Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha

by Harvey Rachlin

  This 1851 lithograph by Royal Navy Lieutenant Conway Shipley depicts a view of Pitcairn Island showing Fletcher Christian's house.

  The men in the launch were then faced with the terrifying prospect of having to navigate their way a great distance in the vulnerable open boat with a meager supply of food. They were near Tofoa, so they decided to stop off at the island to build up their food reserves. They collected some coconuts and breadfruit, but as they were casting off they were attacked by a group of natives, who hurled stones at them. One man was killed before they cast off, and even afloat they weren’t safe from the natives’ hostility. The natives pursued the fleeing Englishmen in canoes. It was only after the occupants of the open boat threw articles of their clothing in the water that the natives’ attention was diverted and they could get away.

  The difficulties the men in the open boat encountered in trying to return to England were substantial, and it is a testament to the excellent navigational skills and foresight of Lieutenant Bligh that the boat did not capsize during any of the storms it encountered, nor did the men starve, despite the scant provisions aboard. In this small boat the eighteen remaining men had scarcely room to move their limbs, were constantly wet, and continually felt the chill of the night “with nothing to cover them except the heavens.” Amazingly, without any catastrophes or other fatalities, the open boat reached the Indonesian island of Timor, some four thousand miles from where they started, and the displaced Bounty crew finally returned to England in another vessel.

  Bligh’s reception in England was sympathetic and positive, and the government set out to punish the mutineers and demonstrate that such a reprehensible act would not be tolerated. Mutiny was punishable by death according to the 1749 Articles of War, and the mutineers were undoubtedly aware of this. With a capital crime committed and the pride of the Royal Navy at stake, a ship of war, the Pandora, with 160 men aboard, was sent to Otaheite to pick up the mutineers. If they had left the island, the Pandora was to search every other island in the South Pacific until as many mutineers as possible could be found, captured, and returned to England to stand trial in the king’s court.

  During the time of Bligh’s struggle to return to England and the subsequent launch of the Pandora, the mutineers in the Bounty had been trying to carve out a new life for themselves as fugitives in the Pacific. The Bounty, under the leadership of Fletcher Christian, sailed to Tubuaï, a nineteen-square-mile island that is part of a huge chain of islands extending eight hundred miles, where the natives proved unfriendly. In need of food sources and companionship, the Englishmen sailed back to Otaheite to obtain animals and to try to convince women, including those they had known while previously on the island collecting the breadfruit plants, to return with them to Tubuaï. Several women did go, but once they were back in Tubuaï, discontent flourished among the mutineers. It was finally decided that those who desired would be dropped off at Otaheite, and the remainder, with their women and any additional women and manservants they could acquire at Otaheite, would move on to another destination.

  After a stop on Otaheite, they arrived at Pitcairn early in 1790, almost nine months after the mutiny. Some men from the Bounty took a small boat to the island to survey it. After they found the island much as described in Bligh’s travelogue, the rest of the party was allowed to go ashore. All the ship’s stores were soon unloaded, which probably included John Adams’s sea chest (National Maritime Museum, London).

  Christian apportioned the island to the nine mutineers; each would have land to build a home and a future. Each Englishman had a woman, and a few women who were left over went to live with the Otaheitan manservants.

  A few days after the settlers’ arrival, the Bounty was run into rocks so her contents could be taken out and the animals on board landed. The ship was then torched on Christian’s command—no doubt so that no one could leave and reveal the fugitives’ whereabouts, and so the ship itself would not signal their presence. But the destruction of the Bounty also had the effect of marooning the pilgrims.

  Despite the constraints and stresses under which they carved out new lives on the island, the residents of Pitcairn Island enjoyed an auspicious beginning. The island was livable and met their needs. They were in a sanctuary of isolation and security even if Bligh should make it back to England, which would assure a sentence of death for each one of them. But then the male inhabitants of the island began to quarrel.

