After taking leave of Fryer, Bligh had retired to his small and windowless cabin; perhaps he had looked in on the nursery to admire the well-ordered ranks of flourishing plants and the pleasing wake of his ship through the great cabin window. As was his habit, Bligh left his door open and unlocked, so as to be immediately accessible if he were needed. Presumably, he would have fallen asleep by midnight.
He was awoken five hours later, at dawn, by the weight of hands being pressed upon him. In sheer astonishment, he came to his senses to find Fletcher Christian, Charles Churchill, John Mills, the gunner’s mate, and Thomas Burkett, seaman, under arms. Bligh was roughly seized and his hands bound behind his back.
“Murder!” Bligh shouted at the top of his voice, as he was pushed up the stairway in his nightshirt, passing other men, also under arms, stationed outside his cabin door. Once on deck, there was a blur of confused activity, voices shouting, mocking, giving orders, whispering encouragement. Christian was calling for a boat to be lowered; first one was chosen and then another. Some two and a half hours later, the ship’s large launch was in the water, and Christian was giving orders for men to enter it.
Different people made different pleas to Christian. Bligh, tied in his nightshirt and naked from the waist down, was hoarse from shouting. One by one, with small bundles of belongings, the men Christian ordered passed over the side of their ship into the boat below.
John Samuel, the clerk, at considerable personal risk had secured Bligh’s log, commission and the all-important “pursery” books. “All this he did with great resolution, being guarded and Strictly Watched,” wrote Bligh. Nevertheless, fifteen years of charts, surveys and drawings had to be left behind.
Christian, so distracted and in such disarray as to frighten those who looked on him, continued to hold the rope that bound Bligh, and to point a bayonet at his chest.
“[H]e seemed to be plotting instant destruction on himself and everyone,” Bligh would write, “for of all diabolical looking Men he exceeded every possible description.” Hayward and Hallett had been ordered into the boat, while Fryer begged to remain but was sent over the side. But, contrary to all the mutineers’ expectations, other men, with Purcell in the lead, voluntarily filed over the side to join their captain.
The launch measured 23 feet in length; at its widest, it had a breadth of 6 feet 9 inches; its depth was 2 feet 9 inches. Eighteen men were now stowed in her, along with the possessions and supplies they had been able to garner: 150 pounds of bread, 32 pounds of pork, 6 quarts of rum, 6 bottles of wine and 28 gallons of water—enough, under normal circumstances, for some five days.
“Come, Captain Bligh, your Officers and Men are now in the Boat and you must go with them,” Christian said, addressing Bligh with haunting formality.
“When they were forcing me out of the ship, I asked him, if this treatment was a proper return for the many instances he had received of my friendship,” Bligh recorded. He also implored Christian more directly: “Consider Mr. Christian, I have a wife and four children in England, and you have danced my children upon your knee.
“[H]e appeared disturbed at my question, and answered with much emotion, ‘That!—captain Bligh,—that is the thing—I am in hell—I am in hell.’ ”
Christian would later confess to being taken aback by the number of men who of their own volition left the Bounty. The launch was by now a fearful sight, so overcrowded that she showed no more than seven inches of freeboard above the calm morning water. Later, a defense made by those who remained on the ship would be that it was evident to all that to join the boat would have been tantamount to suicide. “Something more than fear had possessed them to suffer themselves to be sent away in such a manner without offering to make resistance,” was Christian’s own wondering assessment.
Men loyal to Bligh, who had sought to join the launch and been turned away, now called out to Bligh to remember them. In the confusion of those few terrible and incomprehensible hours, many would forget who said what, who stood where, even who stood under arms. Words would be remembered and misremembered, facial expressions recalled with ambiguity. But one incident was graven into the memory of everyone who saw it. With his ashen men crowded into the launch, surrounded by the boundless Pacific, with no charts and little food, their captain addressed the loyalists detained on board. In a voice that carried across what seems to have been a sudden silence, Bligh called out, “Never fear, my lads; I’ll do you justice if ever I reach England!”
RETURN
England, 1790
On the evening of March 13, 1790, moving cautiously through dangerous, foggy weather, a Dutch East Indiaman approached the Isle of Wight. Impatiently peering through the fog, and taking pointed note that the Dutch captain was “very much frightened” by the thick conditions, was Lieutenant William Bligh, a passenger. Catching an Isle of Wight boat, Bligh was in Portsmouth by midnight. The following morning he left by post chaise for London, and by Monday morning the fifteenth, he was at the Admiralty’s door. It was ten and a half months—321 days—since the mutiny on the Bounty, and William Bligh had returned to England.
The story of the extraordinary events in the Pacific, and of Lieutenant Bligh’s 3,618-mile voyage in an overloaded open boat, was immediately the talk of London. In all the centuries of the kingdom’s remarkable naval history, no feat of seamanship was deemed to surpass Bligh’s navigation and command of the Bounty’s 23-foot-long launch, and few feats of survival compared with his men’s forty-eight-day ordeal on starvation rations. For months afterward, national and local press carried stories about the Bounty and Bligh’s “wonderful escape at sea.”
