Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  Edwards had a structure built on the ship’s quarterdeck to contain them. It was round like a funnel and the prisoners called it Pandora’s Box. It was eleven feet long and the entrance was through an eighteen-inch-square scuttle at the top, secured by a bolt. There was an iron grate for air. No crew member was to speak to the prisoners except the master-at-arms about their provisions. The heat and stench of the place were intense and it became infested with maggots and vermin.

  On 8 May 1791, when all thirteen of the Bounty men were locked in this box, Edwards left Tahiti to cruise the Cook, Union, Samoan and Society Islands in search of Fletcher Christian and the rest. At every port of call he circulated Bligh’s description of the wanted men.

  In violent weather on the evening of 22 June, six weeks after leaving Tahiti, the Resolution with nine men on board got separated from the Pandora and swept out to sea.

  It was armed with blunderbusses and muskets and had netting over the decks to prevent boarding, but its supply of fresh water and provisions was on the Pandora waiting to be winched down. Edwards burned false fires and fired guns, but in the storm the men on the schooner could neither see nor hear these. They had two quadrants and two books – Elements of Navigation and Geographical Grammar – but no charts. They knew they were near the Samoan Islands and they hoped to get to Nomuka and meet up again with the Pandora. Within hours they were attacked by Polynesian fishermen in canoes. They shot many of these fishermen dead.

  Again a group of men, making their way towards what they hoped might be home, endured the chaos of the ocean, starvation and extremes of thirst and went to the edge of disaster and death. The seemingly straightforward venture of transporting plants from one part of the world to another was lost in time. The chance ramifications of Christian’s temper loss fractured yet more lives.

  At Tofua, which they mistook for Nomuka, they traded nails for food and water but were again attacked. Tribesmen tried to take their boat. Unsure of where they were, for weeks they sailed round the Friendly and Fijian Islands, then northwest through the Endeavour Strait and the islands of Indonesia. They scavenged food from deserted beaches and were skeletal when they reached the Great Barrier Reef. They didn’t know of a passage through it and believed their options to be death by famine or shipwreck. They beat their way over the reef and were saved from starving by the crew of a Dutch vessel who sighted them and gave them food, water and supplies.

  After four months they reached the Dutch province of Surabaya on the north coast of Java. They thought they’d reached a safe shore, but the governor didn’t believe their story of separation from the Pandora. He had Edwards’ description of Christian and the missing mutineers from the Bounty. The crew of the Resolution corresponded in number, spoke only English, were in a hand-hewn boat made from Polynesian wood and couldn’t produce any official papers. He concluded they were the wanted men and kept them in prison for a month, then sent them under armed guard to Samarang. But with all such vicissitudes, within the relative framework of what constitutes good luck, those nine men did better than most of the others on the Pandora.

  For three months Edwards cruised the islands of the South Pacific searching for the Bounty and the missing mutineers. He then gave up hope of finding them and headed home. On 29 August 1791 he reached the Great Barrier Reef. He sent a boat to search for a channel through the reef and into the lagoon. The Pandora tried to follow through this opening but, in the evening dusk and strong seas, drifted past it and hit the reef.

  Within five minutes there was four feet of water in the hold. The men threw guns and everything heavy overboard and pumped and bailed all night, but by dawn water had reached the upper deck and the ship was sinking. There were two canoes and four boats – a launch, an eight-oared pinnace and two six-oared yawls – and there were 134 men on board the Pandora. One of the crew tried to lash together the two canoes. He was dashed against the reef. He died and the canoes were lost.

  As the ship sank, three of the prisoners – Joseph Coleman the armourer, Charles Norman and Thomas McIntosh both carpenters – were freed from their shackles to work the pumps. The others begged to be unchained and allowed to try to save their lives. Edwards ordered their guards to shoot any who broke free. Men crowded into the boats or flailed in the sea. When the ship lay on its broadside, with the larboard bow completely under water, Edwards passed the prisoners in the box as he made his own escape. Peter Heywood entreated him to have mercy on them. He refused.

