“[W]e had hoistd the fore topmast Staysail and the Ship was easting, two hands up loosing the Foretopsail,” Fryer wrote, “when I heard Mr. Bligh call out, hand the arms up.”
“Why dont you come to assist me Sir,” Bligh greeted Fryer. The master now discovered that the call for arms was in order to guard the detained chiefs. Local rumor, however, already reported the grapnel had been carried away to another island.
“[M]ean while we were under arms some of the People was rather awkward, when Mr. Bligh made a speech to them told them that they were all a parcel of good for nothing Rascals.” This was the first time, on record at least, that Bligh had complained about his “People,” as opposed to his officers. Morrison recalled the incident somewhat differently. After taking the detained chiefs below, Bligh returned on deck.
“He then came up and dismissd all the Men but two, that were under arms, but not till he had passd the Compliment on officers & Men to tell them that they were a parcel of lubberly rascals and that he would be one of five who would with good sticks would disarm the whole of them.” The day had clearly seen an unpleasant dressing-down of the entire company, either rightly, or quite possibly wrongly. The detained and frightened chiefs—“those poor miserable fellows,” as Fryer described them—were, according to Bligh, “Vastly Surprized” at their predicament and assured Bligh that a canoe would be sent after the thieves and the grapnel.
As the hours passed, great long canoes followed the ship, “full of People making sad lamentations for their chiefs,” as Fryer wrote. By late afternoon, all but one impressive double canoe had left them, full of weeping women and the oldest chief, all lamenting and inflicting on themselves the wounds of ritual mourning.
Still, no grapnel had appeared.
“I however detained them untill Sun Down,” wrote Bligh of the chiefs, “when they began to be very uneasy, beat themselves about their Eyes with their fists and at last cried bitterly.” As before, when he had tried to stay aloof from Tynah, Bligh appears not to have had the stomach to carry out his charade.
“I now told them I should not detain them any longer and called their Cannoes alongside to take them in, at which they were exceedingly rejoiced,” was Bligh’s account of the abrupt termination to the standoff. Each of the captives was given a hatchet, saw, nails and other desirable ironware, at which they “showed such gratitude and thanks for my goodness that it affected all of us,” is how Bligh concludes this bewildering chapter. Two of the chiefs, according to Morrison, “[s]eemd as if they only smotherd their resentment, seeing that they could not revenge the insult.”
At the end of this fraught day, Bligh had gained absolutely nothing by his heavy-handed mismanagement of almost everything recorded of this harried and unsettling visit to Anamooka. His losses, on the other hand, were disastrous. To his men, only three weeks out of Tahiti, with the memories of taios and lovers and many kindnesses received still vivid, the treatment of the chiefs was probably genuinely shocking. Nothing like it had been enacted onshore, and Bligh must have lost much moral stature in their eyes. He had also, as it were, lost the game. When the chiefs and Bounty parted company, the chiefs left with their many presents, the Bounty without her grapnel.
But it is the milling confusion at the watering place that stands at the tantalizing center of the Anamooka sojourn, for it is here that Fletcher Christian was most specifically and directly embroiled. No report makes clear what Christian had in fact done to warrant Bligh’s damning him for a “cowardly rascal.”
Bligh’s very specific instructions regarding the use of arms, which surely struck his men as being almost incomprehensibly unreasonable, were firmly based, once again, upon experience with Cook. Bligh had seen how useful arms had been in February 1779, at Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay. Here, the Resolution and the Discovery had come for repairs, and here Cook and his men suffered the usual petty thieving. But when the ship’s cutter was stolen, Cook had loaded his double-barreled musket, one barrel with shot and one with ball, and accompanied by Lieutenant Molesworth Phillips at the head of nine armed marines, had strode ashore. The crowd he met with on arrival was suspicious and hostile; it was also armed with spears and stones, and the people gathered protectively around their chief, whom, indeed, Cook had intended to take hostage. A man made a menacing movement at Cook, something was thrown and Cook fired his shot—to no effect, for his assailant was protected by stout matting. The crowd grew more threatening, throwing stones, and Cook fired ball. This time he killed a man; his lieutenant of marines fired, the marines fired and the crowd overwhelmed them all. Minutes later, the men in the waiting boats watched with stunned horror as Cook was clubbed from behind and fell facedown into the water as he attempted to reach one of the boats. He was then clubbed to death in the shallows.
“I not only gave my Orders but my advice,” Bligh had told Christian and his men, as they set out on the wood and watering parties; his advice was a personal admonition, concerned, perhaps even friendly. It was based upon what he, Bligh, knew: that no word or gesture should be made to engage a suspect crowd, that loaded arms endowed their bearers with fatal confidence, that the wrong shot fired at the wrong time could precipitate trouble, not quell it. Morrison’s account vindicates Bligh’s concerns.
The crowd, Morrison wrote, was “very rude & attempted to take the Casks from the Waterers and the axes from the Wooding party; and if a Musquet was pointed at any of them produced no other effect than a return of the Compliment, by poising their Club or Spear with a menacing look.” Morrison’s account also confirms that Bligh’s orders had been ignored: Bligh had stipulated that the arms be kept in the boats, knowing that if events took an ugly turn, the boats providing the getaway were the objects that must at all cost be safeguarded.
