The Bounty sailed from Tahiti on April 4, 1789, loaded with more than a thousand breadfruit plants and a crew that had become soft and lazy. Three of the men had attempted to desert some weeks earlier, and nearly half the crew were suffering from venereal disease. Bligh made strenuous efforts to restore discipline, but he lacked the natural authority that had enabled Cook to take his crews through thick and thin with scarcely a murmur of discontent. Bligh was a small man with a quick temper, a sarcastic tongue, and a habit of humiliating his officers in front of the men. Within three weeks of leaving Tahiti, he had provoked Christian beyond endurance, and at daybreak on April 28 a mutiny broke out that led to Bligh being cast adrift in an open launch with eighteen of the crew.
While Bligh made his way across 4,000 miles of ocean to Batavia, the mutineers led by Christian sailed the Bounty to the island of Tubai. There they experienced a situation similar to Wallis’s first encounter with the Tahitians. The islanders came out in canoes and swarmed over the ship stealing any loose items they could lay their hands on. They were driven off the ship by the mutineers, but the next morning a canoe came alongside with eighteen young women escorted by five men. The women had been deliberately chosen for their beauty, and like the Tahitian girls, they had dark, lustrous eyes and manes of fine black hair that fell to their waists. While the women occupied the attention of the Bounty’s crew, the Tubaians launched their attack. Fifty canoes manned by armed warriors converged on the ship. Christian ordered the guns to be loaded with grapeshot and fired into the canoes at point-blank range. In the resulting carnage, a dozen islanders were killed, many more were wounded, and the rest fled back to the shore. It was an ominous beginning for the mutineers in their search for a place of refuge. They named the spot Bloody Bay, and although they landed and began work on building a fort, they decided after a few weeks that they should return to Tahiti. According to mutineer John Adams, “We lacked women and remembering Tahiti, where all of us had made intimate friendships, we decided to return there, so that we could each obtain one.” 23 So they sailed back to Tahiti and dropped anchor in Matavai Bay on June 6, 1789. They dared not stay too long, because they knew that the navy would send a warship to track them down and Tahiti would be the first place they would look, so they loaded the Bounty with goats, hogs, and chickens and persuaded four of the Tahitian women and seventeen men and boys to accompany them. They also tricked seven more women into coming with them by luring them aboard and then weighing anchor before they could get ashore.
For the next six months, the mutineers roved the Pacific seeking a suitable island paradise where they could settle with their women. In the end, Christian decided to head for Pitcairn Island. He had found a description of it in a volume of Hawkesworth’s Voyages, and its remote location some 3,000 miles east of Tahiti seemed promising. It took them two months to find it, but at last its rocky profile was spotted on the horizon. On January 18, 1790, they dropped anchor in an exposed bay, later to be called Bounty Bay, and sent an armed party ashore in the cutter. The island seemed ideal for their purpose. It had rich soil, abundant fruit and water, numerous fish in the surrounding seas, and a pleasant climate. It was uninhabited, so they did not have to contend with attacks from hostile natives. And it was unlikely the navy would find them there because it had been incorrectly charted.
They unloaded the ship, built themselves simple houses on a small plateau above the bay, and set about planting crops. For the first few months all seemed to be well, but problems were brewing. There were rivalries and resentments among the mutineers, and Christian, who was racked with guilt at provoking the mutiny, proved to be a moody and ineffective leader. The Tahitian women were strong and capable but were homesick for their friends and families. More serious was the resentment felt by the men from Tahiti and Tubai, who were treated as servants and laborers, and had to share three women among five of them. When one mutineer’s woman died, he insisted on taking one of the three women, which infuriated her husband. Plottings and killings followed, culminating in a bloody massacre one hot afternoon in which five of the mutineers were shot or battered to death by the Polynesians. Christian was shot in the back of the head while he was digging in his garden, and his face was smashed in with an axe. The bloodshed did not end there. The Tahitian women were distraught and angry at the murder of their white husbands and took revenge on their fellow islanders. The Tahitian woman named Jenny later described how two of the Tahitian men were lying in the sun outside one of the houses at noon, when “one of the women took a hatchet and cleft the skull of the latter; at the same instance calling out to Young to fire which he did, and shot the other native dead.” 24 Within the space of a few days, no fewer than eleven of the fifteen men who had arrived on Pitcairn had met a violent end. The population of the island was reduced to two white men, eleven grieving Polynesian women, and several children.
The mutineers’ dream of ending their days on an island paradise with their women ended in carnage and disillusion. But thanks to the subsequent reporting of the mutiny and the various films that have been based on the story, it is the confrontation between Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian that has fascinated subsequent generations—this, and the exotic images of Tahiti and those lovely young women with hibiscus flowers in their hair, which made such an impression on all the sailors whose ships dropped anchor in Matavai Bay.
