So tempestuous is their tempest, the men on the Bounty are well aware of it, even when on only the distant approaches to Cape Horn.
On 20 March, even as the booming thunder of the trouble up ahead rolls towards them – and our lady of the riding habit is clearly jumping some sharp hedges placed close together – Bligh dictates to his quivering clerk, Mr Samuel, ‘the sea became confused and troublesome’.47
They are twin conditions that grow by the day, as the winds whip up, the waves rise, and the temperature drops further still. The crew know they are getting close when, out to starboard, in the final week of March, the snow-covered mountains of Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of South America appear.
Curious whales spout sprays of indignation at their unlikely presence at this time of year, and enormous albatrosses, with wing-spans of up to eight feet, leave their own sprays of a different kind, but similar sentiment. They are joined by ‘vast quantities of seals, penguins …’48
It is the white and black albatrosses though that attract the most attention … So huge! So majestic! So many of them, gliding high up above the masts, as they follow the ship’s progress ever further to the south. And yes, although most of the sailors know the old reckoning that it is bad luck to kill an albatross, neither they nor Captain Bligh care for such superstitions, not when they are this hungry for fresh flesh. So it is that, as Bligh records, ‘by floating a line with hooks to it beyond where the bait was placed, and giving a sudden pull when the birds had hold of a piece of meat’,49 they are able to catch them. At other times, when the huge birds sometimes perch on the masts and rigging, the men are able to bring them down with a well-placed musket-ball, being very careful not to hit the sails instead.
Just 30 minutes later the albatrosses have been plucked, gutted and are being roasted, with the sailors soon able to fill their gaping maws with great relish and even greater satisfaction – and to hell with the old salts’ superstition. We are modern sailors, and do not believe the nonsense about it bringing bad luck.
More than ever, Bligh is aware that they are about to enter what is reputed to be the stormiest patch of sea on earth, the most infamous sailors’ graveyard on the planet, from which not even St Elmo, the patron saint of sailors, can save a man. But Bligh is firmly convinced, in his heart, by God, that those reports are exaggerated and …
And the BOOM of each wave on the Bounty is now followed by a long shudder as the ship tries to shake it off, to compose itself for getting over the next wave. There’s no doubt the waves are growing taller, thicker, bigger, more powerful. They crash wildly against the hull, drowning out the subtle drip, drip, drip … drop of the dripstones that once kept the placid rhythm of the voyage. The skies darken; the shrieking westerly winds lift. Thunder rolls over the Bounty, rattling the ship’s wooden bones to the point that Mr Purcell is concerned. Lightning bolts flash and strike the sea, dead ahead. This time the old salts’ warning is vindicated: ‘fair weather in this clime is always a fore-runner of foul’.50 The lady in the riding habit rears up, her beast willing her to turn around. Alas, she cannot. Onwards she rides, further into the maelstrom.
Could it be the curse of the albatross, whose slaughter Captain Bligh has assented to?
Whatever the cause, even Bligh must admit over the next few stormy, tumultuous days, that the previous reports had not been exaggerated at all.
Bligh records in the Log on 29 March that the High Seas ‘exceeds any I have seen,’51 no small claim for one who has been at sea for the better part of three decades.
As March turns to April, and the seas turn fouler still, the Bounty finally makes it to 60 degrees of South latitude, which is just far enough south of the latitude of Cape Horn headland that Captain Bligh can at last bark the orders for the ship to tack north-westward – so they may begin the attempt to round the Horn. Right on cue, rising against them, strong winds lash the Bounty unceasingly from dead ahead, followed by gales, followed by squalls, teeming with sleet and hail. And soon enough, snow. Blanketing snow plummets down upon them, even as the wind roars, causing those on deck – with no protection at all from the flush-deck structure of the ship, nothing to break the wind – to freeze. Still they must keep moving, shovelling snowdrifts from the deck, as their hands falter and their mouths curse and the very marrow of their bones turns to ice.
