by Tony Parsons
There was game on Pitcairn – mostly birds, with lovely crunchy bones – and those wild blue waters teemed with fish. Lobster, yellowtail, Wahoo, snapper, cod. And fish that none of us had never seen before and did not know the names of. These we had to name ourselves – as though we were the Lord himself, naming His creatures.
A soft southern breeze made the climate more like a hot English summer than the furnace we had known in Tahiti or on board the Bounty. Work was easier on Pitcairn, and soon some of us were growing carrots, peas, beans, yams, sweet potatoes and sugarcane (while some of us got drunk on what was left of the rum).
Most importantly, they – the Royal Navy – would never find us here. And even if they did – which they wouldn’t! – find Pitcairn by accident, as we had found it, then we would see them coming.
The only access to the island was the bay where we moored our ship. Bounty Bay, we came to call it – the first place on the island to be given a name.
I looked out at Bounty Bay now from the top of those white cliffs. While a gentle breeze moved my hair, and all of Paradise lay spread below me, I remembered the Bounty as she burned.
The fire had been brighter than the stars, and brighter than the moon. If there had been a ship within one hundred miles, then they would have seen that fire and we would have dangled on a rope in Jamaica or Java or wherever they decided to give us a fair trial before they strung us up.
But nobody saw the fire.
In that great blue expanse of ocean, we were all alone now.
It was like being the last men and women alive in the world.
I stretched my arms to the heavens and let out a breath that I felt I might have been holding for a lifetime.
Then I walked back down the green hill and we buried Fletcher Christian.
‘Perhaps we should help them, Ned,’ said John Adams to me, stooping to whisper in my ear so that none of the others should hear.
We were watching a few of the men from Tahiti dig Fletcher Christian’s final resting place. Our dead leader’s body was wrapped in an oily sailcloth and his young widow was weeping and wailing over it.
I looked up at John. I was a big man but he was bigger. In his meaty hands he held the ship’s Bible.
‘Help them?’ I said, not getting his drift. I turned back to the fresh grave and barked a command. ‘Put your back into it, you idle savages, or you will feel the end of my boot!’ I cried, offering them support in their labours. ‘Soon the sun will be high and the body will be getting ripe!’
The copper-skinned Tahitians looked up at me and grinned with apologies. Then they mopped their brows and carried on digging.
‘If we are to live in this place,’ said John to me, ‘then surely all men must be equal.’
I nodded sagely. ‘Of course, John,’ I said. Then I paused. ‘But that doesn’t include the Tahitians too, does it?’
‘Indeed it does, Ned,’ John said. ‘Tahitians and Englishmen alike. This is our home now. If it is to be a more just and Christian world than the hell William Bligh made for us aboard the Bounty, then surely all men must have the same rights – whatever their tribe.’ John got a look full of zeal in his eyes. I glanced down at the battered old Bible in his hands. ‘And that means we find food together, and we build shelter together, and we dig graves together!’
I murmured vaguely. Then I nodded towards the grave. Only the raven-haired tops of those Tahitian heads were visible now. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think they’ve almost finished.’
The Tahitians clambered out and we all formed a circle around the grave. And what a strange little tribe we were, those of us starting from scratch on this uncharted island.
Eight English seamen, some of us still wearing the tattered rags we had worn on the Bounty, others in the light cotton wraps worn by the natives – kirtles, they were called.
Six Tahitian men who had helped us crew the Bounty after we left half of our fellow mutineers on Tahiti.
Eleven women of all shapes and sizes, plus a baby boy who had been born on the quarterdeck of the Bounty.
One of the women gently led Fletcher’s widow to the graveside so we could get on with the funeral. ‘Maimiti,’ said the woman who comforted her, ‘Maimiti.’ It always sounded like ‘My Meaty’ to my scurvy English ears.
Maimiti was across the black hole from me and I had a good look at her. She was the kind of woman that a man can’t stop looking at.
