Mutiny on the Bounty

by Peter Fitzsimons

  Try as they might, however, the Mutineers cannot get to the bottom of who is behind the plot, who is the driving force. It almost seems as if it is a collective plan, put together by all of the women, over months.

  What to do?

  Well, what can they do?

  Punish one or two of them?

  Kill them all, then?

  It is out of the question. Firstly, it is unlikely such a massacre could be organised. And besides that, for all the trouble that comes with the women, it would risk being a very long few decades ahead without them.

  In the end, once the women repent, and promise only good behaviour from now on – the first and most important rule to be observed is that there is to be no axe-murdering, and that’s a promise – the men have a private meeting and, as Young notes, while there is to be no punishment for now, it is agreed, ‘that the first female who misbehaves should be put to death, and this punishment is to be repeated on each offence until we discover the real intentions of the women’.4

  Can the men trust the women?

  They simply have to, but what sleep they gain is restless at best. For the next two days, Young records in his journal, he is ‘bothered and idle’.5

  How can he sleep, close his eyes and get real rest, when, at the tiniest sound, he opens his eyes with a start to see if a woman with an axe is looming above him, about to chop his head off with the sharp side, or dash his brains out with the blunt end?

  After four days of this, with a menacing mood still gripping the village, Young takes two loaded muskets, with extra ammunition, and secretes them behind a well-known tree in the forest, returning to tell the other three men where they are. Now, if the women attack, those muskets will be, ‘for the use of any person who might be so fortunate as to escape, in the event of an attack being made’.6

  Before the month is over, the women do attack, but are beaten off by the white men. Again they beg forgiveness, and again they are pardoned.

  The cycle continues. Strengthening the women’s hand is the fact that they are united, making it clear that he who punishes one of them, punishes all of them, and will have to face all of them. Given their far greater number – 11 of them, to just four Mutineers – this is no small threat. And yes, the Mutineers at least have more weapons and are more skilled with them, but when the women start to equip themselves with firearms, and head off into the hills for days at a time, that advantage, too, begins to dissipate. With women out there, with muskets, the men have to remain vigilant, at all times, a state of perpetual wariness that, indeed, begins to wear them down.

  One way or another, it is a situation that cannot endure for long.

  •

  It is morning on 27 December 1795 when a sail appears on the horizon.7

  A ship! A ship!

  Fear grips the Mutineers to a man.

  Scarcely daring to breathe, secreted in their hideaways, mentally rehearsing where they might flee, how they would defend themselves, what they would do, they watch the sails come closer and now … shrink before their eyes, until they disappear! Whoever these sailors were – it had not been possible to see which flag they flew – they have gone away.

  The Mutineers breathe again, but this visitation is not a one-off. At a later point, they spy another distant sail that passes without coming closer, while still another one actually comes so close that they can see men on deck, staring curiously in their direction. Mercifully, Pitcairn’s rugged nature, with no easy landing spots, no shelter, and many steep cliffs dissuades the passers-by from attempting a landing.

  Again, the Mutineers breathe, while the women groan and wail with disappointment.

  September 1796, England, gone is the sailor

  Now seven years since the Mutiny, Captain William Bligh resumes his life as a sea Captain. His career prospers as he commands HMS Calcutta and Director in the French Revolutionary War.

  If only he could be allowed to forget the whole dreadful episode.

  But, clearly, no-one else wants to. Fascination from the rest of Great Britain, about just what happened to Fletcher Christian, does not abate, and is lifted further in September 1796 by fresh revelations.

  Published in the newspaper The True Briton, and devoured by a ravenous readership, ‘The Letters of Fletcher Christian’ – though entirely fraudulent – purport to be the true account of the dashing buccaneer’s adventures after the Mutiny, an extraordinary swashbuckling tale full of sword fights, gun battles, piracy and a safe port found in South America.

  There is no doubt in the account that Fletcher Christian is the hero to beat them all – even though it is mixed with a fetching bitter regret that it had come to mutiny. Perhaps the person most shocked and infuriated to read it is Bligh.