Like most of the crew, Christian had not sailed with Cook. He did not perhaps know that the taking of hostages had, as it were, naval precedent and was not merely some underhanded act of tyranny devised by Bligh; nor was the ship’s company likely to have appreciated Bligh’s insights into the finer points of crowd management.
It was now April 27, 1789. For the past several days the weather had been unremarkable, with light easterly winds, and cloudy. On leaving Anamooka, the Bounty headed north toward Tofua, the northwesternmost of the Friendly Islands. By night, the air had become so light and still that the ship made little progress. Away to the west, a volcano on Tofua erupted, shooting flame and columns of smoke into the night sky, a spectacle enjoyed by the men on ship. The same still, calm weather held into the morning when Bligh came up for a turn about the quarterdeck and, taking a hard look at the coconuts piled between the guns, sent for Fryer.
“Mr. Fryer,” said Bligh, according to Fryer, “don’t you think that those Cocoanuts are shrunk since last Night?”
“I told him,” said Fryer, “that they were not so high as they were last night, as I had them stowd up to the Rail but,” as he added diplomatically, “that the people might have pull them Down—in walking over them in the Night.”
Bligh thought not. “[H]e said No that they had been taken away and that he would find out who had taken them.” Churchill, the master-at-arms (Morrison says it was Elphinstone, the master’s mate), was then ordered to bring up all the nuts from belowdecks, along with their owners.
“ ‘Every Body,’ he repeated several times.”
One by one, Bligh addressed his officers. “‘Mr. Young—how many Nuts did you bye?’ ‘So many Sir.’ ‘& How many did you eat?’ ” Young did not know, but there was the remainder to be counted. Morrison implied that the interrogation was only of the officers, while Fryer specifically noted “then all the other Gentlemen was calld and likewise the People.” Fryer made no mention at all of Fletcher Christian; indeed, Edward Young is the only person singled out in his version. But in Morrison’s narration, Christian is placed front and center.
Bligh, according to Morrison, “questioned every Officer in turn concerning the Number they had bought, & coming to Mr. Christian askd Hi
m, Mr. Christian answerd ‘I do not know Sir, but I hope you dont think me so mean as to be Guilty of Stealing Yours.’ Mr. Bligh replied ‘Yes you dam’d Hound I do—You must have stolen them from me or you could give a better account of them—God dam you you Scoundrels you are all thieves alike, and combine with the men to rob me—I suppose you’ll Steal my Yams next, but I’ll sweat you for it you rascals I’ll make half of you jump overboard before you get through Endeavour Streights.’ ”
“‘I take care of you now for my own good—but when I get you thro the Straits you may all go to hell,’ and if they did not look out sharp that he would do for one half of them” was how Fryer condensed this same speech.
In Fryer’s account, Bligh concluded this showdown by telling “Every Body that he allowd them a pound and a half of yams, which was more than there Allowance—but if he did not find out who took the Nuts that he would put them on ¾ of a pound of Yams.” Fryer’s almost parenthetical aside—“which was more than there Allowance”—is such an oddly reasonable qualification of Bligh’s threat that it must, one senses, be true; Fryer’s narrative was not intended to be complimentary to Bligh, and this detail was unlikely to have been invented. This same concluding threat, however, Morrison reported somewhat differently.
“Stop these Villains Grog, and Give them but half a Pound of Yams tomorrow,” Bligh is said to have commanded his clerk, Mr. Samuel. “[A]nd if they steal then, I’ll reduce them to a quarter.” Bligh went below, according to Morrison, at which “the officers then got together and were heard to murmur much at such treatment, and it was talkd among the Men that the Yams would be next seized.”
Later reports would depict Christian as having been not only wounded but shattered by this confrontation. William Purcell would state that Christian came from Bligh with tears “running fast from his eyes in big drops.”
“What is the matter Mr. Christian?” Purcell had asked—which is itself intriguing; if all had happened as reported, surely he knew?
“Can you ask me, and hear the treatment I receive?” Christian had asked; to which Purcell had replied, “Do I not receive as bad as you do?”
“[Y]ou have something to protect you,” Christian said to Purcell. He was referring to the carpenter’s warrant, which forbade that he be flogged; although designated “acting lieutenant” of the voyage by Bligh, Christian was still officially a master’s mate, which amounted more or less to a senior midshipman.
“[Y]ou have something to protect you, and can speak again; but if I should speak to him as you do”—apparently the carpenter’s verbal defiance was well recognized—“he would probably break me, turn me before the mast, and perhaps flog me; and if he did, it would be the death of us both, for I am sure I should take him in my arms, and jump overboard with him.”
“Never mind it, it is but for a short time longer,” was Purcell’s parting, buck-up-it’s-not-as-bad-as-you-think advice. To this Christian is said to have replied, “In going through Endeavour Straits, I am sure the ship will be a hell.” Hell was to come up a good deal in Christian’s later speeches.
