At the end of their conversation, Smith gives Captain Folger a present to take with him, nothing less than the Bounty’s prized Kendall chronometer and the azimuth compass that had not only survived the Mutiny, but had had pride of place on Smith’s mantelpiece for most of the last two decades.
Grateful, stunned to have come across such a story, Folger sails away only ten or so hours after arriving and a few months later tells the whole story to a British Royal Navy officer he meets in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso, and that officer, fascinated, writes up his own report, makes a copy of the Topaz’s Log covering the relevant date and forwards the lot to the British Admiralty, who receive the report on 14 May 1809.
Nothing happens. Either disbelieved, or at least placed at the bottom of the list of priorities while Great Britain is at war with France, it is not until a year later that a report appears in the literary and political journal, The Quarterly Review.
‘If this [claim] rested solely on the faith that is due to Americans,’ the Review notes, ‘with whom we say, with regret, truth is not always considered as a moral obligation, we should hesitate in giving it this publicity.’18
But the editors had checked. And the Bounty really did have a Kendall chronometer with it when it disappeared, just as there had been an Alec Smith on the ship’s muster who had disappeared and was presumed to be a Mutineer.
Still, the reaction is strangely muted. After all, the Mutiny on the Bounty was two decades earlier, with many of the principals now dead, and the broad mass of the population not necessarily familiar with the story. As for the Royal Navy, there proves to be little interest in sending out a punitive expedition on the chance of capturing one Mutineer who is now no more than a little old man, and a Christian one at that, leading a model Christian community.
Still, mystified at the lack of response from the British Admiralty – do you understand, I have FOUND them? – Folger writes a further missive, recounting his experience on Pitcairn, adding: ‘I am sending you the azimuth compass which I received from Alex Smith. I repaired and made use of it on my homeward passage. I now forward it to your lordship.’19
No response.
•
At 2.30 am on Saturday 17 September 1814, Captain Philip Pipon on the quarter-deck of his ship the HMS Tagus, on a mission to hunt down the American ship USS Essex, for its part in the Second War of Independence, is awoken in his cabin to news that originated from an eagle-eyed seaman in the crow’s nest who has been gazing into the moonlight: ‘Land ahoy, abeam on the lee!’20
It is some six leagues to their south.
With no such island marked on his map, Pipon is curious to take a closer look – at least such islands should be marked, with their co-ordinates taken for the British Admiralty so other British ships can know of shoals, reefs, safe harbours etc.
And so, at dawn, after dropping anchor in the closest to a safe harbour he can find – it is a rocky cove – he sees two Natives paddling a canoe towards his vessel. That is not the shock. Many such tiny islands have Natives.
But look what happens now.
For as they get close, one of them calls up in English, ‘Won’t you heave us a rope, now?’
Of course they do, and as the curious crew stand gaping, the two brown young men shinny up the rope as if born for the task, and Pipon gets a closer look at them.
The first fellow to make it up on deck is a handsome dark-haired six foot youth, whose ‘well shaped muscular limbs were displayed to much advantage’.21 The only thing that saves him from being naked is the cloth bound around his loins.
‘Who are you?’ asks the Captain.
‘I am Thursday October Christian,’ the lad replies, even as the second lad makes it to the top and stands by his side.
‘Thursday October’, indeed? And also a Christian, you say? No doubt some missionary has previously come to this land … and yet the lad continues.
‘I am the son of the late Fletcher Christian.’22
It takes a moment for Pipon to comprehend what the lad has just said. Fletcher Christian?
Suddenly it all makes sense. That is why the handsome young man with the slightly regal bearing – he carries himself as if of many more years, a natural leader – is more light-skinned than most Natives. That is why he speaks a strange kind of English, with lots of odd, hybrid words. And that is why his last name is Christian. At last, nigh on 25 years after the infamous Mutiny on the Bounty, they really have discovered the secret land of the Mutineers; it is Pitcairn Island.
