But looking at the mutiny from the viewpoint of facts uncovered by recent documentary research, we see that William Bligh, as befitted one of Captain Cook’s star pupils, handled the entire affair with much credit to his training and to the traditions of the navy he served. Today it seems likely that the mutiny was a hot, spur-of-the-moment affair, arising much more from the loveliness and allure of Tahitian maidens than from Bligh’s quarter-deck tyranny.
True, Bligh had cursed at his crew, and he had perhaps stinted them on provisions issued during the voyage. Certainly he seemed to prize his breadfruit more than he did his men. He had punished some of his crew for serious breaches of discipline. But although flogging was common in the British Navy in those days, when crews were recruited mainly from the gin shops and prisons, Bligh flogged nobody until eleven weeks after he sailed. Before the mutiny, only seven men were flogged—three of them for the high crime of desertion, and one for striking a native. Bligh’s conduct certainly did not justify the taking over of one of His Majesty’s ships and abandoning nineteen men to almost certain death in a crowded open boat on the Pacific.
Usually the Bounty story has for its romantic hero the Byronic mate, twenty-four-year-old Fletcher Christian. He was certainly the ringleader, but not of a group of men suffering nobly under a tyrant’s whims. Christian led the young bloods who wanted to get back to their native sweethearts. And certainly Bligh had no suspicion that what he later called “one of the most atrocious acts of piracy ever committed” was brewing.
True, several brushes had recently occurred between the captain and Christian. Three weeks after leaving Tahiti, the Bounty called at the island of Nomuka in the Tonga Islands to take on wood and water. That night Mr. Christian, who was in charge of the party, was blamed by Bligh when a native stole an adz which could not be recovered. On the afternoon of April 27, according to the journal kept by James Morrison, boatswain’s mate, Bligh missed some coconuts and scolded the officers for carelessness. When Christian asked if Bligh thought him so mean as to steal the captain’s coconuts, Bligh was supposed to have responded: “Yes, you damned hound, I do!… God damn you, you scoundrels, you are all thieves alike, and combine with the men to rob me.… I’ll make half of you jump overboard before you get through Endeavour Straits!” But a short time later, when the captain cooled off, he genially invited Christian to have dinner with him in his cabin. Christian pleaded illness and refused.
That night the brooding officer, recalling the charms of his lovely Tahitian “wife” Isabella—who was later on lonely Pitcairn Island to bear his son, Thursday October Christian—apparently made up his mind to desert in a boat But a series of extraordinary chances caused him to elect mutiny instead.
First, there were no marines or other guards on board. The two mates of the watch were criminally asleep. The arms chest was in the center of the main cabin, to make room for the breadfruit plants; and Christian, on the plea of a shark scare, could easily get the key from the armorer. Most providential of all, the more violent characters in the ship happened to be members of Christian’s watch, which took over at midnight. In that watch were all seven of the men who had been flogged for derelictions of duty since the voyage had begun.
On the spur of the moment, Christian broached his bold project to the hardened Matthew Quintal, who agreed and swung others to the idea. The delights of Tahiti, where the men had lived like sultans, were recalled. Both men and officers were young and lusty, and had made many Polynesian friends, who would welcome them back. Their yearning memories of Tahiti were contrasted with the dangerous year-long voyage ahead. The ringleaders spread disaffection, and the remainder of the crew were weak-willed or bewildered. Not one officer was able then or later to rise in the defense of discipline. As for Christian, he is reported to have said, when setting his captain and eighteen shipmates adrift in a leaky boat: “It is too late; I have been in hell for this fortnight past and am determined to bear it no longer.”
Captain Bligh was asleep in his cabin before sunrise on April 28, 1789, when he was seized by the gang of mutineers. Holding naked bayonets at his heart, they tied his hands behind his back, threatening instant death if he made the least noise. He none the less cried out, but the officers were also prisoners and could not come to help him. He was then forced on deck in his shirt and nightcap, hemmed in by men with cocked muskets. He demanded of Christian the cause of this violent act, but the only answer was: “Not a word, sir, or you are dead this instant!” At the same time the mate often threatened to stab the bound man in the breast with a bayonet.
