The lives of the Pitcairn fugitives were gone with faint trace. Those who recorded their fate used the bleached tone of the chronicler: ‘Arrived in 1790. Died in … Shot in the back as he tended his yams’ … ‘Murdered in the mountains …’ But the focus of those restless seafaring men would not have been to settle as peasant farmers. The island was not a place for those who’d known wider shores.
It was my hunch that Christian and some of the murderers had left the island. Fear of reprisal would have diminished with time. There was enough expertise among them to build an equivalent ship to James Morrison’s schooner. It took him less than a year. The women could make sails, the Polynesian men knew the qualities of wood and how to hew it, the English had the ship’s forge. Those who got away would have sworn to silence the women they left behind.
I observed the ocean and listened to its rhythmic chords. Two spouting whales played. They rolled to the surface then dived. Perhaps the men left in good weather in small boats like the one Bea was making with such ease, or as itinerant crew on a passing whaler. Americans hunted whales in these waters. The Pitcairn Register recorded the arrival of an unnamed ship on 27 December 1795. Adams spoke to Captain Folger of three ships that had called and how one sent a boat to the shore. It was feasible to work a passage back to England from China or America.
There were rumours that Christian made frequent visits to an aunt in Cumberland in the 1800s. And in 1808 Peter Heywood was sure he saw him in Fore Street near the docks in Plymouth. He walked fast to catch up with him. The man turned. Heywood was emphatic it was Christian. The man then ran because he’d been recognised. Heywood chased him but didn’t catch him. He wondered whether to make more enquiries but feared all the trouble and pain this might lead to, so did nothing. He recounted this to the explorer Sir John Barrow, who wrote a history of the mutiny in 1831.
Children born on Pitcairn in the 1790s would not have been spared the sight of the murder of their fathers and the abuse of their mothers. Nor could they have been certain of their parentage. Four men were left on the island by 1793. The eleven women were expected to serve them in every way.
A year after the alleged massacre the Register recorded ‘a great desire in many of the women to leave the island’. They built themselves a boat to escape. Perhaps they’d learned how to do this from the men. Teehuteatuaonoa even tore down her house for its planks and nails. This boat was launched on 15 August 1794 and, Young said, ‘according to our expectations she upset’. He called them ‘a few ignorant women drifting upon the waves’.
Prisoners of the island and trapped in a rapacious place, the women grouped together to avoid the men. They lived separately from them and conspired to murder them as they slept. The hatred was mutual. The men, now far outnumbered by the women, became afraid of them. Quintal said he wouldn’t ‘laugh, joke or give anything to the girls’. In his journal Young wrote
It was agreed among us that the first female who misbehaved should be put to death and this punishment was to be repeated until we could discover the real intentions of the women …
The women formed a party whenever their displeasure was excited and hid themselves in the unfrequented parts of the island carefully providing themselves with firearms. In this manner the men were kept in continual suspense, dreading the result of each disturbance.
Into this lawless environment where violence, sex and incest were allied, babies were born. All the children had British names: Sarah McCoy, Jane and Arthur Quintal, Dinah and Rachel Adams, Polly, Robert, George, William, Edward, Dolly and James Young.
In April 1798 McCoy, who’d once worked in a Scottish distillery, turned the Bounty’s copper kettle into a still and made a fiendish liquor from the Te-root (Cordyline terminalis). From that date he and Quintal were alcoholic. When Teatuahitea, or Sarah as she was called, caught too few fish, Quintal bit off her ear. McCoy became entirely disreputable and had frequent alcohol-induced fits. The Pitcairn Register recorded that in one of these he ‘fastened a stone to his neck threw himself from the rocks into the sea and was drowned’. More likely he was despatched, for he was found by a child, in a rock pool, with his hands and feet bound.
The women and their children built houses and fences, cultivated crops, made canoes for fishing, trapped pigs and birds, cooked, sewed and survived. They spoke a patois and they mapped and named their island: McCoy’s Drop, Where Freddie Fall, Break Im Hip, Nellie Fall, Dan Fall, Down the Hole, Headache and, more cheerfully, Bang Iron Valley, Up the Beans, Lucky Valley and Johncatch’acow.
