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

by Caroline Alexander

  Between Cumberland and the Isle of Man, then, young Fletcher Christian had lived within the shadow of family greatness, even if the shadow was not cast by his own immediate kin. No evidence survives of how he passed the years between St. Bees School and his sudden resurfacing in the muster roll of the Eurydice in 1783. The younger sons of Charles and Ann Christian would have been brought up to look forward to university and careers in law, following the paths of John and Edward; but the money had run out. Fletcher’s late coming to his profession, his staying “at school longer than young men generally do who enter into the navy,” may have been the result of family stalling, a hope that something “would come up” to change their fortunes. Nevertheless, Fletcher’s proposal to Bligh—that “he would readily enter his ship as a Foremast-man”—indicates that the young man had accepted with great grace and optimistic courage this abrupt change of destinies.

  Another of the Bounty’s newly recruited young gentlemen had a family background remarkably similar to that of Fletcher Christian. In fact, Peter Heywood was distantly related to the Christians: his great-aunt Elizabeth had married another John Christian of Douglas, and both the Christians and his mother’s family, the Speddings, had married into the ancient Cumberland family of Curwen. On his father’s side, Peter Heywood could trace his ancestry back to Piers E’Wood in 1164, who had settled after the Norman invasion near Heywood, Lancashire. A branch of the family eventually immigrated to the Isle of Man, of whom the most famous member had been Peter “Powderplot” Heywood, who had apprehended Guy Fawkes and so forestalled the plot to blow up Parliament in 1605.

  Peter was born on June 5, 1772, on the Isle of Man, in his father’s house, the Nunnery, a romantic former abbey set in extensive gardens about half a mile up the hill from Douglas, and the most imposing property in the area. Peter’s father, Peter John Heywood, like many of the Manx Christians before him, was a deemster of the island, and took a scholar’s interest in the Manx language, unusual for his time.

  But while Heywood may have been a learned man, he appears not to have been highly practical. The next year, he was forced by debts to sell the Nunnery, surrender his position as deemster, and move to Whitehaven, close to where Fletcher Christian was to go to school.

  Exactly how the Heywoods survived over the next few years remains unclear, but in 1781, Mr. Heywood was offered the appointment as seneschal, or agent, of the Duke of Atholl’s estate and holdings on the Isle of Man. Young Peter had moved back to the island with his large family of ten brothers and sisters, and settled in Douglas, where Fletcher’s mother was now also residing, and where the presence of the Nunnery must have been a constant, bitter reminder of more prosperous days.

  In July 1787, only a month before Bligh received his orders for the Bounty, Peter’s father was unceremoniously fired by the Duke of Atholl when it was discovered that he not only had been wildly mishandling the Duke’s estate, but had also pocketed several thousand pounds of his employer’s income. Confronted with his wrongdoing, Mr. Heywood had responded with self-righteous hauteur; among other tactics, he pointed out that his family could be traced as far back as the Atholls. This inability to assume any responsibility, let alone culpability, for his actions so incensed his employer that the Duke felt compelled to offer a personal rebuke. For years, he observed to Mr. Heywood, “you have been living in a Stile of profusion far beyond your fortune, and to the detriment of your own Children spending money belonging to another.”

  Mr. Heywood’s sudden loss of employment had brought disaster to his family, who were forced to move out of their house, which was the Duke’s property. On the other hand, the disgrace of Mr. Heywood’s offense was studiously concealed and there is no whisper of any misdeed in all the Heywood papers down through the decades after this. Apparently unashamed, the children seemed to have passed through life with all their illusions of superior gentility intact.

  Peter had been sent away to school at the age of eleven, first to Nantwich school in Cheshire and then, briefly, also to St. Bees, at which establishments he would have received a gentleman’s usual diet of religious instruction and Latin. His teacher at Nantwich had published books on Livy and Tacitus, and so one may hazard that young Peter had his fill of these. Unlike Fletcher, however, a seagoing career of some kind had probably been in the cards for Peter, regardless of changed family circumstances; the number of naval and military careers in the Heywood pedigree suggests this was an honored tradition. Peter’s first naval service had been aboard the Powerful, in 1786. The Powerful, however, had never left Plymouth Harbour. As this represented his only naval experience prior to joining the Bounty, he had not yet served at sea.

