The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty

by Caroline Alexander

  On arrival, Edwards arranged for his men to be housed on board a Dutch East India Company ship then in the road, or anchorage outside the harbor. Thirty of his sick were borne to a hospital—a number of these were men from the Resolution who had suffered badly in the course of their impromptu journey.

  In the nearly seven weeks they were detained at Batavia, the majority of the prisoners were allowed on deck only twice, although once again Coleman, Norman and McIntosh enjoyed more freedom. But it may be that the confinement afforded the men some protection from the mosquitoes. “[H]ere we enjoyed our Health,” Morrison stated, noting with satisfaction that “the Pandora’s people fell sick and died apace.”

  Edwards had negotiated an arrangement with the Dutch authorities to divide the Pandora’s complement among four ships bound for Holland by way of the Cape, “at no expense to Government further than for the Officers and Prisoners,” as he somewhat nervously informed the Admiralty. A disaster such as the loss of a ship did not allow a captain of His Majesty’s Navy carte blanche in extricating himself from the disaster. All accounts for the £724 8s. 0d. in expenses incurred between Coupang and Batavia would have to be meticulously itemized and justified on return.

  Edwards also used the sojourn at Batavia to write up his report to the Admiralty relating all that had transpired subsequent to January 6, 1791, the date of his last dispatch from Rio. Edwards’s report, in his own hand, filled thirty-two large, closely written pages and ranged over all his adventures—the capture of the mutineers, the fruitless search for Christian and the Bounty, the wreck of the Pandora, and the voyage to Timor. The events are narrated in strict chronological order, like a story, with discursive material about the customs and country of the islands visited and anecdotal asides (“I took this opportunity to show the Chief what Execution the Canon and Carronades would do by firing a six pound shot on shore . . .”), so that their lordships of the Admiralty would have had no clue until page twenty-six that the Pandora had in fact been lost. Boldly noting that he was enclosing “Latitudes & Longitudes of several Islands, & ca discovered during our Voyage,” with his report, Edwards then offered a tentative conclusion:

  “Although I have not had the good fortune fully to accomplish the Object of my Voyage,” he ventured, “. . . I hope it will be thought . . . that of my Orders which I have been able to fulfil, with the discoveries that have been made will be some compensation for the disappointment & misfortunes that have attended us”; and, with a last rally of optimism:

  [S]hould their Lordships upon the whole think that the Voyage will be profitable to our Country it will be a great consolation to,

  Sir,

  Your most obedient humble servant,

  Edw. Edwards.

  Also before leaving Batavia, Edwards presented the mutineers’ schooner, Resolution, to the governor of Timor as a gift of gratitude for his kindness. Morrison watched this transaction closely. He had been the architect of the plan to build the schooner and although she was the handiwork of many, he had placed the greatest stake in her. Her timbers had been hewn from Tahitian hibiscus, and both her planking and the bark gum used as pitch had come from that versatile and fateful tree, the breadfruit.

  On Christmas Day 1791, the Dutch Indiaman Vreedenburg, Captain Christiaan, weighed anchor and sailed out of the straits at the harbor’s entrance carrying a cargo of coffee beans, rice and arrack, a liquor distilled from coconut milk. On board as passengers were Captain Edwards, twenty-seven officers and men of the Pandora, twenty-six Chinese and the ten mutineers. The remainder of the Pandora’s company, including the Botany Bay prisoners, were divided among two other ships. Lieutenant Larkan and a party of twenty had departed a month earlier on the Zwan. Edwards had also taken on board a distressed English seaman from the Supply. In turn, he had been forced to leave in the deadly hospital one of his own men, who was too ill to be moved. All in all, Edwards lost fifteen men to the Batavian fever, one being young William Oliver, the twenty-year-old master’s mate who had commanded the Resolution with such leadership and skill on her unexpected voyage.

