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

by Caroline Alexander

  The days passed and the weather broke, and still Bligh’s sailing orders did not arrive. As the delay lengthened, his wife, Betsy, broke off nursing their youngest daughter, who was stricken with smallpox, and came down from their home in Wapping to take lodgings in Portsmouth. With impotent exasperation, Bligh watched other ships weigh anchor and slip serenely down the Channel, in the fair, fine weather. Each day that passed, as he knew, reduced the odds of a good passage around the Horn.

  There had already been warning signs that the Bounty’s voyage, so beloved to Joseph Banks, did not stand quite so high in Admiralty eyes. Back in September, Bligh had received a distinguished visitor at the Deptford docks. Lord Selkirk, a Scottish earl, ostensibly came down to use his interest to find a position for his son’s tutor, William Lockhead, who was “an enthusiast in regard to Natural History” and “most anxious to go round the World with Mr. Bligh”; Selkirk’s son, the Honorable Dunbar Douglas, was already set to join the Bounty as yet another gentleman “able seaman.” With his own son destined to sail with her, Selkirk took a closer look than most at the Bounty; alarmed at what he had seen, he wrote a frank and urgent report to Banks, drawing attention to ominous deficiencies.

  The rating of Bligh’s vessel as a cutter, and not a sloop of war, was “highly improper for so long a voyage,” Selkirk wrote on September 14, pointing out that the ship’s establishment did not include “a Lieutenant, or any Marines.” Marines essentially served the role of the commander’s security force, and Cook had never sailed on his Pacific voyages with fewer than twelve.

  But perhaps most troubling to Lord Selkirk was the issue of Bligh’s own status: “I was sorry to find . . . Mr. Bligh himself is but very indifferently used, or rather I think realy ill used,” Selkirk had written with some force. “It would have been scrimply Justice to him to have made him Master & Commander before sailing: nay considering that he was, I believe, the only person that was not in some way or other prefer’d at their return of all who went last out with Capt. Cook, it would be no unreasonable thing to make him Post Captain now.” Cook, on his very first Pacific voyage, had also sailed as a lieutenant—but the prestige of that voyage had never been in question.

  Although Selkirk did not disclose the fact, he was an old friend of Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, and it is probable that he had been leaned upon to communicate family concerns to Banks. These concerns were openly expressed in the farewell letter Betham himself wrote to Bligh a week later, offering his good wishes for the long voyage ahead: “I own I have a different Idea of [the voyage] from what I had conceived before I was acquainted with the Circumstances of the Vessel, & the manner in which it is fitted out,” he told his son-in-law. “Government I think have gone too frugally to work: Both the Ship and the Complement of Men are too small in my opinion for such a voyage. Lord Howe may understand Navy matters very well, but I suppose mercantile Projects are treated by him with Contempt.”

  “Contempt” is perhaps too strong a word; but the accumulation of troubling details—the miserably small ship, the determinedly lower rating, Bligh’s own status and the apparent lack of urgency in getting sailing orders—tend to suggest that collecting breadfruit in Tahiti was not at the top of the Admiralty’s list. Among other things, England seemed poised for yet another war, this time with Holland.

  “Every thing here wears the appearance of War being at hand,” Duncan Campbell had written to a Jamaican colleague on September 29. “Seaman’s Wages & every naval Store have of course risen to War prices.” To an Admiralty intent on mobilizing ships and men, the Bounty’s breadfruit run to the Pacific was only a distraction. Three weeks would pass before Bligh received his sailing orders, by which time the fair conditions had changed.

  On November 28, 1787, Bligh headed the Bounty out to sea, and got as far as St. Helens on the Isle of Wight, an inconsequential distance, where he was forced to anchor. For the next twenty-four days, the Bounty bounced between Spithead and St. Helens as each successive attempt to get down Channel failed in the teeth of contrary winds. Master Fryer and William Peckover, the gunner, were laid up by the bad weather with “rheumatic complaints” and a number of his men had severe colds. Resentment and anxiety that had been mounting in Bligh for months rose to the fore.

