Mutiny on the Bounty

by Peter Fitzsimons

  Fresh meat, with fat!

  ‘This unexpected supply came very opportunely; for none of our livestock remained except hogs, the sheep and poultry not being hardy enough to stand the severity of the weather.’7

  And they are not the only ones in trouble. For, can the ship itself withstand the elements?

  She’s a sturdy ship, a real fighter, but the longer they go, the more the strain on the hull is showing, as the caulking that plugs the seams between the planks continues to work loose, and now the water starts to pour in, to the point that the only way to stay afloat is to have two bilge pumps manned around the clock – something that further exhausts the crew.

  The 22nd of April dawns with ‘Fresh gales with squalls of snow and cold weather’. And as the day goes on, ‘severe squalls of snow’ and ‘a very high sea’8 all come at them from the west – the very direction to which they are supposed to be heading. The Bounty spends another day going backwards.

  Finally, just before 5 pm, with hail battering the hull and snow filling the decks and drenching the men, Bligh comes to the conclusion that most of his men have had for the last four weeks, if not longer. This cannot be done. They have made a stunning attempt, they have fought against all odds, they have persevered long past the breaking point of most men and most ships. But … now?

  He must bow to reality.

  The Horn is impassable at this time of year.

  ‘I thought I had seen the worst of everything that could be met with at sea,’ he will ruefully recount, ‘yet I have never seen such violent Winds or such mountainous seas, for they really are beyond every idea I could form of them … during this time I suffered the greatest fatigue and anxiety.’9

  They cannot go on. At least the logbook will stand as proof positive to the Admiralty that he has gone above and beyond the call of duty to fulfil their wishes. (In any case, as Bligh never stops reflecting, it was the infernal, eternal delays of the Admiralty that were responsible for this torturous impasse in the first place.) But as each day now sees them being blown backwards, and with no hope of a change in the weather, sailing sanity must prevail.

  Beating to windward for a month has achieved nothing.

  On this then, the 33rd day of their attempt to round Cape Horn, Bligh orders Fryer to muster all the men on deck.

  One by one, the skinny, ragtag men pop up through the hatchways, eyes wide and wary, like starved, scared bunnies – even as the freezing windblown men aloft leave their frozen ropes and slippery spars to climb down, barely believing they’ve been given a break.

  ‘I thank you all for your unremitting attention to your duty,’ Bligh says once the men are all before him. ‘My intention now is to bear away for the Cape of Good Hope as it appears to me an impossibility to get around Cape Horn.’10

  Suddenly Captain Bligh is surrounded by men who, forgetting protocol, burst out shouting, clapping, cheering, in ‘great joy’.11 Their blowy agony, trying to round a Horn that won’t be rounded, is over! Brimming with joy to see the men suddenly so happy, Fletcher Christian hugs young Peter Heywood like a brother. After everything they have been through, all the storms, killer waves, it looks like they will live after all! Once more, they will see their families back on the Isle of Man! The worst of their ordeal is surely over!

  ‘Put the helm a-weather!’12 Bligh gives the order, quickly whipped away into the shrieking westerly winds. No matter. Master Fryer has caught it, and repeats it in full volume many times, to all the men who need to know, as the Bounty is ‘instantly put before the wind’13 at last.

  And so it goes, with the frozen figures now back in the rigging eagerly following each order:

  ‘Set the foresail!’

  ‘Set the main topsail!’14

  The sailors go about their work with the most enthusiasm Bligh has seen in weeks.

  In the space of ten minutes, everything changes. The lady in the riding habit charges forward at a gallop. Instead of bashing against a series of aquatic walls breaking all over them, the deafening wind howling straight at them, hurling snow and hail into their ruddy faces, now the wind is in the sweet spot, on the larboard quarter, and they are cascading down the waves. Instead of going nowhere, they are roaring to the east at seven knots, which is close to maximum speed for the Bounty. The ride is still rocky, to be sure. And they will still be some time in escaping this boiling cauldron of fury – the lady in her riding habit continues to buck and rear, crashing into the deep troughs between each mountainous wave – but, whatever else, with the wind behind them they are actually moving quickly away and not simply battering themselves uselessly against an unmoving weather wall. Below deck, the placid rhythm of the dripstones – drip, drip, drip … drop – can be heard once more.