  A few days from the Cape of Good Hope, nearly three months out on what had been a slow passage, the mutineers were released from their irons and allowed to walk the deck. Here, testing the wind, Morrison noted that the men “now found the weather Sharp and Cutting.” The balmy Pacific lay far behind.

  On March 18, the Vreedenburg anchored in Table Bay, at the Cape of Good Hope. Close by the harbor was the fortress that safeguarded the Dutch East India Company stores, and indeed the whole town had been established solely to serve the Company. Here ships could break the long journey between Europe and the East Indies, restock and refit and, if coming from Batavia, offload their sick at the Cape Hospital.

  The Vreedenburg joined other sail at anchor, including to the universal joy of the Pandora’s company, a British man-of-war, the Gorgon, Captain John Parker. This 44-gun frigate had arrived from Port Jackson in New South Wales, where she had dropped off much anticipated and desperately needed supplies, including livestock and thirty new convicts. Seeing an opportunity to return directly to England, instead of by way of Holland where the Dutch Indiamen were bound, Edwards arranged passages for part of his mixed company on the Gorgon.

  Thus, two days after arrival, Edwards added himself, the Botany Bay convicts and the Bounty mutineers to the Gorgon’s company, joining other passengers that included a detachment of marine privates and their families leaving Port Jackson, and fifteen distressed British seamen picked up at the Cape. Among the mixed cargo, boxes of dispatches for the colonial office were probably the most important. More burdensome were the sixty tubs and boxes of plants destined for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, under the direction of the great naturalist and president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks. Specimens of New South Wales lumber cramming the main and quarter decks were for the Navy Board, while a dingo was a gift for the Prince of Wales. Similarly, two kangaroos and opossums were also gifts for Joseph Banks, whose tentacles of influence stretched to the remotest corner of all parts of the globe; it was Banks who had been the driving force behind the Bounty’s breadfruit venture.

  The arrival of the mutineers was noted offhandedly in the Gorgon’s log, along with the more important additions: “Recd Wine fresh Meat; Bread for Ships Company; also Water. Caulkers Caulking within and without board. Carpenters as necessary. Armourer at his forge; Sent to Sick quarters 1 Supernumerary Marine. Came on board from the Dutch Ship Vreedenburgh 10 Pirates belonging to His Majesty’s Ship Bounty. . . .”

  At four in the afternoon of April 5, 1792, the Gorgon at last set sail for England, exchanging salutes with the fort as she passed. Blessed with fine weather and “a charming Breeze,” as one of the marines, Lieutenant Ralph Clark, noted in his private journal, the Gorgon passed the island of St. Helena in under two weeks. Five days later they anchored at Ascension Island, primarily to refresh their food stock with local turtles. Although each passing mile brought the prisoners closer to their day of reckoning, they enjoyed the return to familiar British naval routine. Their confinement had been made less rigorous than under Edwards, and as Morrison noted, they had begun to regain their health and strength.

  May 1 brought an extraordinary diversion: two sharks were caught and in the belly of one was found a prayer book, “[q]uite fresh,” according to Lieutenant Clark, “not a leaf of it defaced.” The book was inscribed “Francis Carthy, cast for death in the Year 1786 and Repreaved the Same day at four oClock in the afternoon.” The book was subsequently confirmed as having belonged to a convict who had sailed to Botany Bay in 1788 with the first fleet of prisoners consigned to transportation.

  In the early rainy hours of May 6 died Charlotte Bryant, the child of Mary Bryant, the escaped convict who had sailed so boldly into Coupang before the arrival of the Pandora. Amid the mixed humanity that the Gorgon carried, it was not the pirates of the Bounty who appear to have stood out, but the young widow from Cornwall, age twenty-seven, “height 5’4‘,
grey eyes, brown hair, sallow complexion,” as the register of Newgate Prison records, who had been sentenced to transportation for stealing a cloak. By coincidence, Marine Captain Watkin Tench, returning from Botany Bay, had gone out with Mary five years before, and recalled that she and her husband-to-be “had both of them been always distinguished for good behaviour.” Now, he got from her the details of her extraordinary 3,254-mile voyage, coasting the shores of New Holland, harassed by the “Indians” when attempting to land, foraging for food and water—this story, which surely circulated around the ship, was one every sailing man on board would appreciate.