  His strong suspicion is that the perfidious wretch Christian has sent these letters to his duplicitous brother, who has in turn conspired to have this new set of slurs also published, just to embarrass Bligh. Apoplectic with rage, he immediately writes to Sir Joseph Banks:

  Is it possible that wretch can be at Cadiz and that he has had intercourse with his brother, that sixpenny professor, who has more law about him than honour? My dear Sir, I can only say that I heartily despise the praise of any of the family of Christian, and I hope and trust yet that the Mutineer will meet with his deserts.8

  No less than William Wordsworth, the famed poet and one-time schoolmate of Fletcher Christian, has no illusions that his old friend has re-emerged. In fact, when Fletcher’s supposed autobiography is published in 1796, for the first and only time in his life Wordsworth writes a letter to a newspaper:

  There having appeared in your Entertainer … an extract from a work purporting to be the production of Fletcher Christian, who headed the mutiny on board the Bounty, I think it proper to inform you, that I have the best authority for saying that this publication is spurious. Your regard for the truth will induce you to apprize your readers of this circumstance.

  Yours,

  William Wordsworth9

  Now, just how Wordsworth could have ‘the best authority’ for saying the publication is spurious, when even Bligh is unsure, he does not make clear. The truth remains, however. Despite such fanciful accounts – of unknown source – no-one has the first clue where the remaining Mutineers are, and what has become of Fletcher Christian.

  •

  For four long years the women continue to treat the Mutineers with a troubling, sometimes sinister, indifference, and the uneasy truce continues. Sleep still does not come easy to Young, and so he comes up with a plan to improve their spirits by … making some.

  Ten years ago, as a young man, in St Kitts, he had been taught how to make spirits out of sugarcane, distilling it using jars. Which is fortuitous. For McCoy had worked in a Scottish distillery many years before, and between them they are able to pool their knowledge in order to make a pool of liquor for parched throats, idle hands and bored brains of Pitcairn. After all, they still have the biggest copper cooking pot from the galley of the Bounty, and, by boiling up tea root and fermenting it for a week, followed by distilling it to concentrate the alcohol, they might be able to get roaring drunk.

  For you see, given that tea root grows everywhere on the island it should be easy to do for men so inclined, and Young begins to teach the method to the other men. It takes a little trial and error, and the women hover suspiciously – but finally it proves possible to concoct a potent beverage …. whish …. shtartsh … to have quite … a sherioush … shimpact.

  Before long, heavy drinking among the men becomes as much a normal part of life on the island as seagulls cawing, waves pounding on the shore, and brutal, uncaring sex.

  It becomes more a matter of remark when they are not drunk than when they are drunk, for sobriety is soon a rarity, but …

  But hark!

  What is that?

  In the distance a scream is heard … which proves to be the last earthly sound emitted by Matt Quintal’s wife, Tevarua, who, while trying to collect eggs from bird nests
nestled high in the cliffs, has lost her purchase and fallen to her death.

  Suddenly lonely, Quintal decides he would like a new wife, and, despite the fact there are many available widows on the island, in vino veritas, announces he wants, nay, demands, either Young or Smith’s wife, it doesn’t matter much. One or other man must hand his woman over or he will kill one of the men.

  Young and Smith take the threat to heart, and decide to embark on what has become Pitcairn’s traditional method of settling strong arguments. Murder. The next time that Quintal falls dead drunk, which is only a day or so after he has made the threat to kill them, Young and Smith loom over his sozzled form, each with an axe in hand.

  Two savage blows, and that is the end of that conflict – the bloodied life of Matt Quintal comes to an appropriately bloody end. (Despite that, only a short time later, Teraura, Young’s wife, has a son she names … Quintal! Yet one more sign of a Pitcairn family tree completely covered in interconnecting vines.)

  And now there are just three men left on the island: Ned Young, Alec Smith and Billy McCoy. Having murdered together, Young and Smith become even closer, and take to spending many hours every afternoon sitting in the shade, with Young even taking the trouble to teach Smith how to read and write by transcribing the Bible – likely skipping over the ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ bit.