“This officer only holds the rank of Lieutenant in our navy,” the English Chronicle stated, “and the distresses he has undergone, entitle him to every reward—In navigating his little skiff through so dangerous a sea, his seamanship appears as matchless, as the undertaking seems beyond the verge of probability.”
Those with keen interest in the story were soon able to look forward to reading Bligh’s remarkable adventure in his own words. Less than two months after his return to England, the imminent publication of Lieutenant Bligh’s “Narrative,” illustrated and with charts, was announced in the London press. In June the book appeared: a slender work of only eighty-eight quarto pages, entitled A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty; and the Subsequent Voyage of Part of the Crew, in the Ship’s Boat, From Tofoa, one of the Friendly Islands, to Timor, a Dutch Settlement in the East Indies. Taken directly and with little embellishment from Bligh’s log and the notebook he had kept in the launch, this essentially modest work was the first public account of both his ordeal in the boat and the mutiny of the Bounty. From the outset, the Narrative had been conceived as only part of what would eventually be a more expansive and complete work, but even in its abbreviated form it received enormously favorable reviews.
Bligh’s Narrative began with the mutiny, with the taunts and rough laughter, the threats to blow out his brains and the oaths of the pirates—“Damn your eyes, you are well off to get what you have.” As the Bounty slipped behind the launch, cries of “Huzza for Otaheite” had been raised by the mutineers.
“As soon as I had time to reflect, I felt an inward satisfaction, which prevented any depression of my spirits,” Bligh reported in his published book. This was not after-the-fact bravado, but taken directly from his running log, which he continued to maintain, along with a rough notebook, until his return to England. Indeed, his personal log had expressed his immediate state of mind even more optimistically.
“I had scarce got a furlong on our way when I began to reflect on the vicisitude of human affairs”—Bligh had written these words either as the launch made slow progress toward Tofua, or, under yet more trying circumstances, on the beach of Tofua itself—“but in the midst of all I felt an inward happyness which prevented any depression of my spirits; conscious of my own integrity and anxious solicitude for the good of the service I was on—I found my
mind most wonderfully supported, and began to conceive hopes notwithstanding so heavy a calamity, to be able to account to my King & Country for my misfortune.”
The boat’s immediate course lay for Tofua, at only ten leagues distant the nearest landfall, where it was hoped that supplies of fruit and water could be acquired. The provisions in the launch amounted to five days of rations for the nineteen men under normal ship usage. The sea remained calm and unthreatening and by nightfall of the following day the launch was riding off the island’s rocky shore; the Bounty, with her cheering crew, had long since vanished into the haze of the horizon. At daybreak, Bligh began a patrol of the shoreline, searching for a landing and scavenging for water, plantains and coconuts. After three days of this routine, some of the island’s inhabitants had appeared, friendly at first, bringing coconut shells full of water to Bligh’s parched men, and trading food for buttons and beads. In response to the islanders’ inquiries, Bligh replied that their ship had been wrecked.
“[T]hey seemed readily satisfyed with our Account,” Bligh logged, “but there did not appear the least mark of Joy or Sorrow in their Faces, altho I fancied I discovered some signs of surprize.” All of the Bounty men were on edge, knowing from their experience at Anamooka that even a large company of British sailors, armed with muskets and with a ship at their backs, did not necessarily inspire awe.
Stormy weather as well as the hope of obtaining further provisions held the men at Tofua, and over the next few days the size of the crowd of curious islanders increased. Several professed to having heard of the Bounty’s visit to Anamooka—a statement of ambiguous significance, given the events at that place; a young man appeared whom Bligh had seen at Anamooka, and who expressed “much pleasure” at seeing him. Eventually, Bligh logged, “I observed some symptoms of a design against us.” Some of the crowd had attempted to draw the launch up onshore. Quietly, Bligh ordered his men to gather their possessions while he continued to make purchases of breadfruit and the occasional spear; four cutlasses, tossed over the side of the Bounty at the last minute, were held in readiness in the boat.
The ensuing events would prove to be as harrowing as any the company encountered in their long ordeal. Nothing met with at sea terrified the men so much as the sudden, palpable hostility of the crowd that now lined the beach. No words were spoken; there was only an ominous clacking of stones knocked against one another.
“I knew very well,” wrote Bligh, “this was the sign of an attack.” The same clack-clack had presaged an attack on Cook’s voyage and was drilled into his memory. As his men drifted with studied casualness down to the launch, Bligh sat at the entrance of the cave where they had set their camp and, while the increasingly raucous crowd pressed close round him, made a great show of writing up his log.
“Stay the night onshore,” said two of the chiefs, who now approached him.
“No, I never sleep out of my boat,” Bligh replied.