In 1799 Quintal’s partner, the unfortunate one-eared Teatuahitea, fell over a cliff while collecting birds’ eggs. She left four children, all perhaps fathered by him. Despite there being nine women and only three men, Adams maintained Quintal then forcibly tried to take Teraura, who was living with Young, and Teehuteatuaonoa, who’d been claimed by Adams. Adams and Young retaliated by killing him:
One day when he was in John Adams’ house Quintal was set upon and overpowered by the two other men. By means of a hatchet the dreadful work of death was soon completed. The daughter of John Mills (who lived to the age of 93) then a young girl of eight or nine years of age was an eyewitness of the awful deed and used to relate how terrified were all of the little band of women and children who beheld the blood-bespattered walls.
Fifteen young men landed on Pitcairn in 1790. Nine years later thirteen of them had apparently been murdered. Twenty children were left on the island: nine boys and eleven girls. It was the only place they knew.
Edward Young died of asthma on Christmas Day 1800. John Adams was left in terrible command. In a notebook he began his autobiography but didn’t get far: ‘I was born at Stanford Hill in the parrish of St Jon Hackney Middlesex of poor But honast parrents. My farther Was Drouned in the Theames thearfore he left Me and 3 More poore Orfing’ – thus the founding father of Pitcairn, the one who definitely didn’t leave and wasn’t murdered, the only mutineer still there in 1808 when Captain Folger arrived in the Topaz.
He became a self-appointed chief, the inheritor of a kingdom. He ruled nine women and a host of fatherless children. After a drunken fit he had some sort of vision in which God told him to show the way forward to his people. With his interpretation of the Bounty Bible he ruled them all. The children grew up brainwashed by him and in service to him. Advised by the angel Gabriel he enforced morning, afternoon and evening prayers and ruled that everyone must fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. Working women fainted as they hoed and slaved. Their Polynesian identity was taken from them and they were severed from their rich Tahitian roots. They chanted from the Bible and had no verbal humour or irony. As the island’s children grew up they married cousins, half-brothers, uncles, aunts. Adams officiated, using the island’s single wedding ring. These children inherited strong limbs, diabetes, asthma, and a lack of candour.
Adams ordered that his daughter Dinah be shot when she had an illegitimate child by Matthew Quintal’s grandson Edward. Her sin was fornication. When no one would shoot her, Adams attempted it himself. Edward’s father, Arthur, restrained him. Perhaps Dinah didn’t know that her father had murdered Arthur’s father by cracking his head with an axe. Perhaps Edward knew and sought revenge.
I wandered back to Adamstown in dappled light. Bea was painting her boat yellow. She’d called it the Dolphin. She said an announcement had been made over the intercom asking if anyone had seen me and knew where I was. I wondered if this was concern for my safety or suspicion as to what I might be doing.
33
Lady Myre and I were invited to supper by the governor’s representative Wayne and his Albanian wife Tania. He was young but old, and with the demeanour of a secret agent. He’d been posted to Pitcairn for a year to deal with the logistics of the trials, then he’d be transferred to some other uncommercial outpost of the old colonial world.
The house assigned to him was clean and well-equipped, as neatly built as the prison and with all amenities. It had a private generator and an electric
ally operated mosquito repellent. There were shelves of CDs, DVDs, and videos. There was a lone cat, neutered by a government vet and with a flea collar. All that the officials might want was shipped with them and extra supplies were brought on Nigel Jolly’s Braveheart. They kept to a standard, mixed with each other and seemed no part of Pitcairn. The islanders called them visitors and seldom remembered them when they left.
Equally polished and pristine was the other guest, Mary the schoolteacher, plump and complacent, in a well-ironed white blouse, her white hair washed in good shampoo. She too occupied a government house, but a new, smarter schoolhouse was being built for her use. She too was on the island for a year. She was about seventy and had gone to New Zealand from Hampstead. Her husband, who wasn’t with her, was a painter. In her school were four children, aged four to fourteen. She said she had one rule: ‘Keep your hands and feet to yourself.’
The food had an Albanian slant: spicy chicken and rice, salads, barbecued fish. There was a chilled New Zealand Chardonnay, and an elaborately decorated chocolate cake.