Theirs is a cold that will not let go, and even when they go below decks and huddle around the smoky fire, there is no respite. For the damp and cold has been seeping into everything, their fellow sailors, their meals, the decks themselves, and particularly their bunks and hammocks. Even their hunger is cold, a problem as that hunger is getting stronger by the day and their bodies are burning ever more energy in the vain attempt to keep warm. Such is everybody’s constant discomfort that tempers are frayed, around the clock, leading to ‘frequent broils in the galley’,52 and particularly vicious fighting around mealtimes, when their food is being divvied up and the men circle each other like feuding scavengers intent on getting the best deal.
And still our lady in the riding habit, leading the Bounty’s valiant charge, day and night, rocks and rears and then rocks and rears some more, through seas that seem to only grow as they try to head west.
The days are a living nightmare, the nights much worse, and their whole existence only made bearable by what they have to admit is Captain Bligh’s solicitude for them, his insistence that the fires are always roaring, that those coming off watch are instantly given hot soup, that their clothes are dried and they have dry clothes ready to get into.
But there remains no sign of relief any time soon.
And Mr Purcell is more worried still, as leaks spring up all over the creaking hull, as ever more water seeps from upper deck to below decks. Bligh records being ‘obliged to allot the great cabin, of which I made little use except in fine weather, to those people who had wet berths to hang their hammocks in’.53
The most appalling thing for Captain Bligh?
It is that even though it is miraculous enough to have survived such violent weather, even though they could not have worked harder to make headway against all odds, the sad truth is they are getting … nowhere!
In fact, it is even worse than that.
On 1 April they had made it to 72.5 degrees west latitude.
And now, after three full days of fighting the battering winds, of tacking to starboard then to larboard, and then doing it all again and again – with each tack taking 15 minutes of very hard work, and exhausting everyone – he does fresh calculations and finds they are at 71.9 degrees west.
Yes, all that effort, and they have been blown backwards by 63 nautical miles!
Bligh records his ‘mortification to find at the end of every day that we were losing ground; for notwithstanding our utmost exertions and keeping on the most advantageous tacks …’54
•
Among the ailing sailing men of the Bounty, few are suffering more than young Peter Heywood, who beyond staggering sea-sickness, which involves projectile vomiting until there is simply nothing left in his body to give, finds there is something even worse – lighting the fire beneath the ire of Captain Bligh.
Though never quite sure what he has done wrong – it may possibly be being an effortless rung or two higher on the class ladder than his Captain, or even that Bligh begrudges the time Fletcher spends with him – Heywood is all too sure of the punishment. On Bligh’s shouted order, Peter is ‘mast-headed’.
Mast-what?
Mast-headed.
Following the Bosun’s barked orders, young Peter learns soon enough, as rung by torturous rung – all as Bligh watches in cruel satisfaction – he must climb the rigging until he reaches the spar on the bottom of the mainsail.
How do you like that then, Master Heywood? Not so fancy, now, lad?
No, indeed.
Not so fancy, Captain Bligh.
With frozen fingers, Peter must fumble to first get a rope around himself, before tying it tight. Praying that his
greenhorn knot will hold, he is now hoisted up and up until he reaches the top of the main-mast, hugging tightly to it as the wind howls and he is rocked from side to side in crazy arcs that never cease.
How long must he endure this hell? He has no idea.
An hour passes. The sleet and rain lashing his boyish face are not the only cause of moisture running down his cheeks. Curse Bligh! It is only after one whole watch, eight full hours, that his frozen form is allowed down. He can barely breathe, with a cold in him that goes clear to the core of his being. Quietly, Bligh omits recording the punishment in the Log, as he does not wish a blot on the record of the young gentleman. And here is Bligh all over.
Bligh’s ‘tornados of temper’,55 as referred to by one of his Lieutenants, are just that. They are violent storms of fury, thunderous curses and endless verbal lashings that nigh blow away the very sanity of the unfortunates who stand quavering and humiliated before them. And then they are gone with the whipping wind, leaving a peaceable Captain Bligh in their wake – often wondering why everyone suddenly seems so silent around him.