  Peter’s position as a young gentleman and an AB on the Bounty came through the sympathetic and pitying offices of William Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, a friend of the Heywoods. “He is an ingenious young Lad & has always been a favorite of mine & indeed every body here,” Betham wrote to Bligh from Douglas, thanking him for taking Peter under his wing. “And indeed the Reason of my insisting so strenuously upon his going the Voyage with you is that after I had mentioned the matter to Mrs Bligh, his Family have fallen into a great deal of Distress on account of their Father’s losing the Duke of Atholl’s Business, and I thought it would not appear well in me to drop this matter if it cou’d be possibly be done without any prejudice to you, as this wou’d seem deserting them in their adversity, and I found they wou’d regard it as a great Disappointment.” Betham did not apparently envisage young Peter’s duties as being particularly nautical. “I hope he will be of some Service to you, so far as he is able, in writing or looking after any necessary matters under your charge,” Betham had added, vaguely.

  In the summer of 1787, Mr. Heywood accompanied his son from the Isle of Man to Liverpool. Here he bade Peter good-bye, entrusting him to the care of friends who were traveling to London by chaise along the long, rough road, each carrying a pair of loaded pistols as a guard against highwaymen. Once at Deptford, as another token of Bligh’s efforts for the young man, Peter stayed with Bligh and his wife at their lodgings while the Bounty was being equipped. Christian had relatives in London of his own to visit, including an uncle and his brother John, who had moved here after his bankruptcy. Given Christian’s already close association with Bligh, it would be incredible that he too did not visit the Bligh household at this time. “You have danced my children upon your knee,” Bligh would remind the master’s mate at a later date.

  Also joining the Bounty, rated as a nominal AB, was another fallen aristocrat of sorts, twenty-one-year-old Edward Young. Edward was the nephew of Sir George Young, a distinguished naval captain and future admiral who had served in both the Royal Navy and the East India Company. “As I do not know all his exploits,” one memorialist offered breezily, “I can only state that he was employed . . . in several services requiring nautical skill and British courage.” Since 1784, George Young had been an advocate, with Sir Joseph Banks, of establishing the New South Wales colony, which he envisaged would serve as a port of call for ships on the China trade and more unexpectedly a center for the cultivation of flax. A paper outlining his proposal became a cornerstone of the government’s eventual establishment of a penal colony near Botany Bay. It is probable that it was through his connection with Banks that Young had approached Bligh about a position for Edward.

  However, there is no family record of a nephew called Edward. On the Bounty muster, Edward is entered as coming from “St. Kitt’s,” and a near contemporary reference mentions him as “half-caste.” He was described by Bligh as roughly five foot eight in height, with a dark complexion “and rather a bad look.” Young had dark brown hair, was “Strong Made” and had “lost several of his Fore teeth, and those that remain are all Rotten; a Small Mole on the left Side of the throat.” If Edward was indeed a nephew of Sir George, it is most likely that his father had been Robert Young, a younger brother who had died in 1781 on St. Helena while captain of the East India Company’s Vansittart
. Whereas other distinguished families associated with the Bounty would be loud in their opinions, news of the mutiny was met with a thundering silence by the Youngs. If Edward had been born on the wrong side of the blanket, there may have been relief when he vanished from the picture altogether.

  Yet another young gentleman, George Stewart from the Orkney Islands, joined the Bounty as a midshipman, but was rerated AB before the ship sailed (the ship’s fixed allotment of two midshipman positions required judicious management on Bligh’s part). Bligh had met Stewart seven years earlier, when the Resolution had called at Stromness at the end of her long and harrowing voyage. In their home, the Whitehouse, overlooking the harbor and the bustling town with its inns and taverns, Alexander and Margaret Stewart, George’s parents, had entertained Bligh.

