The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
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The years immediately following Heywood’s marriage and retirement saw successive deaths of several figures who had cast long shadows over his life. In 1817, William Bligh, Vice Admiral of the Blue, dropped dead in Bond Street on a visit to his surgeon. He was sixty-three years old and had been living quietly with his daughters on a comfortable estate he had purchased in Kent. The cause of his death was probably stomach cancer.
Just over a year later, Aaron Graham died at the age of sixty-six, the victim of “a long train of nervous disorders,” as his obituary read, romantically, if implausibly, attributed to the care he had expended in squaring the accounts of the Drury Lane theater. Among his other accomplishments, Graham had found time to overhaul the hulk prison system. He “left behind him a prudent and respectable widow,” his obituary noted with just a whiff of defensiveness, “who has lately succeeded, by the death of a relation, to a great fortune.” This relative was her first cousin Sir Henry Tempest, Aaron’s good friend—for whom Mrs. Graham had in fact deserted her husband. Living with Sir Henry as his common-law wife, Sarah Graham had borne her cousin several children who were diplomatically given the surname “Tempest Graham.”
Closing out the circle of Heywood’s Bounty past, Sir Joseph Banks died in 1820 at seventy-seven. The slim, alert young man whose restless energy had explored all there was to know or experience, in Otaheite and elsewhere, had become heavy and gouty over the years. His influence and boundless interests had survived unchanged, however, and he had remained the president of the Royal Society up until weeks before his death—a long, unmatched run of forty-two formidable years. True to character, Banks requested in his will to be buried “in the most private manner in the Church, or Church yard of the Parish in which I shall happen to die.” He entreated his “dear relatives to spare themselves the affliction of attending the ceremony” and implored them to erect no monument to his memory.
The death of Sir Joseph Banks represented more than the passing of a landmark figure in the Bounty saga. With Banks had gone William Bligh’s most loyal and influential protector. “My Dear Admiral” was how Banks had come to address his old friend. Bligh’s need of Banks would, however, outlive his death. His career was no longer at stake—but his reputation was. Of this, Peter Heywood would show himself to be keenly aware.
Whereas Bligh had never been able to free himself of the stigma of the Bounty, the same events appear to have intruded very little on Peter Heywood’s life or career. Very occasionally an enigmatic glimmer of something that might have touched on buried memory flickers forth: “[T]he only way to get at Mens’ Characters & to find what sort of stuff their Brains are composed of is to come in close contact,” Heywood wrote to polar explorer James Clark Ross. Had he learned this on the Bounty? And what had passed through his mind when in 1813 he dutifully made note of the secret codes to be used to telegraph a naval crisis: “242 = A disposition to mutiny; 353 = Have mutinied—I shall quell them; 414 = I shall not be able to quell them . . .”?
Retired after a career of blameless service, with the more haunting ghosts of his youth vanished to the shades, Heywood was at last in a position to relax and live more expansively. Settled comfortably in an elegant home in Highgate, with his wife and stepdaughter, Heywood enjoyed a low-key but stimulating social life. Charles Lamb was a good friend, as was the gifted Francis Beaufort, originator of the Beaufort wind scale and now the Admiralty’s hydrographer. Heywood’s stepdaughter, Diana, reported on evenings at the home of the Duchess of St. Albans, a neighbor whom Heywood had met at Aaron Graham’s.
“Peter!” the Duchess was wont to greet him, slapping him heartily on the back. The Duchess was the former Harriet Mellon, the actress whom Aaron Graham had helped pair with banker Thomas Coutts. Old Coutts had died some years before, leaving his widow the wealthiest woman in England. Mrs. Coutts’s marriage to the bankrupt Duke of St. Albans, twenty-five years her junior, had been the means of adding a title to her wealth. Another Highgate neighbor, who complained about the noisy stream of “Carriages, Coachmen and other such Cattle” convening on the spectacular house of the Duchess (whom he called “Mrs. Cootes”), was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Peter’s stepdaughter would recall seeing him, to a child a somewhat frightening figure, walking with a dazed expression in his eyes, which were “like boiled gooseberries.”
