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

by Caroline Alexander

  The massacre of the mutineers and the blacks had taken place in several waves of violence, and principally arose from the fact that the Englishmen had come to regard their Otaheitean friends as slaves. Fletcher Christian was killed in the first wave as he tilled his yam field. McCoy

  and Mills heard his groans, but decided it was Christian’s wife calling him to dinner.

  “Thus fell a man, who, from being the reputed ringleader of the mutiny, has obtained an unenviable celebrity,” wrote Beechey, adding by way of another of his editorials, “and whose crime may perhaps be considered as in some degree palliated, by the tyranny which led to its commission.”

  Captain Beechey and the Blossom departed Pitcairn on December 20, 1825, continuing on their own voyage of discovery throughout the Pacific and Bering Strait, as part of the Admiralty’s new polar ventures. The Blossom did not return to England until 1828. The full import of this voyage would be made manifest two years later.

  One of the items of interest that Beechey brought away on the Blossom was the diary of Edward Young, one of the most enigmatic of the mutineers. The journal, which Young started toward the end of 1793, some two months after the death of Christian in the first wave of massacres—in some accounts—was said by Beechey to give evidence of Young’s education and “serious turn of mind.” His journal, which was never to be seen or cited again, opened a window on a dark, largely undisclosed aspect of island life—the unhappiness of the island’s women. Only one of the female pioneers—Teehuteatuaonoa, nicknamed Jenny—ever gave her own version of the early days of settlement, and that only after she had escaped from Pitcairn—she had hitched a passage with Captain Reynolds on the Sultan, some years before, in 1817. From Young’s and Teehuteatuaonoa’s accounts, and the occasional incautious remark of John Adams, a more complete and complicated history of this exemplary community emerged.

  With the exception of the female companions of Christian and Quintal, and Jenny herself who had once been the “wife” of Adams, all the women brought to Pitcairn had been kidnapped. When the Bounty had arrived at Matavai Bay on its final visit, the usual friendly visitors came on board, including eighteen women, one with a child. After the women went below for supper, Christian ordered the anchor cable cut. Although told that the ship was only going around the island, the women realized the truth when they passed through and beyond the reef; one courageous woman had dived overboard. After this, Christian had been careful not to bring the ship too close to other landfalls, knowing, as Jenny said, that several of the women would have tried to swim to shore. Off the island of Eimeo, five or six leagues from Tahiti, six of the women “who were rather ancient” and presumably deemed physically unattractive were sent ashore.

  After scouting several islands, Christian set out for Pitcairn, a search during which two full months would pass without seeing land. During this time, “all on board were much discouraged: they therefore thought of returning to Otaheite.” But at last, on the evening of January 15, 1790, the island was seen rising like a great rock from the ocean. For three days a fierce wind held them at bay, preventing any landing; that the island was so effectively defended by the elements may have been seen as a favorable omen.

  With the aid of a raft, the men methodically unloaded the Bounty, and when everything had been removed they debated what to do with the ship. “Christian wished to save her for awhile,” Jenny said, but while they were debating, Matthew Quintal had gone on board and set a fire in the bow; later, two others followed and fired other parts of the ship. But during the night “all were in tears at seeing her in flames. Some regretted exceedingly that they had not confined Capt. Bligh and returned to their native country, instead of acting as they had done.”

  Prisoners now of the island, the women set to work. It would be their skills of homemaking, their knowledge of preparing the familiar fruits and fish and fowl, and their traditions of making bark cloth and clothes that would carry the settlement. Passed around from one “husband” to the other, as men died and the balance of power shifted, they rebelled.

  “[S]ince the massacre, it has been the desire of the greater part of them to get some conveyance, to enable them to leave the island,” Edward Young recorded in his diary. Shortly before, he had come upon Jenny handling the skull of Jack Williams and learned to his amazement and horror that the women had refused to bury the slaughtered men.

