Mutiny on the Bounty

by Nordhoff

  Bligh had turned away; now he spun about on his heel.

  "You mutinous old bastard—you have gone too far! Mr. Norman, take command of the work here. Mr. Purcell, report yourself instantly to Lieutenant Christian for fifteen days in irons."

  It was my task to ferry Purcell out to the ship. The old man was flushed with anger; his jaw was set and his fists clenched till the veins stood out on his forearms. "Calls me a bastard," he muttered to no one in particular, "and puts me in irons for doing my duty. He hasn't heard the last of this, by God! Wait till we get to England! I know my rights, I do!"

  We were still on the shortest of short rations, and Adventure Bay offered little in the way of refreshment for our invalids, or food for those of us who were well. Though we drew the seine repeatedly, we caught few fish and those of inferior kinds, and the mussels among the rocks, which at first promised a welcome change in our diet, proved poisonous to those who partook of them. While Mr. Bligh feasted on the wild duck his fowling piece brought down, the ship's people were half starved and there was much muttering among the officers.

  The whole of our fortnight in Adventure Bay was marred by wrangling and discontent. The carpenter was in irons; Fryer and Bligh were scarcely on speaking terms, owing to the master's suspicions that the captain had lined his pockets in victualing the ship; and just before our departure, Ned Young, one of the midshipmen, was lashed to a gun on the quarter-deck and given a dozen with a colt.

  Young had been sent, with three men and the small cutter, to gather shellfish, crabs, and whatever he might find for our sick, who lived in a tent pitched on the beach. They pulled away in the direction of Cape Frederick Henry and did not return till after dark, when Young reported that Dick Skinner, one of the A.B.'s and the ship's hairdresser, had wandered off into the woods and disappeared.

  "Skinner saw a hollow tree," Young told Mr. Bligh, "which, from the bees about it, he believed to contain a store of honey. He asked my permission to smoke the bees out and obtain their honey for our sick, saying that he had kept bees in his youth and understood their ways. I assented readily, knowing that you, sir, would be pleased if we could obtain the honey, and an hour or two later, when we had loaded the cutter with shellfish, we returned to the tree. A fire still smouldered at its foot, but Skinner was nowhere to be seen. We wandered through the woods and hailed till nightfall, but I regret to report, sir, that we could find no trace of the man."

  I chanced to know that Bligh had called for the hairdresser, requiring his services that very afternoon, and had been incensed at Young when it was learned that Skinner had accompanied him. Now that the man was reported missing, Mr. Bligh was thoroughly enraged.

  "Now damn you and all other midshipmen!" roared the captain. "You're all alike! If you had gotten the honey, you would have eaten it on the spot! Where the devil is Skinner, I say? Take your boat's crew this instant and pull back to where you saw the man last. Aye, and bring him back this time!"

  Young was a man grown. He flushed at the captain's words, but touched his hat respectfully and summoned his men at once. The party did not return till the following forenoon, having been nearly twenty-four hours without food. Skinner was with them this time; he had wandered off in search of another honey tree and become lost in the thick bush.

  Bligh paced the quarter-deck angrily as the boat approached. By nature a man who brooded over grudges till they were magnified out of all proportion to reality, the captain was ready to explode the moment Young set foot on deck.

  "Come aft, Mr. Young!" he called harshly. "I'm going to teach you to attend to your duty, instead of skylarking about the woods. Mr. Morrison!"

  "Yes, sir!"

  "Come aft here and seize up Mr. Young on that gun yonder! You're to give him a dozen with a rope's end."

  Young was an officer of the ship and rated as a gentleman, a proud, fearless man of gentle birth. Though Bligh was within his powers as captain, the public flogging of such a man was almost without precedent in the Service. Morrison's jaw dropped at the order, which he obeyed with such evidence of reluctance that Bligh shouted at him threateningly, "Look alive, Mr. Morrison! I've my eye on you!"

  I shall not speak of the flogging of Young, nor tell how Skinner's back was cut to ribbons with two dozen at the gangway. It is enough to say that Young was a different man from that day on, performing his duties sullenly and in silence, and avoiding the other midshipmen in the berth. He informed me long afterwards that, had events turned out differently, it was his intention to resign from the Service on the ship's arrival in England, and call Bligh to account as man to man.

