The Shining Sea (32 page)

With a powerful enemy squadron now searching for him, Porter's decision to go to the Marquesas made good sense. He knew the British were sure to search the Galapagos, and, of course, Valparaiso and the other Chilean ports. He would have to travel far off the beaten path to find a suitable harbor to fix the
Essex
and give her crew some relaxation. It was extremely unlikely that the British hunters would search for him in the Marquesas.

The list of repairs for the
Essex
was long. Barnacles had to be scraped from the hull; the copper bottom, which in places was coming off, had to be cleaned and repaired. The standing and running rigging needed overhauling, and the ship required a thorough smoking to kill the hundreds of rats that had infested her and had become an intolerable nuisance. The rats were destroying provisions, chewing through water casks, destroying cartridges in the magazine, and eating their way through just about every part of the ship, including clothing, flags, and sails. Smoking the ship w
as the only way to get rid of them, and it would require removing everything.

The men were as much in need of refreshment as the ship, and the Marquesas, as Porter imagined them, would be an ideal place for accomplishing that as well. Nothing engrossed sailors as much as thoughts of Polynesian women.
When, in the late nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson first contemplated making the long journey to the islands, his thoughts were of “undraped womanhood, bedecked with flowers, frisking in vales of Eden.” The imaginations of the
Essex
's crew—and of the captain—were undoubtedly filled with the same vision.

Visiting the Marquesas had its dangers, of course, and Porter was alive to them. The islands were beguiling.
Once there, even for a short time, the men might refuse to leave. Mutiny was a real possibility, regardless of the goodwill that currently existed between Porter and his crew.
“No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor,” Stevenson wrote. “The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virgin sense.”

Porter had a high appreciation of the power that Polynesian islands could exert from having studied the uprising aboard HMS
Bounty
in 1789—the Royal Navy's most famous mutiny. After five months on Tahiti, many of the
Bounty
's tars had become so enamored with Polynesian life that getting them to leave proved impossible, especially when it meant returning to their hard lives in England. The ship's captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, had allowed them unusual liberties, and Tahiti had mesmerized them. Of course, there were other reasons for their reluctance to return home. Sailing under Bligh for months in a tiny ship was unappealing. His faults loomed large in their minds—sudden, unpredictable
bursts of temper, flying into a rage over trivial or imagined offenses, and his repeated use of abusive, demeaning language to castigate officers and crew. The men who were the objects of his wrath, particularly officers, found his foul mouth intolerable.

It is likely that Bligh's abrasive, insensitive personality was not, in the end, the main cause of the mutiny, however. It was life on the islands that exerted the most powerful influence. Bligh was convinced that the men's attachment to the women and the easy life on Tahiti were the root causes of his problems.
“I can only conjecture,” he wrote in his notebook, “that they had ideally assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheitans [Tahitians] than they could possibly have in England, which joined to some female connections has most likely been the leading cause of the whole business.”

Bligh was undoubtedly right about the source of his woes, but he remained unaware of his own failings. He was so out of touch with, and indeed indifferent to, the feelings of his men that when the
Bounty
left Tahiti on April 5, 1789, he did not have the slightest idea that a mutiny was brewing. He thought the mood aboard ship was buoyant. He fancied that the men were turning their thoughts to home, as he was. When in the early morning of April 28 Fletcher Christian and three others awakened Bligh in his cabin, pressed bayonets to his chest, and warned him not to make a sound, he was taken completely by surprise—utterly flabbergasted. The leaders of the rebellion, like Christian, were men he thought he had favored and promoted and were loyal to him. “I have been run down by my own dogs,” he wrote to his beloved wife, Betsy.

The mutineers had firm control of the
Bounty
, and they were determined never to go back to England. Bligh had feared that the unusual length of time the crew spent on Tahiti might undermine discipline, but he could do nothing about it. He had planned a much shorter stay. But because of delays in leaving England, Bligh arrived in Tahiti at the end of October, which meant that his departure would have to be delayed until the eastern monsoon began in May.