  Like so many of the Bounty’s young gentlemen, George Stewart could trace an old and distinguished lineage. His father’s family could be traced back to King Robert II, in the thirteenth century; his mother could trace her descent back to Danes who had settled the Orkneys in the ninth century. Alexander Stewart had been born and lived on Ronaldsay in the Orkneys, but had moved to Stromness for his children’s schooling; he and his wife had eight children, of whom George was the eldest. Apparently, when word of the Bounty’s voyage reached them, the Stew-arts had reminded Bligh of their former acquaintance; surely the stories the young master had told the Stewart family seven years earlier, upon his return from the Pacific had made George’s interest in this particular voyage especially keen.

  When he came down to Deptford to join the Bounty, George Stewart was twenty-one years old and “five feet seven inches high,” according to Bligh, who continued with an unprepossessing description: “High, good Complexion, Dark Hair, Slender Made, Narrow chested, and long Neck, Small Face and Black Eyes.”

  The last of the Bounty’s young gentlemen was fifteen-year-old John Hallett from London, the son of John Hallett, an architect, and his wife, Hannah. He had four younger brothers, all of whom would later be employed by the East India Company, and one half sister, the “natural child” of Mr. Hallett. Midshipman Hallett’s father was a wealthy man, with a residence in Manchester Buildings, a gentlemen’s row of private houses situated just off the Thames, almost opposite Westminster Bridge and in strolling distance of St. James’s Park. The Halletts, like the Haywards, belonged to the energetic, gentlemanly professional class possessed of actual skills—doctors and architects as opposed to seneschals or bankrupt country lawyers.

  Hallett Senior moved in a distinguished circle of artists, including members of the Royal Academy. His niece had married into a prosperous family of merchants and shipbuilders, with a home in fashionable Tunbridge, where Mr. Hallett was often found. From diarist Joseph Farington, who recorded a number of dinners and other social occasions at which Mr. Hallett was present, we are given a glimpse of the Bounty midshipman’s circle: “Mr. Hallett spoke of several persons who from a low beginning had made great fortunes,” Farington noted after a London dinner, going on to describe a leather breeches maker now established on Bond Street and said to be worth £150,000. War with Russia would only ruin Russia’s trade, as England could do without her goods. A neighbor recently died having “expended £50,000 it was not well known how”—all good solid, middle-class, mercantile discussion.

  Young John Hallett was already well on the road to a naval career when he joined the Bounty. He had been entered on the books as a lieutenant’s servant in 1777, at the age of five, and on the books of four subsequent ships as a captain’s servant. Prior to joining the Bounty, he had been on the Alarm, which had paid off in Port Royal, Jamaica, when the ship was taken out of commission. This had occurred four years previously, and one assumes young Hallett, at age eleven, was getting his schooling during the interim. John Hallett Sr. appears to have been acquainted with Banks, and wrote to him thanking him for getting his son’s position. While the Bounty was swarming with young gentlemen—officers in training, midshipmen in waiting—the only two to hold the coveted midshipmen’s slots were Thomas Hayward and John Hallett, both protégés of Banks.

  In early October, Bligh prepared the Bounty to leave the Thames for Spithead, Portsmouth, where he was to await official orders to sail. The ship, now copper sheathed, had been completely refitted and was stuffed with supplies—not just the food stores, clothing or “slops,” fuel, water, rum and bulk necessities, but all the miscellaneous minutiae of the gardener’s trade, as inventoried on a list supplied by Banks: paper, pens, ink, India ink, “Colours of all kinds,” spade, pins, wire, fly traps, an insect box, bottles, knives, “Journal Books & other usefull Books,” guns and gunpowder, shot and flints, and “Trinkets for the Natives,” which included mirrors and eighty pounds of white, blue and red glass beads. Bligh had also been given sixty-one ducats and forty-five Spanish dollars for the purchase of plants. Eight hundred variously sized pots for the breadfruit plants had been stowed, but as David Nelson reported to Banks plaintively, “as I have only room for 600, the remainder may possibly be broken.” The pots had been made extra deep for drainage by “Mr. Dalton, potter,” near Deptford Creek.