  On the fourth of September, with a fine spanking breeze at northwest, we weighed anchor and sailed out of Adventure Bay. Seven weeks later, after an uneventful passage made miserable by an outbreak of scurvy and the constant state of starvation to which we were reduced, I saw my first South Sea island.

  We had gotten our easting in the high southern latitudes, and once in the trade winds we made a long board to the north on the starboard tack. We were well into the tropics now and in the vicinity of land. Man-of-war hawks hovered overhead, their long forked tails opening and shutting like scissor-blades; shoals of flying fish rose under the ship's cutwater to skim away and plunge into the sea like whiffs of grapeshot. The sea was of the pale turquoise blue only to be seen within the tropics, shading to purple here and there where clouds obscured the sun. The roll of the Pacific from east to west was broken by the labyrinth of low coral islands to the east of us,—the vast cluster of half-drowned lands called by the natives Paumotu ,—and the Bounty sailed a tranquil sea.

  I was off watch that afternoon and engaged in sorting over the articles I had laid in, at the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks, for barter with the Indians of Tahiti. Nails, files, and fishhooks were in great demand, as well as bits of cheap jewelry for the women and girls. My mother had given me fifty pounds for the purchase of these things, and Sir Joseph had added another fifty to it, advising me that liberality to the Indians would be amply repaid. "Never forget," he had remarked, "that in the South Sea the Seven Deadly Sins are compounded into one, and that one is meanness." I had taken this advice to heart, and now, as I looked over my store of gifts, I felt satisfied that I had laid out my hundred pounds to good effect. I had been a lover of fishing since childhood, and my hooks were of all sizes and the best that money could buy. My sea chest was half filled with other things—coils of brass wire, cheap rings, bracelets, and necklaces; files, scissors, razors, a variety of looking-glasses, and a dozen engraved portraits of King George, which Sir Joseph had procured for me. And down in one corner of the chest, safe from the prying eyes of my messmates, was a velvet-lined box from Maiden Lane. It contained a bracelet and necklace, curiously wrought in a design like the sinnet seamen plait. I was a romantic lad, not without my dreams of some fair barbarian girl who might bestow her favours on me. As I look back over the long procession of years, I cannot but smile at a boy's simplicity, but I would give all my hard-earned worldly wisdom to recapture if only for an hour the mood of those days of my youth. I had returned them to my chest when I heard Mr. Bligh's harsh, vibrant voice. His cabin was scarcely fifteen feet aft of where I sat.

  "Mr. Fryer!" he called peremptorily. "Be good enough to step into my cabin."

  "Yes, sir," replied the master's voice.

  I had no desire to eavesdrop on the conversation that followed, but there was no way to avoid it without leaving my open chest in the berth.

  "To-morrow or the day after," said Bligh, "we shall drop anchor in Matavai Bay. I have had Mr. Samuel make an inventory of the stores on hand, which has enabled him to cast up an account of the provisions expended on the voyage so far. I desire you to glance over this book, which requires your signature."

  A long silence followed, broken at last by Fryer's voice. "I cannot sign this, sir," he said.

  "Cannot sign it? What do you mean, sir?"

  "The clerk is mistaken, Mr. Bligh. No such amounts of beef and pork have be
en issued!"

  "You are wrong!" answered the captain angrily. "I know what was taken aboard and what remains. Mr. Samuel is right!"

  "I cannot sign, sir," said Fryer obstinately.

  "And why the devil not? All that the clerk has done was done by my orders. Sign it instantly! Damme! I am not the most patient man in the world."

  "I cannot sign," insisted Fryer, a note of anger in his voice; "not in conscience, sir!"

  "But you can sign," shouted Bligh in a rage; "and what is more, you shall! " He went stamping up the ladderway and on to the deck. "Mr. Christian!" I heard him shout to the officer of the watch. "Call all hands on deck this instant!"

  The order was piped and shouted forward and, when we assembled, the captain, flushed with anger, uncovered and read the Articles of War. Mr. Samuel then came forward with his book and a pen and ink.