Once the
Bounty
left Tahiti, Bligh's insults grated on the disgruntled tars. Twenty-three days after leaving, they could take it no more and seized the
Bounty
, setting Bligh adrift in the middle of the Pacific in a twenty-three-foot launch, crammed with nineteen men and provisions for only
five days.
At the time of the mutiny, the
Bounty
's complement was forty-three, and at least twenty-two of them did not support those who seized the ship. But none of them resisted either. Eighteen went meekly into the launch, even though they faced almost certain death. Four others, who made it plain they were with Bligh, were forced to remain on the
Bounty
.

Bligh's chances of survival were practically nil, but incredible luck and seamen's skills of a high order saved him. On August 18, 1789, he reached Coupang (Kupang) on the island of Timor in the Dutch East Indies with all of his men but one, after an amazing forty-one-day voyage of 3,618 miles in an open, overcrowded boat. Eventually, he made his way back to England to tell his improbable tale.

Porter studied Bligh's account carefully, absorbing important lessons that would guide his conduct. To begin with, he was determined not to be taken by surprise, as Bligh had been. He intended to watch for any signs of trouble and planned to react swiftly. He had certain advantages that Bligh did not have. The tiny
Bounty
had no marines on board. She was not on a wartime mission. Bligh's orders had been to gather breadfruit plants and bring them to the Caribbean, where British planters hoped to grow them in abundance and feed them to their slaves. A contingent of marines, acting as the ship's police, might have prevented the mutiny. The
Essex
, on the other hand, had a full complement of marines, and Porter intended to use them.

Porter's plans to avoid a mutiny did not include restricting the men's sexual activity—or his own. He gave the crews wide latitude to satisfy their appetites. He knew this could create problems, but he thought they would be manageable if he did not remain in the Marquesas for too long, as Bligh had on Tahiti. Even so, no matter how long he stayed, mutiny remained a possibility, and Porter intended to be on his guard. Knowing what had happened to Bligh was a constant reminder to stay alert.

Acting in Porter's favor was the crew's knowledge that if they took the
Essex
they would be forfeiting substantial prize money. Even though seamen were notorious for living day to day, thinking only in the present, and not planning ahead, the prospect of losing all that money was sure to give the most disgruntled hands pause.

Another advantage that Porter had that Bligh did not was having observed early in his career how a skillful captain dealt with a mutinous crew.
When he was a midshipman in 1798–99 aboard the
Constellation
during the Quasi-War with France, he saw how Captain Thomas Truxtun reacted to unrest in a crew, and he never forgot it.

Mutiny was in the air in those days. There had been two spectacular mutinies in England during 1797—one at Spithead (the anchorage between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight), from April 16 to May 15, and the other at the Nore (an important anchorage in the Thames Estuary) from May 12 to June 13.

The mutiny at Spithead involved the entire Channel Fleet, Britain's principal defense force. It was well organized and unusually peaceful. Little blood was shed. The men (actually, two representatives from each ship), in a notably respectful manner, requested an increase in pay (which had not risen since 1652); improved care and compensation for the wounded; better food; an increase in bounties; and the removal of certain unpopular officers. For weeks prior to the mutiny, the leading spokesmen for the tars had made requests for reform to the Admiralty, but they had been ignored. When the men finally took action, they got a response, although the Admiralty was still reluctant to negotiate, even though the requests were obviously reasonable. The situation might easily have gotten out of hand had it not been for Admiral Lord Richard Howe, who intervened at a critical moment, and, in a relatively short time, brought the Admiralty, Parliament, and the mutineers together on reform. The parties were able to reach agreement with minimal bloodshed, although, except for a modest pay increase, little of what was promised actually materialized. With matters apparently settled, the Channel Fleet sailed on May 17, and resumed its blockade off Brest, the major French naval base on the Atlantic. At that point Britain had been at war with France for nearly four and a half years.