Captain Pipon gazes at Thursday even more closely.
‘He was … about twenty-five years of age, a tall fine young man about six feet high, with dark black hair, and a countenance extremely open and interesting; he wore no clothes except a piece of cloth round his loins, a straw hat ornamented with black cock’s feathers, and occasionally a peacock’s, nearly similar to that worn by the Spaniards in South America, though smaller.’23
And the second lad? Who are you?
‘George Young,’ the lad replies with similarly accented English, ‘son of Midshipman Young of the Bounty.’24
And now it is the turn of the lads to exult, for when the ship’s dog runs up, panting and barking, both Thursday and George yell with delight.
‘Oh, what a pretty little thing it is!’ cries George Young. ‘I know it is a dog, for I have heard of such an animal!’25
Pipon, stunned at this sudden turn of events, is rowed ashore and is soon struggling up a steep path, which finally flattens to something of a plateau. At this point, he is suddenly greeted by a strange and wizened white man, who introduces himself as … Alec Smith.
‘When he learned we had landed without arms,’ Pipon would recount, ‘and were not come to seize his person, he met us on the road … His wife accompanied him a very old woman, blind from age. They were at first extremely alarmed, lest our visit was intended against him, but as we observed to him, we were not even aware of his being then living, and that we had no intention of that nature, he was soon relieved from all his apprehensions.’26
So much so, the visitors are invited to Mr and Mrs Smith’s house.
Here, Pipon listens to much of the story – the Mutiny, the hunt for an island, the arrival at Pitcairn, the burning of the Bounty, the murder of so many men, including Fletcher Christian – whose widow, and Thursday’s mother, Isabella, is one of the very quiet women gathered around, part of a throng of the 40 people now living on the island – and the saga thereafter until there had been just one white man left, with ten women and their children, and a single Jolly Boat all that is left of the famous Bounty.
Pipon is stunned to discover such a strong Christian community can have been built on the foundations of foul mutiny. Of course, there is no trace of the man who had wrought that mutiny, but even now Pipon can hear his echoes in this community, in a very odd way.
They know the Lord’s Prayer and, I believe, the Creed. They frequently call upon our Blessed Saviour, saying, ‘I will arise and go to my father, and will say, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.’ This, I may imagine, was early taught them by Christian, with reference to the shameful part he had acted, both against God and his country; but it was truly pleasing to see, that there poor people are so well-disposed as to listen attentively to moral instruction and believe in the divine attributes of God.27
It is like a parable brought to life. While the Mutineers have clearly destroyed themselves with lust, liquor and murder, this community, built around faith in the Lord, has transformed itself into a model of how man should live.
And, it has to be said, they live very well!
Their habitations are extremely neat … The little village at Pitcairn forms a pretty square. [Alec Smith] occupies the house at the upper end, and Thursday October Christian one opposite to him; the centre is a fine lawn where the poultry wander; but it is fenced in so as to prevent the intrusion of hogs, &c. It was easily to be perceived th
at in this establishment the labour and ingenuity of European hands had been exerted … In their houses they have also a good deal of decent furniture, consisting of beds, and bedsteads, and covering; they have also tables and large chests; their clothing and linen are made from the bark of a certain tree …28
Now, strictly speaking, Alec Smith should be taken back to England and tried for the Mutiny of a quarter-century earlier.
And yet, this old man swears on his well-thumbed Bible, ‘I was sleeping in my hammock’29 when the Mutiny occurred. Indeed, this poor pious soul stumbled up on deck to find ‘everything in great confusion’,30 a confusion which included a bound Captain Bligh being held by those evil Mutineers! (This would be news to Bligh. To this day, when he wakes in the night, it is not to the vision of the Archangel Gabriel, but the memory of Smith aiming a musket at his chest, after Christian broke into his cabin, unleashing the Mutiny.)