Within his affectionate inner circle of family and friends, Captain Heywood was known as the “Capitan.” To them he told his stories of the old naval school, admirals of old, “Capital fighting fellows,” if sometimes “rough and prejudiced,” as he now recalled with nostalgic affection. One of his stories told how a crusty captain had dressed his lieutenant down.
“I thought I was acting for the best,” the lieutenant had protested.
“ ‘Thought, sir!’ returned the other furiously, ‘and pray what business had you to think? I’ll have no one think on board my ship but myself.’ ” Yes, they were capital fellows all.
Heywood’s health was not sound and a chronic shortness of breath gave evidence of a bad heart—the effects, his family believed, of his own boat ordeal following the loss of the Pandora. In 1829, he removed his family to a quieter residence on the edge of Regent’s Park, an area still under development, covered with flowering gorse on which partridges flew and hares and pheasant ran. It was a place “for quiet people,” unattracted to the frivolities of fashionable London. His experience in life had taught him, the Capitan told his family, “that it was not desirable to know more people than were necessary, except to do them good.” Optimistically, he took a lease on this place on the outer fringes of London’s last wilderness for twenty-one years.
It was at this time of quiet winding down that there strode into Heywood’s life a figure who threatened to overturn all that he had so carefully constructed. Edward Belcher was last seen five years earlier as a brash lieutenant on the Blossom, when she had made her extended visit to Pitcairn Island in 1825. Even then, as a lieutenant of twenty-six, his name buried amid many others in his captain’s published report, Belcher snags one’s attention. A distant, vaguely discernible warning bell sounds at each mention of his name. One hears it when Beechey relates how his lieutenant had ignored all warnings about attempting to compete with the Pitcairn youths’ feats of strength and agility; one hears it too in Belcher’s own description of his solo swims in heavy surf, which with casual arrogance he noted to be “more formidable in appearance than reality.” And above all, one hears it in his almost lazy surety of opinion that although his captain had personally interviewed old John Adams, he “I am inclined to think did not get as accurate an account as we did below.” Belcher’s journal is devoid of the usual sentimental asides that characterize such works of aspiring officer-authors, nor did he wax eloquent on the morals of the Pitcairn community; he was far more interested in what had previously happened, on the island and on the Bounty.
When Edward Belcher, now a captain himself, entered Peter Heywood’s life, he was well on his way to becoming both one of the most brilliant and one of the most despised officers in His Majesty’s naval service. His surveying skills were formidable, and he was to produce magnificent charts of large parts of the globe—Africa, the Americas, the China Seas, the East Indies. The secret commissions and diplomatic duties with which he was from time to time entrusted very much suited his reckless self-assurance. He was also soon renowned for his ability, as one historian has succinctly put it, to make “life a living hell for his officers on every ship he had . . . commanded.” At least two courts-martial were the usual toll of his voyages, although on one he was to instigate as many as eight. Voyages under his command often concluded with a number of his men brought into harbor already under arrest.
“Perhaps no officer of equal ability has ever succeeded in inspiring so much personal dislike” was the assessment of the famously staid Dictionary of National Biography. When Belcher was eventually chosen, ill advisedly, to lead four ships in the Admiralty’s last-gasp polar enterprise in search of the van
ished explorer John Franklin, he found a rush of volunteers for the arduous and hateful task of man-hauling sledging; life on the ice, anywhere, was preferable “to the prospect of life under Belcher.” His crew, wrote one officer, were “a body of men especially chosen to serve with one of the most diabolical creatures ever allowed to rule on earth.”
It was this man who in the summer of 1830 was invited to the Re-gent’s Park home of Captain Peter Heywood. Belcher shared a number of interests, such as surveying, with the retired captain, and they also had mutual acquaintances. All this notwithstanding, it comes as a surprise to find, three months later, Belcher married to Heywood’s beautiful, educated, twenty-six-year-old stepdaughter.