  "Now, sir!" Bligh ordered the master, "sign this book!"

  There was a dead silence while Fryer took up the pen reluctantly.

  "Mr. Bligh," he said, controlling his temper with difficulty, "the ship's people will bear witness that I sign in obedience to your orders, but please to recollect, sir, that this matter may be reopened later on."

  At that moment a long-drawn shout came from the man in the foretop. "Land ho!"

  CHAPTER V.—TAHITI

  The lookout had sighted Mehetia, a small, high island forty miles to the southeast of Tahiti. I stared ahead, half incredulously, at the tiny motionless projection on the horizon line. The wind died away toward sunset and we were all night working up to the land.

  I went off watch at eight bells, but could not sleep; an hour later, perched on the fore-topgallant crosstrees, I watched the new day dawn. The beauty of that sunrise seemed ample compensation for all of the hardships suffered during the voyage: a sunrise such as only the seaman knows, and then only in the regions between the tropics, remote from home. Saving the light, fluffy "fair-weather clouds" just above the vast ring of horizon which encircled us, the sky was clear. The stars paled gradually; as the rosy light grew stronger, the velvet of the heavens faded and turned blue. Then the sun, still below the horizon, began to tint the little clouds in the east with every shade of mother-of-pearl.

  An hour later we were skirting the reef, before a light air from the south. For the first time in my life I saw the slender, graceful trunk and green fronds of the far-famed coconut tree, the thatched cottages of the South Sea Islanders, set in their shady groves, and the people themselves, numbers of whom walked along the reef not more than a cable's length away. They waved large pieces of white cloth and shouted what I supposed were invitations to come ashore, though their voices were drowned in the noise of a surf which would have made landing impossible even had Mr. Bligh hove-to and lowered a boat.

  Mehetia is high and round in shape, and not more than three miles in its greatest extent. The village is at the southern end, where there is a tolerably flat shelf of land at the base of the mountain, but elsewhere the green cliffs are steep-to, with the sea breaking at their feet. The white line of the breakers, the vivid emerald of the tropical vegetation covering the mountains everywhere, the rich foliage of the breadfruit trees in the little valleys, and the plumed tops of the coconut palms growing in clusters here and there, made up a picture which enchanted me. The island had the air of a little paradise, newly created, all fresh and dewy in the dawn, stocked with everything needful for the comfort and happiness of man.

  The men walking along the shelf of reef at the base of the cliffs were too far away for inspection, but they seemed fine stout fellows, taller than Englishmen. They were dressed in girdles of bark cloth which shone with a dazzling whiteness in the morning sunlight. They were naked except for these girdles, and they laughed and shouted to one another as they followed us along, clambering with great agility over the rocks.

  As we rounded the northern end of the island, Smith hailed me from the top. "Look, Mr. Byam!" he shouted, pointing ahead eagerly. There, many leagues away, I saw the outlines of a mighty mountain rising from the sea,—sweeping ridges falling away symmetrically from a tall central peak,—all pale blue and ghostly in the morning light.

  The breeze was making up now, and the Bounty , heeling a little on the larboard tack, was leaving a broad white wake. When I reached the deck I found Mr. Bligh in a rarely pleasant mood. I bade him good morning, standing to leeward of him on the quarter-deck, and he saluted me with a clap on the back.

  "There it is, young man," he said, pointing to the high ghostly outlines of the land ahead. "Tahiti! We have made a long passage of it, a long hard passage, but, by God, there is the island at last!"

  "It looks a beautiful island, sir," I remarked.

  "Indeed it is—none more so. Captain Cook loved it only next to England; were I an old man, with my work done and no family at home, I should ask nothing better than to end my days under its palms! And you will find the people as friendly and hospitable as the land they inhabit. Aye—and some of the Indian girls as beautiful. We have come a long way to visit them! Last night I was computing the distance we have run by log since leaving England. To-morrow morning, when we drop anchor in Matavai Bay, we shall have sailed more than twenty-seven thousand miles!"

  Since that morning, so many years ago, I have sailed all the seas of the world and visited most of the islands in them, including the West Indies, and the Asiatic Archipelago. But of all the islands I have seen, none approaches Tahiti in loveliness.