“You will not sleep onshore?” was the response. “Then Mattie,” which, as Bligh observed, “directly signifies we will kill you.” The knocking of stones continued and the mounting tension on both sides betrayed that decisive action was imminent. Taking one of the men, Nageete, firmly by the hand, Bligh made his way with Purcell to the boat through the jostling, pressing mob, “every one in a silent kind of horror.” By the boat, Nageete broke free of Bligh’s grasp; all the men piled into the launch save one, big John Norton, a quartermaster from Liverpool, who, impelled by long years of dutiful training, splashed out into the water to cast off the stern line. While Fryer and others frantically called Norton back, Bligh clambered on board. A shower of stones fell on Norton like heavy hail, knocking him to the beach, where he was set upon by five of the Tofuans. Others began hauling on the stern line, dragging the launch toward the shore. Struggling with his knife, Bligh cut the line and the launch was free. As the boat pulled away, twelve of the Tofuans leaped into their canoes and began chase. Onshore, the men around Norton could be seen beating the fallen man’s head with stones, while others pulled off his trousers. As the canoes closed in, Bligh and Peckover hurled out clothes and other valuable provisions. The ruse worked, and as the canoes stopped to collect the plunder, the launch pulled away.
“The poor man I lost was John Norton,” Bligh recorded. “[T]his was his second voyage with me as a quarter-master”—Norton, then, had also
sailed with Christian—“and his worthy character made me lament his loss very much. He has left an aged parent, I am told, whom he supported.”
Wounded by the rain of stones, and horribly shaken, the men in the launch now made a fateful and historic decision. There would be no more island visits. Tahiti was out of the question on account of the risk of running into the mutineers. There remained, as Bligh told his men, “no hope of relief . . . until I came to Timor,” some 3,600 miles away. There was a Dutch settlement, civilization and ships that could carry them to Europe—although “in what part of the island I knew not.” Coldly assessing the boat’s “stock,” Bligh extracted the “sacred promise” from each man to live upon the rations he would set: one ounce of bread and a quarter pint of water per day. A set of scales was later improvised from coconut shells and on this the ration of bread and occasional salt pork was balanced against a musket bullet weighing a twenty-fifth of a pound.
The plan of action having been determined, the men set about making the boat shipshape. The company was divided into three watches, not only for the usual ship functions, but to enable the men to find physical space in the impossibly overcrowded boat. While others lay prone on the boards, attempting to sleep, the watch on duty gained the space necessary to sit up, bail and work the sails.
Before retiring on this first night of the great voyage, the men offered prayers of thanks for their “miraculous preservation.” The wind had arisen sufficient to warrant reefing the foresail; the launch carried two sails, both lug-rigged, fore and midships. Despite her service to the men, she never acquired a name, being known throughout all the years her story would be told as simply “the Bounty’s launch.”
On the morning of May 3, the sun “rose very firey and Red, a sure indication of a Severe Gale.” By eight in the morning, the launch was in a violent sea, with waves running so high that she floundered becalmed when in the troughs of their valleys. Despite the men’s nonstop bailing, a following sea threatened to swamp them. “A situation more distressing has, perhaps, seldom been experienced,” Bligh wrote. The precious bread was stowed in the carpenter’s chest and all superfluous items— clothes, sails, lines—were thrown overboard. The fearsomely slender freeboard—the length of a man’s hand as one man described it, in calm seas—was of the greatest concern, and no excess weight of any kind could be accommodated.
The terrors and discomforts that the men experienced during the first twenty-four hours at sea would be endured for the next twenty-four days: Downpours of rain and nights of numbing cold, and the small boat continually awash with the onslaught of unremitting waves. At times, great storms of prodigious lightning crackled and forked around them, the sky booming and thundering as the launch dipped and skittered across the face of the Pacific. The bailing, bailing without respite took a severe toll on the increasingly exhausted and starving men. A frightening lassitude claimed them, so that some could barely stir their limbs; all the men were unbearably cramped, from the cold, from the impossibility of ever stretching. As the voyage progressed, the men were wracked by a dreadful tenesmus, the ineffectual straining of their unvoided bowels.
Three times a day—at breakfast, at dinner and at supper—Bligh weighed and distributed the pitiful rations. On days and nights when the wet cold took more than its usual toll, he administered carefully measured teaspoonfuls of rum. As the sea was at all times warmer than the air, the men repeatedly soaked their clothes in the ocean.
“I would recommend to every one in a similar situation the method we practiced,” Bligh advised, straight-faced, in his published Narrative, “which is to dip t
heir cloaths in the salt-water, and wring them out. . . . We had occasion to do this so often, that at length all our cloaths were wrung to pieces.”
Bligh had set course first to the west northwest, by way of the Fiji Islands, which had been rumored by islanders’ reports to lie this way, and then west toward the Endeavour Strait and New Holland. Although the launch carried no charts, Bligh had a quadrant, a compass and the necessary tables required for basic navigation, along with a broken and unreliable sextant. Bligh had a knotted log line made from extra rope and taught lubbers like David Nelson to count off the seconds between knots.
“I have hitherto been only able to keep an imperfect account of our Run,” Bligh recorded on May 5, “but have now got ourselves a little better equipped and a line Marked, & having practiced at counting Seconds, every one can do it with some exactness.” The instruction in itself provided valuable diversion. Bligh also “amused all hands, with describing the situation of New Guinea and New Holland,” taking care to convey to them all he knew “in case any Accident happened to me.” Although William Peckover, the gunner, had been to Timor on Cook’s first voyage, that had been nearly twenty years ago, when he had been barely nineteen, and the charts they were steering by resided mostly in Bligh’s memory.
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty Page 18