  “If there is any punishment that ought to be inflicted on a set of Men for neglect I am sure it ought on the Admiralty for my three weeks detention at this place during a fine fair wind which carried all outward bound ships clear of the channel but me, who wanted it most,” Bligh fumed in a letter to Duncan Campbell. It was December 10, and he was back at St. Helens, pinned in the cabin. “This has made my task a very arduous one indeed for to get round Cape Horn at the time I shall be there. I know not how to promise myself any success and yet I must do it if the ship will stand it at all or I suppose my character will be at stake. Had Lord Howe sweetened this difficult task by giving me promotion I should have been satisfied.”

  The question of promotion worried Bligh grievously. At the very least, as he had written to Banks, “that one step would make a material difference to Mrs. Bligh and her children in case of any accident to me.” Moved by Bligh’s entreaties, Banks personally approached Lord Howe, the revered First Lord of the Admiralty, but without success, being told such advancement “was designed intirely as a reward to those who had engaged in the War equipment”; in other words, breadfruit expeditions did not count.

  “The hardship I make known I lay under, is that they took me from a state of affluence from your employ,” Bligh continued, unburdening himself to Duncan Campbell, “with an income five hundred a Year to that of Lieut’s pay 4/- per day to perform a Voyage which few were acquainted with sufficiently to ensure it any degree of success.”

  But interest had gone as far as it could. Meanwhile, if war was indeed at hand, this would be the occasion for promotions, although not for Lieutenant Bligh, off in the Pacific.

  “Poor fellow,” Campbell would say of Bligh, somewhat later. Ignobly batted back and forth across the Channel entrance, Bligh, while not quite getting cold feet, was clearly assessing the risks of the voyage to which he was committed. Low pay was to have been compensated by promotion and the prestige of the undertaking; but there was no promotion and the prestige had already evaporated. Frustrated, demoralized, already tested by the weather, Bligh had not yet even left England.

  “[I]t is wished to impress it strongly on your mind that the whole success of the undertaking depends ultimately upon your diligence and care,” Banks wrote in an oppressively stern letter to the poor gardener David Nelson—but the warning applied equally to Bligh. “[A]nd that your future prospects in life will greatly depend upon your conduct on this occasion.”

  One person on board, at least, benefited from the delay in the Bounty’s departure. Thanks to the rough weather, Fletcher Christian was able to meet his brother Charles, who had recently returned to England on the Middlesex, the East Indiaman on which he had been ship’s surgeon.

  “When the Middlesex returned from India, the Bounty lay near to where she was moored,” Charles Christian recounted in an unpublished memoir many years later. “Fletcher came on Board coming up the River, and he and I and one of our Officers who had been in the Navy went on Shore, and spent the Evening and remained till next Day.” There were family matters to discuss; their sister Mary had died in her twenty-sixth year, more than eighteen months before; their youngest brother, Humphrey, was soon to go to Africa. Doubtless, too, the brothers conferred over family finances. Things were looking up for Fletcher who, returned from the West Indies, could report that he was now off to Tahiti, with Cook’s sailing master.

  But all of this was overshadowed by the news Charles Christian had to tell his younger brother. Certain events had transpired on the Middlesex that had shaken him to his core—indeed, they were eventually to lead to his mental breakdown. Two weeks before the arrival of the Middlesex in England, Charles Christian had been involved in a mutiny.

  Trouble
had begun as early as Fort Saint George, in Madras. David Fell, the second officer, claimed that he had been unlawfully confined on the ship, and that the governor of the fort had interceded and ordered him released. The Company’s surviving records tend to bear this out, showing that in July 1787 the Directors praised the governor for the “manner in which you interfered in the Disputes on board the Middlesex.”

  The real trouble came to a head two months later, however, as the ship approached English shores. On September 5, according to the log of Captain John Rogers, Mr. Grece, seaman, was placed in irons “for Presenting a Loaded Pistol to my Breast with a threat that he would put the first Man to death who would offer to touch him.” The first and second officers attempted to aid John William Grece and were dismissed “for aiding & assisting in the above Mutinous Conspiracy” as well as “for Drunkeness, Insolent Language & striking at me on the Quarter Deck. . . . The Surgeon also in the Conspiracy.”

