Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  The ferry to Greenwich from Bankside was a trippers’ bus, a soulless glass-encased catamaran. A guide gave a worn-out commentary: ‘To your left Christopher Wren’s monument shaped like a candle. To your right HMS Belfast. That’s the Anchor public house. That’s the Globe Theatre.’ I wished Verity was with me and that we’d packed egg sandwiches and a Thermos of tea.

  There was one glass case of Bounty artefacts on show at the Maritime Museum. The model of the ship was small but exact. It showed the complex rigging, Bligh’s cabin, the ventilation grilles for the breadfruit plants and the windows to give them light. I saw the relative smallness of the open launch in which Bligh made his journey from Tofua to Timor, without charts, across the great South Sea.

  There was a polished coconut shell engraved by him with ‘the cup I eat my miserable allowance out of. 28 April 1789’. There was the tiny horn beaker with which he rationed drinking water for each man three times a day, one of the bullets he used to weigh their morsels of bread, his clay pipe, his little silver corkscrew, magnifying glass and reading glass. There was a facsimile of Robert Dodd’s 1790 painting of ‘The mutineers turning Lieutenant Bligh and part of the officers and crew adrift from His Majesty’s ship the Bounty’, and an engraving of Bligh by John Condé, done in 1792 from a portrait by John Russell. It showed a feminine face with Cupid’s bow lips, bright eyes and an intelligent brow – I wondered if it was a fusspot face and if cruelty was discernible.

  I pondered the gap between the souvenirs of the museum and the violence of the ocean, between description and the thing itself, between a frozen portrait and a living face and between life and its reflection in glass.

  4

  Bligh, when he sailed from England to Tahiti, left behind Elizabeth his toothy, plump, round-faced wife, and three daughters: Harriet, Mary, Betsy and a fourth, Fanny, on the way.

  Fletcher Christian was twenty-three, ten years younger than Bligh and unmarried. He was five feet nine, with dark skin and hair, muscled arms and bow legs. He sweated a lot, had a sticky handshake and liked to show off – turning somersaults, lifting heavy things and balancing a gun on the palm of his hand.

  Born in Cockermouth in Cumberland, a market town with mills and coalmines, fertile valleys and wooded hills, he was the fifth and last surviving child. Fletcher was his maternal grandmother’s family name. When he was three his father died. His mother paid for her elder sons to read law and medicine at Cambridge but got into debt, and by 1780, when she was thirty-eight, owed £6500. To avoid the debtors’ gaol she moved to the port of Douglas on the Isle of Man. Bligh was living there, back from a four-year voyage of exploration to the South Seas as Captain Cook’s sailing master on HMS Resolution. He’d seen Cook murdered and hacked to pieces in Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii by hostile islanders – a murder that made him aggressively vigilant in his own command.

  Without money for an education, Fletcher Christian joined the navy aged seventeen. He liked naval life. ‘It is very easy to make one’s self beloved and respected on board ship,’ he wrote to his brother Charles. ‘One has only to be always ready to obey one’s superior officers and to be kind to the common man.’ On a two-year voyage to India, on the merchant ship HMS Eurydice, he was promoted to acting lieutenant and watch leader. In 1785 he wrote to Bligh asking if he’d take him as midshipman on a voyage Bligh was to captain to the West Indies. Bligh had his full complement of men so turned him down. Christian persisted – said he’d work for no pay and wanted only to learn his profession from a navigator as respected as Bligh.

  They made two voyages together before the catastrophe of the Bounty. Christian became Bligh’s protégé, favoured and tutored by him. He dined with him on board ship, was a guest at his house and a family friend. Bligh asked to have him as his midshipman on the Bounty. Christian held him in intense regard. He described him as ‘very passionate’. Bligh was his surrogate father, his role model.

  Something happened to warp his respect and good feelings. Charles, when he heard of the mutiny, thought only extreme provocation could have made Fletcher act so out of character. He said he was ‘slow to be moved’. He wondered if it was the stress of proximity:

  When men are cooped up for a long Time in the Interior of a Ship there oft prevails such jarring Discordancy of Tempers and Conduct that it is enough on many Occasions by repeated Acts of Irritation and Offence to change the Disposition of a Lamb into That of an Animal Fierce and Resentful.