12
Two Naval Heroes and Their Women
IT IS HARD TO find another British sailor with a womanizing record equal to that of Augustus Hervey, but the American navy’s most famous sailor also acquired a considerable reputation as a ladies’ man. Like Hervey’s, his later life was overshadowed by scandal. John Paul Jones never married, but he clearly adored women and they in turn found him attractive, particularly after he became a naval hero. He has often been compared to Nelson, and there were indeed many similarities. They were both slight in build and small in stature but were fiercely ambitious and recklessly brave. They both went to sea at an early age (Nelson at twelve and Jones at thirteen) and assumed command of ships while in their early twenties. They both had an instinctive grasp of battle tactics and a killer instinct when confronting the enemy. They were inspirational leaders in action, refusing to accept defeat when all seemed lost, and encouraging their men to fight until the enemy was annihilated or forced to surrender. They both achieved spectacular victories that made them famous across Europe, though the British never acknowledged Jones’s achievements. Smarting from the military defeats they had suffered during the American Revolution, the British were outraged by his audacious attacks on their shipping and persisted in regarding him as a rebel and a pirate. Jones’s misfortune as a commander was that he never had the opportunity to lead a fleet into battle and had to content himself with small-scale actions involving three or four ships. Nevertheless, for the generations of American seamen who followed him, his words and deeds continued to be an inspiration.
Like many of America’s most famous sons, John Paul Jones was an immigrant. He was born in Scotland on July 6, 1747, the fourth of five children. 1 His father was a gardener on an estate at Arbigland on the shores of the Solway Firth. His mother was Jean Macduff, the daughter of a local farmer. In 1761, John Paul was apprenticed as a mariner and went to sea as a ship’s boy on the brig Friendship. The brig sailed from Whitehaven and crossed the Atlantic to Barbados. There she took on a cargo of rum and sugar and headed north to Hampton, Virginia, where she arrived in May 1761. From Hampton, the Friendship sailed up Chesapeake Bay to Fredericksburg, where John Paul was reunited with his eldest brother, William, who had set himself up as a tailor there.
For the next seven years, John Paul continued to sail to and fro across the Atlantic on merchant ships trading between Whitehaven, the West Indies, and the American east coast. He completed his apprenticeship, and in 1768, at the age of twenty-one, he was appointed master of the 60-ton brig John of Liverpool. His first voyage as a ship’s captain was from the Scottish port of Kirkcudbrigh
t to Kingston, Jamaica. His second voyage was to the Windward Islands. In 1772, he took command of a larger ship, the Betsy, and his voyages in her took him from London to Ireland, Madeira, and Tobago and back. On his second voyage he ran into major trouble. At Tobago, his crew became mutinous when he refused to advance them their wages. The ringleader, a powerful man who had proved insolent on the outward voyage, attacked John Paul with a blunt instrument and drove him into his cabin. John Paul picked up his sword and in the ensuing scuffle ran the man through and killed him. He went ashore at once and offered to give himself up to the local justice of the peace. Although he would undoubtedly have been cleared by an Admiralty court, John Paul was advised by his friends to flee the island before the local people decided to avenge the death of the man he had killed. He took passage in a local vessel, and nothing is known of his movements for the next year and a half. When he reappeared on the scene, he had changed his name from John Paul to John Paul Jones.
In December 1775, he joined the American navy. The country was on the verge of the war with Britain that would culminate in American independence. Congress had appointed George Washington commander in chief of the newly created Continental Army and had issued orders for the creation of a navy. At this stage in its existence, the entire American navy, then called the Continental Navy, consisted of two ships, two brigs, three sloops, and a schooner. They were all converted merchant vessels. The British navy at this date had 400 ships of the line and 800 frigates, brigs, and sloops.
John Paul Jones was appointed first lieutenant of the 20-gun ship Alfred. At 350 tons, and with a crew of 220 men, she was the largest vessel in the hastily convened fleet. The Alfred’s first operation was to sail in company with three other American ships to the Bahamas. The aim was to capture gunpowder and weapons for Washington’s army from the British base at Nassau. There were no troops or warships to defend the island of New Providence, and so the American ships were able to take Nassau without a fight and come away with eighty-eight guns and a useful supply of powder and ammunition. A month later, on April 6, 1776, the American squadron encountered the British warship Glasgow, 20 guns, near Block Island and went into action. After a two-hour battle that was notable for the energetic but inaccurate gunfire on both sides, the Glasgow was forced to break off the fight and retreat to Newport. The first naval action of the American Revolution was declared a glorious victory by the American press and by Congress. Soon afterward, John Paul Jones was given command of the sloop Providence with the temporary rank of captain. In August 1776, he headed out from the Delaware Capes and in less than five weeks had captured seven merchant ships belonging to Britain or her colonies.
In October 1776, Jones was back on the Alfred, this time as her commander. His orders were to raid Cape Breton and capture British ships. Again he showed a ferocious appetite for action. He captured three merchant ships and an armed transport ship and sent boats into the port of Canso, where his men set fire to a British supply ship and captured a small schooner. He went on to capture three colliers off Louisbourg, and a British privateer. Heading back south with his string of prizes, he encountered the frigate HMS Milford off Cape Cod. In the ensuing action, the British ship managed to recapture the privateer, but Jones escaped with his remaining prizes and returned to Massachusetts Bay.
