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

by Caroline Alexander

  William Cole, age twenty-six, was the boatswain and thus another of the warrant officers. Born in Dorset, Cole had gone to sea as a teenager, working as a seaman in the hard Labrador Trade. More recently he had seen action in India, at the battle of Cudolalore. Returning to England, he settled in Deptford with his family. A third son was baptized on the very day the Bounty anchored at Spithead.

  A great deal is known, however, about the boatswain’s mate, James Morrison—fortunately, for he was to play an important role in the story of the Bounty. Morrison was a native of Stornoway, on the isle of Lewis off the western coast of Scotland. His family was descended from several generations of educated Lewismen and even local hereditary judges, while his father was a merchant and land entrepreneur of education and some means. As events would show, the twenty-seven-year-old Morrison was exceptionally—dangerously—well educated, and although almost certainly Gaelic speaking, fluent and literate in English, and with at least a passing knowledge of Latin. One of the ways in which Morrison was to exercise his superior intellect was by writing a narrative of the Bounty voyage, which included a lengthy and well-observed description of life on Tahiti, as well as the voyage and aftermath of the Pandora. It was written several years after the events described, while he was a prisoner on the Hector awaiting trial for his life, circumstances that very directly colored some of his “recollections.”

  At five foot eight, Morrison was of above-average height and of slender build, with sallow skin and long black hair; a musket wound on his arm was a memento of action seen in service. He had joined the navy at the age of eighteen, and had since served on several ships in an intriguing variety of capacities: as a clerk on the Suffolk, a midshipman on the Termagant, acting gunner on the Hind. In 1783, at twenty-three, Morrison passed his master gunner’s examination, having shown proficiency, according to the examiners, in “Vulgar and Decimal Arithmetic, the extraction of the Square and Cube Roots, and in practical Problems of Geometry and Plain Trigonometry.” This success, however, did not provide any material advantage. Like many during those “weak, piping times of peace,” Morrison seems to have been without a ship. At any rate, he does not surface in any known naval records until he appears as a boatswain’s mate on the muster of the Bounty.

  In this capacity, his duties were to assist William Cole in his continual inspection of sails, rigging and boats. It was also Morrison who would administer all floggings; on a ship of the line, the boatswain’s mate was said to be “the most vocal, and the most feared, of the petty officers.” Still, boatswain’s mate was a step down from master gunner and one must suspect either an urgent need for employment or a passion to see something of the world in his willingness to sign on to the Bounty in this lower position.

  William Peckover, the thirty-nine-year-old son of a Northamptonshire farming family, the Bounty’s actual gunner, had sailed with Cook on every one of his voyages. He was well known to Banks from Cook’s first voyage. He therefore knew Tahiti and was also known to Bligh from the third expedition. William Purcell, the carpenter, made up the complement of warrant officers; the Bounty was his first ship of naval service. All of these men were at least minimally educated, as the Admiralty regulations stated that no person could be placed in charge of stores “unless he can read and write, and is sufficiently skilled in arithmetic to keep an account of them correctly”; all warrant officers had responsibilities for stores of some kind. Importantly, too, no warrant officer could be flogged.

  Joseph Coleman, the thirty-six-year-old armorer, had also sailed with Cook and Bligh, having been mustered as an AB on the Discovery in 1776. Another man from Cook’s third voyage was David Nelson, the gardener, who had originally been recommended to Banks by a Hammer-smith nurseryman. Banks had personally selected him for the breadfruit voyage on respectable terms of £50 a year. According to a shipmate from the Discovery, Nelson was “one of the quietest fellows in nature.” His assistant, William Brown, aged twenty-three and from Leicester, had also been selected by Banks. Although now a gardener, Brown had formerly served as a midshipman, when he had seen fierce action against the French—how or why he had gone from the one profession to the other is not known. Both Nelson and Brown were practical, hands-on gardeners, not botanists; Banks was adamant that there be no competing interests to the sole object of caring for the shipment of plants.