  On June 19, the Gorgon completed her long voyage and on an overcast day anchored at Spithead off Portsmouth alongside three of His Majesty’s ships, the Duke, Brunswick and Edgar, three frigates and a sloop of war. Captain Parker immediately notified Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, the port’s commander on duty, of his ship’s arrival and awaited further instructions. Meanwhile, his crew busied themselves with the numerous tedious and chaotic duties that awaited the end of a long voyage. The officers and men of the Portsmouth and Plymouth Divisions were disembarked, and water and victuals were brought onboard. The carpenter made his customary report, noting that the ship’s “works in general is very weak from carying large quantities of water and hay & tubs of Plants.”

  Captain Edwards, a passenger, had nothing to do with these transactions. Most of his men were still behind him, on the other Dutch ships, and the pirates and convicts would now be turned over to the proper authorities. Disembarking early at the Isle of Wight, he was safe in Portsmouth by the time the Gorgon came to anchor. At some point in their wanderings, most probably during the sultry, sickly sojourn at Batavia, an anonymous member of the Pandora’s crew had immortalized their journey, and their captain, with a long doggerel poem:

  Brave Edwards then with freindly Care

  for men and boat began to fear . . .

  by hard fatigue Our men were Spent,

  the Ship keel’d Over and Down She went

  An Equel Chance Our Captain Gave

  to All Alike their Lives to Save . . .

  Edwards’s last semiofficial duty had been to accompany the captain’s wife, Mary Ann Parker, to shore, a journey that, perhaps predictably, turned into a four-hour ordeal, as she noted, “rowing against the wind.” Once onshore, nothing remained for Edwards but to await his own court-martial; like Bligh, he had returned without his ship.

  On the day after the Gorgon’s arrival, Captain Hamond informed Captain Parker that their lordships of the Admiralty had directed that “the ten Prisoners belonging to the Bounty” be sent to the security of one of the port guardships. The following day, a longboat, manned and armed, was sent from the Hector, Captain George Montagu, to collect the mutineers. Put over the side of the Gorgon in chains into the waiting boat, the prisoners were able to enjoy the sights of the busy, lively anchorage in the course of their short journey. The cloudy weather had briefly cleared and showed breezy and fair—an English summer day. Their arrival on board was mentioned briefly in the Hector’s log: “Post-noon received the above Prisoners, Wm Muspratt, James Morrison, Jn Milward, Peter Heywood, Thomas Ellison, Michl Burn, Thos Burkett, Josh Coleman, Thos. McIntosh & Charles Norman . . . and secured them in the Gun Room.” A sergeant’s guard of marines was sent over to provide additional security. For Thomas Burkett, at least, the Hector was familiar territory: he had served as an able seaman on this same ship, six years previously.

  Peter Heywood had brought away a single possession from his long ordeal, a Book of Common Prayer, which he had carried in his teeth as he swam from the wreck of the Pandora. On the flyleaves, he had made some notations of events and dates important to him: “Sept. 22 1789, Mya TOOBOOAI mye; Mar. 25 1791, We ta Pahee Pandora . . . We tow te Vredenberg tea . . . Pahee HECTOR”—the most striking thing about Peter’s entries is that he had written them in Tahitian.

  Back in Tahiti, the Bounty men who had cast their lot in with the islanders were remembered largely with affection. Less than eight months after the Pandora left Matavai Bay, Captain George Vancouver arrived with his two ships, Discovery and Chatham. Through conversations with the Tahitians, he and his men learned a great deal about the mutineers’ lives on the island: they had built a schooner; they had each taken a wife and treated their women well; Stewart and Heywood had laid out gardens that were still in a flourishing state; these two had conformed to Tahitian manners to such an extent that they ceremonially uncovered their upper bodies when in the presence of King Tynah, as was local custom.

