The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (2 page)

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Authors: Caroline Alexander

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Great Britain, #Military, #Naval

BOOK: The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
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First published in 2003 by Viking,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2004
 
 
Copyright © Caroline Alexander, 2003
eISBN : 978-0-142-00469-2
 
 
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TO SMOKEY
 
SHIP’S COMPANY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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), Endeavor 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 April 28, 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 minute 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 equaled £1 plus 1s. 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 0s. 0d. (28 pounds, 0 shillings, 0 pence) a month in pay; a lieutenant, £7 0s. 0d. (7 pounds, 0 shillings, 0 pence); an able seaman, £1 4s. 0d. (1 pound, 4 shillings, 0 pence)—less deductions!
 
PRELUDE
 
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 farther 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 December 10, 1787, “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.”
 
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 December 23, 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 February 17, 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 May 25 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 August 19, 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
 
Tahiti, 1791
 
 
At daylight on a fine, fair, breezy day in March, a young man in his late teens said good-bye 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.

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