The small cutter was hoisted out, but since it was a worm-eaten carcass of a boat, the launch was put out instead and loaded with sails, twine, rope, a grapnel and a small cask of water. Bligh tried several times to rally the men to a sense of duty, but was saluted by shouts of “Damn his eyes! Blow his brains out!” Eighteen other officers and men not concerned with the mutiny were hurried overside. The carpenter was allowed his tool chest, and the captain’s clerk managed to load in 150 pounds of bread, some wine, a quadrant and a compass, but no maps or chronometer or any of Bligh’s precious drawings and surveys. He did, however, salvage Bligh’s journals, his commission and some ship’s papers, as well as the captain’s uniform. Four cutlasses were thrown into the boat when it was veered astern.
Holding the captain by the cord that gripped his hands behind his back, the diabolical-looking Christian and his bayonet-wielding gang forced Bligh over the side. The crowded launch was then cast adrift in the open ocean, thirty miles from the nearest land. Symbolically, the mutineers threw overboard the offending breadfruit plants and shouted, “Huzzah for Tahiti!”
The Bounty was fated to return to that luscious island. Then, when Christian feared retribution, it was to sail onward with eight of the mutineers in search of a secret hideout, leaving sixteen of the crew behind. Its final destiny—to be burned and sunk in the deep waters off Pitcairn Island—and the story of the crimes and murders of the pirates on that lonely rock were not to be revealed until twenty years later, when the tale was told by old John Adams, the one mutineer who survived.
Undoubtedly Fletcher Christian had originally intended to toss his captain and the loyal men to the bottom of the Pacific, but others among the mutineers had qualms and Bligh’s party were given a fighting chance to make land in the launch—which was only twenty-three feet long and was loaded to within seven inches of the gunwale. Even then death seemed certain, and only the bravery and seamanship of Bligh avoided it.
Bligh’s bitterest critics marvel at his feat of bringing that perilous launch to safety. For length, privations and heroism, the story of that voyage—told in Bligh’s salt-stained log, which has miraculously survived—is unsurpassed in sea history. In forty-one days the open craft traveled 3618 miles, across waters almost uncharted, through tempestuous weather—on half the days of the trip there was either gale with heavy seas or else pouring rain—with provisions not exceeding a gill of water a day and an ounce and a half of bread, weighed out with a musket ball. They passed through some of the most dangerous waters of the world, including the cannibal Fiji Islands, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia and the deadly Torres Strait. Undefended by a single firearm, they faced daily threats from savage islanders; yet only one life was lost on the voyage, that of the fat quartermaster, who was stoned to death in a battle with the fierce natives of Tofua, one of the central Tonga Islands.
The crew of the launch, who were half dead during the last days of the voyage, survived only because their captain had superhuman courage. He got no help from his officers—in fact, the behavior of his sailing master Fryer and his carpenter Purcell was so exasperating as to amount to revolt, and finally Bligh had to take a cutlass and face them down, “determined to strike a final blow at it and either to preserve my command or die in the attempt.”
Yet even when at last the launch arrived at Kupang on Timor on June 14, Bligh’s troubles did not end. He bought from the friendly Dutch, with bills on the Br
itish government, a small schooner. With the Bounty’s launch in tow, this vessel left Kupang on August 20, and reached Surabaja on September 12. And here the continued mutinous behavior of the master and the carpenter forced Bligh to call for a court of inquiry, at which the two were judged to be held as prisoners to stand trial when they arrived in England. The complicated affair at Surabaja, during which Bligh seized a bayonet and personally put Fryer and Purcell under arrest, can be counted as at least a minor mutiny to add to Bligh’s growing list.