I realised that I had always enjoyed looking at her. Though when our master and commander was husband to her, it had to be done out of the corner of my eye, on the sly.
We were silent apart from the choking sobs of Maimiti. The English mutineers. The Tahitians. Even the baby was sleeping.
John Adams opened his Bible and said a few words.
‘Today we say goodbye to our fallen leader and our beloved brother,’ said John, his voice booming across the open grave. ‘Master’s mate and true captain of His Majesty’s Ship Bounty – Fletcher Christian.’
John gave the nod and a couple of our crew began lowering his body into the grave. The Tahitian man next to me – no more than a boy, really – was examining the dirt under his fingernails. I gave him a quick kick and then he gave the funeral service his full attention.
‘Fletcher believed that we would find no happiness here,’ said John. ‘That we would be forever hiding and shivering like convicts. That life here would be another way of dying. As we say goodbye to our fallen brother, and as we dedicate our lives here to living in the light of the Lord, we hope to prove him wrong …’
It was impressive stuff from John Adams – full of fire and brimstone, the wrath of God and the promise of streets of gold. But I was not really listening. I was too busy watching Maimiti on the other side of the grave, noticing how her body curved under that thin native dress.
She was the loveliest of the lot. The fairest woman I have ever seen. Her eyes flashed with black light. Her skin looked as though it had never spent one day out of the sun. Her teeth were white as bone.
The King’s daughter, so they said. I believe he had several hundred of them.
But this one here, she was said to be the favourite child of King Tynah of Tahiti. And a real king he was too. Although a king in these parts was not quite the same as a king back home. I believe His Majesty King Tynah was the type of monarch who had fifty wives and wiped his royal arse with his hand.
But still, she was the daughter of the king of Tahiti. Maimiti, Maimiti. Daughter of the king, widow of the captain, the most beautiful sight in all of our tropical Eden.
John didn’t look up from his old Bible.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All of that. The usual mournful farewells.
But the other men – Tahitians and English, boys and men – kept glancing up from Fletcher Christian’s grave to steal a look at his young widow.
There she stood, all curvy and weeping and alone. I could see it in their eyes and I felt it too.
Maimiti wasn’t like the rest. You couldn’t buy her with a bucket of glass beads and a bite of your banana.
She had to be won.
3
Wives of the Bounty
The women.
It was all about the women.
They told our tale as if it were the story of men. But they got it wrong by making it a story about the men.
The men of the King’s ship Bounty. The men who served under Captains Bligh and Christian. The men who rose up when the cruelty and the sadism and the lash became too much to bear.
A story about men.
Somewhere in my bones I knew they would tell our tale all round the world for generations. In the alehouses of Portsmouth and London and Liverpool. In the whorehouses of Shanghai and Alexandria and Lagos. In the ten thousand docks where the King’s navy lay anchor.
And in another kind of dock in Jamaica. The kind of dock where you stand in chains and you can hear the tock-tock-tock sound of them building your gallows out in the yard.
Men at sea. Men w
ith the cat-o’-nine-tails taking the skin off their backs. Men who could take no more. That was us. And it was all true.
But the story of the Bounty was really about the women.
It is true that Bligh was a cruel and cold-hearted captain who believed the men who served under him were the scum of England (he was probably right). But I had seen and served with other English naval captains who were just as cruel, and just as quick to reach for the whip.
That was our navy. Those were our lives. Here was our glorious Empire.
But the mutiny that seized the Bounty would never have happened if it wasn’t for the women we found on Tahiti.
Those angels of the South Seas. So soft, so brown, so gentle. So totally unlike anything we had ever known in our hard, sea-faring lives.
Yes, Bligh was a wicked devil, but we had seen his like before. And if we had kept taking the King’s shilling, we would have seen his like again. But when would we ever again find women like the women we found in Tahiti?
They looked into our broken, toothless faces and they saw something that nobody in our lives had ever seen. Not even our mothers. The women of Tahiti looked into our scarred, battered features and seemed to see fine gentlemen rather than a bunch of stinking sea dogs.
