Hell's Fire

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Prisoners will stand,’ ordered the clerk.

  Lord Hood lounged back, studying the men as they rose, already aware of the identities of the accused from the Circumstantial Letter which set out the evidence to be produced and which had, by the same tradition that decreed the enquiry be held aboard ship, been circulated to the officers conducting the court martial. Some of the prisoners would have to be discharged, Hood knew. In a deposition before the court, Bligh had exonerated completely the blind fiddler, Michael Byrn, who was groping to his feet, head held respectfully to one side to locate from the sound which way he should face. Charles Norman had been kept on the Bounty because Christian had wanted the skills of a carpenter, not because the man had thrown in his lot with them, Hood remembered. And Thomas McIntosh had been carried away against his will. Bligh had been emphatic about that, as insistent as he had been that the armourer, Joseph Coleman, had taken no part in the affair. Evidence would have to be called, before their discharge, though. Justice very positively had to be seen to be done at the enquiry. He had always to keep in mind what would happen after the court martial, Hood knew. The affair had already dragged on for three years and become a cause célèbre in English society. It wouldn’t end, he guessed, with whatever was to happen in an overcrowded enquiry room on a British man-o’-war.

  He moved on, studying the rest of the prisoners awaiting the charge to be read to them. Why was it, wondered the admiral, lips twisting in disdain, that they’d all seen fit to have those disgusting pictures indelibly marked upon their bodies? Tattooing, it was called, he believed. Captain Cook had referred to the native practice, in the journal of his Pacific voyages. And Bligh, too, in the narrative of the disastrous journey on the Bounty. Shouldn’t have let the men deface their bodies like that, determined the admiral. It was pagan. How could a man expect to maintain discipline in his ship if he let his crew descend to the level of unchristian savages? Point to bear in mind, decided Hood. He wondered if the thought had occurred to the rest of the court martial officers. Must remember to mention it during their deliberations.

  The midshipman, Peter Heywood, appeared very frightened, thought Hood. To be expected, accepted the admiral. He was only a lad of seventeen, after all. Came from a good family, too. Well connected. Little secret that for months now there had been every pressure possible brought to bear to show the boy an innocent victim of events that had swept him along in their wake.

  The bo’sun’s mate, James Morrison, seemed better controlled. But then he was a grown man. And intelligent, too. The document he’d submitted, indicating he was going to conduct his own defence, showed an education far higher than most seamen. Better than some officers even, mused the President, glancing along the table at which the court sat. Some could hardly write their damned names.

  Thomas Birkitt and Thomas Ellison had been very actively involved in the insurrection, recalled Hood, coming back to the shackled men and feeling the edge of the Circumstantial Letter. They seemed to have accepted their fate already, he thought, watching as the men stood, heads contritely bowed, even before the evidence against them was presented.

  Jonathan Millward was apprehensive, too, realised the President, coming towards the end of the line. Several times since the enquiry had opened, the man had turned to the last prisoner, William Muspratt, as if seeking encouragement, but the bearded Muspratt had ignored him, staring fixedly at some point at the stern of the ship, his lips moving in apparent repetition of the accusation being laid against them.

  The clerk was coming to the end of the preliminaries, Hood realised, and arriving at the actual charge.

  ‘… against each and every one of you that upon April 28, 1789, you did mutinously run away with the said armed vessel, the Bounty, and by so doing deserted from His Majesty’s service …’

  Where was Fletcher Christian? wondered Hood, as the court martial settled itself after the formal opening. The men before him now were meaningless, he decided, as unimportant as the pilot fish who unquestioningly follow the lead of a shark. Fletcher Christian was the key. And he had vanished.