In this case, the horrifying scar on Peter’s soul is not so easily erased by Bligh’s subsequent calm. Never will he forget his agonised and freezing fingers clutching the ropes for fear of falling, as the mast swung back and forth on its crazy arc, even as his eyes scanned desperately for a break in the weather that would not come.
Of course it is not just Heywood who is struggling to keep physically and emotionally strong. Nigh on every day, yet one more of the exhausted, terrified crew staggers to his frozen berth or hammock, and, when his next turn comes, is unable to rise again.
During snowstorms, the men on watch are frozen so stiff that they often have to be assisted to come below deck at the end of their eight hours, and are even incapable of speech for some time afterwards. To these men, Bligh remains notably sympathetic.
I took care to nurse them when off duty with every comfort in my power. The invalids I made attend and dry their clothes and keep a good fire in every night, so that no man took his watch with a wet rag about him.56
It is tough going, and on a bad watch it can seem like impossible going, but through it all Bligh orders that, whatever else, they keep going and so they do.
Bligh is just made that way, come hell or high water, raging storms or rebellious seas.
Keep going!
CHAPTER THREE
ON THE HORN OF A DILEMMA
Blow wind! come, wrack!
At least we’ll die with harness on our back1
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3
’Tho the [Bounty] was an excellent sea boat, it was as much as she could do to live in this tremendous sea where the elements seem to wage continual war.2
James Morrison, Bosun’s Mate,
recalling the attempt of the Bounty to round Cape Horn
Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the albatross
About my neck was hung.3
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
April 1788, off Cape Horn, the Bounty battered
In such appalling weather, nothing is simple.
When the wind is so strong and seas so violent that your Captain now has his own person tethered by a rope when on deck, it is a fair reckoning how difficult things must be below, even when one is embarked on something as basic as trying to prepare supper. Coughing and spluttering, the men so assigned can only just manage to cook and serve the food in the dark and cramped confines, due to the thick smoke hanging heavily with no passage to escape, as even though the hatches are battened down, Bligh insists on every fire roaring to try to keep things below as dry as possible.
Still, things get even worse when, in the second week of April, they face mountainous seas the likes of which they have never imagined, let alone seen, as the Bounty climbs ever higher up successive monsters, momentarily sheltered from wind as her shortened sails droop wanly, only to climb to the crest, where she is hit by the screaming winds with full force once more, the reefed sails bellowing in protest, the masts creaking to the point of shrieking, begging for release … only to plunge down into the valley of water once more … before she reaches the terrible bottom. Like the nose of an enormous wooden porpoise, at this point the bow of the Bounty is buried in the ocean for a few seconds before, thinking better of the full dive, rises, water cascading from her deck, shuddering with the strain, even as the next wave looms above and she must start her long and agonised climb once more.
As the ocean tries everything to stop her, one wave arrives from a surprise angle and hits amidships with such violence that the ends of the yards take a dip in the ocean and the ship near rolls on her side. She rights herself, but not everyone hurled sideways does, and the cook, Thomas Hall, Bligh is informed, was thrown into the bulkhead so violently he cracks a rib and is knocked stupid. Coming to, it is all he can do to hobble painfully around the galley for a short time, before taking to his berth, no longer able to work. The wretched Dr Huggan also falls and dislocates his shoulder, though Bligh strongly suspects this is more due to him being rolling drunk. There is no way around it. Every day, the weather gets still worse, progress gets even slower – on a bad day, which is just short of every day, they don’t advance at all, as although they battle the elements, it is the elements that win, pushing them backwards or off course – and the number of crew injured and invalided continues to rise. Yes, if Dr Huggan were still able to minister to his patients, he would have a lot of them. As it is, Surgeon’s Mate Ledward is left in full charge, tending to Able Seaman Skinner’s dislocated shoulder after a bad fall, nursing the Quartermaster, Linkletter, who has been hurled by the force of the ocean down into the fore cockpit, wrecking his back, and now must just lie in his bunk and groan as he can do nothing, just as nothing can be done for him.