Certainly they were fooling themselves.
Certainly our Tahitian wives gave us more credit than we had ever been given by a working girl in a Southampton knocking shop.
Or perhaps an English sailor is as exotic and strange to a brown Tahitian maid as she is to him. I don’t know.
After being at sea for ten months, we stayed in Tahiti for five months. Five months while we collected 1,015 breadfruit plants (somebody counted them, although it wasn’t me).
You see, although I can’t explain the gardening of the matter to you, we all understood that the breadfruits had to reach a certain stage of their growing before we could transport them to the slaves in the West Indies.
‘Men,’ said Bligh one day, frowning like Moses down from the mountain. ‘Listen now. The breadfruit is vital to the economic life of the British Empire. We must drop our anchor for a good while in Tahiti.’
That was fine by our lights. It gave us plenty of time to get to know Tahiti. And the women. We explored every lush tropical inch of the island, and of the women.
We were more than sailors on shore leave. It was not just a matter of spreading our wanton seed. Spend five months in Tahiti and man will find one woman he could spend the rest of his days with. Or perhaps more than one.
In Tahiti, we knew loving like we had never known. And we knew love.
After knowing such sweetness, how could we live on without it? After glimpsing Paradise – no, after setting anchor in Paradise for five months of bliss and free bananas – how could we sail away to the lonely, loveless sea?
That was what made our voyage away from Tahiti unbearable. Not William Bligh, whose evil ways were standard issue in the King’s navy, inhumanity being the British Empire’s most loyal and faithful servant.
During our stay in Tahiti, Bligh ordered our hides to be flogged almost on a daily basis, usually because some light-fingered natives had made off with goods that belonged to His Majesty King George. Yet the flogging didn’t seem quite so bad when you could spend the night making love under the palm trees with the South Sea moonlight shining its silvery light on your hairy English arse.
We put up with Bligh’s cruel ways so long as we had our women. But after we sailed with our cargo of breadfruit, leaving our women weeping in their little canoes and cutting their heads with rocks, as is the South Sea custom at times of grief, that is when we said, ‘Damn your blood, William Bligh! And damn your eyes!’
It wasn’t because of the constant flogging that we wanted to string up our captain. It was because he robbed us of our women.
The Bounty was taken by Fletcher Christian because he pined for his Maimiti just as the rest of us pined for the dusky maidens that we had left back on that Tahitian shore.
We knew we were for the noose if they ever caught us. We knew we would never see England and home and family again unless we saw it briefly with a rope around our necks.
We knew that we would be exiles forever for taking the Bounty.
But we did it for the women.
And the men who stuck with Bligh (and who probably followed him to the bottom of the sea, I shouldn’t wonder, or starved to death, or gave their bollocks for a native to wear as earrings), they left because of the women.
The other women.
The women back home.
The wives who were nursing newborn babies or raising small children. Or the older wives who they had loved for a lifetime. Or the sweethearts who were yet to become wives. All of it was about the women. Those who mutinied. Those who got into Bligh’s leaky boat.
The Bligh loyalists – that was what we called them, our former shipmates who wanted no part of the mutiny – got into that little boat and paddled away for their women just as surely as we sailed back to Tahiti for the women that we had left behind.
Even Bligh had a wife. I suppose he must have loved her, as much as Bligh was capable of loving anything. Certainly he was as celibate as a novice monk during our time in Tahiti. Bligh never touched a Tahitian lass with so much as a dirty breadfruit.
The women ruled our world.
Our story wasn’t about breadfruit. And it wasn’t about Bligh’s cruelty. And it wasn’t even about treating men like vermin.
It was about the women.
And even now – with Bligh no doubt dead, and with the Bounty burned, and Fletcher Christian freshly buried, and with us willingly shipwrecked for evermore … Even now as our mad adventure reached its bloody conclusion on the secret island of Pitcairn, I thought to myself that it was still all about the women.