Diana, compliant, protected and adoring of her adoptive father, would have obeyed Heywood on the matter of marriage, as much else. But Peter’s wife, the young woman’s mother, was beside herself with grief and rage at what was destined to be a fatally unhappy union. Years after the marriage, a friend visiting their home found on the flyleaf of a family Bible “a diatribe against Captain Belcher written by Mrs. Heywood.” The outraged mother’s worst suspicions were quickly confirmed when on her wedding night Diana contracted a virulent form of venereal disease.
“I confess it requires a considerable stretch of belief to think that any man would be beastly enough to pox his own wife, and that too on their first connexion,” one of Edward’s own surgeons wrote him. “But you know that you did so, having a perfect knowledge of what would be the consequence from my having warned you of it in strong language.”
Her fever and inflammation, “effusion of blood,” pain in the groin and bladder, scalding sensation when passing water, offensive discharge—all would be aired before the public when Diana was eventually induced to petition, unsuccessfully, for divorce, and her personal correspondence relating to her marriage was published. She would return to her husband once again, and again suffer the same results.
“As long as life endures,” Belcher wrote to his wife, responding to the suggestion of their separation, “by this title, and no other, I address you; you are my wife. . . . Hear the decision of your husband, whose very existence is wrapped up in yours:—No power on earth that can be available, shall be left unmoved until you are restored to me.”
Before he died, Heywood was clear-sighted enough to make provisions for Diana to receive an income free and clear of her husband’s interference. This amounted, in its way, to his confession of having grievously erred.
“Captain Heywood was fond of the navy, and had a justly high opinion of Captain Belcher’s abilities,” wrote a close friend of Diana’s, after her death and by way of explanation of Heywood’s role in this act of astounding bad judgment. “[T]hat officer having visited Pitcairn in the Blossom, gave them a ground of common interest.” But the visit to Pitcairn had furnished Belcher with something more than common ground. While his captain had nattered on with Adams about the early days of the settlement, Belcher alone, of all the visitors to the island, left evidence of having raised hard, specific questions while he had Adams in the gun room.
“Those who wished to go were now sent into the boat excepting the Carpenters Mate & Armourer whom Mr. Christian detained as they might be of service,” Lieutenant Belcher had written in his log of the Blossom, taking dictation from Adams about the last moments of the mutiny. One can imagine him sitting, one arm flung lazily over the back of a chair, listening as the garrulous old mutineer spilled his secrets. “No one else was detained. Mr. Heywood was on the Gangway and might have gone if he pleased. All the party being in the boat, the Captain was put into her. . . .”
That Peter had perjured himself at his court-martial undoubtedly formed part of the burden of penance he seemed to have voluntarily assumed in his post-Bounty life. On the day of the mutiny, then a tattooed boy of sixteen, he had watched from the gangway as Bligh was led toward the boat. He had, of course, not been “kept below,” as he had represented, and as his uncle and Aaron Graham had bribed the boatswain to swear. On balance and in its roundabout way, in his case, justice could be said to have been fairly served; he had been found guilty, but had been pardoned to redeem himself—which he had done with, it would seem, penitence and humility. But others had been hanged—and there was the rub.
With his marriage, the ambitious Captain Belcher gained valuable connections with a still powerful family. Belcher’s greatest and most useful patron, as it would turn out, was to be Francis Beaufort, since 1829 the Admiralty hydrographer—and one of Peter’s very closest friends; indeed, Beaufort owed his post to Heywood, who had been offered it himself, but who had declined for personal reasons in favor of his good friend.
