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

by Caroline Alexander

  The pub also provided the kind of familiar, unthreatening atmosphere in which ordinary seamen like Coleman and Byrn would feel most at ease. As it was, some of the comments made by these humble men to Edward Christian and the “several respectable gentlemen” who were his colleagues reeked of class-conscious, cap-in-hand deference, not to mention a little gentlemanly editing:

  “Oh ! he was a gentleman, and a brave man,” McIntosh was reported to have said “with honest simplicity” of Fletcher Christian. “[E]very officer and sailor on board the ship, would have gone through fire and water to have served him.”

  “His Majesty might have his equal, but he had not a superior officer in the service.”

  “He was adorned with every virtue, and beloved by all.”

  “As much as I have lost and suffered by him, if he could be restored to his country I should be the first to go without wages in search of him.”

  Edward Christian’s committee membership was both eccentric and impressive. At the top of the list was Samuel Romilly, one of the most distinguished legal reformers of his day and a friend of Edward’s from their days as law students. An enthusiastic and engaged supporter of the revolution in France, Romilly had been entertained by Lafayette during a visit to France in the late 1780s when they had “talked together of ‘American’ ideas of patriotism and liberty.”

  Four theologians were involved. The Reverend Dr. John Fisher had been recently appointed rector of Nether Stowey, where he was shortly to become friends with two young poets resident in the area, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Now a canon of Windsor, Dr. Fisher enjoyed close contact with the King; he was also a close friend of the Laws, another of the Christian family’s gifted and well-connected first cousins. The Reverend Mr. William Cookson was also, since 1792, a canon of Windsor. Cookson was in every sense a very weighty man, being close to the King, and also having allowed himself to balloon to almost three hundred pounds. His sister was William Wordsworth’s mother. The Reverend Dr. John Frewen had previously been William Wordsworth’s tutor at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where Edward Christian had also gone. The Reverend Mr. Antrobus, chaplain to the Bishop of London, was from Cockermouth, with family still in the area.

  Of John Farhill nothing is known except his address, as stated by Edward. Similarly, little more is known of John Atkinson than that his was a Cumberland name, and he held a position at the College of Arms, the institution that advised on matters of heraldry.

  William Gilpin, originally of Cumberland and now of the Strand, was a landscape gardener and watercolor artist, but as a biographer observed, the “inferior quality of his work as a painter was, however, very evident at the first exhibition.” William’s father was Sawrey Gilpin, a Royal Academy artist of some distinction who specialized in animal paintings, a fact that had undoubtedly helped launch his son’s unexceptional career. William was a neighbor of Joseph Christian, the linen draper whom John Fryer had gone to see shortly after his return to England; both men had country residences in Surrey, and town quarters in the Strand.

  John France, who was originally from Yorkshire, was a lawyer with chambers in the Inner Temple and a commissioner in bankruptcy. John Wordsworth was a captain in the East India Company (until 1787 under the directorship of Edward’s relative Sir Henry Fletcher) and William Wordsworth’s father’s cousin.

  Finally, James Losh, resident for most of his time in Penrith, Cumberland, was, like Romilly, a legal activist and reformer with strong sympathies for the revolutionary cause in France. Also a Cambridge man, Losh was to become a close friend of Wordsworth through radical friends in Bristol. He was also on social terms with John Christian Curwen and with the Speddings—the family of Peter Heywood’s mother—and very close to other branches of the Christian family.

  Even a very casual glance at this list of participants revealed clear, if curious, fault lines. The Cumberland connection was strong, as less expectedly were the associations with William Wordsworth, at this time a promising if unestablished poet. The Wordsworths and Christians knew one another well. It will be recalled that Fletcher and William had been schoolmates at Cockermouth, and that William was later, very briefly, a pupil at Hawkshead School, where Edward had been headmaster. Edward and William shared a wide circle of college friends and associates. And Edward Christian successfully represented William and his siblings in a legal suit to obtain their father’s inheritance, held up for years by the unscrupulous Lord Lonsdale. “We have got a very clever man on our side but as he is young he will not have much authority. His name is Christian,” William’s sister Dorothy had written in June 1791, regarding the Lonsdale suit. “[H]e is a friend of my Uncle, knows my brother William very well and I am very well acquainted with him, and a charming man he is.”

  But there were also other more subtle associations. The great majority of Edward’s panel were fervent abolitionists. In some cases, as with Romilly and Losh—and William Wordsworth—this arose from strong revolutionary sympathies. St. John’s College, where so many of the men had connections, was an important disseminator of the abolitionist movement. William Wilberforce, the great leader of the antislavery movement, had gone here. Wilberforce was in fact an old friend of Edward’s from these university days and had written to him a sympathetic letter when news of the mutiny reached England. Edward was also quick to report to his old friend the result of his “inquiry.” “Captain Bligh is a detestable villian,” he wrote at the end of 1792, “against whom on his return every door must be shut.” Wilberforce’s closest friend was Prime Minister William Pitt—the brother of Lord Chatham, whom Bligh would wait so long in vain to see.