I watched the slim yet curvy figure of Maimiti walk away from the grave of Fletcher Christian, the man she had loved. Her black hair tumbled down over her lovely face.
The king’s daughter. The captain’s widow. I admired the way her rump rolled rhythmically up and down as she walked.
‘Someone should comfort that poor child,’ I said to John Adams, who was sitting on the grass hunched over his open Bible, muttering to himself about the wrath of the Lord.
He looked up from the good book.
‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Ned,’ he said. ‘Shall I ask one of the women to stay with her?’
‘No, I’ll do it,’ I said, perhaps a little too quickly. But my Bible-thumping shipmate got a teary glint in his eye.
‘You’re a good man, Ned Young,’ he said, and I scarpered off after Maimiti before he had a chance to change his mind.
She was off up a grassy path that led away from our settlement. As I trotted after her, I encountered some drunken piece of scum lounging against a palm tree with a bottle of rum in his hand. It was John Mills, a gunner’s mate, and as different to Bible-loving John Adams as chalk is to cheese.
He leered at me in his insolent fashion. (As a general rule they are a rough lot, the gunner’s mates.)
‘Off to sample some of the captain’s port, are we, Ned?’ he said, rolling his eyes and grinning foolishly and almost puking his guts up with merriment.
‘Still your tongue, John Mills,’ I said.
I leaned down and gave him the back of my hand across his stupid face and he didn’t like the taste of it as much as his rum. But he was too drunk to stand up and fight me like a man.
I moved quickly on, having for a moment lost sight of the lovely Maimiti’s magnificent backside (surely one of the finest views in all the South Seas).
The drunken gunner’s mate called after me.
‘You can’t do that to me, Ned Young! There are no more officers and men! Now there are only men, Ned! You cannot strike me!’
I answered him over my shoulder.
‘Examine your broken nose,’ I shouted, ‘and you will find that I can strike you well enough.’
Then I had a bit of a chuckle to m
yself until I saw Maimiti on her knees in the shadow of the palms, crying her pretty brown eyes out.
Taking a deep breath, I knelt down beside her, gently patting the silky skin of her shoulders.
‘There, there,’ I said, like a kindly priest at your true believer’s deathbed. ‘There, there, don’t cry, my duck of diamonds. For he is at rest now, and gone to a far better place.’
I sounded very sincere. I almost believed myself. Although a part of me wondered what place could ever be better than the soft bed of Maimiti, the king’s daughter.
Sob, sob, sob, she went, the poor thing. The black hair was still covering that beautiful face. I gently tried to pull it away from her eyes, her nose, her mouth – especially that.
‘Now, now,’ I said. ‘Don’t cry your little heart out. For old Ned Young is here to comfort you in your hour of need. What can I do to comfort you, my lovely one? Now if we could just slip into these bushes for a moment …’
She spat in my face.
A good one, it was – full of feeling and well aimed.
It caught me right on the bridge of my frequently broken nose, and dribbled down that sad excuse for a hooter, the spit only veering off to the right when it reached my upper lip.
Then she was up and screaming at me. Her fists hammering my chest.
And I was too shocked to move.
‘You killed Fletcher Christian!’ she howled. ‘You ugly dog! You toothless old man! You killed my love!’
‘I killed no man,’ I gasped, and I stepped away from her.
She spat again, this time on the ground.
‘You burned the Bounty!’ she hissed, that black fire in her eyes. ‘You killed the only good man among you!’
The funny thing about Maimiti is that she sounded a lot like Fletcher Christian. Because she had learned the lingo from him, I suppose, she had a bit of the dandy and fop in her voice like our poor grilled skipper himself.
But I think that was true of all of us. The ones who learned English, and the ones who learned Tahitian. We all had our language lessons in bed.
She spat a third and final time.
‘You remarkable pig!’ she growled, and I shivered with shock. For they were the very words that Fletcher Christian had uttered just before we put William Bligh in his boat.