  Billy McCoy? He has no interest in either reading or writing, and only cares about drinking to try to take away the pain of being unhappy, lost on an island in the Pacific, leading a pointless existence. He is so miserable that not even Christmas could cheer him up, for it is on the Eve of that sacred day in 1799 – 12 years and a day since he sailed on the Bounty from Spithead – McCoy decides to give up the uneven struggle. Tying a large weight around his neck, just as Fletcher Christian had on the day of the Mutiny, he leaps off towards the beckoning finger of Davy Jones. This is a man who had been determined to manage his own death, rather than wait for it to come in the night at the hands of either the men, or the women.

  Merry Christmas, Ned Young. Having once planned to kill all the men except his mate, Alec Smith, he now finds that McCoy’s suicide has spared him the trouble of another murder.

  Alas, alas, Young has very little time to enjoy this gift of the Gods. For with the dawn of Christmas Day, he is hit by such an asthma attack that, despite all but coughing up a kidney, he simply cannot catch his breath and … succumbs to that rarest of all things for a Pitcairner – a natural death.

  Merry Christmas, Mr Smith! Yes, 12 years since leaving England and nine years on from the burning of the Bounty, Alec Smith is the last man standing, his sudden solitude attended by an epiphany. The depressive delirium and suicide of drunken Billy McCoy shocks Smith so much that he swears off liquor for life. (Helping that decision is the fact that he is now one man with ten women, who have already shown a propensity to kill what they don’t like – and they don’t like drinking.)

  A certain quiet descends on Pitcairn, with none quieter than Smith, a sole patriarch surrounded by potentially murdering matriarchs, keenly aware that every night as he goes to sleep, his only chance of waking again is that none, not one, of these women has anything against him. He must treat them well.

  •

  The fact that there is nobody left to kill – and on the reckoning that the women are not inclined to kill the one being capable of giving them children – life proceeds relatively calmly for the next decade.

  Both the women and the 14 children alike come to address him as ‘father’. Growing into the role, Smith becomes what he has never been before, a good and peaceful leader. For their part, the women, too, change their approach. With no men fighting over them, and none working the fields, they are both happier and busier than ever before. They work, they raise their children, they take turns spending the night with Alec, they become ever closer to each other.

  All proceeds calmly until one midnight, in the early years of the new century, when Smith receives an unexpected visitor. The way he will recount it ever afterwards, his visitor is no less than the Archangel Gabriel come ‘down from heaven’ to warn him of his danger ‘for his past wickedness’.10

  Now, when it comes to wicked sins, Smith knows only too well that, high in the Kingdom of Heaven, his register doth overflow and the Lord has had to put another man on, just to keep track. Mutiny and murder are only the beginning of it. He has taken the Lord’s name in vain more times than he can remember, been violent on the innocent, stolen, lusted in his heart, coveted his neighbour’s wife before sleeping with her, after knocking his neighbour on the head, he has fornicated before wedlock more times than he can remember, and committed adultery after marriage – all that, and while this island of Pitcairn has been baptised in blood, not a single one of the children now running around has been baptised at all!

  The result is that, when Smith awakes, he has the fear of God in him, and, with the Archangel Gabriel as his guide, becomes if not quite a tub-thumping Christian, at least his perception of what a tub-thumping Christian should be.

  Now, where did he put that Holy Bible that Ned had used to teach him how to read and write?

  Here.

  Now, though Smith does his best to read and understand it, Young’s lessons had not quite been finished when he had died, meaning that Smith – acting as parishioner, priest and Pope – does not always grasp the full intent, or extent, of the Bible’s lessons, and so mistakenly forms a few new Christian traditions of his own.

  Luke 5:35, for example – ‘But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days’11 has long been used by Christians as a reason to fast on Good Friday. Smith, though, interprets it differently. Using notes from a Prayer Book that had come to him from Young – ‘Good Friday: fast, Ash Wednesday: fast’12 – Alec comes to the conclusion that they must fast every Wednesday and Friday.