  Two days later, George Aitken, the dismissed first officer, came on deck when Captain Rogers was present, an action the captain interpreted as hostile. Calling on his other officers, Rogers had Aitken and David Fell confined below, “battened them both in their Cabbins,” with a scuttle cut in the door for air. Twelve days later, the Middlesex reached the Downs, the sheltered anchorage between Dover and the Thames estuary.

  The captain’s log, however, did not give the entire story. Upon return to England, the Middlesex officers and men sent a stream of furious and aggrieved letters into the East India Company’s Court of Directors, charging Captain John Rogers with brutal conduct.

  “I see myself bearing with Silence, insults, excessive severe to my Feelings, considering the Character I held,” wrote seaman William Grece. Shortly before the fateful day of the mutiny, he claimed to have been “wantonly insulted” by one of the passengers in the presence of the commander, who later “sent for me, Bent me, Ordered me to be Flogged to Death, and I believe, there was not much Hyperbole in this Order,” Grece wrote, his rage still palpable in the fraught diction of his letter. “I am sure if He had dared, He would have done it, and ordered me in Irons, in which Situation, he treated me with inhumanity unparrelled, this every man in the Ship knows—all commanders of the Royal Navy allow Prisoners to do the necessary calls of Nature in another place than the small space, that they are confined in. . . .

  “I think much Stress was laid with regard to the Pistol,” poor Grece now ventured, knowing he was on thin ice: such an act in the navy would have meant his death. “I for a moment thought, to prevent myself being Seized, to be Flogged, but my conduct shews I had no intention of using it.”

  The first and second officers leaped to Grece’s assistance, implicating themselves in the mutiny. They were joined by Charles Christian, whose own intervention resulted “from a sudden ebullition of passion springing from humane sympathy at seeing cruel usage exercised towards one who deserved far different treatment—on putting an ingenious, unoffending, insulted, oppressed, worthy young man into irons, by the capricious orders of tyranny influenced by a hollow sycophant,” to quote Charles’s own, impassioned and inimitable account. Grece, Aitken and Fell were all roughly imprisoned, a punishment Charles escaped.

  The Court of Directors deliberated, and handed out penalties all around. Captain Rogers was rebuked for not informing the Company of his actions toward his officers, and fined £500 and a year’s suspension for the unrelated offense of refusing passage to a Company seaman at Madras. Grece, Aitken, Fell and Christian were all handed suspensions—Grece for his lifetime, Charles Christian for two years.

  But the incident did not end here. Although the final accounting would not be given until long after the Bounty had sailed, it has much bearing on Charles Christian’s credibility. The aggrieved parties brought civil suits against the captain.

  “I had to appear as the principal, the sole witness in their favour,” Charles reported. “Lord Loughborough complimented me in court for the impartial and steady manner in which I gave my testimony.” By juries’ verdicts, the plaintiffs were awarded £3,000 in damages—an enormous sum, which must be taken as a reflection of the strength of their suit.

  No doubt Charles Christian told the same story that had so impressed Lord Loughborough to his brother Fletcher, as they talked through the stormy night at the riverside inn. Charles’s friend First Officer George Aitken would have had his own heated version to relate of having been battened inside his cabin for his principled stand. But it seems that it was Charles who had been most affected by the events.

  “I went on board of this ship in hopes,” he wrote, “as a tree in a state of pleasing promising blossom—full of life and active vigour. I returned as one withered with blight, palsy-struck, disappointed, dispirited, and full of heart-damping trouble.” He was also broke. Before setting out he had borrowed £500 on credit for trade goods, but the “markets were glutted at Madras and at Canton in China, by the unusual number of ships sent out that season,” and the money was lost.