  But on that aborted journey from Tahiti to the West Indies, Christian was cooped up in the Bounty interior for only three weeks before he mutinied. He’d lived for five indulgent months on Tahiti. No one spoke of him as an angry man, he was disposed to be obedient and kind. The ‘jarring Discordancy’ was provoked by Bligh’s erosion of trust and accumulation of insult. It turned Christian’s love of him to hate.

  5

  It wasn’t easy for me to get to Pitcairn in 2004. Press reports of the depraved behaviour of Fletcher Christian’s descendants, and criminal charges for their crimes against girls – gang rape, serial rape, gross indecency – made the islanders wary of visits from strangers. And this tiny isolated island, this remote, unwanted British dependency, had no transport links with anywhere. Most islands in the South Pacific, administered by the French, had airstrips and ferry links. But not Pitcairn.

  There was satellite email, though – set up for the judges and lawyers who’d go from Auckland, in a boat chartered by the British government, to conduct the trials. Islanders too could log on for free, though there was no privacy to their mail. Rosie advised my best chance was to travel with Graham Wragg Expeditions from the island of Mangareva, 300 miles east of Pitcairn, which had an air link with Tahiti. Wragg, a New Zealand botanist, was chartered by the French Polynesian authorities to sail his catamaran Bounty Bay through their waters to Pitcairn. I emailed him. He said he’d take me. A cost of thirteen hundred US dollars would include two days on the uninhabited island of Henderson, 107 miles east-north-east of Pitcairn, where I might see the Ridley turtle, the dark-rumped petrel and the flightless rail. I was to meet him on the quay at Rikitea, Mangareva’s only settlement.

  I paid the money into his Oxford account and rebooked my flights with Harold Wing. ‘Welcome aboard Bounty Bay,’ Wragg wrote. He recommended the Tahiti Airport Lodge, ‘Clean and friendly, five minutes up the hill from the airport.’ He said he’d sort a pension on Mangareva, advised me to bring sunburn cream and seasickness pills and wrote of a fantastic tour into the centre of Tahiti to the crater of the volcano from which the island was born.

  Rosie said bring something nice to wear for church, but apart from that just shorts, jeans and maybe a fleece because it was cool in the evenings. There were mosquitoes, I’d need repellent, and did I eat special food? She added a caution. Things to do with Pitcairn seldom worked out as planned. Shipping was unreliable and dependent on the weather. It was a fact of life. They were used to it.

  Within a week came an email from Wragg. I deserved a medal for perseverance but he had ‘frustrating’ news. There’d been a change of government in Tahiti, his permission to sail in French waters was under review, voyages to Pitcairn were on hold, it was all a mess, he was trying to sort it, it would take him months. ‘Hope your air tickets are date changeable. Sorry about this.’ Startled questions from me were blocked by auto-reply. Wragg and the Bounty Bay were at sea.

  Two weeks later he emailed that he couldn’t risk having his boat impounded by the Tahitian authorities. It had happened before and cost him twenty thousand US dollars in fines. The new Tahitian president, Oscar Temaru, was pro-Polynesian independence and had a one-seat majority over the outgoing pro-France man Gaston Flosse, whose staff had all been sacked and taken their paperwork with them. The British authorities didn’t want outsiders on Pitcairn while the sex trials were going on, and the Pitcairn governor had asked him not to rock the boat – his boat – with the French Polynesian authorities at this delicate time. Maybe he’d be able to take me next year, but trials an
d international manoeuvrings between governments were way above anything he could influence. I wondered about the reimbursement of my thirteen hundred dollars.

  6

  The whole Bounty endeavour was a ‘jarring Discordancy’ to Bligh. Even before setting off from Spithead he was frustrated and bad-tempered.

  His commission was to take the breadfruit saplings acquired in Tahiti to the West Indies to form plantations to feed the colony’s starving slaves. He was to sail via the Endeavour Strait so as to chart that stretch of ocean which was little known and dangerous.