  The three men joining the Bounty who had sailed on Cook’s last voyage were old acquaintances of Bligh’s—they had all been paid off together in 1780, seven years before. A more substantial number of the crew, however, had sailed with Bligh more recently, and were joining the Bounty from the West Indian ships Bligh had commanded for Duncan Campbell. These men knew Bligh as a commanding officer: Lawrence Lebogue, age forty, the sailmaker from Nova Scotia; John Norton, a quartermaster, age thirty-four, from Liverpool; Thomas Ellison, able seaman, age fifteen, from Deptford, where the Bounty now lay; and Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate, aged twenty-three, cited on the muster as being from Whitehaven, in Cumberland.

  According to Bligh, Fletcher Christian was “Dark & very swarthy,” with “Blackish or very dark brown” hair. Standing about five foot nine, he was strongly built, although his “knees stands a little out and may be called a little bow legged.” Others would later describe his “bright, pleasing countenance, and tall, commanding figure.” While born in Cumberland, in the north of England, Christian had more recently been based on the Isle of Man, where his family had old, strong connections, and where Bligh had been living after his marriage.

  Fletcher, it was said by his family, had “staid at school longer than young men generally do who enter into the navy.” His first sea experience had been as a midshipman on the Eurydice in 1783, when he was eighteen and a half years of age—remarkably late in the day for a young man with his sights set on a naval career. After six months spent at anchorage in Spithead, the Eurydice had sailed for India, and for the next twenty-one months, Christian had been exposed to some of the most exotic parts of the world: Madeira, Cape Town, Madras and the Malabar Coast. Christian’s biographer would conjure the steaming coastal settlements the new midshipman encountered on this first voyage: most notably, the British Fort Saint George at Madras, defiantly set to survey the sea and surrounded by the residences of the English traders and officials, the busy traffic of lumbering oxen and sweating palanquin bearers, the rowdy trade of fine cotton, spices and green doves. The Eurydice was a ship of war, with a complement of 140 men, including a unit of marines, and Christian had also experienced for the first time British naval life in all its coarseness—bad food, complete lack of privacy, irregular sleep and rough discipline. Yet he must have prospered, or at least shown promise, for the ship muster indicates that some seven months out from England, he had been promoted from midshipman to master’s mate.

  Christian had returned from India in high spirits, telling a relative that “it was very easy to make one’s self beloved and respected on board a ship; one had only to be always ready to obey one’s superior officers, and to be kind to the common men.” This promising start was somewhat derailed by the inconvenient peace, which had put so many ships out of commission and, like Bligh, Christian had turned his sights from naval service to the merchant trade. The decision to approach Bligh, then working for Duncan Campbell, had been prompted, as a relative advised, because “it would be very desirable for him to serve under so experienced a navigator as Captain Bligh, who had been Sailing-master to Captain Cook.”

  To Christian’s request for a position, however, Bligh had returned the polite response that he already had all the officers he could carry. This was undoubtedly true, but the fact that Bligh did not stretch himself to accommodate the eager young man, as he was to do for so many young gentlemen on the Bounty, suggests that he was not in any way beholden to the Christian family; Fletcher had approached Bligh, it would appear, without benefit of interest.

  Upon receiving this rebuff, Christian was undeterred; indeed, he rose to the occasion, volunteer
ing to work before the mast until a vacancy arose among the officers.

  “Wages were no object, he only wished to learn his profession,” he had told Bligh, adding, “we Mid-shipmen are gentlemen, we never pull at a rope; I should even be glad to go one voyage in that situation, for there may be occasions, when officers may be called upon to do the duties of a common man.”