  Bligh reflects, in his tightly controlled handwriting, very like the man himself – in this case showing a lot of ink blobs, because of the rolling of the sea –

  It was with much concern I saw it improper and even unjustifiable in me to persist any longer in a passage this way to the Society Islands.15

  Under the circumstances, Bligh remains more than ever haunted by the sheer incompetence of the Admiralty and the fact that, ‘If we had been one month earlier, or perhaps less, I doubt not but we should have effected our passage’,16 but there is no way back.

  Yes, the following morning, the temperature is only just above freezing point, and the storm is still there, but the Bounty surges to the north-east, up and down the waves like a whale unleashed from a foetid pond into the wild ocean after long and torturous captivity, and before long the hatches are opened and, as the redoubtable Morrison documents of the following weeks, there is much ‘airing and drying the ship between decks, and the sick recovered fast, as we got into a more temperate climate’.17

  Their new destination is the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of the African continent, at a much friendlier latitude of 34 degrees south, after which they will cross the Indian Ocean, going beneath New Holland, stopping briefly at Van Diemen’s Land, before heading up its east coast. It is plain sailing all the way. Even the table fare is improved by the men being able to catch some sharks on special shark hooks that are trailed behind the ship, and it takes only a neat, well-fed month after turning back from trying to round Cape Horn until the crew feel blessed to spy the remarkably flat-topped mountain that tells them they have arrived at Cape Town.

  On the 24th of May 1788, the Bounty’s cannon salute the Dutch Governor van de Graaff and, unlike Tenerife (sniff), the salute is returned, gun for gun. At nearby Simon’s Bay, the winter season anchorage of the Cape of Good Hope, close to Cape Town, there will be 38 days of much needed rest and repair for both the ship and the men, who have been at sea for five straight months. The most urgent thing is for Purcell, with a little assistance from the local Dutch, to re-caulk the whole ship from bow to stern, to stop the infernal, eternal leaking, even as sail-maker Lawrence Lebogue sees to it that all the damaged sails are again made ship-shape, while Morrison attends to replacing worn rigging.

  Still, overall, Bligh is happy with his vessel, noting that, ‘upon the whole she is as fine a little ship as ever was at sea. I have suffered much fatigue, but I always thrive best when I have the most to do and I never was better in my life.’18

  As always when pulling into remote ports, far from the distracting tumult of the ocean, the thoughts of the ship’s company turn more than ever to home, wondering how their families are faring, how long it will be before they can be reunited, how much the little ones have grown.

  One who feels it more than most, as it happens, is Captain Bligh. For not only is he that rarest of things on this ship, an entirely devoted family man, with an established wife, home and cherished children to return to, but when he had left, his dear Betsy had been four months pregnant – and it is about now, he knows, she will have been confined to have their fourth child.

  A small parenthesis, here. Actually, make that fifth child, too. Back in Great Britain, at this very time, Betsy gives wha
t she thinks is one last push to deliver a bouncing baby daughter, only to find there are many pushes to go, before a second daughter is also delivered! How thrilled her other three little girls, Harriet, Mary and Elizabeth, are with their new sisters. And yes, it will be difficult, particularly in the early months, without dear William there to help, but, as she tells her girls, he is working hard upon the oceans, so as to return to them next year. Daddy is the skipper of a very big ship, doing very important work for England, and he will be back to them next year. Close parenthesis.

  •

  Down in the glistening golden cove that is Simon’s Bay, right at the foot of a high green mountain just south of Cape Town, the crew of the Bounty glisten with sweat themselves as they work all around the ship, and nearly around the clock. They repair and replace the rundown gear, hauling in new supplies for the next leg to Tahiti – ‘fresh meat, soft bread, cabbages and celery with onions and leeks and wine’.19 Oh, and Bligh is also quick to buy ‘two very fine red Wings of Flamingoes’20 which he knows will soon be of great value in Tahiti. And of course other sailors and officers are buying their own things. Very quietly, because it is a little irregular, the ever impecunious Christian – he has never been good with his finances, easy come, easy go – borrows a good deal of money from Bligh to make some purchases and take some pleasures. It can be their small secret. Bligh doesn’t hesitate to lend to his friend, despite having very little money himself.