  But with the ship under water as far as the mainmast and with the box beginning to fill, William Moulter, boatswain’s mate on the Pandora, drew the bolt on the scuttle. And Joseph Hodges, the armourer’s mate, at the risk of his own life unlocked the prisoners’ fetters. He said he’d set them free or drown with them.

  In seconds the ship went down. Nothing of it was visible but the tip of its mast. The master-at-arms and the sentinels drowned. Peter Heywood was one of the prisoners who survived. He was haunted by memories. ‘The cries of the men drowning was at first awful in the extreme but as they sunk and became faint they died away by degrees.’

  The boats made for a sandy cay four miles from the disaster. When they returned to the wreck to pick up more men there was silence. Thirty-one of the crew and four of the Bounty prisoners had drowned. Naked in the sea Heywood clung to a plank, swam towards the cay and was picked up by one of the boats. James Morrison, builder of the Resolution, though still handcuffed, also managed to stay afloat and reach a boat.

  The cay was about ninety yards long and sixty wide and with-out shade. Ninety-nine men reached it. Their only provisions were two casks of water and two bags of bread. Their mouths became so parched they couldn’t chew the morsels available. James Connell, a seaman, drank salt water and became delirious with dehydration.

  Edwards improvised tents out of sailcloth for himself and those he favoured. The prisoners scorched in the sun. ‘We appeared as if dipped in large tubs of boiling water,’ Peter Heywood later wrote to his sister Nessy. Their only means of shelter was to bury themselves up to their necks in the burning sand. Heywood asked Edwards if they might make use of an old sail salvaged from the wreck. His request was refused.

  After three days the crew and prisoners, in the four boats, headed for Timor and the mercy of the Dutch. They stopped at island shores for oysters and fresh water. At the rocky outcrop Bligh had called Sunday Island, they were attacked by fishermen with bows and arrows. On 2 September, at the north-east point of New Holland, they launched into the Indian Ocean. Ahead of them was a thousand-mile voyage. Their suffering was extreme, ‘their temper cross and savage’.

  Connell died. The rest reached Timor after eleven ghastly days. ‘Nothing could exceed the kindness and hospitality of the governor and other Dutch officers of this settlement, in affording every possible assistance and relief in our distressed condition,’ Edwards wrote. For three weeks the men recuperated, then went on a Dutch ship, the Rembang, to Samarang, where they were reunited with the crew of the Resolution. They all went on to Batavia then home in an English ship, the Gorgon.

  They arrived at Spithead on 19 June 1792. It was a repeated saga: another ship lost, another court martial, another story of cruelty, heroism, suffering, death, endurance and chaotic departure from the original life plan.

  31

  Sir Roland remained elusive, though two replies came from London Rookeries. One, asking for a donation, was from a nature reserve with charitable status. The other, from a Mr Stasinopoulos who ran a small hotel in Euston, voiced concern about an elderly guest who called himself Rommel, owed a great deal of money and appeared to have no relatives. Could he be the one we were looking for? My own news was equally discouraging: an automated out-of-the-office reply from Verity and – as ever – alarming news of mother. She’d assaulted one of the residents and caused confusion with the emergency services by her repeated dialling of 999. Firemen had insisted on evacuating the building. There was talk of moving her to a secure psychiatric institution.

>   I walked to the village square and felt watched by unseen eyes. Bea, the policewoman, was in her garden building a boat, helped by Len, her elderly uncle. They worked with speed and confidence using a handsaw and a hammer and without drawings or reference. I thought of the ‘pirates’ schooner’ the Resolution, and how it withstood cruel seas for thousands of miles. I asked questions about the craft of Polynesian boatbuilding and if this boat could reach Mangareva. Bea said it might, if the weather was good.