Years back, in 1816, at the conclusion of Heywood’s final voyage after so many years’ service, there had occurred an event that had deeply stirred him. As commander of the Montagu, Heywood was informed that there were two Tahitian men on board one of the ships in his convoy. Summoning them, the English captain greeted them in his cabin: “Mă nōw, wa, Ehō, māa?”—Welcome, my friends! Their names wereandHeywood later reported to the Admiralty, the precision of his spelling and inflection suggesting the relish he may have found in speaking what had briefly been the language of his youth. The Tahitians had been kidnapped and taken to Lima by an English vessel, thence made their way to Cádiz, eventually ending up on the Calypso, where Heywood had found them. Heartsick and homesick, they wanted badly to return to their native land. To this cause Heywood gave considerable effort, finding and paying for their passage and personally attending to the necessary paperwork. A merchant ship going to New South Wales would carry them to Port Jackson, whence they could get passage to Tahiti, or nearby Eimeo.
How easy it now was to voyage to Otaheite! For Peter Heywood, freshly retired from his unbroken and penitential service, the departure of the youths stirred up long and carefully suppressed emotion. “And after all that is said and done among us great and wise people of the earth, pray what do we all toil for, late take rest, and eat the bread of carefulness, but to reach, at last, the very state to which they are born,” he wrote to a close friend, dropping his habitual guard, “—ease of circumstances, and the option of being idle or busy as we please?” There had been his cottage close by the mountains, the hill with its view over the sea; his neat garden; black beaches under the rattling palms; his wife and children. . . .
“But,” he continued, as if shaking off the sudden spell that had briefly claimed him, “if I go on this way you will say I am a savage, and so I believe I am, and ever shall be in some points; but let that pass.”
Toward the end of 1830, the year of his daughter’s marriage, Heywood’s shaky health took a sudden, alarming turn for the worse. His shortness of breath became painful, and he found even speaking difficult. From his bed, he watched the sun and wind that blew over the fields of gorse beyond his house, commenting to Diana when she drew the curtains that it was a fine wind to beat out of the Channel, where her husband was then bound. He died on February 10, 1831, at fifty-eight, and was buried in the vault of Highgate churchyard; the worldlier part of London claimed him at the last. Three years later, another body would be laid in the same vault—that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Thus the poet of the “Ancient Mariner” and the midshipman who had shared the voyage that had partially inspired him were brought together.
Reserved as he had been, Peter had also proven a zealous and watchful guardian of the Bounty saga; his complicity with Belcher apart, he left compromising fingerprints all over the later story. In his lifetime, he had cooperated with a historian in preparing an account of his own career for a series of naval biographies, and to this historian he had made available James Morrison’s “Journal.” In fact, Morrison was placed front and center of this work, as indicated on its title page: “This narrative is from the private journal of the late Mr. James Morrison, Gunner of H.M.S. Blenheim, who had the misfortune to witness all he has related.” Joseph Banks was dead, and there was now no other check to having it published.
There then follows a paraphrase of all Morrison’s charges against Bligh. The paraphrase itself, laced with its editorial commentary—“To this grievance another quickly succeeded”; “To this imperious menace they bowed in silence”—tended to confer additional authority. The manuscript of Morrison’s “Journal” that is known to have survived—whether or not other copies, or versions once existed or now exist—shows that a second hand made amendments to the text. Some of these are merely stylistic; others are of more import, such as the consistent obliteration of George Stewart’s name. The revelation that Stewart had played a central role in the mutiny had, at all costs, to be obscured in view of Heywood’s own repeated reference to their close friendship.
In 1831, following Heywood’s death, there appeared the first comprehensive account of the several dramas making up the story of the mutiny on the Bounty. Sir John Barrow was second secretary of the Admiralty when he published, at first anonymously, The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty: its Causes and Consequences. That the Heywood family was complicit in this is evident from Barrow’s access to Morrison’s manuscript, which was by now in Diana Belcher’s hands. Barrow himself knew Heywood well and was also close to Edward Belcher, the latter from their involvement in the Admiralty’s ongoing polar expeditions. It was undoubtedly for the sake of the Heywoods that Barrow included in his book the text of a letter Peter had written to Captain Beechey regarding the “confusion” over George Stewart’s role. That Fletcher Christian was recommended to take the ship by George Stewart was “entirely at variance with the whole character and conduct of the latter,” Heywood had written heatedly. A gentleman’s word being quite enough, that ended the matter.