Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  He talked of the qualities that make a good captain. Because of the close proximity of shipboard life, the interdependent community and the perilous dangers, the captain, Raja said, must above everything be a manager of men. Politeness mattered, and encouragement. I thought of the words of Fletcher Christian’s brother Charles, how ‘jarring Discordancy’ and ‘repeated Acts of Irritation and Offence’ were enough ‘to change the Disposition of a Lamb into That of an Animal Fierce and Resentful’. Raja told me what a good captain Sanjeet Dutt was and how readily the men went to him with any problem. He listened, was fatherly, humorous and fair. He let them make decisions and have their freedom. They could send and receive email and use the satellite phone. He held lots of parties on board with barbecued food, dancing and fair shares of Hindi, Goan, Punjabi and Western music. On a voyage when the cook was hopeless he gave him a lot of time off, then helped the crew prepare their own food. He was decisive without being arrogant and had no air of superiority, rather he behaved as a humble man and did not flaunt his rank.

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  Bligh omitted from his journal incidents that didn’t show himself as efficient and considerate, but his sailing master, John Fryer, claimed he was as tyrannical in the open boat as on the Bounty, that his chief concern was his own survival and, despite all the weighing with pistol shot and ‘Who shall have this?’ palaver, he took more bread for himself.

  Bligh had an impenetrable self-regard and his underlying contempt and aggression made men hate him. He believed, rightly, that he showed his mettle in adversity. He achieved the extraordinary feat of reaching Timor with all the crew alive, in an ill-equipped boat, overloaded with men, on a journey without maps across violent seas. ‘Wonderful as it may appear,’ he wrote in his log, ‘I felt neither extreme hunger nor thirst. My allowance contented me knowing I could have no more.’ He broke his bread into slivers, dipped each bit in salt water and chewed it umpteen times to make it last longer.

  He reached the coast of Australia after four horrendous weeks on 28 May 1789 – the same day as Christian in the Bounty reached Tubuai. The boat almost capsized as the men searched in high winds for an opening through the Great Barrier Reef. David Nelson the botanist was so weak he couldn’t move. He had ‘violent heat’ in his bowels and he couldn’t see. Bligh fed him morsels of bread soaked in wine. Within the calm of the reef they chanced on an uninhabited islet some two miles wide. As they pulled the boat ashore, one of the gudgeons broke from the rudder:

  This if it had happened at sea would probably have been the cause of our perishing as the management of the boat could not have been so nicely preserved as these very heavy seas required. I had often expressed my fears of this accident and that we might be prepared for it had taken the precaution to have grummets fixed on each quarter of the boat for oars; but even our utmost readiness in using them, I fear would not have saved us. It appears therefore a providential circumstance that it happened at this place, and was in our power to remedy the defect; for by great good luck we found a large staple in the boat that answered the purpose.

  The men made a fire by using a magnifying glass. They ate oysters and, against Bligh’s advice, unknown berries. They’d observed birds eating them and though they feared the effects no one died. They saw bees, wasps, lizards and the tracks of a kangaroo. Bligh named the place Restoration Island, because with food, warmth and sleep the men were restored, and it was also the anniversary of the Restoration to the English throne of King Charles the Second.

  Timor was still 1300 miles away and in a further ghastly week at sea, hatred of Bligh grew. There were two flare-ups when they stopped at another tiny rocky outcrop which he named Sunday Island. The men all gathered clams from the rocks, but William Purcell refused to hand his haul over. He said they were his. Bligh insisted they were common property and called him a scoundrel. Purcell said, ‘If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be in this mess.’ Bligh grabbed a cutlass, threatened murder, and claimed the crew would all have perished without his command. Fryer intervened, wrestled with him and got the cutlass from him.

  In another fracas, several men at midnight tried to snare roosting birds barehanded, but caught only a dozen noddies. They blamed Robert Lamb, who’d separated from them and spoiled their chances by catching birds for himself. He confessed to being so desperate with hunger he’d eaten nine raw birds before rejoining the group. Bligh wrote in his journal that he gave him ‘a good beating’. On previous days he’d written of how the men were more dead than alive, their clothes in rags, their extreme hunger evident, their appearance horrible, how they were skin and bone and covered in sores. Yet still he’d beat them.