  For Fletcher Christian, these were unsettling stories to hear on the eve of departure, and he left his brother a broken man, with the judgment of the mutiny still hanging over him. In his turn, Charles’s last memory of Fletcher was more cheerful: “[H]e was then full of professional Ambition and of Hope. He bared his Arm, and I was amazed at its Brawniness. ‘This,’ says he, ‘has been acquired by hard labour.’ He said ‘I delight to set the Men an Example. I not only can do every part of a common Sailor’s Duty, but am upon a par with a principal part of the Officers.’ ”

  When the weather at last permitted the Bounty to sail on December 23, both Bligh and Christian had much upon their minds—Bligh, demoralized and resentful; Christian, ambitious, but burdened with family matters, and shaken with the revelation of how a man could be broken by an oppressor’s tyranny. Both had everything to gain or lose on the Bounty voyage.

  After many exertions on their behalf, neither Lord Selkirk’s son, the Honorable Dunbar Douglas, nor his eager tutor sailed with the Bounty. The tutor never obtained a position, and the young gentleman departed the ship just before she left Long Reach for the open sea. Perhaps his father had continued to mull over the ship’s troubling deficiencies—her improper size, Bligh’s lack of a single commissioned officer, the absence of marines to back his authority—and concluded that this was not, after all, an enterprise on which he cared for his own son to stake his life.

  VOYAGE OUT

  On December 23, the Bounty sailed at break of a boisterous, cloudy day. By night she was already battling heavy squalls. Near disaster occurred within the first twenty-four hours, when one of the sailors fell from the main topgallant sail, and narrowly saved himself by grabbing a stay. As rain and sleet drove down, Bligh ordered the sails close-reefed, the dead-lights in and hatches battened. Heavy seas struck the ship, carrying away extra sails and a yard. By the evening of the twenty-fifth the weather had abated, which, as Bligh noted in his log, “allowed us to spend our Christmas pleasantly.” Beef and plum pudding were served for dinner, washed down with an allowance of rum.

  The well-timed respite was brief, and in the following days the heavy gales increased to a storm that piled up alarming, huge seas. Sleet and rain stung the men as they lurched and fumbled at their duties, and the Bounty herself was slammed with great waves that stove all the boats, almost washing them overboard.

  “[W]e were an entire Sea on Deck,” Bligh recorded. The sham windows of the great cabin were also stove in, and water flooded inside. So severe was the wind that Bligh dared not attempt to turn his ship to lie to but, dangerously, was forced to scud ahead of the great following sea.

  “[B]ut the Ship scuds very well,” he allowed—Bligh’s pride in the Bounty never flagged. When conditions allowed, he ordered fires lit to dry his men’s sodden gear. “Thick Rainy Weather” continued, and belowdecks he found that casks of rum and stores of fish and bread had been damaged or destroyed by the thundering, incoming seas.

  On December 29, the weather
diminished to a moderate gale. “Out all Reefs, Up Top G[allan]t Yards & set the sails,” Bligh’s log sang out. Slowly the ship regrouped. Bligh ordered the men to wash all their dirty linen, and by noon shirts and breeches were hung all around the ship, fluttering in a fresh, drying breeze. Additional clothing and tobacco were given to the men, always a good move for restoring morale.

  On January 5, following a good run through the night, Tenerife was sighted, its landmark peak hidden in clouds. By break of the following day, the Bounty was safely moored off Santa Cruz. It was drizzling, but the winds were calm and the temperature pleasant, hovering just below 70 degrees.

  Once anchored, Bligh detailed an officer to go ashore to pay respects to the governor. The officer in question is not named in Bligh’s log, but in a subsequent published narrative he pointedly reported that this was “Mr. Christian.” The delegation of the master’s mate for this vaguely prestigious function would suggest that at this early date Bligh regarded Christian as his de facto lieutenant. Christian had been instructed to request the governor’s permission to restock supplies and to repair the damaged ship. He was also to inform His Excellency that Lieutenant Bligh was willing to salute him provided that the salute was returned with the same number of guns; “but as his Excellency never returned the same Number but to persons equal in Rank to himself, this ceremony was laid aside.” Still, Bligh was able to meet with the governor personally, thanking him “for his politeness and Civility,” and was later to dine with him.