The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty

by Caroline Alexander

  The sea of intrigue in which Bligh found himself entangled remains unfathomable. Heywoods and Christians and disgruntled petty officers, he knew, were gunning for him. But what was meant by Nessy’s casual comment after the court-martial that sentencing might be delayed “on account of the Interest making for some of the prisoners”? Which prisoners, other than Peter? Was there something more than merely an anxious brother’s goodwill behind Muspratt’s ability to retain legal counsel? William Muspratt’s family came from Bray and nearby Cookham; was it only coincidence that Cookham was the seat of Sir George Young, uncle of mutineer Edward Young, one of Fletcher Christian’s inner circle? In this regard, what is to be made of a very curious provision in the will of Sir George Young; how did it come to pass that one of the executors was Aaron Graham?

  Joseph Banks remained Bligh’s loyal protector. That Morrison’s “Journal” was never, after all, brought forth in any published form was almost certainly due to Banks’s discreet interference. But the appearance of Edward’s “Appendix” forced Bligh into the open.

  “The appendix endeavours to palliate the behaviour of Christian, and the Mutineers, and to criminate Captain Bligh,” a review in the British Critic observed, “to which he will, without doubt, think it necessary to make reply.”

  This, with characteristic energy and irritation, Bligh did. His swift response was made to the world the following month, and consisted of a series of documents and affidavits, or as he entitled them a “List of Proofs,” preceded by a statement noting, among other things, that although Edward Christian had cited the names of all participants in his inquiry, no single statement was ever attributed to a specific individual. “The mixing together the names of men, whose assertions merit very different degrees of credit, and blending their evidence into one mass” ensured, Bligh wrote, “the impossibility of tracing the author of any particular assertion.” This was, however, not only good storytelling technique on Edward’s part, but a clever lawyerly ploy to protect against libel. Bligh’s uneven miscellany of proofs included such items as his standing orders at Tahiti regarding the regulation of trade, the deserters’ letter of apology and contrition, the examination of all survivors of the mutiny by Dutch authorities in Batavia, and various notarized statements by some of the men Edward had already interviewed.

  Less colorful than Edward’s document, Bligh’s response nonetheless had its own striking images. Christian had been drinking at least until midnight on the night before the mutiny, although he had to be up at four to take the morning watch; also revealed was the fact that throughout the voyage Christian had been indulged with the use of Bligh’s private liquor cabinet. To the Dutch authorities, the boat survivors had testified (with Bligh absent) that they had “heard at the time several expressions and huzzas in the ship, which makes them believe that the mutineers are returned to Otaheite.”

  “Huzza for Otaheite!” Bligh had stated in his Narrative that this cheerful cry had been heard “frequently” from the ship as it sailed away. In his “Appendix,” Edward had vehemently denied that these words had ever been uttered, just as he denied that Fletcher had a “favorite woman” (“if that was the case,” a former shipmate from West Indies days dryly noted in a letter to Bligh that was included with the other attestations, “he must have been much altered since he was with you in the Britannia; he was then one of the most foolish young men I ever knew in regard to the sex”). For Edward to concede these small points would be to play to Bligh’s claim that the mutiny had occurred because his men wanted to return to a life of sensual leisure; the picture Edward strove to depict was of his brother’s tortured soul.

  Of the supporting affidavits that Bligh attached, some carried more credibility than others: “I never knew Christian and Captain Bligh have any words particular”; “I never knew any thing that Christian intended to make a raft, or ever heard of it until the Mutineers arrived in the Pandora”; “I never knew any thing of Christian intending to make a raft, to quit the ship”; “I never heard, or told Mr. Edward Christian, about his brother’s expression that ‘he had been in hell for weeks past with you.’ ” Here, the stern and indignant presence of William Bligh leaning heavily over the shoulders of Joseph Coleman and John Smith, his faithful servant, was all too evident.

  On the other hand, the novel facts and idiosyncratic language of the statements of Hallett and Lebogue bore the ring of unscripted truth—in particular, the latter’s claim that Edward Christian had summoned him to ask “whether Captain Bligh did flog his people, and why he kept them at short allowance,” and about his behavior on the Providence.

  “Captain Bligh was not a person fond of flogging,” Lebogue had answered, adding that “some of them deserved hanging, who had only a dozen.” Hallett took strong exception to a “discovery” Edward had reported, that he and Hayward had been asleep at their watch when the mutiny broke out. It required some temerity to float this theory in the face of all the testimony given at the trial that both young gentlemen were excitedly tracking a shark at the time. On a more personal note, Hallett felt compelled to address, of all things, Edward’s claim that Fletcher was a “fine scholar.” This could not be, Hallett reported haughtily, “as he did not appear to have received any portion of classical education, and was ignorant of all but his native language.”

  Bligh’s rebuttal was received with respectful acceptance in most public circles. The British Critic acknowledged that Bligh had replied to the “Appendix,” as its reviewer suggested, “in the properest manner,” through documents and testimonies. The follow-up concluded with some advice: “We cannot help thinking, that the friends of Christian will act the wisest part, in throwing as much as possible into oblivion, the transaction in which that young man acted so conspicuous, and so criminal a part.”