  After two more hellish weeks of starvation, sleeplessness and extremes of hunger, thirst, heat and cold, on Monday 15 June they reached the Dutch East Indian settlement of Coupang on the south-west shore of Timor. Bligh hoisted a makeshift flag of distress. The governor, William Adrian Van Este, received them with all kindness, a surgeon tended them and they were given a house, bedding, food and clothes.

  David Nelson the gardener died on 20 July – of ‘Inflammatory Fever’, Bligh said. At the start of the voyage Joseph Banks had told Nelson, ‘The whole success of the undertaking depends ultimately upon your diligence and care.’ Nelson, a quiet man, had with diligence and care cultivated, nurtured, tended and potted the breadfruit plants that Christian flung into the sea. He was buried behind the chapel at Coupang without a tombstone.

  Bligh didn’t help his crew sort their final passage home. At Coupang he was the only one who could access money through an agent. He bought a thirty-four-foot schooner for a thousand Rix dollars, named it HMS Resource, and in it took them to Batavia* escorted by two armed Indonesian schooners. They arrived on 1 October 1789. He then left for home on the first available ship, a Dutch vessel, the Vlydte, which sailed to South Africa on the sixteenth. He took only his clerk John Samuel, and his servant John Smith. John Fryer called him fraudulent, violent, self-interested and unconcerned in any caring way for the men he commanded.

  Most of these men were very ill. Three died in Batavia: Thomas Hall seaman, Peter Linkletter the quartermaster and William Elphinstone master’s mate. Robert Lamb died trying to get home and the acting surgeon Thomas Ledward wasn’t heard of again. A surviving letter from him to his family spoke of Bligh’s harshness.

  The captain denied me, as well as the rest of the gentlemen who had not agents, any money unless I would give him my power of attorney and also my will, in which I was to bequeath to him all my property. This he called security. In case of my death I hope this matter will be clearly pointed out to my relations.

  Thirteen of the nineteen men set adrift by Christian reached home. Bligh was the first to arrive. He landed at Portsmouth on 2 January 1790.

  * In 1949 this was renamed Jakarta.

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  The Bounty had left Tahiti on 4 April 1789. Christian arrived back there on 6 June without his captain and most of the crew or any of the breadfruit plants. He’d rehearsed a lie for the Tahitians about what had happened. He said that when they stopped at the nearby island of Aitutaki for water, they met up with Captain Cook. Bligh and Cook were thrilled to be reunited and were going to form a settlement there. Bligh had dropped the idea of taking all those breadfruit to King George. Supplies were needed for this new enterprise, which Christian had been delegated to go back to Tahiti to acquire.

  The Tahitians regarded Cook as their friend and teacher. Bligh hadn’t told them about his murder at Kealakekua in February 1779. He’d been Cook’s midshipman on the Discovery. As at Nomuka, the Kealakekua tribesmen had stolen the ship’s cutter. In revenge, Cook tried to take their king hostage and carnage followed. For the Hawaiians their king was their soul. ‘An immense Mob compos’d of at least 2 or 3 thousand People’ retaliated. Cook’s men fired at them. Cook was attacked, hit with a club, held under water, beaten with stones, then hacked to pieces. Bligh rushed to the English camp and shouted at them to ‘strike the Observatorys as quick as possi
ble’. Before he spoke, the men could see in his eyes ‘the Shocking news that Captn Cook was kill’d’.

  Christian and the others who returned to Tahiti had cut spare sails into nautical jackets in an effort to look like a uniformed crew. If the Tahitians had doubts about his story they didn’t convey them. In exchange for the red feathers they thought sacred, and for nails, they gave Christian 460 pigs, most of them sows, fifty goats, numerous hens, cockerels, dogs and cats, and the bull and the cow that Cook had given to Chief Otoo on his third visit to the island in August 1777.

  Christian enticed on board six Tahitian men and eighteen girls and women. To join a colonising enterprise with Captains Cook and Bligh on a nearby island sounded attractive. If it didn’t work out they could be home in a week in a double hulled canoe. None of these abducted passengers knew they’d be exposed to danger, hardship and extravagant abuse.