I foolishly asked, ‘Where did you get that?’ ‘From the French patisserie down at the bay,’ Mary said, then spurted with laughter.
Lady Myre was wonderfully herself in a rustling green skirt and a pink feathery boa. She’d painted each of her toenails a different colour. ‘Don’t you love them?’ she asked Wayne. ‘Aren’t they jewels?’
We ate on a verandah overlooking the sea. The talk was of planned improvements for the island: the reconstruction of the jetty, shipping links with French Polynesia, the feasibility of an airstrip, a concrete surface for the Hill of Difficulty – though it was thought that if mud stuck to the wheels of quad bikes from tracks to the houses and gardens, they’d skid off the concrete and into the sea. All the grant allocation had to be spent by the end of the financial year, but not much had yet been agreed.
I asked a few questions about the forthcoming trials.
‘The truth is going to come out,’ Wayne said.
A notice had been issued requiring all islanders to hand in their guns before the court convened. One or two had refused. The guns were to be taken from them out of fear of ‘hot-headedness’ or that they might be used against defendants or victims.
Conversation shifted to Lady Myre and her iPod, the temporary dressing on her tooth, her attempt to learn to drive a quad bike.
‘Are you travelling together?’ Wayne asked.
She said we were, I said we weren’t. There was a thoughtful quiet. Then she went into a performance about her time on the Shaw Savill Line and how she’d starred in Kenya as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and the audience had left in droves at the interval. ‘Is it me you’re after, Willie?’ she declaimed, ‘or is it something else? Is it a kiss you’re after, Willie? or is it something else?’
No one knew what she was talking about. They looked uncomfortable, even alarmed. ‘And you,’ Mary asked of me, ‘what’s your career?’ I talked of the flightless rail and the mutiny on the Bounty and how I’d spent three months on Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, because of my interest in Alexander Selkirk, who’d been marooned there for four years – and did she know he was the prototype for Robinson Crusoe?
It seemed there was no transparency from anyone except Lady Myre, who perhaps was entirely mendacious but gave the impression of being frank. The paranoia and concealment of Pitcairn’s history pervaded the room. Mary then said Wednesday at her school was Culture Day, and Lady Myre and I were invited to attend this week, as special guests. Nola Young would be teaching the children how to cook the manioc root and there’d be one or two other subjects of discussion. We should be there at ten.
Lady Myre wanted to get back to the computer while the generator was still working. ‘Come along,’ she said to me as if I were her spouse or dog. She asked if she might take the remains of her supper with her to feed the cats. She said she was a bird person really, but life was life, and she loved it. I suspected more candid conversation might begin after we’d gone.
The moon was high and clear and seemed further away than at home. Lady Myre linked my arm as we passed the unfinished prison and the health clinic where Dr Scantlebury had slept at night. At our lodging, at either side of the door to the outside lavatory – the dunny as it was called – stood two large land crabs. Each had the legs of a cockroach sticking from its mouth. I shared this observation with Lady Myre, who made a trilling noise of alarm. There was no communication from Sir Roland or from Verity. There was, though, a familiar update on mother, who’d thrown her bedding out of the window at Sunset View.
34
In August 1791, on a ship called Providence with an escort brig the Assistant, Bligh left on a second attempt to take breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies. Two botanists were on board to supervise the venture and to collect rare plant specimens for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.
It took thirty-six weeks to reach Tahiti and for the first six of those Bligh was very ill. He thought he was going to die and he assigned command to his lieutenants. He had a constant and terrible headache and ‘burning heat’ in his skin, his face was flushed, he lost his balance, found the least sound intolerable, had a sinking feeling in his stomach, ‘a lowness and flurry of spirits’ and couldn’t bear the sun on him. The surgeon thought he had some nervous illness.
The Providence passed Pitcairn in April 1792. Like Edwards in the Pandora the previous year, Bligh had no inkling of what was going on there. He again warned his crew they mustn’t say anything to the Tahitians about Captain Cook’s death or why all these breadfruit were wanted, and he threatened ‘disgrace and punishment’ to anyone who disobeyed his commands.