  The architect of the enterprise, Sir Joseph Banks, botanical adviser to King George the Third, traveller and rich entrepreneur, had recommended Bligh to the Admiralty. He thought him a brilliant navigator. They’d sailed together to Tahiti with Captain Cook, so Banks knew Bligh was on good terms with the island’s chiefs. But the Admiralty, preoccupied with war in Europe, gave scant attention to this commercial voyage of a small ship and Bligh was demeaned by a commission which didn’t even merit the official rank of captain and which gave him only a lieutenant’s pay.

  He supervised the transformation of the Bethia, a merchant ship eighty-five feet long and rated only as a cutter, into the Bounty. He turned the great cabin into a conservatory for the saplings, with skylights, air vents and a lead floor cut with hundreds of holes, each fitted with a pot and drainage pipe. His private cabin was a windowless annexe. He was meticulous over detail and the Admiralty was slow to respond to all his queries, so the ship wasn’t ready until October, months later than he’d expected. He worried about setting off late and rounding the notorious Cape Horn in bad weather. Then, when there was a fine fair wind, he remained stuck at Spithead for three weeks because the Admiralty failed to give clearance to sail. The weather worsened, gales swept the Channel and the dispirited crew suffered colds and rheumatism. Bligh wanted the Admiralty bureaucrats punished for negligence.

  While they waited, Fletcher Christian met up with his brother Charles, back from a voyage to India on which he’d served as ship’s surgeon. At the start of it, Charles said, he’d been full of life and vigour, ‘like a tree in promising blossom’, but he’d returned blighted, disappointed and ill. And he was to be charged with involvement in mutiny, a charge that led to a two-year suspension from the navy. Perhaps he communicated mutinous disaffection to Fletcher.

  Bligh, disappointed from the start, set sail on 23 December 1787 in rough, stormy weather. Such late departure meant he reached the hazards of Cape Horn towards the end of March – entirely the wrong time for safe passage round that perilous stretch of ocean where gales and waves up to sixty-five feet high prevailed for all but thirty days of the year.

  It was a voyage of missed winds and lost opportunities. Within hours of leaving Spithead, in rough seas a man was injured in a fall from the mainsail. For three days waves broke over the ship and washed away beer casks, spare yards and spars, loosened the three boats* and ruined the bread. ‘We were an entire Sea on Deck,’ Bligh wrote in his log. He was critical of the design of the ship and its small size and thought the complement of forty-five men too few and their calibre poor.

  On the voyage out to Tahiti, Christian was his prize pupil, good-mannered and keen to please. Bligh made him acting lieutenant, assigned him morning watch, dined with him and even loaned him money despite his own modest pay. When they stopped at Tenerife it was Christian he sent as his envoy to negotiate with the governor for supplies of beef, pumpkins, potatoes and wood.

  Bligh’s vigilance was constant. He was assiduous in keeping his crew healthy, disciplined and fed. When rain and humidity caused mildew, he had the ship aired with fires and sprinkled with vinegar. In clear weather he saw that all hatchways were opened and bedding and clothes washed. Drinking water was filtered through dripstones. Cooped seabirds were force-fed with corn so they didn’t taste fishy. He made sure all men had sufficient rest, that they ate sauerkraut to ward off scurvy, and hot porridge for breakfast when nights were cold. After Sunday inspection for cleanliness he held ‘Divine Service’. But his rigid discipline and efficiency were untempered by tact. He was high-handed, quick to anger, and worse than caustic. He chided one man in front of another, jeered if they made mistakes and made them feel like fools. He didn’t disguise his disdain for his crew and complained often to them about the absence of trained marines and commissioned officers.

  Every afternoon from five to eight he made them all dance, ‘for Relaxation and Mirth’, to the music of Michael Byrne, the ship’s near-blind violinist. He thought this conducive to health. When John Mills the gunner’s mate, and William Brown the assistant gardener, refused to comply with such obligatory fun, Bligh stopped their grog. He judged Matthew Quintal insolent and mutinous, so had him stripped to the waist, bound by his wrists and watched by the crew while he was lashed two dozen times. He fell out with John Fryer the master, and with the surgeon Thomas Huggan. Both refused to dine with him. Bligh called Huggan, with reason, a fat, lazy, entirely incompetent sot and noted in his log that he was constantly drunk. (Huggan diagnosed scurvy when William Brown complained of rheumatism, James Valentine, an able seaman, died of an infection after being ‘bled’ by him for some minor ailment, and he described his own delirium tremens as caused by ‘paralytic affection’.)