Inspired by the apparent success at Spithead, another mutiny occurred on May 12 among warships assembled from various places (not a united fleet like the one at Spithead) at the Nore. The mutineers demanded far more than their more modest brethren at Spithead. The Admiralty, when it considered the additional demands, reacted negatively, and beginning on May 28 took action against the mutineers, starting with cutting off their supplies. Whatever cohesiveness the mutiny had started to crumble. Unlike the protesting tars at Spithead, these mutineers had little public
support, and when they felt their cause being undermined, they seriously considered blockading the Thames, or sailing their ships to a neutral, or even a French port. Their talk was so reckless that patriotic seamen soon took over the ships, and the mutiny ended on June 13. Twenty-nine men were hanged, but some of the leaders escaped.

Not long afterward, another sensational mutiny took place in the Caribbean during the night and morning of September 21–22, 1797, aboard the 32-gun British frigate
Hermione
. Its unusual brutality drew the world's attention. There were other mutinies and near mutinies during this time, but this one stood out. The vicious action taken by the crew against a tyrannical skipper remained part of the consciousness of seafarers for years to come, and it directly touched David Porter.

To begin with, the
Hermione
had an infamously cruel captain, Hugh Pigot. His predecessor, Philip Wilkinson, had been just as cruel, if not more so. Thanks to Wilkinson's two-and-a-half-year tyranny, Pigot inherited a sullen crew, which he mindlessly alienated further. The son of an admiral, Pigot had been a privileged character from the start of his career and exhibited no self-control. Unpredictable, a raging sadist, he frequently used strong language—always to demean, never to praise. He was arbitrary in dealing with subordinates, and a heavy flogger in both the
Hermione
and his previous command, the 32-gun frigate
Success.
To make matters worse, he played favorites; certain men escaped his wrath for no apparent reason.

For nine months, Pigot's abusive behavior embittered the already estranged crew, but hands remained obedient until a particularly outrageous incident. At six o'clock on the evening of September 20, 1797, a sudden squall came up, and Pigot ordered the topsails reefed. Topmen were soon at their tasks in difficult conditions, as the masts gyrated in the storm. Pigot observed from below and was unhappy, as he often was, with the men's performance. He screamed at them through a speaking trumpet, and grew enraged. He was especially upset with the ten men working on the mizzen topsail yard. Suddenly, he shouted at them, “I'll flog the last man down,” by which he meant that after work on the mizzen topsail was completed, the last man to reach the deck would receive at least twelve strokes from a cat-o'-nine-tails—a common, but brutal, practice that Pigot regularly employed. In their rush to reach the deck, three young,
terrified sailors lost their balance and fell fifty feet screaming from the mizzen topsail yard to the deck. Two of them smashed directly into the quarterdeck, nearly at Pigot's feet. The other glanced off Pigot before hitting the hard-as-iron oak planking. Pigot looked at the lifeless, disfigured bodies with disgust and yelled, “Throw the lubbers overboard.” The entire ship was shocked. Experienced topmen on the mainmast murmured loud enough for Pigot to hear, and he ordered all of them to be whipped the following day. But that order was never carried out. During the night of September 21, a savage mutiny began, and Pigot, nine officers, and a midshipman were killed and thrown overboard.

The mutineers then sailed the
Hermione
to the Spanish Main, entering the Spanish port of La Guairá just north of Caracas (in present-day Venezuela) and surrendered the frigate to Spain, which, at the time, was Britain's enemy.

The Admiralty went after the mutineers with a vengeance, never closing the books on the case, continuing the search for years. In time, thirty-three of the
Hermione
mutineers were caught and twenty-four hanged after trials. One was exiled to Australia. But over a hundred were never caught, including many of the ringleaders.

It was not clear who planned the mutiny. It appeared to be a spontaneous uprising spurred by recent events like the deaths of the three topmen and Pigot's sacrilegious abuse of their dead bodies. The Admiralty and its numerous supporters in Parliament insisted that Pigot's cruelty was an exception, not the rule, in the Royal Navy. But Pigot's superior, Admiral Hyde Parker, who knew about Pigot's methods, had never reprimanded him for them. Pigot's cruelty was tolerated, if not encouraged, by his superiors' passive acceptance of his methods.