  “I thought that if the girls did not agree to give up the heads of the five white men in a peaceable manner, they ought to be taken by force, and buried,” wrote Young indignantly; he was after all a gentleman. One of these unburied skulls belonged to Fletcher Christian, whose head, according to Jenny, had been “disfigured” with an axe after he was killed.

  The women’s desperation finally prompted the men to build them a small boat, according to Young, who also reported that Jenny in her zeal had ripped boards out of her own house for building material. On August 13, 1794, the little vessel was completed, and two days later launched. But the women’s hopes of a return to their native land were bitterly dashed when the vessel foundered, “according to expectation,” as Young wrote, with masculine amusement. Miserably, the women returned to their captors. The “wives” of McCoy and Quintal—who, as Beechey had to comment, “appear to have been of very quarrelsome dispositions”—were frequently beaten.

  A grave was duly dug for the murdered men’s bones. Three months later “a conspiracy of the women to kill the white men in their sleep was discovered.” No punishment was inflicted, but as Young recorded, “We did not forget their conduct; and it was agreed among us, that the first female who misbehaved should be put to death.” And so the years passed. A multitude of offspring were born to the women, who had been passed promiscuously around the male survivors. Jenny herself had formerly been the “wife” of John Adams, who as Alexander Smith had tattooed her with his initials while they were on Tahiti. When he left her, she was turned over to Isaac Martin. With the arrival of the Sultan in 1817, Jenny at last made good her escape, returning in a roundabout fashion after a voyage of some years, to her native Tahiti thirty-one years after she had departed. As the newsman who first recorded her story reported, she had been “apparently a good looking woman in her time.” Her hands were hard from manual labor.

  Mauatua (Christian’s wife, known by him affectionately as Mainmast, perhaps for her height), Vahineatua, Teio (and her little daughter, Teatuahitea), Faahotu, Teraura, Obuarei, Tevarua, Toofaiti, Mareva, Tinafornea, and Jenny or Teehuteatuaonoa . . . the names of the women who made the Pitcairn experiment succeed had rarely been evoked. Also evocative were the familiar names with which Jenny referred to the Bounty men—Billy Brown, Jack Williams, Neddy Young, Matt Quintal—the names of English lads one might run into on any waterfront. Christian on the other hand, as Adams reported reverentially, was always addressed as “Mr. Christian.” As Lieutenant Belcher had been shrewd enough to perceive, the authority Christian possessed had held in check even those against his desperate scheme. Sleepless and the worse for drink, he seems to have succeeded with his mutiny in great part because he was the most popular man on board.

  How much of his authority he retained to the end is difficult to tell. He clearly lost his grasp at Tubuai, and also the confidence of the sixteen men who at the last chose to leave him and take their chances on Tahiti. Events related by Jenny suggest that he was having difficulty holding his small band intact during the months in which they roamed the sea, seeking their new home. Adams, as often, contradicts himself: Christian “was always cheerful,” he told Beechey, and was “naturally of a happy, ingenuous disposition.” Yet, when discussing the island’s geography Adams pointed out a cave, “the intended retreat of Christian, in the event of a landing being effected by any ship sent in pursuit of him, and where he resolved to sell his life as dearly as he could.” In this cave, Adams told other ships, Christian was wont to retreat and brood. And what of Adams’s earlier statements to Captains Staines and Pipon that Christian had “by many acts
of cruelty and inhumanity, brought on himself the hatred and detestation of his companions”?

  Despite the heartfelt pronouncements of almost every visitor that “for good morals, politeness of behavior,” as well as their “strict adherence to the truth, and the principles of religion,” the Pitcairners had, thanks to John Adams, “not their equals to be found on earth,” it is very unclear how much of anything Adams himself said was to be taken as truth. Most suspicious were his inconsistent stories of Christian’s death. Was the story he spontaneously told Captain Folger, the first visitor to catch him unawares, the real truth? If so, then Fletcher Christian was killed in a single massacre that occurred on the island about four years after arrival. Or was the truth that which he related, after a sober second thought, to Folger’s second mate—that Christian committed suicide? Why, when Christian’s own wife was living, had Adams insisted that she had predeceased her husband? And what of his statement to Captain Pipon that the mutineers had divided into parties, “seeking every opportunity on both sides to put each other to death”? Had Adams and Christian been of the same “party”? Or had they been adversaries? What importance is to be attached to the striking fact that Adams was one of only two men left standing in the wake of the massacres? Was it Adams’s party that killed Christian? Could it even be—impossible as it would seem of the venerable patriarch! —that it was Adams who killed Christian?