  At least Fletcher can now engage a little in the wide commerce of this bustling port, buying ale, curios and the like, a dashingly good-looking man, always smiling, making his way through an always pressing throng in the marketplace. For the snug harbour of this bustling Dutch port is in fact host to many Dutch East India men – both outward and homeward bound – and they are joined by several French ships, too.

  And what’s this now?

  Yes, at 9 o’clock in the morning on 13 June, a ship flying the Union Jack from the foremast, the Dublin, sails into the harbour. As the men of the Bounty gaze towards it, gazing back at them, crowding the deck, are the soldiers and officers of the 77th Regiment under command of Colonel James Balfour, bound for service in India. Among them is an ambitious, highly capable officer by the name of Lieutenant Lachlan Macquarie. A contained, careful officer, Macquarie keeps a contained, careful diary – a white vellum-bound book, each page carefully given margins, numbered and dated before his departure from England – and carefully chronicles today’s key event. For, yes, they have met up with ‘H.M. Sloop “The Bounty”’ commanded by Lieutenant Bligh (who sailed as master with Captain Cook), bound for Ottaheitta in the South Sea, in search of discoveries, but particularly sent to carry and transport the bread-fruit from Ottaheitta to the West India Islands.’21

  Clearly, Bligh is gilding the lily somewhat, in claiming that he ‘is in search of discoveries’ rather than the mere grocery errand of getting the bread-fruit, but of course he has nowhere to go in expanding that conversation over dinner, as that adventure is still months away from completion.

  In the meantime, while at Cape Town, Bligh is deeply troubled by the sight of manacled black men, in pods of 30 or so, being whipped along by brutal French slave traders. These poor brutes, ‘imported by the French … from Madagascar, Mosambique, Sumatra and Malacca’, are forced to traipse naked or barely clothed around this bustling trading town of ‘opulence and great abundance’. Each one of them bears a ‘weighty burden’22 on knobbly shoulders covered with open sores due to terrible nutrition, horrible conditions and unceasing labour.

  Why, many of these ‘poor wretches’23 are reduced to scooping their sustenance off the street. Bligh has his stomach turned to see many a slave carefully place his cumbersome load on the roadside before roughly falling to his knees, to reaching out a filthy and emaciated arm of skin and bone to ‘pick up the most offensive offals and claiming them for food’.24

  They eat the offending offal quickly, too hungry and exhausted to worry about dignity, lift their loads once more, and stagger off down the road.

  On his return to the Bounty, Bligh confides in his Log, ‘If the Police would oblige the owners of these Poor Wretches consigned to constant drudgery, to clothe and feed them properly it would be much to their honour and humanity …’ As it is, the slaves are at best in rags, a sight that one ‘would imagine could not fail to reproach the owners of a want of decency and compassion in not relieving such a degree of wretchedness of which they were the cause, and had every call on their humanity to remove’.25

  It is at least something for Bligh to know that when he gets the bread-fruit trees to the West Indies, the British slaves will no longer have to endure such a wretched existence.

  At four bells in the afternoon watch of 1 July 1788 the Bounty fires its cannon 13 times in a salute to the Governor, receiving 13 cannon roars in reply from His Excellency, and then sets sail.

  Four weeks of fast, relatively pleasant sailing ensues, with the notable exception of 22 July when, ‘we experienced as heavy a Storm as ever blew hail and sleet, the sea also exceedingly high’.26

  But for men who are battered veterans of trying for a month to get around Cape Horn, this is no more than a brief inconvenience. They sail on, first passing the island of St Paul – which is roughly the halfway mark between Cape Town and Van Diemen’s Land, on 28 July 1788, and then, on 19 August, the Mewstone, ‘a high bold rock’,27 which juts 150 yards out of the sea like a massive shark fin, and which, according to Bligh’s charts, means that the south-western cape of Van Diemen’s land is but five leagues away.

