On the purely legal front, Hood also asked the Admiralty’s counsel for a decision whether the mutineers were to be tried separately, as he understood they wished, or as a group. He personally was of the opinion that they should be tried together, “the whole being involved in one criminal act.” This issue was still pending.
The Admiralty had already made other legal determinations concerning the Bounty affair, such as whether the prisoners’ alleged offense amounted to an act of piracy under common law. The precedents for this offense—such as Captain Kidd’s theft of a ship—had, however, been found to pertain to “ships belonging to private owners.” Consequently the Admiralty’s counsel concluded that “the proper way of proceeding in this Case will be by a Court Martial according to the Articles of War.” The main changes were clear enough under Article XIX: “If any Person in or belonging to the Fleet shall make or endeavour to make any mutinous Assembly upon any Pretence whatsoever, every Person offending herein, and being convicted thereof by the Sentence of the Court-martial, shall suffer Death.”
Hood himself, distracted by his many responsibilities as commander in chief of the port, was also for personal reasons not in a particularly happy mood. He had recently applied for and lost the prestigious position of Vice Admiral of England, for which he had been in competition with his younger brother. The Right Honorable Samuel, Lord Hood, had been born the son of a clergyman and a gentleman’s daughter of humble means. Both he and his brother, Alexander, Lord Bridport, had gone to sea and achieved enormous distinction. Following a steady, solid career pursued since his first naval service at age sixteen, Hood had, in 1778, been appointed commissioner of Portsmouth Dockyard, “an honourable and lucrative position,” as one biographer recorded, and one greatly aided by the fact that he had married the daughter of a mayor of Portsmouth. This and his simultaneous appointment as governor of the royal naval academy at the age of fifty-three were seen as the graceful winding down of his active service. Two years later, however, to the astonishment of many, Hood was promoted to rear admiral and sent out at the head of a squadron to reinforce Admiral Sir George Rodney in the West Indies. It was in this second wind of his career that he gained the most distinction, and in 1782, following a series of decisive actions against the French, he had been created Baron Hood of Catherington.
Despite this solid, satisfying advancement, despite the prizes, honors and titles achieved, Lord Hood was a bitter and disappointed man. As recently as June, he had written his distinguished brother Lord Bridport (whom he addressed as “Sir Alexander”) a letter rehashing his grievances of years past as well as more recent, familial hurts. His surrender of a hard-won seat in Parliament to accommodate the Admiralty in 1788—all of four years before—had been particularly harmful; by this, he told his brother, “I am beggar’d and thereby broken hearted.” This was something of a smoke screen for his real cause of grief—namely, that his brother, this same “Sir Alexander,” had put his name forward for the position his own heart was set upon, Vice Admiral of England.
“Whether you will have it is more than I can tell but this I know, that I shall not or anything else,” Samuel told his brother, bitterly, of the contested position. “I believe there never was a man, who had lent himself to an administration, with that zeal & attention I have done, that was ever so neglected.”
Lord Hood was now sixty-seven years of age, on the cusp of the final tier of his career. Either some final flurry of advancements would catapult him into the legion of true naval immortals—or he would die as another vaguely important career officer. His long thin face, tight lips and introspective, disappointed eyes betrayed the fact that it was the latter he expected. Only days before the court-martial commenced, he would learn both that he had not received the appointment he had applied for and that his brother had been advanced, if not to Vice Admiral—that coveted position had gone to Lord Howe—to Rear Admiral of England.