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  For four days on the Tundra Princess bad weather precluded parties or much progress through the sea. Cooking pots flew across the galley, chairs slid across the mess room and Pandal couldn’t lay the table. Low pressure pursued the ship and there was a constant PAN PAN warning. In the vast, empty Pacific the swell of the waves set in, created momentum and was more of a problem than the wind.

  Captain Dutt couldn’t work at the desk in his cabin because of the roll of the ship. He sat on the floor with a laptop, maps and faxes spread around him, playing Hindi music loud. Like a mantra he repeated that if the sea continued to be as wild as this he’d go straight to Panama. He was unfamiliar with Pitcairn’s coast and dangers and had been told by his bosses not to anchor there.

  In those stormy days I languished in my cabin or staggered to the galley for cups of sweet tea. Lady Myre flourished. She abandoned her pot noodles as bland, decided curry was a cure for queasiness, and ate her way through spicy mackerel, kedgeree and chicken vindaloo. Chilli made her eyes water and her cheeks flush. Around the ship she sang along with a medley of songs on her iPod: ‘High on a Hill Lived a Lonely Goatherd’ and ‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow Wow’. The crew loved her and treated her like a trophy. She spent long hours in the officers’ lounge watching videos: Primal Fear, The Ghost Ship, and Death Wish 1, 2, 3 and 4. She remained intractably on Greenwich Mean Time and carped at dinner being served in the middle of the night. I’d hear her imperious voice calling, ‘Raja, you haven’t replaced the towels in my cabin.’ Raja would explain that he was the second officer, that towels were her responsibility, and that this was a cargo not a cruise ship.

  Uninvited, she’d drift into my cabin and lie on my bed with her rum-and-peach-juice. She asked what I was scribbling. I told her I was making notes on the metaphor of the journey and the interconnection of voyages. She said if I wanted to know about voyages, I should look at the photos of her whitewater rafting in Ecuador and kayaking in Costa Rica. She’d been three inches away from a crocodile’s jaws and found a scorpion under her pillow. She travelled with a company called Explore.

  Twice she voiced surprise at the time the journey was taking. On the map, she said, Picton seemed close to Christchurch. I gave up trying to disabuse her about her destination. But I forcefully reiterated that Pitcairn was a rough place, the hideaway of the Bounty mutineers, that the population numbered only forty-nine, that many of the men were sex offenders and that nothing there would be easy. She laughed, said God had a purpose for her which she was yet to find, and asked me if I shaved my legs or used a depilatory.

  I just couldn’t fathom her. Because she so frequently swigged, I told her this might be an offence on Pitcairn, though I doubted she’d be gaoled if the prison was full. She scrabbled in her bag for her liquor licence, waved it at me and said she’d passed her drinking test. I explained that Pitcairners were Seventh Day Adventists who believed in the second coming of the Messiah. She said she found the idea sweet and wondered if they’d view her as their saviour. Roley often told her she was no ordinary mortal. I again told her it might be months before a ship called that would take her off the island. She said she didn’t care if she stayed until kingdom come.

  In all I said I tried to discourage her from disembarking with me. I hoped she’d stay with the Tundra Princess until Panama. I feared she’d be a distraction, though I was fast losing focus as to what this distraction was from. I advised her she could fly from Panama to Christchurch, then get a ferry to Picton. She said she couldn’t countenance an extra twenty-one days on the ship alone with so many sailors. Her presence would inflame them.

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  The Bounty with forty people on board reached Tubuai again on 23 June 1789. This time Christian anchored on the western side. Tribesmen paddled out to the ship without blowing conch shells or waving lances. The chief of this area, Tummotoa, went on board, accepted presents of red feathers, hatchets, nails and matting, pledged friendship to Christian and invited him to settle in his territory. He explained that the previous hostility came from a rival tribe governed by Chief Tinnarow.

  Christian reconnoitred, looking for the best place for his proposed settlement. He favoured a site on the north-east coast, at Taahuaia, where there was a river, good vegetation, grazing land, a clear view of the lagoon and reef, and the chance to hide in the mountains. There was an abundance of breadfruit, coconuts, yams, bananas, fish and turtles. And the women, the sailors said, were the most beautiful they’d seen in the South Seas. This was where Christian hoped to build his new community, his colony, beyond the reach of English law.