  But Bligh’s absence was the most irritating. It was not for him to question the wisdom of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. Or of the King himself, upon whose direct instructions the Pandora had been dispatched. But to rely upon Bligh’s evidence from a deposition that could be introduced into the court but upon which there could be no cross-examination was a mistake, Hood felt. Particularly with the man so near England. He had little doubt the Christian family would use it to their advantage: their determination to harass Bligh appeared implacable. It was almost as if they were preparing the way for the mutineer’s eventual reappearance. Surely they didn’t think they could so discredit Bligh that Fletcher Christian could some time in the future return to England? No, dismissed Hood. Whatever their purpose, it could not be that. There could be no mitigating circumstances to prevent the man’s immediate arrest and subsequent hanging. Edward Christian would know that, well enough. It could only be the determination of a proud family to salvage something of their reputation.

  It was just possible, the President tried to rationalise, that there would be advantage in not having the major participants before the court. The witnesses might possibly speak more openly, without the restricting presence of either man. And frankness was damned important: from the brief details set out in the summary of evidence, Lord Hood couldn’t understand why the mutiny had occurred in the first place.

  He coughed again, clearing his throat this time.

  ‘This is to be, in many ways, an unusual enquiry,’ he opened. ‘We are to hear evidence into an armed uprising, three years ago and thousands of miles from these shores, led by the second-in-command against his superior officer. It will be unusual in that neither the alleged leader of the mutiny, Fletcher Christian, nor the captain, William Bligh, will appear to give evidence. Fletcher Christian cannot appear because no one knows where he is …’

  The President paused, deciding to break away from his carefully rehearsed statement.

  ‘… but let me say every endeavour will be made at this hearing to discover his whereabouts.’

  He stared up, looking at the lawyers again. Let that get back to the Christian family, he thought, defiantly.

  ‘Captain Bligh will not give evidence personally,’ picked up Lord Hood. ‘Because he had already embarked upon the second voyage to Tahiti and from there to the West Indies before the apprehension of the accused and it was not thought proper by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to delay this trial until Captain Bligh’s uncertain return …’

  They should have delayed, determined Hood again. It could not be a proper trial without him. The Admiralty was a bumbling collection of fools.

  ‘… such a decision was reached,’ he hurried on, alert to the bustle of note-taking that was occurring at the lawyers’ bench ‘… in the sound belief that the full and detailed facts of the uprising have been carefully taken down and notarised by a lawyer, to be presented at such time as I and my fellow officers deem necessary.’

  Hood sipped from the glass of diluted wine on the table before him. He had been right, he decided. Already the overcrowded room was getting too hot. Thank God he wasn’t among those poor buggers way at the back of the cabin. He looked towards the witnesses, wedged on their narrow bench.

  ‘… for not only do we have the written evidence of Captain Bligh,’ enlarged Lord Hood. ‘We have, for this enquiry, the castaways most closely involved in the insurrection whose evidence we can hear first-hand. We shall hear from the master, James Fryer. From the bo’sun, William Cole. From the gunner, William Peckover. From the carpenter, William Purcell. And from the two midshipmen who were in the watch of Fletcher Christian and who were among the first to be aware of the uprising, Lieutenants Thomas Hayward and John Hallett.’

  Another glance up at the lawyers. There! thought Hood, triumphantly. They might be without Bligh, but no fault could be found with a witnesses’ list like that.r />
  ‘… and about the facts of the mutiny itself,’ he continued. ‘There appears little doubt …’

  He paused, looking first to the prisoners, then to the lawyers, waiting for a contradiction. No one challenged him.

  ‘… therefore the purpose of this enquiry, which I intend to be as far-reaching as possible, is to determine the circumstances that led up to those facts and the reasons for them …’

  Someone appeared to be smiling at the back, thought Hood, curiously. It was Fryer, he recognised, squinting in the semidarkness of the cabin. What, he wondered, did the master find so amusing about what he said?