  With the arrival of each ship eager to pay homage to the Christian miracle of Pitcairn, the wily survivor made subtle adjustments to his narration. From the tenor of the questions he was asked, he must have soon caught hold of the shape his story had taken in England. By the 1820s, Adams had introduced a new element: the mutiny had been caused by the “remorseless severity” of Bligh, who had even subjected his mate, Fletcher Christian, “to corporal chastisement.”

  Adams died in March 1829, on the day after his sixty-sixth birthday—if the date he had told the captain of the Maryland on her visit in 1824 was true. His power to shape and embellish the story, however, continued posthumously. Just before the pious old mutineer expired, one reverential tribute—uniquely, and many years after the fact—reported, “[H]e said in a whisper as his countenance lighted up with joy ‘Let go the anchor’ and fell back upon his pillow and died.”

  After Adams’s death, the next generation continued the tradition of telling the story of the Bounty to the steady stream of curious visitors, if with some fuzziness as to details. In relating the famous coconut scene, for example, a Pitcairn narrator described how some “fruit, which had been sent on board for the captain’s cabin . . . disappeared; Captain Bligh was exceedingly angry,” and had berated Christian by saying, “I suppose you have eaten it yourself, you hungry hound!” (“Can we be surprised at insults of this nature rankling in the mind of a susceptible man, and driving him at last to the desperate deed . . . ?” the visitor interjected.) These new narrators brought new details to light and accorded old ones new scrutiny. It was more openly recognized that Adams’s safeguarding of his own daughters’ virtue was in great part due to the fact that if they married they would cease to till his own fields. His stepdaughter was reported to retain “most unpleasant recollections of John Adams, who she insists killed her mother by his cruel treatment of her.” The patriarch’s insistence on religious observances had been rigorous, “even to severity of discipline,” whatever that might have entailed. It was also said that when the Bounty arrived at Pitcairn and Christian went ashore to scout the island, there had been a plot afoot among those, such as Adams, who had remained on board to leave their ringleader and take the ship back to Tahiti.

  The growing legend was, however, able to absorb all its discrepancies as well as all its darker elements. Truly unfavorable reports were largely ignored—such as an account that the pious youths had been caught red-handed brewing spirits very much like whiskey; or that when Thursday October Christian had come on board the Briton, he had abruptly left the table when a West Indian member of the company entered, muttering, “I don’t like that black fellow, I must go.” Fletcher Christian’s offspring were generally treated with great tact and only very occasionally received anything less than flattering descriptions—such as the opinion of a visitor in 1830 that “Thursday and Charles Christian, the sons of the mutineer, are ignorant, uneducated persons, unable to maintain superiority.”

  As long ago as 1791, when the Pandora had been roaming the broad Pacific in her hapless search for the Bounty, Surgeon George Hamilton had mused on a far-fetched and, under the circumstances, inappropriate fantasy: should Christian “elude the hand of justice, it may be hoped he will employ his talents in humanizing the rude savages, so that, at some future period, a British Ilion may blaze forth in the south, with all the characteristic virtues of the English nation, and complete the great prophecy, by propagating the Christian knowledge amongst the infidels.” And so, improbably, it had come to pass. Few in England, apparently, were able to discern that the Pitcairn Islanders’ traits were more readily traced to their Polynesian ancestry than to English Christendom. Their selfless and communal identity, the much marveled lack of locks on their doors, their open-handed generosity, their cleanliness—these were Otaheite characteristics that the men of the Bounty had admired, and not found in the society that had only recently ceased to gibbet executed criminals along the Thames.