  Such fasting is no easy thing, and many times the Pitcairn women and children faint from hunger, but as they are all soon converted to a life of strict faith, they know that Jesus died for their sins, that God is watching, and they must stay with it. And so they do, praying every day, fasting twice a week, and attending services conducted by Smith every Sunday. A pious Christian community grows up on the same bloodied ground that has seen the massacre of Mutineers, and the annihilation of the Native men.

  Meanwhile, Smith’s dreams continue, or, more particularly, nightmares, as he suffers the ‘recurrence of another vision’ in which he is ‘carried away to view the flames and torments of the bottomless pit’.13 These infernal visions drive his devotion deeper still. Soon, every woman and child on Pitcairn can not only recount the Lord’s Prayer, but does so every day. And from having church services only on Sunday, they move to having morning and evening Christian services every day with a third added on Sunday. Not a man to do things by halves, when Smith delivers his Sunday sermon, he doesn’t just do it once, he repeats it twice more in the same service – three times in total – so that every word has the best chance of being remembered. Though they don’t know it, as they have no contact with the outside world, Pitcairn becomes one of the most devout Christian communities in the world.

  But still, so isolated, will the world ever find out?

  •

  It is the most extraordinary thing.

  For on the afternoon of 6 February 1808, an American sealer, the Topaz, under the command of Captain Mayhew Folger from Boston, spots an island on the far horizon south-west by west, where none is marked on his chart, and, after steering towards it, he finally drops the anchor in the wee hours of the following morning. Shortly after dawn he puts off two boats to look for seals and is in one of them approaching the beach when he sees a Tahitian-style canoe boat paddling towards them with three Natives aboard. He is stunned when they hail him.

  ‘Who are you?’ one of them asks in perfect English, and even with an English accent.

  ‘This is the ship Topaz of the United States of America. I am the ma
ster, Captain Mayhew Folger, and American.’

  Incredulous, they fire off rapid questions: ‘You are an American?’ ‘You come from America?’ ‘Where is America?’ ‘Is it in Ireland?’

  But enough. For now, Folger has a question for them.

  ‘Who are you?’ Folger asks them.

  ‘We are Englishmen …’ they reply.

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘On that island which you see.’

  ‘How then are you Englishmen?’

  ‘We are Englishmen, because our father was an Englishman.’

  ‘Who is your father?’

  ‘Alec.’

  ‘Who is Alec?’

  ‘Don’t you know Alec?’

  ‘How should I know Alec?’

  ‘Well then, did you know Captain Bligh of the Bounty?’14

  As a matter of fact, Captain Folger does. Everyone in the English-speaking maritime world knows of the Bounty.

  Landing on the beach, Folger follows the three young men up to the village, to be greeted by the last surviving Mutineer, Alec Smith, with white hair, surrounded by – Folger counts them – a dozen or so wives, and a gaggle of children. There are about three dozen in all.

  To begin with, Smith is ravenous to know details of what has happened in the world, and Folger tells him, among other things, of the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and Admiral Horatio Nelson’s subsequent victory over the French at Trafalgar in 1805.

  Smith is so delighted at the news that, as Captain Folger would recount, he rises, ‘from his seat, took off his hat, swung it three times round his head, threw it on the ground sailor-like and cried out “Old England forever!”’15

  Captain Folger likes him. And is clear: ‘Whatever may have been the Errors or Crimes of Smith the Mutineer in times Back, he is at present in my opinion a worthy man and may be useful to Navigators who traverse this immense ocean.’16

  As to what happened during the Mutiny on the Bounty, Smith, in turn, gives a comprehensive account, making clear that he barely had anything to do with the Mutiny himself, having awoken to find it already going at full tilt – led by Fletcher Christian, due to ‘the overbearing and tyrannical behaviour of the captain’17 – and when arms were pressed into his hands, he had no choice but to take them up, or risk being killed by the Mutineers himself, don’t you see?