As to the fate of the leader of the Mutineers, the old man has news: ‘Fletcher Christian was never happy after the rash and inconsiderate step he had taken, but became sullen and morose, and having, by many acts of cruelty and inhumanity, brought on himself the hatred and detestation of his companions, he was shot by a black man whilst digging in his field, and almost instantly expired.’31
No doubt about it, Smith makes clear. Christian was a deeply troubled man after that very unfortunate mutiny.
But what he stresses again and again is his own innocence. And, really, who, in good conscience, could be so cold of heart, so un-Christian in charity, to separate this Christian paterfamilias from his clearly devoted flock, by arresting him? Certainly not such a man as Pipon.
‘Although in the eye of the law [we] could only consider him in the light of a criminal of the deepest dye,’ the good Captain would note, ‘[yet Alec Smith’s] exemplary conduct and fatherly care of the whole of the little colony cannot but command admiration.’32
Take him back to England, to face justice?
Decidedly, no.
‘It would have been a heart-breaking circumstance to have torn him from those he most dearly loved, as well as cruel to a degree, to have left a young colony to perish without such a protector and adviser as he was in all their concerns, both with respect to the tilling of the ground, and the private and domestic concerns of all.’33
Besides which, by informing the Admiralty of this outpost, passing British ships of the future would have a place to wood and water and re-victual, as the Tagus does now.
Captain Pipon is confident he has made the right decision.
And so, just six hours after arriving, the Tagus is on its way, leaving the small Christian community exactly as it had found them, bar two things. First, it has corrected their mistake.
‘On our arrival here we found that [Alec Smith] was mistaken in the day of the week and month: he considered it to be Sunday, the 18th of September, whereas it was Saturday, the 17th.’34
And it has relieved them through trade of ‘many valuable refreshments … such as a few small pigs, yams, cocoa-nuts. bananas, &c’35 that young Thursday and George manage to guide through the surf on their canoe, to the side of the ship.
As the British ship sails off, Smith remains free on Pitcairn Island, surrounded by his faithful family flock. He and his pious people weep with joy. Truly, the Lord has smiled upon him. Yea, He is good. Yea, He is great. Yea, He has shown the greatest mercy to them.
Now, time for church service, everyone.
The Tagus leaves in its happy wake a people who are no longer English, Scottish, Irish, American, Tahitian or Tubuaian. They are, instead, a people all their own, a little flock descended from Mutineers and Natives, the people of Pitcairn, living at last in promised peace, a life of fabled faith on a tiny, beautiful island.
Theirs is a world apart, and they are a people apart, the children of the revolution, the progeny of one of the most compelling stories the world will ever know, the Mutiny on the Bounty.
Sail on.
EPILOGUE
For never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.1
John Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’
The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him.2
Albert Camus, The Rebel
For the rest of his long career in the Royal Navy, Captain William Bligh’s brilliance continued unabated, as did his monumental bastardry, despite the fact that – even beyond the three mutinies he’d suffered in 1789 – still more mutinies were recorded on his watch. For four weeks in 1797 the crews of no fewer than 20 ships of the Royal Navy mutinied in Nore harbour in a dispute over pay and conditions. The crew of HMS Director, under the command of Captain Bligh, was the last to surrender. Although his abrasive manner of leadership continued to rankle with his men, still his brilliance and bravery shone through. At the Battle of Copenhagen in April 1801, where the British Fleet fell upon the Danish Fleet, just outside the harbour of Copenhagen, he performed so well that Lord Nelson publicly thanked Bligh for his judgement, skill and bravery on deck after the battle was won.
So overwhelming did his bastardry become, however, that, on 26 February 1805, he faced a further court martial because of it. It was convened aboard HMS San Josef and Bligh’s accuser was Lieutenant John Frazier, who the year before had sailed under Bligh on the Warrior – a 74-gun, 1600-ton ship of the line, with a complement of 600 men – and because of his scarifying experience brought charges of abuse against Bligh for language, threats and behaviour unbecoming to an officer.