  At the insistence of Bligh, Fryer and Purcell had been accused of near revolt before a Dutch enquiry at Timor after their incredible survival in the open launch, recalled Lord Hood. And both had been found culpable during the investigation. The evidence of Fryer would have to be examined with particular care, thought the President. And perhaps some pointed questions directed at the man. Odd, reflected Lord Hood, that there had been a second uprising, particularly in the middle of a 3,600-mile voyage which no one knew they were going to complete so miraculously and when, presumably, men should have been bound by the common need for survival rather than splintered by dissent. It really was damned inconvenient that Bligh wasn’t going to be before him in person: inconsistencies like this were going to arise frequently before the end of the enquiry. Bligh must be a damned funny man.

  ‘… because neither Fletcher Christian nor Captain Bligh are present, I intend conducting this court martial with complete impartiality and purposely to introduce evidence that would have come from one or other of them, had they been here. For that reason, although the facts are not in dispute, I am going to have the clerk read out the details in the Circumstantial Letter, according to naval regulations. That will conclude the hearing for today. We will begin tomorrow with the evidence of the master, James Fryer …’

  That had made the bugger jump, thought Lord Hood, relaxing back into his chair but with his eyes still upon the master at the rear of the cabin. The man had started forward in his seat at the announcement and the smile had gone from his face. That would teach him to grin in a court of which Lord Hood was the presiding judge. What was going on in the Duke was damned serious, not an occasion for stupid giggling. There were a lot of questions he would put to Mr Fryer when the man took the witness stand.

  God, thought Hood, it was confounded hot. It had been a wise decision to rise at noon.

  Edward Christian sat, knees beneath his chin, in the window seat of his lodgings at Sally Port, the pot of porter forgotten on the table beside him. There was no breeze at all to move the curtains and the clouds were rumbling up over the Isle of Wight and gathering at Spithead. The day would end in thunder, he decided. It would be uncomfortable out there on the Duke, he thought, looking over the Narrows as the warship slowly veered to starboard as the tide turned. But he’d still have given a thousand guineas to be there, in person, so he could have actually questioned in the environment of a court men who had been with Fletcher and knew what he had had to endure from Bligh. He’d have got the truth, the lawyer knew. He always had, which was why he had risen so high in the legal profession. It hadn’t been easy, though, after the slander that Bligh had spread to involve the whole family. It had hindered his career, Edward knew. At one time, aware of the opposition he was facing, he had actually considered abandoning the law altogether.

  He smiled at the recollection. Now he was being selected for appointment as a judge. He’d have forgone even that, he thought, to have been out there, aboard that warship, stripping away the deceits and excuses with which everyone involved would by now have covered their part in the mutiny. In that they’d had guidance enough from Bligh.

  Edward Christian sighed, turning towards his forgotten drink and sipping the beer, without interest.

  But he couldn’t attend. So therefore it was pointless to speculate about it. Far better to concentrate upon the daily reports from John Bunyan, the eager young lawyer who was defending the midshipman Heywood and who appeared flattered at the interest from the older man. Through Bunyan, Edward hoped, he would be able to introduce the sort of questions and accusations he would have made had he been there in person.

  Edward Christian was a man very different from his seafaring brother. He was a short, precise and scholarly person, of abrupt incisive movements, hair receding to form a wide forehead above which he habitually lodged his spectacles. In a family remarkable for their sense of purpose, Edward Christian was probably the most determined. And for the past three years that resoluteness had been directed solely to the defence of a younger brother damned to ridicule by a man who had become a favourite of London society and even honoured by King George himself.

  It had been a solitary and largely unsuccessful campaign, he acknowledged, staring back out of the window as the first full splashes of the thunderstorm slapped against the sill outside. Bunyan would get wet, he thought.

  It had been in October 1789, two months after he had written it from the Dutch settlement at Timor, that Bligh’s dispatch of the mutiny of the Bounty had first become public knowledge and the hero-worship had begun. That a man, with just a sextant, compass and book of longitudinal tables, could have safely navigated a vessel with just seven inches of freeboard for a distance of over 5,600 miles and saved the lives of seventeen other castaways had been a tale to enrapture London society. The adulation had increased with the official enquiry, during which the name of Fletcher Christian had been vilified, and then been confirmed with the publication of Bligh’s book. It was said there was hardly a house in London without a copy and that the strutting, bouncing figure of Captain Bligh was a familiar sight, moving from salon to salon, autographing copies as he went, always with another untold anecdote of Christian’s villainy.