  One day the Chatham’s men were “surpized at seeing alongside in a double Canoe, three women all dress’d in White Linen Shirts, and having each a fine young child in their arms, perfectly white,” as Edward Bell, a young clerk on the Chatham, reported in his journal. These were the women who had lived with the Bounty’s mutineers, and their children.

  “One call’d herself Peggy Stewart, after Mr. Stewart, one of the Bounty’s midshipmen, and her child which was very beautiful was called Charlotte,” wrote Bell. “[A]nother’s name was Mary MacIntosh and the other’s Mary Bocket [Burkett].”

  Following this first meeting, Peggy Stewart frequently came to visit, often bringing small gifts and always inquiring after her husband. At length, it was time for the ships to depart, and she came to make her affectionate and tearful farewell.

  “Just before she went away, she came into my Cabbin,” wrote Bell, “and ask’d me the same question she had often done, whether I thought Stewart would be hung.” Deeply moved, he replied that he didn’t know—perhaps not.

  “She then said ‘If he is alive when you return, tell him that you saw his Peggy and his little Charlotte, and that they were both well, and tell him to come to Otaheite, and live with them, or they will be unhappy.’ She then burst into Tears and with the deepest regret forced herself into her Canoe and as long as we could see her she kept waving her hand.” The next ship that came from Tahiti brought word that Peggy had pined away and died of a broken heart.

  BOUNTY

  England, 1787

  The passion for exploration and discovery, the hunger to learn all things about all aspects of the physical world, the great and preposterous optimism that held that such truths were in fact discoverable—these remarkable traits that so characterized the British eighteenth century were embodied by one remarkable eighteenth-century man, the admired, en-vied and uniquely influential Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was forty-four years old in 1787, and already a national treasure, as powerful in his way as any member of government. And it was the interest of Banks, more than any other consideration, that ensured that the government undertook the Bounty’s breadfruit mission to the South Seas.

  Banks had been born in 1743, to a prosperous and well-connected landowning family. Somehow he had managed to be educated at both Eton and Harrow and at Oxford, although under a tutor he had privately hired from Cambridge. He was only eighteen when his father died and he had inherited the first of his estates, and from this time, for the remainder of his life, Banks was the master of his own destiny. From an early age he had shown a passion for natural history, above all botany, and this he now pursued. At the age of twenty-one, having established himself in London society, where he quickly became the friend of distinguished men some decades his senior, Banks set out for a summer of botanizing along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Returning with a professionally compiled collection of novel specimens never before seen in Europe, and the basis of what would become his world-famous herbarium, he was, at twenty-three, elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Still restless, still implausibly young, Banks then decided that his next venture in gentlemanly inquiry would be with Lieutenant James Cook in the Pacific.

  The first of what would be Cook’s three magnificent voyages left England in the Endeavour in August 1768. The primary objective was to enable British astronomers to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti, but after accomplishing such observations, the expedition was to proc
eed in search of the fabled Southern continent, surveying New Zealand and other islands en route. Banks was footing the bill for his own passage as well as that of his considerable entourage—his colleague and employee Dr. Daniel Solander, a distinguished Swedish naturalist and disciple of Linnaeus, two artists to make records of what was seen, his secretary, four servants and his two greyhounds. It was popularly rumored that Banks’s expenses for the trip had cost him some ten thousand pounds.

  Cook’s first voyage made discoveries in New Zealand, Australia (where Botany Bay was named for Banks’s botanizing) and a multitude of new islands, but it was the visit to Tahiti that became most memorably etched in the English imagination. Tahiti had been “discovered” before Cook—Captain Samuel Wallis of the Dolphin had touched here, on what he called “King George III Island,” in 1767—but it did not become a subject of popular and fashionable fascination until the return of the Endeavour in 1771.