by Tony Parsons
‘William Bligh?’ says the wretch. ‘Bligh is not dead. Bligh lives.’
We were stunned.
‘That is not possible,’ I said. ‘We – I mean, they – put Bligh in a launch just thirty nautical miles from Tofua.’
‘And Tofua is teeming with hostile natives,’ said William Brown. ‘They will put your head on a stick and call it supper.’
‘No – William Bligh lives,’ insisted the shipwrecked sailor. ‘I saw him with my own eyes on the streets of London. And I saw him again on the dock of Portsmouth.’ And then he smiled. ‘I touched my cap to the great man.’
John Mills whipped out his knife.
‘This lying dog!’ he said. ‘This lying piece of burned meat! I will cut his throat and stop his lies!’
‘Put your knife away,’ said John Adams, not even looking at the snarling oaf. ‘There will be no more cutting today.’ He took the wet rag from Maimiti’s hands and touched it gently to the shipwrecked sailor’s temple. ‘Friend,’ he said. ‘How is it possible for Bligh to live? He was set adrift in hostile waters. And even if he survived the natives on Tofua, he was four thousand miles from civilisation.’
‘It’s not possible,’ I said, looking at the others. ‘Is it?’
‘William Bligh sailed his little launch four thousand miles,’ the shipwrecked sailor told us. ‘He sailed it from Tonga to Timor in the Dutch East Indies. He lost a man in Tofua to the natives. He was chased by cannibals in Fiji. He lost five men after landing in Timor. But he did it. They are calling it the greatest act of seamanship in the King’s navy.’
‘William Bligh was a monster,’ said Isaac Martin. ‘He was a cruel, vicious monster.’
‘William Bligh is a hero,’ laughed the shipwrecked sailor. ‘More than two years after the Bounty left England, he reported the mutiny to the Admiralty.’
The men conferred.
It was worse than we could have possibly imagined. Not only had Bligh survived, the fat little devil was considered a hero.
And in our hearts we somehow knew it was true.
When we turned back to the shipwrecked sailor, he was being tended to by the native women. They all loved an English sailor. Especially one on his last legs.
‘Mother, I am nursed by angels,’ the dying sailor said. ‘Is this Paradise?’ His eyes swam in and out of focus.
‘We are English seamen,’ John Adams said, his voice all cold. ‘Just like you.’
‘But where is your ship?’ the shipwrecked sailor asked.
‘We have no ship,’ I said. ‘Just like you.’
He looked at our brown bodies, our tattered rags, our rough features.
‘But where are your officers?’ he said.
John Mills laughed. ‘There are no officers here, mate. Not now Fletcher Christian is gone.’
The man jolted at the name.
‘Fletcher Christian? That traitor? That Judas? I have heard that he slipped back into England, cloaked in shame, and that he lives on the streets of London among thieves and whores.’
We all had a black laugh at that.
Already I saw the lies that would be told about us. How the legend and myth of the Bounty would be so distant to the truth.
‘So that’s who you are,’ said the man quietly, and he closed his eyes. ‘Fletcher Christian’s men. Pirates. Traitors. Mutineers.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s who we are. The men who took the Bounty. The men who cast that devil – your hero, William Bligh – adrift.’
‘A thousand ships look for you,’ he said.
‘We took a prison,’ John Adams said. ‘We took a prison that would have been our graveyard.’
‘You took the King’s ship,’ said the shipwrecked sailor. And then he howled with pain and fear. ‘Mother, is that really you?’
‘Yes,’ said Maimiti. ‘I am here, my darling son. Close your eyes. Rest now, my child.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ he said. ‘I know that I will soon be dead. But at least I still have a country.’
He did not say much after that.
The other men wandered off, for there was nothing to see but the last breaths of one more dying sailor. Even John Adams walked away, blood dripping all over his Bible.
But I stayed and watched the native women care for him in his last hour.
He opened his eyes once, to stare at the palm tree where the hunters had hung Matthew Quintal by his neck.
The shipwrecked sailor caught his breath to see the brightly-coloured birds that already picked at the dead man’s eyes.
‘Is this Heaven or is it Hell?’ said the shipwrecked sailor.
‘It is both,’ I told him.
8
The Best Time
I bounced the baby on my knee.
‘My son,’ I said. ‘My beautiful boy.’
I lifted the baby high above my head.
He gurgled with delight.
‘You are an Englishman,’ I told him, and he seemed shocked at this news. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you are a little brown Englishman. And one day you will walk down the Mall dressed like a gentleman.’
And at these words my heart was heavy. For I knew that the only way I would return to England would be in chains. But my baby – Captain, was his name – lifted my spirits with his gummy smile.
I smiled back at him, revealing my own toothless mouth, so much like his own.
My wife, Jane, looked over from the cooking pot and smiled.
‘I must go to the house of Jack Williams,’ I said.
Her smile faded and she nodded, for she knew my grim purpose. The wife of Jack Williams, the sister of my own wife, was very ill.
I stepped outside my door with Captain in my arms. The homely sight that greeted us was unrecognisable from the little camp that had been our first home on the island.