Beyond the Portsmouth ramparts, out beyond the shelter of the harbor and the anchorage, there were other causes for grave concern. Across the Channel in France, the revolutionary politics of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité had swung wildly out of control. The Bastille had fallen to the mob in 1789 and the King and Queen were currently imprisoned and under imminent threat of ignoble and brutal deaths. Only a month before, in August 1792, the Tuileries had been stormed and the King’s Swiss Guard massacred. By September stories of the massacre of aristocrats were filling the London papers. The Countess of Chèvre and her five young children had been mutilated and then butchered; the Countess of Perignon and her two daughters had been stripped naked, covered with oil and roasted alive in the Place Dauphin while France’s new citoyens danced and cheered. Like the aristocrats, churchmen were a favorite target and some three hundred terrified priests had recently escaped across the Channel, washing up in Portsmouth. Where this all might end was impossible to fathom; Prime Minister Pitt was struggling to maintain peace, but Englishmen were also advised to keep an eye “on certain coffee-houses in Jermyn-street and about the Haymarket,” an area alleged to be the haunt of French sympathizers and spies. These circumstances were of first importance to those captains gathered in Portsmouth from their recent cruises. At the end of the day, their business was war. And at this unsettled time, they may have had difficulty extending keen interest to the faraway and famously peaceable South Seas, where two of His Majesty’s ships under Captain William Bligh were now searching again for breadfruit.
“[O]ne useful lesson offers itself to mankind,” the Times was to opine on the very day the court-martial commenced: “Revere your Laws.”
On September 8, Peter at last met Aaron Graham. The following day, a Sunday, Graham returned to the Hector with Const and, with Captain Montagu’s permission, conferred privately with his client. As had Pasley’s, Peter’s spirits soared as a result of his tête-à-tête with Graham: “I have something to say that will give you pleasure tho’ my Trial is not yet over,” Peter wrote to his mother two days later, informing her of his meeting with Mr. Graham. “[F]rom what Information I had the Happiness to receive I have every reason, as may you my Dear Mother, to look forward with the most pleasing Hopes of———I need not———indeed I should not say much to you. . . .” Like his sister, however, Peter could never resist the chance for a piece of verse, and he now affixed to his letter as tactless a couplet as ever a mother received:
The awful Day of Trial now draws nigh
When I shall see another Day—or—Die!
“[T]ell my sisters to set taught the Topping-lifts of their Hearts from an Assurance that with God’s Assistance all will yet end well !” he concluded on a more jocular note.
For her part Nessy, knowing that the usual delays in the mail packet could mean that the family might hear nothing of Peter’s fate until some time after verdict had been rendered, had already sent her final good wishes. As if binding her brother with protective spells and incantations, Nessy offered Peter her blessing, her prayers, and consigned him to the care of all the powers in heaven: “May that Almighty providence whose tender Care has hitherto preserved you be still your powerful protector—may he instill into the Hearts of your Judges every sentiment of justice, Generosity, & Compassion—May Hope, Innocence, & Integrity, be your firm Support—& Liberty, Glory, & Honor your just Reward—May all good Angels guard you from even the Appearance of Danger, & may you at length be restored to us. . . .”
While Peter and his family had prepared for the trial with all the considerable means at their disposal, the other prisoners also took what measures they could. Confined together in the gun room, every man would have been aware of Peter’s resources, the emissaries, the letters and words of advice from visiting officers and relatives, the visits from Delafons, Const, Beardsworth and finally Aaron Graham. If they had not known before this time, they had surely learned by now that when the stakes were high one did not sit idle and trust to the impartial law of His Majesty’s appointed judges, nor look to Providence.
James Morrison, boatswain’s mate, and Thomas Burkett, able seaman, had both received letters bearing testimony to their good character from officers under whom they had formerly served. Captain Stirling represented that he could “perfectly recollect” Morrison’s “sobriety and attention to his duty” while on the sloop Termagant, back in 1782; more to the point, he had always “paid due respect to his superiors.” Commander John Doling recalled that Burkett had behaved with such “sobriety and attention to his duty” that he had been “confidentially considered” when, in 1786, they had both served on the Hector, that same ship on which Burkett was now confined; the Hector, then as now, had never left Portsmouth Harbour. It is probable that other prisoners made similar unsuccessful attempts to establish their “characters”; a lot would have depended on pure chance—a captain at sea, for example, could not be reached. Moreover, the most recent former service could only have been in 1787, just before the Bounty sailed: how many able seamen could count on being remembered five years after the fact from a crew of hundreds?