Bligh was back home on March 14, 1790, his name on every tongue for his open-boat exploit, the narrative of which he published before the end of the year. The formal court-martial on the loss of the Bounty was held at Spithead on October 22, and the verdict was that “the Bounty was violently and forcibly seized by the said Fletcher Christian and certain other mutineers.” The court honorably acquitted William Bligh and those tried with him of responsibility for her loss. On the same day, Purcell the carpenter was reprimanded for his behavior during the open-boat voyage.
At about the time of the trial, Fletcher Christian, on far Pitcairn, was learning that mutiny never pays. He had won the detestation of his fellows because of his cruelty and disregard of human rights—the very crimes of which he had accused Captain Bligh. His native wife had died on the island, and to replace her he forced the wife of one of the Tahitian men to live with him. This native retaliated by shooting Christian, and thus died the exiled mutineer, whose distinguished connections among the gentry of Westmoreland had begun a campaign to defame Bligh as a way of defending the reputation of their kinsman.
Bligh, in England, was riding high. He was introduced to the king at court. The Admiralty recognized his services by promoting him to the rank of commander and appointing him captain of the fourteen-gun sloop Falcon. Exactly a month later he was given an unusually rapid promotion to the rank of post-captain—the customary three years’ service as commander required by naval regulations having been dispensed with in his case as a special recognition of his valor.
On April 15, 1791, he was appointed captain of H. M. S. Providence, and charged with making a second attempt to transplant the breadfruit tree to the West Indies. This time Bligh saw to it that nineteen marines were aboard; he was taking no chances of having his ship pirated from him again. The Providence sailed on August 3, carrying among the officers young Matthew Flinders, who under Bligh’s instruction was to learn his trade in a way that enabled him to become Australia’s foremost maritime explorer. Flinders later recalled that on this second breadfruit voyage the ship’s complement often suffered from thirst, so that in quest of water “he and others would lie on the steps and lick the drops of the precious liquid from the buckets as they were conveyed by the gardener to the plants.”
During Bligh’s absence on this trip a number of the Bounty crew, survivors of the sixteen who had remained in Tahiti, were hauled back to England for trial. These were not the ringleaders, who by this time had settled on Pitcairn, but lesser figures who had been abandoned by Christian. At Tahiti one man had been murdered by a companion, who was then killed by the natives. The remaining fourteen were rounded up in March, 1791, by the twenty-four-gun frigate H. M. S. Pandora, under Captain Edward Edwards. The retributory arm of the British Admiralty had reached across the world to bring back for court-martial as many men as could be found of those who had stayed behind on the Bounty on that fateful April morning. But of course not even the determined Pandora
The fourteen prisoners that were taken experienced a living hell, penned up like animals in what they came to call “Pandora’s Box,” an iron-barred roundhouse built on the frigate’s deck. In this cage they were shackled in irons and treated by Edwards with greater severity than Bligh had ever exercised. Morrison wrote of it: “The heat of the place when it was calm was so intense that the sweat frequently ran in streams to the scuppers, and produced maggots in a short time. The hammocks being dirty when we got them, we found stored with vermin of another kind, which we had no method of eradicating but by lying on the plank. And though our friends would have supplied us with plenty of cloth, they were not permitted to do it, and our only remedy was to lay naked. These troublesome neighbors and the two necessary tubs which were constantly kept in the place helped to render our situation truly disagreeable.”
Seeking a passage through the Great Barrier Reef, the Pandora was wrecked on the night of August 28. For many hours after she struck, Edwards, disregarding the Admiralty’s orders to pay “proper regard to the preservation of their lives,” kept the Bounty prisoners in the cage, still in chains and guarded by sentinels with orders to fire among them if they made any motion. When the ship broke up, four of the Bounty men perished, still in manacles. The surviving ten, with the eighty-nine crewmen of the wrecked Pandora, were finally brought back to England.