  This chapter of the Bounty saga was also to serve English poetry. “Christina, the Maid of the South Seas” was written by Mary Russell Mitford in 1811, following the news of the discovery by the Topaz—the poem was then one of the few public responses to the event. Relating the love of Christian’s daughter Christina for “Henry,” an English sailor somehow serving on the American Topaz, the poem received editorial assistance from two old Bounty hands: Rear Admiral James Burney, who had edited Bligh’s log for publication, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In an ill-advised preface, the authoress expressed some anguish at both having to recognize “the sufferings of Captain Bligh” on the one hand and “irritating the feelings of a highly respectable family” on the other; one may be sure that this in itself succeeded in irritating the Christian Curwens.

  Another poet inspired by this most romantic tale of love and exile was none other than that arch-romantic Lord Byron. By the time he published The Island in 1823, Byron was near the end of his wild life and had perfected his self-image as the dark-haired exile, dragging his intriguing taint of unspecified wrongdoing across Europe. Who better to immortalize the charismatic mutineer! And yet, in a role reversal of breathtaking unexpectedness, Byron championed William Bligh.

  Awake, bold Bligh! the foe is at the gate!

  Awake! awake!—Alas it is too late!

  Fiercely beside thy cot the mutineer

  Stands, and proclaims the reign of rage and fear.

  As for the mutineers—

  Young hearts, which languish’d for some sunny isle,

  Where summer years and summer women smile;

  Men without country, who, too long estranged,

  Had found no native home, or found it changed,

  And, half uncivilised, preferr’d the cave

  Of some soft savage to the uncertain wave—

  (Perhaps Byron’s uncharacteristic disapproval of so romantic a figure arose from pique, a wounded sense that Fletcher Christian—his long hair loose, his shirt collar open—had out-Byroned Byron.)

  A number of the survivors of the Bounty did not live to learn of Fletcher Christian’s fate. Loyalist Charles Norman died in December 1793, which would explain his absence as a “witness” in the dueling pamphlets of Bligh and Edward Christian. He had been buried in the Gosport church of his baptism, and so had not strayed far from Portsmouth Harbour after his acquittal and release.

  After the court-martial John Hallett joined the Penelope as third lieutenant, and a little over a year later, while the ship was in the West Indies, the muster indicates that he was “Invalided” for the remainder of the voyage. Hallett died in Bedford in December 17
94, “after a long and severe illness,” as the Times reported. Another obituary indicated he had lost the use of his limbs following the open-boat voyage, and although recovered sufficiently to make another voyage, he “again lost the use of his limbs, and recovered them no more.” Hallett was only twenty-two years old at the time of his death. His parish church registry noted he had been a “gentleman.”

  A later tradition put out by the Heywood family represented that Mr. Hallett had died on board the Penelope—and that in “his last moments he expressed his contrition for the unfavorable evidence he had given against his friend Peter Heywood.” He had been bewildered by the events of the mutiny and too much under the influence of Lieutenant Bligh—so Hallett had himself confessed to “one of the most distinguished flag-officers in the service, who was then first lieutenant of the Penelope.” The first lieutenant of the Penelope had been Pulteney Malcolm—another of Thomas Pasley’s nephews as it turns out, although this striking fact was not publicized. Doubtless, the rumor of Hallett’s “death on board,” instead of by slow and dreadful paralysis allegedly resulting from his ordeals in the open boat, was intended to deflect invidious attention from those persons who had made him suffer. An elaborate memorial tablet of white marble in the chancel of St. Mary’s, Bedford, reflected both his proud parents’ grief and their social pretensions: amid engrailed sable arms and a demi-lion rampant was inscribed his epithet: “Juvenis Laboris patiens, Virtute praeditus, nec Tempestate nec Fama nec Periculo Fracta: A youth patient in his duties, outstanding in his valour, broken neither by tempest, nor rumour nor danger.” The notion that “Fama”—rumor—could be a threat to a naval officer of only twenty-two is so curious that one must suspect that it was pointed.