Only one other man had the wits, gumption and capability to hire outside legal counsel. William Muspratt, assistant to the Bounty’s cook, had retained the services of Stephen Barney, a lawyer of the Inner Temple and a former town clerk of Portsmouth. How Muspratt of all men had the means to take this step is a question that has long been debated, but it is possible to venture at least one explanation. His brother Joseph, with whom he was particularly close, was employed at this time as a groom at Cam’s Hall, in nearby Fareham, the town where Stephen Barney lived. Cam’s Hall, recently built and reputed to be one of the most elegant estates in the area, belonged to the wealthy Delmé family, and it may be that they had put up the funds for their groom’s brother’s defense. More conventional than Aaron Graham, and with no reputation for Graham’s intellectual flair, Barney nonetheless would prove an able agent for his client.
As September 12, the date designated for the start of the trial, loomed closer, Lord Hood was further inconvenienced by the opinion of some of his captains that on reflection the court-martial should be assembled not on a spare three-decker, but on his own ship, the Duke. The propriety of holding a court-martial on a ship in ordinary had been questioned, and was believed to be without precedent. With their eyes on the suspect “Counsel from London” who would be in attendance, the concerned captains pointed out that such an irregularity might give later grounds for an appeal of the sentence. Consequently, even though the weather had turned unpleasantly squally, Hood weighed anchor and brought his ship from Spithead closer to the harbor.
Two captains who had arrived separately from the fleet completed the muster of court-martial judges. Sir Andrew Snape Douglas of the Alcide, age thirty-one, was the nephew of Sir Andrew Snape Hamond. Although he was an officer of enormous promise, the feats for which he would achieve lasting glory still lay ahead. Douglas was destined to live a short life, and to die a gallant, painful death.
Captain John Nicholson Inglefield had achieved renown on two occasions. In 1782, having seen hazardous action against the French in the West Indies, Inglefield was returning to England in command of the Centaur when a hurricane hit his convoy. In the howling turmoil, a number of ships went down with great loss of life. The Centaur, dismasted and thrown on her beam ends, was for a while kept afloat by the exertions of Inglefield and his crew, but on the eighth day she too suddenly went down. In wild high seas Inglefield and eleven other survivors had set out in the ship’s pinnace, with little food and little equipment; at one point, they were forced to use blankets to improvise a sail. After sixteen days of great suffering and the loss of one life, they had arrived in Fayal, in the Azores. Like Bligh, Inglefield had published an account of this sensational adventure, which had attracted much attention—Byron’s great shipwreck scene in Don Juan was lifted almost verbatim from Inglefield’s narrative:
Nine souls more went in her: the long-boat still
Kept above water, with an oar for mast,
Two blankets stitch’d together, answering ill
Instead of sail, were to the oar made fast . . .
It was this great voyage that Sir Joseph Banks’s correspondent James Matra had waggishly referred to on learning the news of Bligh’s voyage in the Bounty launch. Until Bligh’s journey, Inglefield’s travails in the Centaur’s pinnace had been one of the most highly regarded feats of survival and seamanship.
Inglefield’s other great claim to fame was as the cuckolded husband in a notorious divorce case. This too had been published from “an Authentic copy” of the shorthand notes of the trial. Interested readers were thus able to learn that Mrs. Ann Inglefield, after nearly thirteen years of marriage and four children, had “cast lustful eyes upon the negro lad” whom Inglefield had taken into his family, that the lad wore an apron and that Mrs. Inglefield “would not let that apron alone.” Also disclosed was the fact that Inglefield was a jealous husband who had used spies to monitor his wife while he was away at sea, and that persons listening at her locked door had heard such noises “precisely as if . . . two persons, upon the floor, or a chair, or something of that kind, were doing what men and women are apt sometimes to do in the dark.” Somehow, Byron resisted this material, and somehow poor Inglefield weathered this second storm.