  After three months, on 28 March 1788, the Bounty reached Cape Horn. For twenty-five days Bligh forced the ship against great waves, gales and driving winds, snow, sleet and hail. The decks flooded, men were injured trying to manage the sails, eight became ill with exhaustion, the cook broke a rib, Huggan dislocated his shoulder. When neither men nor ship could take any more, Bligh turned and headed east to approach Tahiti via the Cape of Good Hope, southern Australia and New Zealand. By this change he added ten thousand miles to the journey. From Spithead to Tahiti he logged twenty-eight thousand miles. He arrived in October 1788. The voyage had taken ten months. Bligh prided himself on having kept all but one of his crew alive in extreme conditions. But the men had had enough of him. William Purcell said he watched them solely to find fault.

  * A launch of 23 feet, a cutter of 18 feet and a jolly boat of 16 feet.

  7

  The Tahitians had cause to be chary about visits from English mariners. Twenty years before the Bounty saga, on 18 June 1767, the Dolphin arrived at the island captained by Samuel Wallis, a Cornishman. His commission by the Admiralty was ‘To discover and obtain a complete knowledge of the Land or Islands supposed to be situated in the Southern Hemisphere’. When he reached Tahiti and saw mountains obscured by cloud he thought he’d discovered ‘the Southern Continent’.

  The islanders, intrigued as his ship came into view, paddled out to it in their canoes. As a symbol of peace and friendship they held up plantain branches and at Wallis’s invitation they surged on board ship to marvel at this floating island. In the noise and excitement a goat butted one of them on the bottom. The man turned, saw a creature ‘so different from any he had ever seen’ rearing on its hind legs to butt him again. In terror he jumped overboard. Screaming, other Tahitians jumped too or scrambled to their canoes. This was no friendly ship. It housed monsters.

  Wallis had been months at sea and needed water and fresh food. He sent a boat to the shore. It was stoned by tribesmen. As a warning, he fired a nine-pound cannon ball across the water and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Furneaux, fired buckshot at the stone throwers, wounding one of them in the shoulder. In search of safe anchorage Wallis then sailed to another part of the island. Again he tried to send a boat to the shore, again islanders threatened it with clubs and paddles, and again Wallis’s men fired. They killed one man and grievously wounded another.

  There was a day’s silence, then a few Tahitians approached the ship in canoes. They bartered hogs, fowl and fruit, for nails, knives and trinkets. But then two thousand of them paddled out in three hundred canoes and circled round. Women made alluring gestures to the Dolphin’s crew, men sang, blew conches and played flutes. From a canopied canoe a chief hande
d up a bunch of red and yellow feathers for Wallis, while large canoes filled with men converged. Another chief held up a coconut-tree branch. There was a ‘Universal Shout’ and the men in the canoes showered the Dolphin with stones. Again Wallis ordered fire. He sprayed small shot indiscriminately at the Tahitians, who panicked, retreated, then reconverged. Wallis fired the ship’s great guns. The canoes scattered, regrouped, hoisted white streamers, and tribesmen armed with slings hurled two-pound stones at the ship.

  Wallis smashed the force of the ship’s cannon at the islanders until they fled from the sea and into the forest. Next morning a party of English sailors landed in Matavai Bay. It was deserted. Close to the river’s estuary Lieutenant Furneaux stuck a British flag into the ground and in the name of His Majesty declared this land King George the Third’s Island.

  A dozen Tahitians paddled out to the ship and in supplication offered gifts of hogs and green plantain leaves and made a speech which was not understood. Unchallenged, Wallis sent boats to the shore for water. When the islanders again dared approach the ship in canoes filled with stones, he ordered tremendous fire from all the ship’s guns. He bombarded the canoes, the woods, the hills where the women and children were hiding. Within minutes no creature was to be seen. He then sent armed boats to destroy all the moored canoes. Many were sixty feet long and had taken years of painstaking work to build.