  None of the buildings in the square was locked. There was no theft on the island. The courthouse where the trials were to be held was a simple room with plain tables and chairs and a photograph of Queen Elizabeth the Second on her throne. Pinned on boards outside were public notices to do with the erection of a garden shelter without Council approval and a missing library book, which had a green cover with a computer on it. More urgent notices voiced anxiety and anger about the impending trials:

  It has been brought to my attention that some very serious accusations is being sent and passed on from Pitcairn to outsiders concerning people on Pitcairn. This is classed as malicious gossip and like I asked at the public gathering when I made the statement on the same issue, it is a serious offence and that the police can get involved.

  If anymore issues are brought to my attention then the police will deal with it immediately. Please let us all try to work together for the good of the island and stop making lives miserable for others.

  Thanking you

  Steve Christian

  Island Mayor

  As from 7 June 2004 the Council has passed a resolution that in cases when islanders are involved in personal incidents that could be sensationalised in the media, to refrain from publishing a report of the island until all parties concerned have been consulted. This is in the best interest of all parties concerned and the well being of the island.

  Such public trials in this lost and private place seemed harsh – the division of the islanders one against the other, the blame and shame. And there was another missive pinned to the board that would not excite the world’s attention. It was from Dr Thomas H. Scantlebury and dated May 2004. He wrote of his ‘undying appreciation to my Pitcairn brother Randy for saving my life and for the cool head which he demonstrated. I will never forget him and will consider him to be a part of me and my family until my dying day.’ He thanked Steve too ‘for coming into the cave in terrible weather conditions on 11 May at Gudgeon. And no less everlasting appreciation to Jay …’

  I asked Rosie about this story. Dr Scantlebury was a Florida doctor who’d served a three-month stint as a Pitcairn locum. One afternoon he went out in a boat with Randy Christian, Steve’s son, to take photos of the cliff face and its caves. The sea grew huge, waves whipped up, the boat smashed against the rocks. Both men were big. Scantlebury cracked his head against a rock. Randy dragged him to a secret cave, known to the Pitcairners, beneath the cliff face, at the back of which was dry sand out of reach of the sea. He stemmed the bleeding from the doctor’s head. They huddled together for warmth. By evening the islanders feared for them and in treacherous weather Steve and Jay took a boat out to the cave and rescued them.

  ‘Those were acts of heroism,’ I said to Rosie. ‘Oh it’s what we do,’ she replied. ‘We look out for one another.’

  I thought of Joseph Hodges, the armourer’s mate on the Pandora, who risked his life to unchain prisoners as the ship went down.

  After his ordeal Dr Scantlebury became withdrawn. He slept in the clinic and didn’t go home to the house assigned to him. He said there was something wrong with its plumbing. At dawn one wet morning the front door was open and Lady Myre was not in the house. I found her halfway down the Hill of Difficulty, her cyclamen shorts, blue blouson top, pouch bag, face and hands sticky with mud. She seemed to have lost something and was prodding around in thick tyre marks that veered into the ditch.

  A woeful saga followed. She’d been bitten to death, not had a wink of sleep and there was no word from Sir Roland. On her way to the jetty in search of a ship she’d met Smiley on his quad bike and he’d said he’d teach her to drive, so she could at least tour the island. She’d accelerated instead of braking, veered off the road, hit her head on a tree and dislodged a gold filling from one of her molars. It was twenty-four-carat. She might have swallowed it but perhaps it was in the mud. Smiley was sweet but she only wanted to be with me.

  I made a desultory show of looking for the filling, wiped her hands and knees with half a packet of Wet Ones and walked with her to the health centre. Steve the mayor, engineer, cat castrator, rescuer of Dr Scantlebury and accused rapist, was also the island’s dentist.

  We waited until the current locum, Les, arrived. He wore shorts, his feet were bare, and he was soon going home to South Island on the Braveheart. The dental drill had been donated to the island in 1954. It looked industrial.