Giving testimony with the force of the truly scandalised, Lieutenant Frazier paints a picture that is very familiar to those who know Bligh and have had the misfortune to serve under him.
Gentlemen, in the course of honourably fulfilling my duties, Captain Bligh called me a ‘damn’d rascal’, and a ‘damn’d scoundrel’, and in front of the crew bitterly complained that ‘never was a man troubled with such a set of blackguards as I am’. He, furthermore, shook his fist in my face, called me a ‘liar’, yelled that I ‘bore false witness’, and declared every man in the Warrior constituted ‘a parcel of villains and scoundrels’.3
These proved to be his opening remarks.
For Bligh goes on to call others, ‘an infamous scoundrel, an audacious rascal, a vagrant and a dastardly villain’, and ‘a damn’d long pelt of a bitch’.4
And so it goes.
After two days the examinations and cross-examinations are complete, and the court retires to consider its verdict. It does not take long.
All rise.
Their Honours find the charges, ‘part proved’. Captain Bligh is officially reprimanded and instructed to ‘be in the future more correct in [your] language’,5 the best result he could hope for, under the circumstances of the damning testimony that has been delivered.
The fact that it does little to damage Bligh’s career is revealed just two months later, when – due to the efforts of the relentless Sir Joseph Banks pushing his case once more – Bligh is asked to become the next Governor of New South Wales, the notoriously corrupt colony that is a disgrace to the British Empire.
After all, as Sir Joseph writes to his protégé, the incumbent Governor, Philip Gidley King, is exhausted, having ‘carried into effect a reform of great extent, which militated much with the interest of the soldiers and settlers there. He is, consequently, disliked and much opposed, and has asked leave to return.’6
Who better to command and regain the confidence and respect of a group of soldiers who disliked and were much opposed to the old Governor than Captain Bligh?
(Seriously, Sir Joseph? Seriously?)
It did not end well.
For, once in New South Wales – with Betsy and all but one of their daughters remaining in England – it was not long before the mother of all mutinies against Bligh took place, this one the infamous Rum Rebellion, but that is another story (and, I hope, another book).
Not surprisingly, well before Bligh has made landfall in Sydney, his reputation has preceded him, moved in and made itself uncomfortable. There was always going to be a clash, and this time the man leading the rebellion against Bligh’s rule was that most fascinating of Australian heroes and villains, John Macarthur. Wealthy, well-connected, influential and ruthless, Macarthur quickly laid the foundations for the only successful military coup in our national history. And Bligh helped, quickly rousing both the people and the soldiers against him.
As Bligh began reforming the Rum Corps, and slicing away at Macarthur’s power, graffiti showed up all over Sydney Town:
Is there no CHRISTIAN in New South Wales to put a stop to the tyranny of the Governor?7
At the next confrontation with Macarthur, after Bligh had confiscated Macarthur’s industrial-scale still for producing rum, Sydney’s wealthiest man threatened the Governor that he’d better return it, as ‘if you do not, you will perhaps get another voyage in your Launch again’.8
Funny he should say that.
For not long afterwards, Macarthur was indeed instrumental in having the Rum Corps rise against Bligh and having him held prisoner in Government House, before he would agree to return to England as Captain of HMS Porpoise. Bligh did so agree, but, once on the ship, turned his guns on Sydney Town before heading to Van Diemen’s Land instead, where he held out, blockading the state before sulkily returning to a Sydney finally prospering under a popular Governor, the former Lieutenant Lachlan Macquarie who had met Captain Bligh so many years and so many miles ago. (As I say, it is another fascinating story that needs another book.)
As Bligh’s successor as Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie had to put up with the pompous presence of his predecessor for many an awkward month and was not long in spotting the problem, noting in a letter to his brother: ‘Governor Bligh certainly is a most disagreeable person to have any dealings, or public business to transact with; having no regard whatever to his promises or engagements however sacred, and his natural temper is uncommonly harsh and tyrannical in the extreme.’
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