By mid-April, even Bligh recognises that if the Bounty herself doesn’t break some time soon, the spirit and bodies of the crew-members will, as he notes on 13 April.
I now begin to see that this is a most improper time to venture into these seas … Upon the whole I may be bold to say that few ships could have gone through it as we have done, but I cannot expect my men and officers to bear it much longer …4
Just how close that breaking point is, he is too busy and important to know, but Morrison knows. He knows very well. And it is soon. If not before. For Morrison is intimate with a story that has been kept from the Captain. That injury of Thomas Hall? That happened during the storm? Well, it actually happened during a storm of angry men, furious at the meagre rations Bligh doles out each day … and fighting among themselves over who gets what. At dinner, Hall had been doling out one gallon of cooked wheat into 46 separate lots when some of the men had decided their portion was unfairly small, their tempers exploding in rough rhythm to the fists of the worst of them – big, bruising Quintal – on the ribs of the cook. Of course they hadn’t told Bligh. If there is an honour among thieves, so too is there honour among brawlers, even when the brawl-ee gets very badly injured.
All of them know that Bligh’s own temper is so white-hot that there is simply no telling what punishment he might mete out, so even Hall agrees to maintain that his broken ribs are due to the storm. Similarly, Churchill, who has his right hand badly scalded in the course of the melee, suffers in glowering silence. Someone is going to pay, but just not yet.
A Captain of more moderate disposition would have learnt thus of the fraying tempers of his own men, but, in this case, Bligh’s reputation for incandescent rage means he remains oblivious of what is happening on his ship.
Recognising this, Fryer takes matters into his own hands. When that genuine scoundrel Churchill – the roughest ruffian on the ship, though a couple of others run him close – has his hand scalded in yet another fight about who is to get the first food, Fryer decides something must be done. Saying nothing to Bligh, he decrees that henceforth, at ever
y meal, a mate will be posted at the galley to ensure that the food is shared fairly, and to ensure no fights break out over it.
And so it goes.
A storm without … and a storm within. And both of them are getting worse as the days pass, and the Bounty continues to plough forward, and backwards, making ever heavier weather of it.
And yet there is one notable exception to those on board the Bounty who are demonstrably suffering in the ongoing lashing of the storms – Bligh himself. A man with a chunk of ice for a soul, and a spine of cast iron, he does not shake or shiver or bend in tough times, he just stands out as so much stronger than all those around him who are wilting. Bligh is at his best in a crisis, grows ever stronger as the odds get longer, and is a whirl of action and command! Others go on and off their watch, depleted and defeated, but Bligh is there in the middle of every big storm, no matter how long it lasts.
Meanwhile, though the men on deck continue to struggle through the tons of freezing water that continue to be dumped over the ship’s sides, down below those off-watch busy themselves drying their clothes, their hammocks, their bags – everything that is sodden is brought close to the galley fire to be painstakingly dried. Of course, it will all be drenched again soon enough, and to some it seems not worth the effort, but Captain Bligh is insistent.
Bligh can sometimes seem more like a scolding nanny than a fearsome Commander, perhaps because it is Bligh’s firm belief that, ‘Seamen will seldom attend to themselves in any particular … they must be watched like Children.’5
And the sailors do indeed display a certain childish joy, when, on occasion, if the wind subsides and the heavens part for long enough, they succeed in what is by now a favourite crew activity, catching and eating albatrosses. Now, instead of killing them immediately to fill out the ship’s depleted stocks of food – not a good idea as the flesh tastes too ‘gamey’ and ‘fishy’ for the moment – they take the birds below, where they are cooped up and fattened on ground corn for a week or two, and then slaughtered. In this manner, Bligh records, the ‘albatrosses were as fat, and not inferior in taste to, fine geese’.6
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