  Edward made one final public and very indignant rebuttal of Bligh’s response, invoking the respectability of his committee, and lashing out against the Bounty men who had stood by their captain. Joseph Coleman, he now ventured, had the “appearance of a decent and honest man, but he is old and dull.” Moreover, Edward allowed, his bluster running ahead of his reason and inadvertently shedding new, unflattering light on his committee’s interviewing methods, “I never saw him but in the company of other persons belonging to the Bounty, who took the lead in conversation; but to their information he certainly in every instance assented by his silence.” Edward Christian also took particular exception to Hallett’s dismissal of his brother’s education; Fletcher had been educated at St. Bees, in Cumberland, he felt compelled to retort, “where the young men of the best families in that country receive their education.”

  Bligh retired from the field with his considerable pride intact and the belief that he had successfully silenced the villainous wretches, and it was true that news of the Bounty would be muted and very sporadic for the next twenty years. But the damage done to him in naval circles would prove irreparable. While Bligh had defended himself in crisp, logical naval fashion, he failed to comprehend that he was doing battle with a force more formidable and unassailable than any enemy he would meet at sea—the power of a good story. In a great seafaring nation, now beset by revolution and the travails of war, this fantastic tale of escape to paradise at the far end of the world had the allure of something epic. And at the very dawn of the Romantic age, now in the process of being invented by men like William Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge, Edward Christian had elicited the perfect Romantic hero—the tortured master’s mate, his long hair loose, his shirt collar open, he with his gentlemanly pedigree and almost mythic name: Fletcher Christian.

  Whatever else might be implied from William Wordsworth’s striking association with so many key parties, this much is secure: the story of the Bounty was to enjoy a healthy run through the annals of Romantic poetry. Wordsworth himself borrowed from it in his verse tragedy The Borderers, published in 1795, which describes how the crew of a ship conspired to leave their despised captain without food or water on a remote island:
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  Marmaduke A man by men cast off,

  Left without burial! nay, not dead nor dying,

  But standing, walking, stretching forth his arms,

  In all things like ourselves, but in the agony

  With which he called for mercy; and—even so—

  He was forsaken?

  Oswald There is a power in sounds:

  The cries he uttered might have stopped the boat

  That bore us through the water—

  . . . Some scoffed at him with hellish mockery,

  And laughed so loud it seemed that the smooth sea

  Did from some distant region echo us.

  Less overt was the trace of the Bounty saga in another, majestic work of this time. At some point between December 1795 and January 1796, Wordsworth’s bosom friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge made a simple entry in his notebook of ideas for future essays and poems: “Adventures of CHRISTIAN the Mutineer.” No great poem Coleridge ever wrote was woven from less than a hundred strands of inspiration; nonetheless, embedded amid much else (including images from Cook’s voyages), one can discern in the story of the haunted Ancient Mariner, doomed to wander the ocean for having committed a single crime, the shadow of Fletcher Christian:

  Alone, alone all all alone,

  Alone on the wide wide Sea;

  And Christ would take no pity on

  My soul in agony.

  (“I am in hell, I am in hell . . .”)

  It was Lieutenant Bligh’s ill luck to have his own great adventure coincide exactly with the dawn of this new era, which saw devotion to a code of duty and established authority as less honorable than the celebration of individual passions and liberty. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner was a crude forerunner of the full-blown Romantic hero to be glamorized by Byron; but Fletcher Christian was the forerunner of them all. And in the clumsy, erratic testimonies of his “Appendix,” Edward Christian had unleashed the most irresistible elements of the story now known as “the Mutiny on the Bounty.”

  LATITUDE 25° S, LONGITUDE 130° W

  The revolutionary movement that led to the decapitation of the French King evolved by 1804 to crown a French emperor; and for England, the war with France that began in early 1793 was to continue, with little respite, for twenty-two years. On land, Napoleon’s armies had consumed whole countries, but Britain still retained command of the sea and in October 1805 won a historic victory at the battle of Trafalgar. Under the command of Lord Nelson, the British defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets—but lost Nelson, who had died on his ship thanking God he had done his duty. The navy was now perpetually engaged in a strategy of blockade and skirmish with few further major battles. On the bright side of things, there were no more officers on half pay. Amid this grave turmoil the affair of the Bounty, a small transport vessel in the Pacific, was no longer a matter of consequence. In any case, the navy had undergone important reforms and change, and events of the 1780s belonged to a bygone age.

  The Pacific had been “opened.” The penal colony at Port Jackson was succeeding, there was missionary activity in the islands, and a steady if still sparse traffic of mostly American whalers and sealers patrolled these seas. And it was an American sealer, the Topaz, that in February 1808, cruising at latitude 25° 04’ south, longitude 130° 06’ west, spied land where no land was indicated on the charts.

  Over the next hours, as the Topaz, under the command of Captain Mayhew Folger, drew closer, the island was seen to be about two miles long and a mile wide, green and forested, with precipitous, dangerous cliffs that admitted no anchorage—“iron bound,” as it would later be described. From its latitude, Captain Folger guessed this must be Pitcairn’s Island, discovered forty years ago by the British sloop Swallow, Captain Philip Carteret, but wrongly laid down on all sea charts as lying nearly 180 miles farther west. Folger had come to a place, then, that was literally off the map.