  Lady Myre refused to open her mouth to have her cavity inspected. She said her pieces of luggage were numbered, the inventory was in her bumbag and in case seven was an emergency dental kit of analgesics and temporary fillings. It would suffice until she reached Tahiti, Panama, Christchurch – anywhere.

  I wondered why she’d have a dental kit but no mosquito net. Les weighed us both, perhaps because he’d no other help to offer. He didn’t know when the drill had last been used. Most of the islanders had false teeth.

  Lady Myre and I walked back through groves of banana palms and citrus trees. We explored the neglected remains of Thursday October Christian’s house, looked at the Bounty cannon and anchor, and the grave of Alexander Smith/John Adams. Such were the museum pieces of the island’s murderous past. ‘Why are you here?’ Lady Myre asked and I embarked on my usual spiel about the narrative consequences of random happenings. She began to cry and said she’d never felt more lonely. I told her to come along because there might be enough hot water for a shower, and that Sir Roland might have sent a message. But there wasn’t, and he hadn’t.

  32

  On a rock at St Paul, high above the crash of the waves, I pondered the history of Pitcairn. I was unconvinced that all the supposed murders had happened, or that within three years only four out of the fifteen men who reached Pitcairn were still alive. The account of this carnage came from three sources: a lost notebook written by Edward Young and quoted from by F.W.Beechey in Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait published in 1831; from Teehuteatuaonoa – Jenny – who after thirty-one years on Pitcairn returned to Tahiti on an American ship, the Sultan, and told her story to a Captain Dillon who spoke Tahitian and published it in 1829 in the United Service Journal and Naval and Military Magazine; and from the self-named fantasist John Adams, who gave his version to Captain Folger, who chanced on Pitcairn in an American whaling ship the Topaz in 1808. Folger stayed about five or six hours on the island. Adams by then was the sole survivor of the mutineers and he was keen to assert his own innocence of murder and worse.

  All three accounts blamed the Polynesian men for most of the killings. But the Polynesians were outnumbered by the mutineers and had no guns or ammunition. And there was a lack of forensic evidence: no bones or skulls, no burial places, no telling possessions, none of Bligh’s maps or charts, or the gold ducats or Spanish dollars given him by the Admiralty. There was the cannon and the anchor and the ship’s Bible, but all the useful things had gone. It was possible that an account of events was fabricated for those who remained on Pitcairn to relay.

  In my Moleskine notebook I added to my chronology of significant dates:

  1789

  28

  May. Christian in the Bounty anchors at Tubuai in the Austral Islands. Bligh, in the open boat, sights the Great Barrier Reef.

  6

  June. The Bounty returns to Tahiti to abduct women and get provisions.

  15

  June. Bligh’s boat arrives at Coupang in the Dutch East Indies.

  16

  June. The Bounty again leaves Tahiti for Tubuai.

  Ju
ne-September. Christian starts building Fort George. There are battles with the islanders.

  12

  September. The Bounty leaves Tubuai for ever.

  22

  September. The Bounty arrives at Tahiti. Fifteen of the crew opt to stay there.

  23

  September. The Bounty leaves Tahiti for the last time with nine mutineers and eighteen abducted Tahitian girls and young men. September-December. Christian searches for an uninhabited island to colonise.

  1790

  15

  January. Fletcher Christian arrives at Pitcairn Island in the Bounty.

  23

  January. The Bounty is burned.

  14

  March. Bligh reaches Portsmouth after his ordeal in an open boat.

  22

  October. Bligh court-martialled for the loss of the Bounty but acquitted of wrongdoing.

  November. The Pandora leaves Britain captained by Edward Edwards to round up all the mutineers.

  1791

  23

  March. The Pandora reaches Tahiti. The Bounty crew there are rounded up and put in irons.

  8

  May. The Pandora leaves Tahiti.

  3

  August. Bligh leaves England in the Providence on a second breadfruit mission.

  28

  August. The Pandora wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef. Four of the Bounty prisoners die.