  To this honorable request Bligh had responded favorably. Christian was taken on board the Britannia as a seaman, and on his return from the West Indies, according to his brother, “spoke of Captain Bligh with great respect.” He had worked hard alongside the common sailors, but “the Captain had been kind to him,” instructing him in the art of navigation. At the same time Christian had observed “that Captain Bligh was very passionate; yet he seemed to pride himself in knowing how to humour him.” On their second voyage Christian was entered as nominal “gunner” but, as Bligh made clear, was to be treated as an officer. Christian, it would seem, had become Bligh’s protégé. Bligh had taken pains not only to instruct the ambitious young man, but to elevate him, regularly inviting him to join him and his officers at his table for dinner. Christian for his part must have passed muster with his captain, for Bligh was not one to suffer fools, and it was Bligh who recommended Christian to the Admiralty as midshipman on the Bounty. “[A]s it was understood that great interest had been made to get Midshipmen sent out in this ship,” Fletcher’s brother would write, “Christian’s friends thought this recommendation . . . a very great obligation.” On the return from the South Seas, Fletcher could expect to be promoted to lieutenant.

  This promising naval career had not been in the Christian family’s original plans for its second-youngest son; and as the family itself was to play a significant part in the shaping of the events ahead, it is well to introduce its members here. Fletcher Christian was born on September 25, 1764, in his parents’ home in Cumberland, and had been baptized that same day, in Brigham Church, some two miles distant. Baptism on the day of birth was unusual, and implies that the newborn child was not expected to live. His parents, Charles and Ann, had already lost two infants.

  Charles Christian came from an old Manx family that had been settled on the English mainland since the seventeenth century. At the age of twenty-two he had married Ann Dixon, the daughter of a dyer and a member of the local gentry well connected with other important north-country families. Ann’s mother was a Fletcher, another old and established Cumberland family. It was for his grandmother’s family that Fletcher Christian was named.

  Charles had grown up in the Christians’ ancestral home, Ewanrigg, a forty-two-bedroomed mansion with crenellated battlements overlooking the sea. Reputedly, the property had been won by the Christians from the Bishop of Sodor and Man in a card game. Charles’s mother, Bridget Senhouse, could trace her ancestry back fourteen generations to King Edward I. Such distinctions bore little practical weight, however, and as a younger son (and one of eleven children), Charles inherited only his name and some shares in various family interests. Like all but the eldest son, he was expected to make his own way, which he did as an attorney-at-law, and later as coroner for Cumberland. The main boost to his fortune was his marriage—Ann brought with her a small but respectable property called Moorland Close, just outside Cockermouth, described locally as “a quadrangular pile of buildings, in the style of the mediæval manor house, half castle and half farmstead.” The surrounding wall, originally built to rebuff Scottish border raiders, during Fletcher’s boyhood benignly enclosed an orchard and gardens, while the former guard stand had been converted into a little summer house.

  Ten children were born to the young couple, six of whom survived infancy. Fletcher was the fifth surviving child, born twelve years after his eldest brother, John. Although Fletcher was raised in a large family, with cousins and relatives nearby in every direction, his childhood was made precarious by the early death of his father, who passed away in 1768. A month before he died, Charles Christian had written his will declaring himself “weak of body,” which suggests a protracted illness.

  Ann Christian was now left to raise six children on her own. Fletcher was not yet four; his elder brothers, John, Edward and Charles, were sixteen, ten and six, respectively; his sister, Mary, was eight, while little Humphrey was just three months old. Money was, and evidently had long been, a problem. As early as the year of his first son’s birth, Charles Christian senior had borrowed from his eldest brother, and family records indicate a series of other large “loans” made in later years. Still, under Ann’s management, care was given to Fletcher’s education, and he was sent first to Brigham’s one-room parish school and then to the Cockermouth Free School, which he attended for seven years—and where a younger contemporary was William Wordsworth, the future Poet Laureate.

  Cockermouth and Moorland Close stood on the edge of the Lake District, “the wildest, most barren and frightful” landscape in England. Years later, Wordsworth would romanticize and memorialize the savage grandeur of fractured crags and sweeping valleys, scored with streams and dark tarns. Cockermouth, situated against the backdrop of Mt. Skiddaw on the Derwent and Cocker Rivers, was by all accounts a pleasant market town, its two main streets lined with stout stone houses roofed with thatch and blue slate.