Our rough grass shelters were now sturdy wooden cabins. The air was full of the cries of babies and children. Our running – from tyranny, from justice – was over.
We had built lives on Pitcairn.
We had found a home.
Maimiti passed me and I touched my forehead in respect. She nodded coolly. There was a handsome brat squirming in her arms.
She had given birth to Thursday Fletcher Christian a year ago, not long after we buried the shipwrecked sailor. The child had been born around midnight but nobody was quite sure what side of the witching hour. So sometimes he was known as Thursday Fletcher Christian and sometimes as Friday Fletcher Christian. It was very confusing.
With Captain cooing to himself against my chest, we made our way through the camp.
This was the best time – every Englishman had his own wife and cabin now. The native men and the remaining women had shelters down on the beach.
We got on well enough by doing what John Adams told us to do.
There was enough of everything to sustain us. Fish, fruit and women. But the dark times were not far away. Jack Williams’ wife had given birth to their baby and it seemed to rip the life from her.
I called Jack’s name before entering.
It was dark inside the cabin. When my eyes became used to the light, I saw Jack kneeling over a pale figure on the floor. The new baby cried in its little wooden cot.
‘How is she, Jack?’ I asked.
He tenderly wiped his wife’s face with a wet rag. ‘She fades fast,’ he said. ‘The blood does not stop. Her fate is in the air we breathe. Can’t you tell?’
It was true. The cabin smelled of death. A sickly, metallic smell that I was glad to take my son away from.
I stepped back outside and my lungs drank in the sweet pure air. Feeling death breathing on my neck, I climbed to the very top of the white cliffs.
Looking back at the island, and the smoke from the fires in our camp, holding my baby boy in my arms, I felt something that I had not felt for years.
Happiness.
What more could we ask from our home? We had families. We were never hungry. We were never too hot nor too cold. We had stout wooden ho
mes that were better than anything we had ever known in England.
This was the best time.
This was when our dream became real. This was the time when our bellies and our beds were full. The time when we started to believe that they would never find us and that if they ever did it would take them one thousand years.
‘Look, Captain,’ I said to my son. ‘Notice the deeper blue of the sea and the lighter blue of the sky. Do you see, my darling boy?’
Captain showed me his gums and a wave of love flowed through me.
Yes, the best time.
When we all learned to love again.
And then came the war.
9
Civil War
This is how the war began.
When the wife of Jack Williams died shortly after giving birth to their baby, poor Jack was maddened with grief. He roamed the white cliffs with his face twisted in pain, like a wounded animal looking for a place to die.
It was Maimiti who nursed the motherless child. It was Maimiti, the king of Tahiti’s proud daughter, who went to Jack Williams’ cabin and nursed the new baby as if it was her own child.
And when Jack returned from his mourning, Maimiti did not leave the baby.
Or the cabin.
The first night they stayed together, every man on the island felt a stab of longing. Who did not want Maimiti for their bride? I bet even John Adams dreamed of getting her down on her knees for some good hard praying and perhaps a few hymns.
But she went to Jack Williams. Or perhaps it was the motherless baby that she went to. But Jack shared her bed.
And what was hard medicine to swallow for the English seamen was pure poison to the native men.
The Tahitian men must have thought that the king’s daughter would work her way through the whole of the King’s navy before she got around to one of her golden, raggedy-arse countrymen.
They had said nothing when Maimiti lay with dashing Fletcher Christian.
But Jack Williams was just another rough tar with a scarred face and bad tattoos.
And it was too much for them.
The beginning of the war was simple enough.
Jack and I were returning to camp. We had been out fishing and had a good catch of lobster, yellowtail and snapper. A few of the natives were on their way out of camp with their bows and arrows to hunt birds. They stepped to one side to let Jack and I pass. Apart from one of them – a young hothead called Hu.
He had been a boy of fourteen when he went off with Fletcher Christian and the mutineers. Now he was a man of sixteen.
He caught Jack with his broad shoulder and sent him flying.
‘I saw that, you filthy heathen!’ cried William Brown, the four-eyed gardener.
William McCoy and John Adams were swiftly on the lad, pinning his arms to his side.
‘What’s to be done with him?’ said young Isaac Martin, who I knew to be friendly with the native lad. They were around the same age.
‘Teach him a lesson,’ said William McCoy. ‘School him well, the brown bastard.’
‘Aye,’ said John Mills. Neither of them were drunk at the minute, but they could not have been angrier in their cups. ‘Whip him,’ says John Mills. ‘Whip him in exactly the way that we were whipped.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said William McCoy, a big grin on his stupid face. ‘I’ll lay the lash on with relish.’
We all turned to John Adams, who was looking into his big black Bible as if it would have a few suggestions about how to deal with uppity natives. Eventually John Adams nodded his mournful head.
‘Hu must be punished,’ he said. He looked at the oldest of the natives, an old cove called Tetahiti. He must have been thirty if he was a day. ‘I’m sorry, Tetahiti. But I will not see an English seaman struck by a native.’
The Bounty’s cat-o’-nine-tails was produced.