Now forty-four, Inglefield had just returned from the coast of Africa in the 50-gun Medusa. Early in his career, Inglefield had served under both Lord Hood and his brother. He was especially close to the former, naming his son Samuel Hood Inglefield after his friend and mentor. Inglefield was a humane man. Only a year before, he had taken some pains to plead for the lives of seamen who were charged with piracy on his African station, pointing out to the Admiralty that the men had been ill treated and were only trying to obtain their liberty.
The sum experience of the twelve captains brought together for the court-martial represented England’s great naval campaigns of the past few decades. Collectively, the men had seen wars and blockades, foul weather and shipwreck; they had been wounded and been prisoners of war. They had commanded 74-gun ships and been responsible for companies of hundreds of men. As sea warriors, they were mindful of the Articles of War, which bound them never to display fear in combat, never to hang back, never to retreat against orders. All were braced to embark upon new campaigns if the developments in France warranted. None had ever been involved in a venture such as the breadfruit voyages of Sir Joseph Banks.
Curiously, the least experienced of these men, by a long shot, was the amiable Albemarle Bertie, Peter’s relative by marriage. Although Bertie was now thirty-seven, his naval résumé could be told in a few short lines. Promoted to lieutenant in December 1777, after previous service so obscure it has not been recorded, Bertie was captured by the French eight months later. Released after four months’ captivity, he saw no further service of any kind until 1782, when he was nonetheless made post-captain, at the tender age of twenty-seven. Subsequently he had command of one other Channel ship before being appointed to the Edgar, now moored so cozily beside the Hector.
In a delightful crossing of paths, Bertie would later make the acquaintance of that most discerning judge of character, Jane Austen, who declared there was “nothing to like or dislike” about him. And it would have to be allowed that, with his somewhat pampered expression and vague unfocused gaze, he was not a man naturally to command attention. But Captain Bertie had one great asset: he was married to Emma Heywood, the daughter of James Modyford Heywood, the same “Mr. Heywood of Plymouth” spoken of with such deference by Peter’s family. This same Mr. Heywood, in his turn, had the happy fortune to have married the sister of the great Lord Howe and was thus known in royal, government and Admiralty circles as “a relation of Lord Howe.” Indeed, to this familial connection Mr. Heywood owed one of the only two offices he appears to have held in the course of his entire life, six months’ service as a lord of the Admiralty. Only a few summers before, Mr. Heywood had played host to the royal family, who had come out to his beautiful Devon estate at
Maristow to admire the grounds. Another of his daughters, Sophia Heywood Musters, had been the toast of London and was rumored to have had an affair with the Prince of Wales.
Lord Howe’s relationship to the Heywoods does not appear to have been much known outside their immediate family circle, nor does he appear to have taken much interest in their affairs before the events leading to the court-martial. It was he, indeed, who had been partly responsible for Bligh’s maddening delay in receiving sailing orders for the Bounty, when young Peter had been on board. However, his lordship had been kept abreast of Peter’s activities through James Modyford Heywood, who read him letters Peter had written from the Bounty—Lord Howe had been pleased to comment on Peter’s fine nautical description of the Bounty’s attempt to round the Horn. That he now came to take a personal interest in the court-martial is evident from a discreetly worded letter Howe wrote four days before the trial commenced to his close friend Sir Roger Curtis, one of Peter’s judges, requesting that Curtis stay close to Portsmouth until his “court-Martial business” was over.
There is no sure knowing what Aaron Graham saw in Peter’s apparently hopeless circumstances that had made him so confident of winning his client’s freedom. But it may be, with his astute understanding of how life in the navy worked, that Graham had instantly grasped that the salient facts of the issue at hand were not Peter’s guilt or innocence. The sudden “favourable” nature of the evidences; Peter Heywood’s relationship to the most powerful naval figure in the land; his relative’s presence as a judge on his court-martial; Pasley’s two “particular friends” also sitting as judges; the presence of Captains Curtis and Hamond, who owed their careers to Lord Howe—these may have been the facts that most interested Graham.
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty Page 26