  As we drew nearer to the land, with the rising sun behind us, there was not a man on board the Bounty who did not gaze ahead with emotions that differed in each case, no doubt, but in which awe and wonder played a part. But I am wrong—there was one. Toward six bells, when we were only a few miles off the southern extremity of the island, Old Bacchus came stumping on deck. Standing by the mizzenmast, with a hand on a swivel-stock, he stared indifferently for a moment at the wooded precipices, the waterfalls and sharp green peaks, now abeam of the ship. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

  "They're all the same," he remarked indifferently. "When you've seen one island in the tropics, you've seen the lot."

  The surgeon went stumping to the ladderway, and, as he disappeared, Mr. Nelson ceased his pacing of the deck to stand at my side. The botanist was a believer in exercise and kept his muscles hard and his colour fresh by walking two or three miles on deck each morning the weather permitted.

  "Well, Byam," he remarked, "I'm glad to be back! Many a time, since my voyage with Captain Cook, I've dreamed of revisiting Tahiti, without the faintest hope that the dream might come true. Yet here we are! I can scarcely wait to set foot on shore!"

  We were skirting the windward coast of Taiarapu, the richest and loveliest part of the island, and I could not take my eyes off the land. In the foreground, a mile or more offshore, a reef of coral broke the roll of the sea, and the calm waters of the lagoon inside formed a highway on which the Indians travel back and forth in their canoes. Behind the inner beach was the narrow belt of flat land where the rustic dwellings of the people were scattered picturesquely among their neat plantations of the ava and the cloth plant, shaded by groves of breadfruit and coconut. In the background were the mountains—rising fantastically in turrets, spires, and precipices, wooded to their very tops. Innumerable waterfalls plunged over the cliffs and hung like suspended threads of silver, many of them a thousand feet or more in height and visible at a great distance against the background of dark green. Seen for the first time by European eyes, this coast is like nothing else on our workaday planet; a landscape, rather, of some fantastic dream.

  Nelson was pointing ahead to a break in the line of reef. "Captain Cook nearly lost his ship yonder," he said, "when the current set him on the reef during a calm. One of his anchors lies there to this day—there where the sea breaks high. I know this part of the island well. As you can see, Tahiti is made up of two lands, connected by the low isthmus the Indians call Taravao. This before us is the lesser, called Taiarapu or Tahiti Iti; t
he great island yonder they call Tahiti Nui. Vehiatua is the king of the smaller one—the most powerful of the Indian princes. His realm is richer and more populous than those of his rivals."

  All through the afternoon we skirted the land, passing the low isthmus between the two islands, coasting the rich verdant districts of Faaone and Hitiaa, and toward evening, as the light breeze died away, moving slowly along the rock-bound coast of Tiarei, where the reef ends and the sea thunders at the base of cliffs.

  There was little sleeping aboard the Bounty that night. The ship lay becalmed about a league off the mouth of the great valley of Papenoo, and the faint land breeze, wandering down from the heights of the interior, and out to sea, brought with it the sweet smell of the land and of growing things. We sniffed it eagerly, our noses grown keen from the long months at sea, detecting the scent of strange flowers, of wood smoke, and of Mother Earth herself—sweetest of all smells to a sailor. The sufferers from scurvy, breathing deep of the land breeze, seemed to draw in new life; their apathy and silence left them as they spoke eagerly of the fruits they hoped to eat on the morrow, fruits they craved as a man dying of thirst craves water.

  We sighted Eimeo a little before sunset: the small lofty island which lies to the west of Tahiti, four leagues distant. The sun went down over the spires and pinnacles of Eimeo's sky line, and was followed into the sea by the thin golden crescent of the new moon. There is little twilight in these latitudes and, almost immediately it seemed to me, the stars came out in a cloudless dome of sky. One great planet, low in the west, sent a shimmering track of light over the sea. I saw the Cross and the Magellanic Clouds in the south, and constellations unknown to dwellers in the Northern Hemisphere, all close and warm and golden against the black sky. A faint burst of song came from the surgeon's cabin below, where he was carousing with Peckover; every other man on the ship, I believe, was on deck.