Three months after their arrival, the prisoners were put on trial on a charge of mutiny. By this time a good deal of public sympathy had been aroused in their favor, particularly through the activities of the friends and relatives of young Peter Heywood and the brother of Christian, a professor of law. The Admiralty committed an error in not waiting until Bligh’s return to prosecute the prisoners, and hence public opinion became definitely anti-Bligh. He has sometimes been accused of avoiding this trial through cowardice, but his absence cannot be charged against him. He had reported the mutiny; he had faced his own court-martial and been honorably acquitted; and he had published his account of the affair. He did not appear in court against the accused for a very good reason: the mutineers were not brought back until June, 1792, by which time Bligh was again at Tahiti, seeking another load of breadfruit.
The court-martial met at Portsmouth on September 12, 1792, and ran until the eighteenth, attracting a crowd of spectators. At the end, four of the men were acquitted. Six were found guilty and condemned to death, but Heywood and Morrison were recommended for mercy. They were later pardoned, along with William Musprat. Three others were executed in Portsmouth Harbor on October 29—three and a half years after the mutiny had taken place.
Bligh returned with the Providence in September, 1793, after a highly successful voyage. He had collected twice the number of breadfruit plants in half the previous time, and had transported them to the West Indies. His voyage had also contributed to Pacific discovery. He had introduced the apple into Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), where it still prospers. He had discovered Mount Wellington and D’Entrecasteaux Channel, between Tasmania and Bruny Island. He had reported on the customs of the Society Islands, and was also the author of the first description of the natives of Fiji, first called Bligh’s Islands, which he further explored and mapped. In the waters between Australia and New Guinea he discovered a passage into Torres Strait which is now called Bligh’s Channel. In nineteen days his two ships safely traversed the island-dotted Strait, a region of which Flinders wrote: “Perhaps no space of three and a half degrees in length presents more danger.” Subsequently they passed around the Cape of Good Hope and on January 23, 1793, anchored at St. Vincent in the West Indies, where the first consignment of breadfruit was delivered. Though the fruit was soon sold in the markets of those islands, the people did not take too kindly to its flavor, and stubbornly preferred their own plantain.
During Bligh’s third mutiny, he had the company of other distinguished captains. At the end of the century, the treatment of seamen in the British Navy caused a growing series of outbreaks. The first big one was at Spithead, and lasted from April 18 to May 15, 1797, but it was put down. The mutiny of the Nore, which began as that at Spithead ended, was not so easily suppressed. Bligh’s ship, the sixty-four-gun Director, was, as might be expected, to play a leading part.
The sailors had many serious grievances. Their wages had not been raised since the time of Charles II, when prices had been thirty percent cheaper. Provisions were often of poorest quality and frequently deficient in weight. No vegetables were issued to ships in port. The sick were not well cared for, and luxuri
es from the ships’ stores intended for them were embezzled by the surgeons. Pursers cheated the men and usually amassed a fortune, while the crew lived in a chronic state of irritation.
Worse were the charges against cruel officers; the inhuman Lieutenant Irwin once gave a seaman thirty-six lashes for expressing “silent contempt.” Other impetuous officers had men keelhauled, a punishment which consisted of tying a long rope to the man’s hands, passing it beneath the keel of the vessel at midships, and then dragging the unfortunate victim slowly across the barnacled bottom of the ship. If the sailor did not drown, as was often the case, he lived the next weeks in agony as rotten material from the needle-sharp barnacle shells festered and suppurated in his body. Adroit twisting of the rope while keelhauling insured that his face and back alike would be well torn by the poisonous shells.
Further complaints were that enough liberty in harbor was not commonly granted; that men wounded in action were deprived of their wages while incapacitated; and that the amount of prize money paid them was out of proportion to that paid the officers.
The mutiny of the Nore, which broke out off the mouth of the Thames on May 12, during the Dutch war, had the aspect of a modern strike. The men chose two delegates from each ship to a general strategy board, with Richard Parker as president, and on each ship elected a committee of twelve to manage its special affairs. The delegates and committee men tried to gain popular support by going ashore daily at Sheerness, holding meetings, and marching to a brass band.