  He’d reverse it, Edward vowed. No matter if it took him the rest of his life, he’d destroy the esteem in which Bligh was held. And discover what had really happened to make his brother lead a mutiny.

  And there was little legal doubt that his brother had been the ringleader, he reflected, sadly. Edward had reached that objective conclusion, regrettable though it was, long before learning the outline of the evidence that was to be presented to the court martial and about which he had read in the Circumstantial Letter that Bunyan had allowed him to study the previous night.

  But there had to be mitigating circumstances, he knew. More than that, even. A proper, understandable explanation. Just had to be. As boys they had been inseparable in the Cumberland dales and valleys near Cockermouth. At Cockermouth grammar school it had been unthinkable they would not sit side by side and when Fletcher had determined upon a career in the navy, it had been Edward who had accompanied him to join his first ship at Liverpool No man knew another better than he knew Fletcher. And that was why Edward had no doubt that there was something which would explain completely why Fletcher had involved himself in the overthrow of his captain. And he’d discover it, vowed the lawyer. He’d discover it and use it to make William Bligh a pariah in the very society in which he was at the moment so revered.

  He turned at the knock on his door and saw, immediately it was opened by the inn servant, the polished, anxious face of Bunyan.

  ‘Come in, sir! Come in,’ invited Edward. The other man was soaked, he saw, water running from his hair in tiny streams.

  ‘A towel, Mr Bunyan? And some refreshment? A little wine, perhaps?’

  The younger lawyer nodded, head buried in the cloth that Edward had offered him.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Edward, urgently, when Bunyan had dried himself.

  ‘Little enough to tell,’ replied Bunyan, wishing he had a better report for the man recognised to be one of the leading barristers in London. ‘It was a formal opening, nothing more.’

  ‘No evidence?’

  Bunyan shook his head.

  ‘None,’ he said. ‘Lord Hood has said he’ll call Fryer when the court resumes tomorrow.’


  Edward nodded, slowly. Fryer would know more than anyone, he decided. He would have been the man most associated with both Bligh and his brother. In the restricted conditions of the Bounty, a plan of which he had studied and knew by heart, the ship’s master would have been aware of everything that passed between the two men.

  ‘He’s important,’ stressed Edward. ‘Get all you can from him, particularly about what sort of man Bligh was. Don’t forget there was an enquiry, immediately after they arrived in Timor, upon Bligh’s complaint. There’ll be no love for the man, I’ll wager.’

  Bunyan nodded, accepting the wine from the returning servant.

  ‘How far do you think you’ll be allowed to go with your questioning?’

  ‘A goodly way,’ guessed Bunyan. ‘The President insisted he would make it as extensive an enquiry as possible … said he wanted to be fair to your brother and Bligh …’

  That was interesting, decided Edward. Why should the President make such a point? Did it mean the Admiralty weren’t happy with the account they had so far received from Bligh? God, it was infuriating that he couldn’t attend the damned hearing.

  ‘What about your client?’ he asked, politely.

  ‘I’ve a good chance, I think,’ said Bunyan, smiling gratefully at the interest. ‘He was little more than fifteen when it happened … a child, almost. There appears to be some evidence of his having seized a weapon, but to what point nobody is clear.’

  Edward nodded.

  ‘Make much of the confusion,’ he advised. ‘The Circumstantial Letter indicates there was uproar.’

  ‘Bligh’s deposition says otherwise,’ contradicted Bunyan. ‘He insists it was a planned affair.’

  ‘Then it must be attacked,’ said Edward, urgently. ‘For the sake of your client. And for my brother. A conspiracy would be the worst thing that could be proven.’

  Bunyan moved his head in acceptance of the advice, sipping his wine, slowly.