, Christian – other known offenders – have all been edited out, perhaps along with others of his young gentlemen. Bligh was later, privately, to refer to Edward Young, for example, as ‘a worthless wretch’, which at the very least suggests dereliction of some duties; and yet Young’s name is never mentioned in the Admiralty’s log. All of these young gentlemen were friends of the friends and patrons Bligh would have to rub shoulders with once back in England.
On 4 February, two nights after the second part of the deserters’ punishment was meted out under cover of heavy rain, the cable of the Bounty’s bower anchor was cut, an act that could have brought the ship to disaster by allowing it to drift upon the reef. No explanation for what Bligh termed ‘this Malicious act’ could be made; indeed, the mystery would be cleared up only much later, when the mutineers returned to Tahiti and learned that the agent had been the taio of Midshipman Hayward. His object had been to wreck the ship so as to ensure that his friend never left Tahiti. More alarming, he declared that he had watched as the deserters were flogged and vowed that if a lash were laid on Hayward, he would kill Bligh for it. But now, perplexed and affronted, Bligh threatened ‘instant revenge’ unless the perpetrator was produced. To underscore his displeasure, Bligh held aloof from Tynah and Iddeeah for two days, approaching them only to reiterate his anger. But for all his efforts, the unhappy chief was unable to produce the villain, and at length burst into tears.
‘I could no longer keep these people under an Idea that I mistrusted them,’ Bligh wrote, already repentant ‘Our reconciliation therefore took place, and they came on board with me at Noon to dine.’
February and March, the last two months the Bounty was to be in Tahiti, were spent readying the ship for departure. Under the great lowering cloud banks that filled the sky with violent colour and claimed the island heights, the Bounty’s men worked through the daily fits of rain that ranged from light to torrential. Their very visible activities – caulking, repairing sails, mending iron fittings, stowing provisions and all the bustle preparatory to a long voyage – caused consternation among the Tahitians, now faced with the imminent certainty of losing their friends. Tynah began an unsuccessful bid to persuade Bligh to carry himself and Iddeeah to England. This period also saw an increase in the number of thefts, as many Tahitians saw their last chance for a little profit fading. As Bligh wrote, ‘it is to be expected when a ship is near the time of Sailing,’ adding that he attached no blame to the Tahitians, because he was ‘perfectly certain that had the Ship been lying in the River Thames, a hundred times as much would have been Stolen.’ Nonetheless, when, thanks to Tynah’s efforts, the thief of the azimuth compass was found, Bligh felt the time had come to deter all such future acts with a demonstration of Pretanee’s might
‘Kill him,’ said Tynah, committed to demonstrating his unwavering good faith. Bligh was not inclined to do so, but instead administered the most severe punishment of his voyage: one hundred lashes to the thief, who was then confined in irons until the departure of the ship.
‘His back became very much swelled,’ Bligh recorded with a kind of wonderment, ‘but only the last stroke broke the Skin.’ The incident is also recorded by Morrison, who administered the flogging and makes no adverse comments on it, only remarking that Bligh had gone ‘in a passion’ to Tynah when the theft was first discovered.
Still the rains continued, and on the dawn watch of a day and night that had seen ‘much Rain’, the mate of the watch heard a splash over the side of the ship, which on investigation turned out to be the sound of the confined thief diving overboard to his freedom. The thief’s escape – according to Morrison, he had picked his lock – elicited a last strenuous outburst from Bligh.
‘I have such a neglectfull set about me,’ he wrote, after castigating the mate of the watch, whom, exceptionally, he named as George Stewart (it is worth noting he had not come to Bligh through a patron), ‘that I beleive nothing but condign punishment can alter their conduct’ – this was the second occasion Bligh had adverted to the possibility of ‘condign’ punishment of his officers. ‘Verbal orders in the course of a Month were so forgot that they would impudently assert no such thing or directions were given, and I have been at last under the necessity to trouble myself with writing what by decent Young Officers would be complied with as the common Rules of Service.’
As preparations for departure continued, it is likely that at least some of the Bounty’s men looked up from their work on the ship, through the rain and its steaming aftermath, across the water to the rustling skirt of palms and the dense canopies of fragrant trees they now knew so well…and dreaded the day of departure. Not just a life of ease, but friends, lovers, common-law wives, in some cases their future children would be left behind. William Bligh, on the other hand, for all the praise he showered on the island and for all his ease and professed friendships with his hosts, had always had his eye on the homeward run. His outbursts at his officers significantly increased in the final months of the Tahitian sojourn. Whether this was simply because Bligh had reached the limit of tolerance for their irresponsible behaviour, or because he responded to the increased pressures of the approaching departure by lashing out at those next in pecking order, is impossible to know. Certainly Bligh had much to think about even without the worry over unreliable officers. His ship and everything in her had to be overhauled and provisioned for the long voyage still ahead; he had to take final surveys of the coast and harbour, which would be submitted to the Admiralty for the use of future navigators; he had to rerate the ship’s timekeeper, and keep a clear head for the Endeavour Straits. Relationships with Tynah and all local dignitaries had to be massaged until the last moment, so that future British vessels would receive as much goodwill as had the Bounty. And he had to nurse the 1015 breadfruit and other miscellaneous plants through the vicissitudes of a twelve-thousand-mile voyage home.
‘One day, or even one hours negligence may at any period be the means of destroying all the Trees and Plants which may have been collected,’ Banks had written in his final orders to Nelson with characteristic directness, noting earlier, ‘You will take care to remind Lieutenant Bligh of that circumstance.’
On 27 March, Bligh ordered all cats and the two dogs disembarked in preparation for bringing the plants on board, an operation that he characterized as ‘tedious’. Now firmly rooted in boxes, tubs and pots, they had all to be sorted by size and arranged in their appropriate holdings.
‘Thus far I have accomplished the Object of my Voyage,’ Bligh wrote, days later, when the operation was finished. Complacently surveying his flourishing plants neatly arrayed in the great cabin, he noted he had managed to stow 309 additional breadfruit to what had originally been planned; he was, then, safely covered for any losses.
With the ship crammed – ‘lumbered’, to borrow Morrison’s term – with gifts of coconuts, yams and plantains, the men made their goodbyes. Tynah and Iddeeah wept bitterly, begging Bligh to spend one last night in Matavai, but this he gently declined. He had grave misgivings about leaving his friends, knowing, as did they, that once the protection of the Bounty
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Caroline Alexander
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Историческая литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The bestselling author of The Endurance reveals the startling truth behind the legend of the Mutiny on the Bounty – the most famous sea story of all time.More than two centuries have passed since Fletcher Christian mutinied against Lt. Bligh on a small armed transport vessel called Bounty. Why the details of this obscure adventure at the end of the world remain vivid and enthralling is as intriguing as the truth behind the legend. Caroline Alexander focusses on the court martial of the ten mutineers captured in Tahiti and brought to justice in Portsmouth. Each figure emerges as a richly drawn character caught up in a drama that may well end on the gallows. With enormous scholarship and exquisitely drawn characters, The Bounty is a tour de force.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.