The Tahitian chiefs were again flattered that he’d come to see them as King George the Third’s emissary. Their queen Obereroah visited him on the ship, but was so corpulent she had to be winched on board in a chair. She asked for beads and other things. Bligh declined her reciprocal offer of one of her maidservants.
There was the usual barter. The English wanted exotic souvenirs: war mats and wickerwork breastplates adorned with sharks’ teeth. The Tahitians wanted nails, firearms, hatchets, knives, scissors, mirrors, brandy. But they were ever more wary of these English mariners. The crew of the Pandora had brought an infectious epidemic and given them more venereal disease. The Tahitians told Bligh of the now fatherless sons and daughters of the mutineers. ‘I have seen none of the sons and some are said to be dead,’ Bligh wrote in his log. He did, though, see the midshipman George Stewart’s daughter ‘a fine child, a very pretty creature’. Her father had drowned, aged twenty-three, in the wreck of the Pandora.
From the chiefs Bligh learned of Christian’s return to Tahiti, his attempt to settle on Tubuai, his second visit, then departure for some unknown place. He heard how the men who’d stayed built the Resolution, which was taken by Captain Edwards, and how Churchill and Thompson became jealous of each other, so Churchill stole Thompson’s musket and shot him dead and then friends of Thompson beat Churchill’s brains out. The chiefs told Bligh that though they’d given Christian sails and all he wanted, they’d treated him with coldness and were happy when Edwards carried the rest of the English away.
As in 1788, Bligh set up a nursery on shore for the plants to establish. He intended to sail ‘with every inch of space filled up with plants’ and by 6 May 1792 he had 1281 vigorous saplings potted. A greenhouse was created on the quarterdeck, the sailmakers made covers and the carpenters made scuttles to give air when the portholes couldn’t be opened. The ship was cleaned and painted, a hundred tons of water were casked from the River Matavai, hogs and fowls were caged on board, the islanders helped load the breadfruit and the ship sailed in August. Two Tahitian boys were on board. One had stowed away and when found became known as Jacket or Bobbo. The other, Maititi, sailed as a servant to Bligh.
Bligh’s second breadfruit voyage was relatively uneventful. His route from Tahiti was to Timor through the Torres Strait, across the Indian Ocean,
around the Cape, and north-west to Jamaica. On the journey one of the crew died from arrow wounds in a skirmish with fishermen, another from cold and ‘an improper use of arrack’, and two from malaria contracted in Coupang. The stowaway, Bobbo, was left in Jamaica to help the gardener there, but he died after a few weeks. Nine hundred and twenty-seven of the plants survived. The West Indians hated the taste of breadfruit, though it became an integral part of their diet because no alternative staple food was available.
It took Bligh a year to get back to England after leaving Tahiti. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and given their gold medal for distinguished services to botany and navigation. More generally he was known as Bounty Bastard Bligh. To his chagrin his account of this second voyage was not wanted. The Admiralty told him, ‘At present books of voyages sell so slowly that they do not defray the expence of publishing.’ His Tahitian servant, Maititi, died soon after reaching England and was buried in St Paul’s churchyard in Deptford.
35
While Bligh was at sea, the court martial of the accused men who survived the wreck of the Pandora was held in the captain’s cabin of HMS Duke, anchored at Spithead. It lasted from 12 to 18 September 1792. Presiding over the process was Lord Hood, First Lord of the Admiralty. He and eleven captains were to judge which of the accused should live and which should die.
The defendants were Peter Heywood midshipman, James Morrison boatswain’s mate, Charles Norman carpenter’s mate, Joseph Coleman armourer, Thomas McIntosh carpenter, Thomas Burkett, Thomas Ellison and John Millward seamen, William Muspratt the cook’s assistant and Michael Byrne the violinist. All were charged with the capital offence of mutiny.
Without Bligh, the Crown was missing its chief witness for the prosecution, but he’d given an emphatic account at his own court martial two years previously. He testified that Coleman, Norman and McIntosh had wanted to leave in the boat with him and had been detained on the Bounty by force. He scathingly indicted Peter Heywood and deemed him as guilty of mutiny as Christian. The six other men he left to defend themselves as best they could.
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