We all caught our breath.
The last time we had seen that cruel whip was out on the open sea, when Bligh was dishing out his rough justice with the biscuits.
I found I could not breathe in the presence of the cat-o’-nine-tails.
We tore off the boy’s native garb, his kirtle, and tied him to a tree.
‘I am going to enjoy this,’ said William McCoy.
As the words left McCoy’s leering mouth, Tetahiti came up behind him with a large grey rock.
The old native lifted the rock high above his head and brought it down with as much force as he could muster.
I believe that William McCoy was dead before he hit the ground. Some of his grey brains splashed across my bare feet.
All hell broke loose.
Englishmen and native warriors were immediately locked in hand-to-hand combat.
And then, like a flock of birds acting with one will, the natives broke away from us and headed for the hills of the interior.
We caught our breath and tended our wounds. Then we armed ourselves with knives and went after them.
But the day was almost over now and night falls quickly in that part of the tropics. They were conditions that favoured the game rather than the hunter. We slowed our pace as we entered the green heart of Pitcairn, catching our breath at every strange noise.
The natives ambushed us by the waterfall.
They had been hiding behind the crashing avalanche of water. They came screaming blue murder out of the falls, slashing wildly with their knives.
I saw the death of William Brown, the four-eyed gardener, stabbed in the back by Hu.
And I saw Jack Williams die, his throat slashed ear to ear by Tetahiti – poor Jack dead after just one night of rough love with the King’s daughter.
Then we were on them and they were on us.
Men gripping the wrists and the throats of other men. Screaming oaths in terror and fury in the gathering twilight, the waterfall pounding behind us.
And then a single gunshot.
Like the voice of God speaking to Adam in the Garden of Eden.
A long crack that split the air and froze our blood.
We looked at John Adams, the musket still smoking in his hands.
‘Enough,’ he said. ‘No more killing. Not today. Not ever.’
The colour of our skin suddenly mattered no more. Tahitian and English sailor, we walked back to the village, carrying our dead.
The English seamen had lost three men – William McCoy with his brains dashed out as he raised the whip. Jack Williams, the happy groom. And William Brown, the four-eyed gardener, stabbed to death in the ambush. The natives had also lost three of their number. When we gathered once more in the settlement, the cat-o’-nine-tails lying there like the serpent in the good book, John Adams spoke to us in his terrible voice.
‘We live together or we die together,’ he said. ‘From this day forth, we live as equals. Every man has one vote – English seaman or South Sea native, white or brown.’
I snorted with scorn.
‘John,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you give a vote to the women? And how about the monkeys? Do the monkeys get a vote?’
John Mills laughed at that, and then his laughter died in his throat. He looked around wildly.
‘Where are the women?’ he said.
We ran to the cliff top. I had half-expected to see that the women had dashed themselves to death on the rocks below. But no – they were out on Bounty Bay, sailing a raft that they must have been secretly building for months.
‘The women grow weary of men,’ said Tetahiti, that wise old bird. ‘All men.’
The women clung to their raft and their children. Perhaps they would have made it out to open sea without the babies and the children.
But their squawking offspring howled with terror and clung to their mothers, demanding to be soothed. And one hand for the sea and another for the children was not enough. It was an escape plan that would have required all hands.
The wild waves of Bounty Bay flung the little raft back onto the rocks.
Repeatedly the women tried to escape from our is
land’s water – repeatedly the sea threw them back to Pitcairn.
In the end whatever rough twine had bound the wood of their raft came apart. The logs separated. The raft seemed to melt on the moon-washed sea. The women trod water and held their children above the waves. They believed that they would all now drown.
Down on the narrow sandy beach, we men tore off our native kirtles. We cried out that help was on its way. Then we swam out to the floundering women and children.
And we carried them home to Pitcairn.
10
King of the World
Maimiti smiled at me once.
There had been a time when I had hoped that she might be my wife. It was a mad dream – that the daughter of a king, and the widow of Fletcher Christian, would take the hand of a toothless sailor such as myself.
She was not for me.
But one day, as our children played on the top of the white cliffs, she gave me a smile.
And for those few happy moments, Maimiti made me the King of the South Seas.
Thursday Fletcher Christian was older than my boy Captain. But Thursday – or Friday, as he was sometimes known – was one of those kind children whose joy it is to care for smaller children.
The boys played a game of tag. Captain would stagger on his fat little legs after Thursday. The older boy would let him get just within range and then hop off. They both laughed merrily at this, as did Maimiti and myself.
We sat on the grass as it sloped upwards, keeping ourselves between the two children and the edge of the cliff. We laughed and laughed at the game our children played.
‘They will be great friends,’ I said.
‘They will be brothers,’ Maimiti said, and her laughter subsided to the most beautiful smile that any man has ever seen.
Then she coughed.
Just once.
With her hand over her mouth (she had lovely manners).
And her smile faded when she took her hand away.
I saw the black spot of blood on the palm of her hand.
We gathered the children and walked quickly back to the camp, all laughter gone.
I saw a dead bird on the path, and then another. And then I saw hundreds of dead birds.