  Every British naval seaman brought certain expectations to each ship he joined. He expected to endure hard labor in raw conditions, and was ever mindful that he was vulnerable to harsh and often arbitrary punishment at the hands of his officers. He expected to eat very specifically measured amounts of rank food, and to drink much liquor. Above all, he expected to exist for the duration of his service in stifling, unhygienic squalor. There would be no privacy. As the official naval allotment of fourteen inches sleeping space for each man suggests, space was always at a premium—but nowhere more so than on the little Bounty, now crammed with supplies for eighteen months’ voyaging and trade. Her fo’c’sle, an unventilated, windowless area of 22 by 36 feet, was shared by thirty-three men, while the maximum height between decks amidships was 5 feet 7 inches—the average height of the men she carried. The master’s mates, Fletcher Christian and William Elphinstone (another protégé of Banks’s), the midshipmen and young gentlemen Hayward and Hallett, Peter Heywood, George Stewart, Edward Young and Robert Tinkler—were all quartered directly behind Bligh’s little pantry, separated, it is suggested, merely by canvas walls.

  On deck, amid the piles of stores, were the Bounty’s three boats. The Navy Board had placed an order for these as early as June, but the usual supplier, swamped with other work, had been forced to beg off. The Board then turned to a private contractor to build a launch of 20 feet in length with copper fastenings, and to the Deal boatyard for a cutter and a jolly boat of 18 and 16 feet, respectively. For reasons known only to himself, Bligh requested of the Navy Board that the launch and cutter, which had already been supplied, be replaced with larger models. The Board complied, and thus was acquired one of the most historic craft in maritime history, the Bounty’s 23-foot-long, 2-foot-9-inch-deep launch.

  On October 9, 1787, a drear, dull day, the pilot arrived to take the Bounty out of the Thames on the first leg of her voyage. In the Long Reach she received her gunner’s stores. Officially designated as an “Armed Vessel,” she was equipped with “four short four-pounder carriage guns and ten half-pounder swivel guns,” to quote the Admiralty’s directive—a laughably meager firepower. Additionally, there were small arms, muskets, powder and bayonets, all locked in the arms chest, supposedly at all times under the key of the ship’s master, John Fryer.

  The Bounty herself was in her glory—newly fitted out to the tune of thousands of pounds, sails set, piled with stores, guns gleaming and swarming with her men, the midshipmen in their smart blue coats, Bligh in his blue-and-white-piped lieutenant’s uniform with its bright gilt buttons, and the seamen in their long, baggy trousers and boxy jackets: Charles Churchill, with his disfigured hand showing “the Marks of a Severe Scald”; German-speaking Henry Hilbrant, strong and sandy-haired, but with “His Left Arm Shorter than the other having been broke; Alexander Smith, “Very much pitted” with smallpox, and
bearing an axe scar on his right foot; John Sumner, slender, fair and with a “Scar upon the left Cheek”; William McCoy, scarred by a stab wound in the belly; William Brown, the gardener, also fair and slender, but bearing a “remarkable Scar on one of his Cheeks Which contracts the Eye Lid and runs down to his throat.” With the knowledge of hindsight, they are a piratical-looking crew.

  The Bounty lingered at Long Reach for nearly a week before receiving orders to proceed to Spithead, the naval anchorage outside Portsmouth Harbour. But “the winds and weather were so unfavorable,” in Bligh’s words, that the short journey down the Thames and around the coast took nearly three weeks to complete.

  “I have been very anxious to acquaint you of my arrival here, which I have now accomplished with some risk,” Bligh wrote Banks on November 5 from Spithead. “I anchored here last night, after being drove on the coast of France in a very heavy gale.” His plan, as he now related, was to make as swiftly as possible for Cape Horn in order to squeak through a diminishing window of opportunity for rounding the tempestuous Cape so late in the season; as he observed to Banks, “if I get the least slant round the Cape I must make the most of it.” Bligh was awaiting not only a break in the weather, but also his sailing orders, without which he could not sail. He did not, however, anticipate any difficulties, noting that “the Commissioner promises me every assistance, and I have no doubt but the trifles I have to do here will be soon accomplished.”