  According to Sir John Barrow, who in 1831 wrote what may be the definitive account of the entire Bounty affair, The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty : Its Causes and Consequences, Fletcher Christian’s remorse over his actions on board the Bounty began to get the better of him. Barrow quoted a statement that John Adams was later to make: “It was clear enough that this misguided and ill-fated young man was never happy after the rash and criminal step he had taken; that he was always sullen and morose; and committed so many acts of wanton oppression, as very soon incurred the hatred and detestation of his companions in crime, over who he practised that same overbearing conduct, of which he accused his commander Bligh.” But then again Barrow was to report another comment Adams made subsequently that painted a diametrically opposite account of the lead mutineer, wherein Christian is seen as having a constantly happy disposition.

  In any case, with the native women as their wives, the Englishmen started families. But approximately two years after their arrival, a series of tragic events occurred to ignite the simmering ill will.

  While gathering birds’ eggs on a cliff, the wife of John Williams fell and died, and subsequently Williams usurped the wife of one of the native servants to be his new wife. The servant, clearly wronged, was understandably upset by this action. With his fellow natives, who sympathized with him and like him were angry at the Englishmen for other forms of maltreatment, he planned revenge—not just on the culprit Williams but on all the white men, who might otherwise repeat the same action under similar circumstances.

  The Englishmen found out about the assassination plot of the native men with the help of the women, who, in a little ditty they composed, suggested the bloodletting yet to follow: “Why does black man sharpen axe?/ To kill white man,” the women chanted. With the mutineers after them, the wronged Otaheitan husband and a male companion tried to hide, but their fellow natives killed them as a means of pacifying the Englishmen and perhaps of saving their own lives. The peace would only be temporary, unfortunately.

  England, 1792. Life-and-death court trials were held for those mutineers apprehended by the crew of the Pandora. The mission had been calamitous, exacting a toll in lives far greater than the number of people who were to be brought to justice.

  The Pandora had sailed to Otaheite, where it found and seized sixteen of the twenty-five mutineers. A search for the remaining mutineers, including Fletcher Christian, the ringleader, was fruitless. So the Pandora headed back to England, but on its way, on August 28, 1791, in the Santa Cruz Islands, the ship suffered a horrible wreck in which thirty-five men aboard were drowned, including four of the shackled Bounty prisoners. The voyage was completed in launches, and the harshness of famine, cold, and fatigue suffered by Bligh and his men in their open boat was ironically repeated. The commander of the Pandora, Captain Edward Edwards, had dispensed severe and unpitying treatment to the captured mutineers, whose misery was compounded by the prospect of having to stand trial upon their return. Aboard the Pandora, before returning to England, one prisoner was murdered by another, and the victim’s friends exacted retribution in kind. After their court trial in 1792, of the surviving ten Bounty prisoners who returned from Otaheite, three were hanged, three were sentenced to die but received a royal pardon, and four were acquitted.

  Pitcairn Island, 1793. For more than a year there had been peace on the island, but the abusive treatment the surviving Otaheitans received from the Europeans continued to gnaw at them until they resolved to do away with the former seamen altogether. One day in October, w
hile the white men were working on their land, the Otaheitans gathered muskets and hammers and proceeded to the Englishmen’s homes. They killed John Williams, Fletcher Christian, John Mills, William Brown, and Isaac Martin. Matthew Quintal and William M’Koy fled to a mountain. Edward Young, whom the Otaheitan women favored, was hidden by them, and John Adams was shot in the shoulder but negotiated a peace for himself.

  With five of the mutineers dead and the Otaheitans now in command of the island, the natives planned to seize the widows of those they killed. But the women, incensed at this notion, struck back. With the participation of Edward Young, all the Otaheitan men were killed. This left four of the Englishmen and ten women. For the next five years there was peace on the island.