Jones spent the winter of 1776 in Boston, staying in a tavern. On June 14, 1777, Congress appointed him commander of the Ranger, 18 guns. She was one of the new ships built for what was now called the United States Navy. Compared with the ships in which Nelson made his reputation she was tiny, but she was sufficient for Jones’s purpose. He sailed her across the Atlantic to France, where Britain’s old enemy helped him outfit the ship for an ambitious raid on shipping in British waters. While the Ranger’s rig and armament were being overhauled in a French dockyard at Paimboef, Jones embarked on a love affair with Madame Thérèse de Chaumont, the wife of a French entrepreneur who had made a fortune in the East India trade and bought a château on the Loire and a magnificent town house in Passy. Monsieur de Chaumont owned a fleet of merchant ships, and in addition to procuring supplies for the French navy, he had negotiated with Benjamin Franklin, the American commissioner in Paris, to supply the American navy. He invited Jones to stay in his town house, and when he went away on a business trip, Jones took the opportunity to make love to Madame de Chaumont. This was by no means Jones’s first affair, but it was the first of a number of relationships he was to have with rich or well-born ladies in France.
In February 1778, he set off from Brest, captured two ships in the Irish Sea, and then led a raid on his old port of Whitehaven in Scotland. Anchoring off the harbor, he took two boat parties of armed men ashore. They spiked the guns of the battery that protected the entrance to the port and then set fire to a collier in the harbor before heading back to the ship. He then sailed across the Solway Firth to St. Mary’s Isle with the aim of taking hostage the Earl of Selkirk. Unfortunately, the earl was away and Jones’s men were faced by a resolute Lady Selkirk. Rather than come away empty-handed, they ordered her to hand over the family silver, and she reluctantly agreed to do so.
News of the raid spread like wildfire and caused panic along the coast. Although there had been no loss of life and the damage inflicted was minimal, it was the audacity of the raid that upset the British, who had not experienced an enemy attack on their coast since the Dutch raid on the Medway in 1667. The Admiralty ordered warships in the Irish Sea to hunt down the Ranger, and on April 24, Jones encountered HMS Drake, 16 guns, in the seas off Belfast. A fierce battle took place. After an hour of heated exchanges, the captain of the British ship was killed, his first lieutenant mortally wounded, and the ship surrendered. She was so badly damaged that Jones took her in tow until his men could repair her rig. On May 8, the Ranger entered the French port of Brest together with the captured British warship flying the British colors inverted under the American Stars and Stripes. Jones’s brief cruise of twenty-eight days was a major propaganda coup for the Americans, and although his achievements attracted little attention in France, he became a notorious figure in England, where he was the subject of much alarmist gossip and wicked caricatures.
In February 1779, Jones was given command of the Bonhomme Richard, a former French East Indiaman of 40 guns that was being outfitted at Lorient. He was also put in charge of six other vessels and was able to style himself “the Honorable Captain John P. Jones, Commander in Chief of the American Squadron in Europe.” In August he set sail with his squadron, and the subsequent raids in the British Isles were to be the most spectacular exploits of his career. During the course of his cruise around Ireland and Scotland, he captured half a dozen merchant ships. He sailed up the Firth of Forth and was only prevented from attacking Leith by a westerly gale that forced him to bear away. He headed south looking for more prizes, and on September 23, he sighted a fleet of ships off Flamborough Head. It proved to be a convoy of some forty merchant ships from the Baltic escorted by two British warships: the Serapis, 44 guns, and the Countess of Scarborough, a sloop of 20 guns.
The subsequent Battle of Flamborough Head centered around a heroic duel between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis, commanded by Captain Pearson. It was a duel that lasted three hours and cost the lives of more than 150 men. The action began about 7:20 P.M., and the booming explosions attracted a crowd of spectators to the nearby cliffs. By eight o’clock, the sun had set and most of the battle took place by the cold light of a full moon. Apart from the Pallas, which engaged the Countess of Scarborough and after a sporadic action forced her to surrender, the other ships in Jones’s squadron took little part in the action. Indeed, the Alliance, commanded by Captain Pierre Landais, a mad and malevolent Frenchman, fired on Jones’s ship a number of times and killed several of his men.
Jones’s aim was to engage the Serapis at close quarters and board her, because he soon realized that she was faster and better armed and would pound him to pieces if he let her fire broadsides into the elderly h
ull of the Bonhomme Richard. After an hour of ferocious gunfire in which each captain tried to gain the most advantageous position, the two ships became locked together. Captain Pearson, observing the damage that his broadsides had inflicted, shouted across, “Has your ship struck?” to which John Paul Jones made the famous reply, “I have not yet begun to fight.”
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