  Sailing through the night, the ship was off Pitcairn by the early hours of the morning. At daylight, Folger joined a boat party to go ashore in search of seals, wood and water. Approaching the plunging cliffs, Folger and his men were startled to see smoke drifting lazily from the trees in the fresh dawn light.

  “I was very much Surprised,” Folger wrote in his log. The island had been represented by Carteret as being “destitute of Inhabitants.” Folger had thought he was at least eight hundred miles from the nearest inhabited land.

  Suddenly, skimming toward them through heavy surf, came a double canoe, expertly paddled by three young men. And to their utter amazement, Folger’s party heard themselves hailed in English by the three dark-skinned men, asking for the captain of the ship.

  Turning to his crew, Mayhew asked them who they thought the men could be.

  “Curse them, they must be Spaniards,” his mate had replied, judging from the young men’s tawny good looks. The canoe and the boat now bobbed beside each other and it was seen that the three friendly strangers had brought a hog, fruit and coconuts as presents for their visitors, Tahitian fashion.

  “Where are you from?” one of the young men asked. Folger, believing the men would know little about America, answered, “England.”

  “Don’t you know my father?” asked another islander, who appeared to be in his late teens. “He is an Englishman.” Folger did not know his father, and the youth tried again. “Did you ever know Captain Bligh?” he asked, adding that “his father had sailed with him.” And thus it dawned on Folger that he had solved the mystery of what had become of Fletcher Christian and the Bounty.

  Ferried by the adroit canoeists through the violent surf that guarded the island, Folger arrived onshore. He was met by the island’s small colony of thirty-five inhabitants of mostly women, youths and children—the widows and offspring of the Bounty mutineers. Ranging from one week to some eighteen years of age, the Bounty children were a handsome people, the young men standing over six feet, men and women alike strong-limbed and athletic—they not infrequently swam around the island for pleasure and exercise, they said. Dark-haired, with perfect white teeth and tawny skin, they stood nearly naked, the men dressed only in loincloths and straw hats, the young women with long skirts and shawls of bark cloth draped over their shoulders. They had plenty of old clothes from the Bounty, as it turned out, but preferred not to wear them. The oldest of the young men, a youth of eighteen, with a recognizably English face under his dark tan and long, plaited hair, was Fletcher Christian’s son, Thursday October Christian. His father had named him for the day and month of the child’s birth, much as another mutineer had tattooed himself, nearly twenty years before, with the date of his arrival and rebirth on Tahiti.

  Reluctantly, tentatively, and much against the misgivings of his suspicious wife, the island patriarch came out to meet with Folger. Alexander Smith, former able seaman, had been about twenty-three when the Bounty sailed. Short and stocky, at five foot five, and badly scarred by smallpox, he had been, as Bligh reported, “very much tatowed on his Body, Legs, Arms & feet” while at Tahiti. Smith was in his midforties but looked much older, his brown hair mixed with white and hanging in long strands from his bald pate. He was the sole surviving mutineer.

  Smith’s principal concern at this first meeting with the outside world, and the source of his wife’s anxiety, was that a King’s ship might carry him away to serve justice in England. Folger had caught wind of this fear, and revised his own introduction, disclosing to his three young guides that he was not after all from England but from America.

  “Where is America?” they had asked, and then settled among themselves that it was “some Irish place.” Now, reassured by Folger personally on this count, Alexander Smith relaxed and became more expansive.

  “Old England forever!” the mutineer had exclaimed, on learning of the great naval victories won by Lords Howe and Nelson.

  For his part, Folger does not seem to have been particularly inquisitive about the events on the Bounty. Smith had kept “a regular Journal, which had become very voluminous,”
from which he invited Folger to copy any extracts he chose—an offer Folger declined in light of the fact that he was staying “only five hours.” The information Folger did pick up was somewhat murky, in part because he left no account of how it was obtained: Had Smith volunteered information, or had Folger asked leading questions, based upon what he knew of this by now famous story?

  The mutiny, said Smith, looking back to those few fraught hours almost two decades ago, “originated with Lieutenant Christian, who at the time was Officer of the Watch,” and its cause was the “overbearing and tyrannical Conduct of the Captain.” Alexander Smith had been fast asleep in his hammock when it broke out and on learning of the events had come on deck bewildered and disoriented. “Arms were put into his hands.”

  (“I saw Chas. Churchill, Isaac Martin, Alexr. Smith, Jn. Sumner, Matthew Quintell, come armed with Musquets and bayonets, loading as they Came Aft,” Charles Norman had testified.)

  After leaving sixteen men and cutting the ship’s cable in the night at Tahiti, Christian steered the Bounty for a group of islands said to have been discovered by the Spanish. When no such islands were found, the company had struck out for Pitcairn’s, which they had at last hit upon despite its wrong position on the charts. Running the Bounty aground on the island’s rocky, treacherous shore, they had then broken up the ship that had carried them on so many adventures.