  Little is known of Fletcher Christian’s Cumberland upbringing, but his schoolmate William Wordsworth never forgot the wild freedom this countryside gave his childhood:

  Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child,

  In a small mill-race severed from his stream,

  Made one long bathing of a summer’s day;

  Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again

  Alternate, all a summer’s day, or scoured

  The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves

  Of yellow ragwort; or when rock and hill,

  The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,

  Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone

  Beneath the sky, as if I had been born

  On Indian plains, and from my mother’s hut

  Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport,

  A naked savage, in the thunder shower.

  While Fletcher Christian rode back and forth between the orchards and gardens of Moorland Close to Cockermouth, his two oldest brothers, John and Edward, went off to Cambridge and to professions in law. It was Edward who, as a new fellow of his college, handled his mother’s affairs when her finances finally and fatally bottomed out. The crisis occurred in 1779, although to judge from the size of her debts it had been building for years. Somehow, together with her eldest son, John, she had managed to accumulate debts to the tune of £6,490 0s. 11d. The family, it appears, had been living for years with no regard for reality, and now Ann Christian was faced with the humiliating prospect of debtor’s prison. John Christian, her husband’s wealthy brother and head of the family, once again bailed them out, but seems to have made it clear that he could not be counted upon to do so again. In partial compensation, John Christian assumed ownership of Moorland Close and all effects attached to it.

  Through Edward’s special pleading and contributions from his own modest fellowship, he succeeded in scraping together an annuity of forty guineas per annum for his mother, with which, as he observed, she would “be able to live comfortably any where, so that if she is not secure from arrests at Moorland Close, I should have now no objections to the family’s removing to the Isle of Man.” In the course of these negotiations with his wealthy uncle, Edward indicated the hope that “in time perhaps some of us may be in such circumstances as to think it a desirable object to redeem the place of our nativity.” This touching aspiration was never to be realized. In October 1779, an advertisement was run on the front page of the Cumberland Pacquet for “that large commodious House situated in the Market Place of Cockermouth” formerly belonging to John Christian, Fletcher and Edward’s oldest brother. Edward briefly became headmaster of Hawkshead Grammar School in Cumberland, where one of his pupils was W
ordsworth. After seeking a position as a naval surgeon, Charles junior, the third son, entered the West Yorkshire Militia Regiment, commanded by Sir George Savile, who wrote glancingly of him, noting that “Mr. Christian [is] well satisfied & happy I believe in his situation. Indeed he is very deserving,” which suggests the special attention of an aristocratic patron with “interest” in his new recruit. When the regiment disbanded, Charles Christian went to Edinburgh to study medicine, and then qualified as a surgeon aboard an East India vessel called the Middlesex.

  The fact that Ann Christian, with her daughter, Mary, and young Humphrey, immigrated to the Isle of Man suggests that she was not, after all, “secure from arrest”: debts acquired on the mainland could not be pursued here, and the island had become a haven for financially distressed gentry. Fletcher, now about fifteen, attended St. Bees School, close to Whitehaven in Cumberland, but would have been a summer visitor to the island between school terms, where he encountered another part of his heritage. Here, on the Isle of Man, the Christians were an ancient and distinguished family who could trace their lineage back in an unbroken line of male successors to 1408, the year in which John MacCrysten, deemster or judge of the island, had put his signature on a deed.

  It was not, however, in the magnificent, castlelike Christian family home of Milntown, with its sixteenth-century gardens and doors reputedly made from the wreckage of the Spanish Armada, that Ann and her family had settled. Bound to live within the means of her modest annuity, Ann Christian had taken her family to Douglas, where she rented property. Facing the Irish Sea and backed by miles of rolling, sparsely inhabited countryside, Douglas was more isolated and more remote than Cockermouth. It was home to just under three thousand souls. Herring sheds, a small shipyard and a brewery represented local industry. Douglas society, according to a contemporary English diarist, was “not of the best kind, much like that in our common Country Towns.” But life here was cheap: no taxes, a “good living House at £8 a year,” and port wine for ten pence a bottle.