  The territory he chose was governed by a third chief, Taroatehoa. He, too, fêted Christian and, like Tummotoa, was pleased to receive red feathers and nails and keen for the mutineers to settle in his region. But Tummotoa viewed Christian’s choice as an insulting rejection of his own hospitality. He told him and his crew never again to show themselves in his or Tinnarow’s territory. Two-thirds of the Tubuaians now viewed these settlers as invaders. None the less Christian went ahead with plans for a wooden fort, fifty yards square, with a moat and a drawbridge facing the sea. It was to be guarded by swivel guns and cannons and called Fort George, in honour of the king whose laws he’d so flouted.

  He instructed his crew and passengers to build this fort during the day then return to the ship at sunset. But he couldn’t enforce discipline. The mutineers, armed with pistols, drank, fought and threatened each other’s lives. John Sumner and Matthew Quintal took to staying on shore at night to pursue women. On 5 July Christian had them put in leg irons. Two days later he and Charles Churchill drew up articles of agreement designed to impose rules and put aside past grievances. Each man was ordered to sign under oath. Sumner and Quintal signed then said they were their own masters and would do as they pleased.

  Not enough women had been taken from Tahiti for the men to have one each. The mutineers preyed on Tubuaian women. The midshipman George Stewart wrote that the men

  began to Murmur and Insisted that Mr Christian would lead them, and bring Women in to live with them by force, and refused to do any more work till every man had a wife, and as Mr Christian’s desire was to perswade rather than force them, He positively refused to have any thing to do with such an absurd demand. Three days were Spent in debate and having nothing to employ themselves in, they demanded more Grog. This he also refused, when they broke the lock of the Spirit room and took it by force.

  Mutiny, murder, abduction, rape and drunkenness were all on the agenda now. Scant progress was made in building Fort George. The Tubuaians grew to loathe this marauding gang who came it seemed from an uncivilised place. They suspected that the moat being dug was a communal grave intended for them. They ambushed a group of mutineers collecting coconuts and dragged Alexander Smith from the woman he was raping in the grass and took him, wearing only his shirt, to Chief Tinnarow’s house. Christian’s gang shot their way free, set fire to the house and stole emblems the Tubuaians regarded as gods.

  Tinnarow wanted revenge for this arson, rape and pillage and for the slaughter of his people in the Bay of Blood. He p
lotted with one of the Tahitian men to murder the mutineers and seize the Bounty. News of this was conveyed to Christian by Mauatua, his Tahitian woman. In the fight that followed sixty-six Tubuaians were killed, among them six women, Thomas Burkett was stabbed in the side by a Tubuaian spear and Christian wounded himself on his own bayonet. One of the Tahitians wanted to cut out the jawbones of the murdered men and hang them in the Bounty as trophies.

  It occurred to most of the men on the Bounty that British justice might be no worse than the quality of freedom on offer. On 12 September, after less than three months and with not much constructed of Fort George, the ship left Tubuai for good. The intention was to return briefly to Tahiti. Those of the Bounty crew who chose to leave the ship there, could do so and await the consequences. The abducted Tahitian men and women were restrained and compelled to stay with Christian and the ship. His plan was to blow with the wind and colonise the first uninhabited island he chanced on.

  The ship arrived back at Tahiti, at Matavai Bay, on the night of 22 September. It anchored a mile out to sea. Sixteen men were rowed ashore in the dark. Each was issued with a musket, pistol, cutlass, bayonet and ammunition. Eight mutineers opted to continue with Christian. The Bounty put out to sea while the women ate their supper. When they realised they’d been tricked they were desperate. One woman leapt overboard about a mile outside the reef and swam for home on a moonless night. Next morning three other women were restrained from venturing to swim ashore as the ship passed the island of Tetiaro. Near Eimo, another of the Society Islands, two more women made such a fuss they were allowed to leave in a passing canoe. The rest sailed on: twelve Polynesian women and a baby girl, six Polynesian men and nine mutineers. They were to be the colonisers of Pitcairn Island.