  Sure enough, on the morning of 22 August they drop anchor in Adventure Bay, a ‘large spacious bay’ with ‘white sandy bottom’,28 which, Bligh knows from his first visit here with Cook back in 1777, is a place abundant in wood and fresh water.

  Most advantageously, as a spot on the east side of Van Diemen’s Land, it is protected from the endless westerlies that blow across the Southern Ocean.

  And yet, when he had visited here with Cook, the Natives had been apparent on the shore, from the first. This time, Bligh is puzzled to see no sign of anyone at all, bar the odd lazy plume of smoke rising in the distance from the green blanket of forest that covers the surrounding mountains. Not that it matters, particularly. The principal reason they have come is to get fresh water and renew their stores of wood, as they are ‘in want of plank’29 – though they are also hoping for fresh food in the form of crabs, fish, and perhaps a shot kangaroo or two, and even some wild duck – and as soon as the following morning a landing party is sent to the shore on the 23-foot Launch. Under the charge of his best young officer, Christian, the wooding party are soon at work in the spot that Bligh had wooded while on voyage with Cook.

  After the trees are felled with an axe, the men dig a sawpit so they can quickly cut the trunks into manageable lengths – with one man standing below pushing and pulling, while the other above pulls and pushes – before they bundle them together and load them into the Launch.

  And so it is that the sounds of industry float to the Palawa, Natives, as the raytji, white people, visiting their homeland, lutruwita, cut down the trees with their axes, even as their saws cut them into neat blocks.

  And now one of the raytji, Midshipman Hayward, breaks away from the work group he is overseeing, and wanders some 20 yards, where his eyes are immediately drawn to something carved on an old dead tree trunk.

  A.D. 1773.30

  Extraordinary. As Captain Bligh will note of the discovery after inspecting it himself, the letters and numbers are carved as freshly as if it had been done just last month, let alone 15 years ago.

  This must have been done by some of Captn. Furneaux crew in March 1773 which is 15 years and 5 months since.31

  While generally the crew is happy to be here, just as any crew is happy to have time back on shore after almost two months at sea, not all are happy all the time – least of all the ship’s Carpenter. Not long after arriving at Adventure Bay, Purcell is also working as part of a
wooding party onshore. Of course, to store the maximum amount of wood in the storage space allotted to it on board, the best thing is for the wood to be cut into small, relatively uniform chunks. Coming on shore himself for an inspection, Bligh expresses the view to Purcell that he is cutting up his wooden ‘billets’ too large and too haphazardly.

  Sorry?

  You are cutting the pieces too large and haphazardly.

  Purcell, not raised in the naval tradition of obeisance to the Captain at all times, pauses. He is a skilled, highly trained, highly accomplished carpenter, and a warrant officer on this ship. He is capable of everything from splinting a damaged mast at the height of a storm, to caulking the hull; from fixing a leak in the Jolly Boat, to replacing a rotten plank in the hull. And now he is engaged in the lowest of all low activities for a skilled carpenter – gathering firewood – and still Bligh is presumptuous enough to tell him he is doing it wrong?

  Purcell pauses … just a little …… longer. In the end, however, he cannot help himself, muttering that Captain Bligh had only left the Bounty and come here, ‘on purpose to find fault’.32

  You challenge me, Sir?

  Not outright, no. But having come to the view that William Bligh is no gentleman, in either sense of the word, Purcell does bristle at such high-handedness from one he is happy to look right in the eye as an equal, and brook any challenge that he is not. He aches to say it: I am as good a man as you, and you will not treat me like a lord condescending to a peasant!

  For now, however, he contents himself with dark muttering only – it has been building for months, and this is merely the release of some of his pent-up anger – the result of which is Purcell is sent back to the ship by Bligh, who is quick to pen his official view, for later perusal by the Admiralty.