  But the downfall of paradise seemed to be the order of things. William M’Koy, who had been employed in the making of alcohol before becoming a seaman on the Bounty, successfully applied his knowledge to produce spirits on Pitcairn, becoming a heavy drinker often subject to raging alcoholic bouts. During one such rage he killed himself by hurling himself from a rock. Matthew Quintal was the next to cause his own demise, although his death left the stain of blood on Adams and Young. Quintal’s wife had been killed in an accident while hunting birds’ eggs, and now Quintal wanted to appropriate another woman. Despite the abundance of Otaheitan females on Pitcairn, and despite the previously fatal example, Quintal insisted on having the wife of one of his compatriots. He then tried to kill both Adams and Young but was stopped. However, the two latter men, surmising that Quintal had murder on his mind and might well be successful the next time, felt he was too grave a threat to their lives and used a hatchet to eliminate him.

  Now, of all the men to come to Pitcairn, only Young and Adams were left. Sick of the bloodshed, they set themselves on a religious path of repentance, holding “regular church services” and instilling a sense of piousness and devotion into the island’s children, who now numbered nineteen. But Young’s days were numbered also, as he succumbed to an asthma condition not long afterward.

  This left John Adams with eight or nine women and the numerous children of the dead Bounty mutineers. The little band of survivors assiduously applied themselves to working the land, growing bananas and yams. But could they stay alive? And would Adams continue to escape capture? He was consumed with the dispiriting notion that England would send a ship to bring him home and hang him.

  But Pitcairn being cut off from civilization, Adams could not have known that with international wars and other dramatic national and world events transpiring, little thought would be given to the Bounty mutineers who had mysteriously vanished. With no word about them as time passed, some assumed they had been swallowed by the sea or slaughtered by natives. In any case, the price paid for the capture of the other mutineers was too high, and the national affairs of England too frenetic, to devote money and resources to hunting down the nine men who might or might not be alive in another part of the world.

  Pitcairn Island, 1808. The Topaz, an American trading ship on a sealing expedition commanded by Captain Mayhew Folger, happened on the island. It was the first contact the residents of Pitcairn had had with the outside world in more than nineteen years. Of course it was of concern to Adams whether the officers aboard this ship might try to convey him back to England to stand trial.

  Folger’s acquaintance with the people on Pitcairn was a mutually satisfying one, and his discovery of John Adams, the Bounty mutineer who went by the name of Alexander Smith, was passed along and reached the English Admiralty in May 1809. As related by Sir John Barrow, an English officer’s report of Folger’s experience on Pitcairn read:

  Captain Folger, of the American ship Topaz, of Boston, relates that upon landing on Pitcairn’s Island, in lat. 25° 2' S., long 130° W., he found there an Englishman of the name of Alexander Smith, the only person remaining of the nine that escaped in his Majesty’s late ship Bounty, Captain W. Bligh. … There are now some grown-up men and women, children of the mutineers, on the island, the whole population amounting to about thirty-five, who acknowledge Smith as father and commander of them all; they all speak English, and have been educated by him (as Captain Folger represents) in a religious and moral way. … Smith gave to Captain Folger a chronometer made by Kendall, which was taken from him by the Governor of Juan Fernandez.

  With this report, the outside world would not only learn for the first time what had happened to the missing Bounty mutineers, but would discover an unknown society on a remote South Seas island.

  Pitcairn Island, September 1814. At a distance of about half a dozen leagues, two British ships of war, the Briton and the Tagus, spotted the island. The captains did not know quite what to make of this, since Pitcairn, the only island charted in the area, had a supposed longitude of 133° 24' W, and the Tagus observed this island as having a latitude of 24° 40' S and a longitude of 130° 24' W. The next morning the frigates moved in, and to their crews’ surprise, they sighted huts. The surprise increased when two youths dressed in nothing but loincloths suddenly appeared and descended a hill carrying canoes over their shoulders. The two natives set their canoes in the water and paddled out to the ships. On reaching the vessels, one asked, in English no less, “Won’t you heave us a rope now?”