All reports agree that after this blowup, Bligh went contentedly about his business; the coconut incident receives no mention whatsoever in either his private or official log. Afterward, he resumed his custom of inviting Christian to dine with him, as Christian had done every third evening of the voyage. Christian declined, sending word he was indisposed, upon which Thomas Hayward accepted Bligh’s offer, and, according to Fryer, was hissed by the other young gentlemen when he left.
Writing to Bligh some years after the events, Edward Lamb, who had sailed with Bligh and Christian on the Britannia’s last voyage as chief mate, back when they were working in the West Indies, made some skeptical observations about Fletcher Christian. “When we got to sea, and I saw your partiality for the young man,” the former mate told Bligh, “I gave him every advice and information in my power, though he went about every point of duty with a degree of indifference, that to me was truly unpleasant; but you were blind to his faults, and had him to dine and sup every other day in the cabin, and treated him like a brother, in giving him every information.”
All available evidence indicates that this favoritism had continued on the Bounty. Of Christian—and of Peter Heywood—Bligh was shortly to write, “These two were objects of my regard and attention . . . for they realy promised as professional Men to be an honor to their Country.” This was high praise from Bligh and suggests that in spite of whatever specific causes of complaint he may have had against the master’s mate, he was not, all in all, dissatisfied with his protégé’s progress. It was then not Bligh who broke with Christian, but Christian who broke with Bligh.
Exactly why or precisely when Christian had began to succumb to the pressure of serving under his irascible commander is impossible to ascertain. In reports that would later emerge he was quoted as saying he had been in hell “for weeks past,” “for two weeks,” or in other words, since the Bounty left Tahiti. Central to Christian’s state of mind appears to have been the extraordinary idea that Bligh might either break or flog him. Bligh’s log hints darkly at “condign” and “corporal punishment” being in order, so it is not impossible that he made such a threat in one of his passions. But if so, one would expect an event of such blazing significance to be referred to by Morrison or Fryer; or Heywood in his letters; or in testimony in the court-martial; or in later rumored accounts. No such allegation was ever made.
Sixteen months earlier, at the riverside inn with his brother Charles before the Bounty sailed, Fletcher Christian had gained a breathtaking insight into how powerless a man could be made, officer or seaman, in the hands of a tyrannical captain, as his brother related all that had happened on the Middlesex.
“His passions were raised against me, to a more violent degree than formerly. Let him speak the truth, and he cannot assign a reasonable cause . . . sent for me, bent me, ordered me to be flogged to death”; so had Fletcher learned one of the men in the Middlesex mutiny had protested his treatment. From his impassioned brother, who had leaped into the fray, Fletcher had also learned there was honor in resistance.
The fact that Bligh invited Christian to join him on the usual terms of friendship at his table suggests that Bligh himself, for all his passionate language, did not seriously entertain any such thoughts of violence against his master’s mate. “Passionate” was a term that would be used of Bligh throughout his life, even by his supportive relatives. Cook had been passionate too; behind his back his men had referred to his impressive foot-stamping, fist-shaking rages as “heivas,” after the exuberant Tahitian dances. The impotence of young officers in the face of their captains’ intemperate rule was, moreover, simply an established fact of naval tradition. “The state of inferior officers in his majesty’s service is a state of vassalage,” an officer of this era had reflected. “[T]hat power of reducing them to sweep the decks, being lodged in the breast of a captain, is often abused through passion or caprice.”
Bligh’s passions were verbal, not physical, and it is unlikely that he was aware of half of what he said. Nonetheless, something had shaken Christian to the core.
“He is subject to violent perspirations, and particularly in his hands, so that he soils any thing he touches,” Bligh would write of Christian, in his description of this apparently well-made, well-looking young man. One may be sure that Christian was sweating now.
By late afternoon of this unpleasant day, Bligh headed the Bounty due west, so as to pass to the south of Tofua, and be on course for her jog to the Endeavour Strait; this represented a decisive stage on the homeward voyage, since to turn back, for any reason, would be to sail against the now prevailing easterly wind. The evening passed without incident, and if Bligh was oblivious that some dark and critical line had been crossed in Christian’s mind, it appears everyone else was too. Only in relentless painstaking retrospect would anything be detected amiss.
John Fryer had the first watch of the night, eight P.M. to
midnight, and noted with pleasure that at about ten o’clock the weather cleared. About an hour later Bligh came on deck, as was customary, to give Fryer his orders for the night.
“We at that time was upon speaking terms,” Fryer noted.
A welcome breeze had arisen, promising better sailing than had been seen for some days. Both men stood looking out over the ruffled night water and observed the new moon, which Fryer noted would be “lucky for us to come on the coast of New Holland.”
“Yes, Mr. Fryer,” replied Bligh, “it will be very lucky for us.” Shortly afterward, Bligh took his leave and went below.
At midnight, Fryer was relieved by William Peckover, who, according to Fryer, “had a very pleasant watch.”
“[E]very thing very quiet on board,” as Fryer wrote. Four hours later, at four A.M., Peckover in turn was relieved by Fletcher Christian. The Bounty was by now some ten leagues south of Tofua.
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty Page 17