  When the older of the two youths was asked who he was, he identified himself as Thursday October Christian, and then without hesitation proceeded to offer details about himself and the island. He was the son of Fletcher Christian, he said, one of the Bounty mutineers, who was now dead. Thursday had taken as a wife one of the Otaheitan women that the mutineers had brought with them, and she was much older than he. Christian was twenty-four years old and a strapping six feet tall. His friend was George Young, son of the late Bounty midshipman, Edward Young. Sir Thomas Staines of the Briton invited the two islanders below deck for a meal, and was surprised once again when, with the meal set before them, the two young men stood up and recited a prayer.

  The two youths surveyed the ship with wonder. Of this John Barrow wrote, “The youths were themselves greatly surprised at the sight of so many novel objects—the size of the ship—of the guns, and everything around them. Observing a cow, they were at first somewhat alarmed, and expressed a doubt whether it was a huge goat or a horned dog, these being the only two species of quadrupeds they had ever seen. A little dog amused them much. ‘Oh! what a pretty little thing it is!’ exclaimed Young. ‘I know it is a dog, for I have heard of such an animal.’”

  The two youths also told the captains that there was one last Englishman surviving on Pitcairn. He was known on the Bounty as Alexander Smith, but his real name was John Adams. Intrigued by the whole episode and the youths’ stories, Staines and Captain Pipon of the Tagus decided to visit the island and have a look about for themselves.

  The two boys took the captains back, whereupon they were greeted by John Adams and his old, frail, and nearly blind Otaheitan wife. The sight of the king’s uniform initially made Adams think his freedom was in danger, but the fact that the officers were alone and unarmed convinced him that they were not a threat. On the island the two captains found about forty-six inhabitants, and they were immediately struck by the physical attributes of the young people born there, as Barrow was to note: “The young men all born on the island were finely formed, athletic and handsome—their countenances open and pleasing, indicating much benevolence and goodness of heart, but the young women particularly were objects of attraction, being tall, robust, and beautifully formed, their faces beaming with smiles, and indicating unruffled good humour; while their manners and demeanour would have done honour to the most enlightened people on earth.”

  Back in his hut, Adams expressed his fears to the two captains that they were going to take him back to England. He had surmised correctly that the British government had been out to capture him along with the other mutineers, but was not aware that its pursuit of the missing mutineers had been largely abandoned.*

  Both Staines and Pipon allayed Adams’s fears
. Staines said that he had never even heard of John Adams, and Pipon’s sentiment echoed the remark he would shortly make, which was that although legally “they could only consider him in the light of a criminal of the deepest dye, yet that it would have been an act of the greatest cruelty and inhumanity to have taken him away from his little family, who, in such a case, would have been left to experience the greatest misery and distress, and ultimately, in all probability, would have perished of want.”

  Adams lied about his prominent role in the Bounty mutiny, saying that he was ill in bed when he was awakened by a disturbance and forced to participate in the rebellion. But he said he would return to England to face justice. Hearing this, one of his daughters nearly became hysterical; the other women present began to weep, and all the other inhabitants were shocked and extremely upset. When Pipon said that Adams would not have to go back to England, all the natives were visibly elated and grateful for the captains’ great humanity.

  Adams assured his visitors that morality of the highest standards existed on the island. He advised all the young women, who called him their father, to delay marriage until they acquired enough property to ensure the proper upbringing of children. By Adams’s decree, a boy on the island had to be twenty to marry, a girl eighteen.

  Sir Thomas Staines, who served under Horatio Nelson and had been knighted in 1809, transmitted to the British Admiralty in Valparaiso the following month a report of his accidental discovery of Pitcairn:

  I fell in with an island where none is laid down in the Admiralty or other charts, according to the several chronometers of the Briton and Tagus. I therefore hove to, until daylight and then closed to ascertain whether it was inhabited, which I soon discovered it to be, and, to my great astonishment, found that every individual on the island (forty in number), spoke very good English. They proved to be the descendants of the deluded crew of the Bounty, who, from Otaheite, proceeded to the above-mentioned island, where the ship was burnt.