  Edward Christian gave no account of his method of choosing his colleagues. It may be that other men had been asked to participate and declined; it may be the men who were eventually gathered had caught wind of the campaign and volunteered for inclusion. The radical-abolitionist aspect of the eventual “committee” may have been a simple accident of the entirely reasonable association so many of them had with St. John’s. But whatever the mechanism by which it had fallen in place, this abolitionist sympathy would prove significant to the outcome.

  While Joseph Banks may have been beguiled by the botanical aspects of the Bounty voyage, the real goal of the breadfruit expedition had been succinctly expressed by one West Indian planter. Breadfruit would be “of infinite importance to the West Indian Islands, in affording a wholesome and pleasant food to our negroes, which would have the great advantage of being raised with infinitely less labour than the plaintain.” By “our negroes,” the author meant the thousands of African slaves who worked the vast West Indian plantations, and on whose labor the sugar industry depended. The principal object of the Bounty’s voyage, then, was to enable plantation owners to feed their human chattel as cheaply and as efficiently as possible.

  William Bligh, purveyor of slave provisions, was unlikely to have aroused much natural sympathy among the men Edward had congregated. In addition, Bligh had worked for his wife’s uncle ferrying rum and sugar from the islands. This association with Duncan Campbell in itself was not likely to have impressed Edward’s associates.

  In short, while Bligh’s ship had been renamed Bounty for her humane contribution to West Indian Negroes, in certain eyes the bread-fruit voyages were nothing to celebrate. And when Edward Christian began his inquiries, William Bligh was back in Tahiti, engaged once again in this same unsavory mission.

  Into this atmosphere of radical sympathizers and ardent abolitionists was now flung the saga of the Bounty—a story of a young gentleman who, “agonized by unprovoked and incessant abuse and disgrace,” stood up for his natural rights and overthrew the oppressive tyrant who was his captain. Bucking the despised authority, he sailed away to freedom in the South Pacific.

  That at least some of Edward’s committee did in fact make the association between Christian’s acts and their own radical interests is evident from James Losh’s private diary. In conversation with friends one evening,
talk had “turned principally upon the invasion of the liberty. . . . We all agreed that were there any place to go emigration wou’d be a prudent thing for literary men and the friends of freedom,” he had recorded with gloomy melodrama. “I explained the real state of a Christian’s mutiny.” His companions, one of whom was Wordsworth’s friend and fellow poet Robert Southey, had been “much struck” by this almost encoded reference to the Bounty mutiny.

  Sipping their ale in the Crown and Sceptre, Edward’s colleagues had undoubtedly listened spellbound to the extraordinary story unfolding, witness by witness. As the dirty winter water lapped at the riverfront outside the window, they heard of hard life at sea, of Tahiti and its black beaches, of the promiscuous customs of the Tahitian women, of the erupting volcano filling the night skies over Tofua—all the rush of images that infused the story with romance and even glamour.

  The details that Edward extracted from the Bounty men would remain some of the most memorable in all the tellings of this story. Bligh had called his officers “scoundrels, damned rascals, hounds, hell-hounds, beasts, and infamous wretches.” When the Bounty reached the Endeavour Strait, Bligh had declared, “he would kill one half of the people, make the officers jump overboard, and would make them eat grass like cows.”

  The general tenor of Edward’s published revelations obviously focused on his brother and made vivid the mental anguish that had driven the engaging young man to mutiny.

  “What is the meaning of all this?” Bligh had asked indignantly, on being led on deck at bayonet point.

  “Can you ask, Captain Bligh, when you know you have treated us officers, and all these poor fellows, like Turks?” Christian replied. Despite all previous testimony that Christian had claimed to have been in hell for “weeks past,” or “this fortnight past”—in other words since leaving Tahiti—new evidence now emerged that Bligh had abused Christian on the island and had done so, worst of all, in front of the natives.

  “There is no country in the world, where the notions of aristocracy and family pride are carried higher than at Otaheite”—except England, Edward Christian might have added. The Downing Professor of Law was now an Otaheite authority. “[A]nd it is a remarkable circumstance, that the Chiefs are naturally distinguished by taller persons, and more open and intelligent countenances, than the people of inferior condition,” Professor Christian continued; hence, it was implied, their affection for Fletcher Christian.

  “[T]hey adored the very ground he trod upon,” as one of the Bountys had declared. Remarkably, for all the energy invested in these proceedings, nothing emerged to suggest that the direct cause of Christian’s breakdown was anything more than the famous theft of coconuts.

  “Damn your blood, you have stolen my cocoa nuts,” Bligh had said, accosting Christian when the loss was perceived.

  “I was dry, I thought it of no consequence, I took one only,” Christian plaintively replied, according to one of Edward’s new witnesses.

  “You lie, you scoundrel, you have stolen one half” and “thief” were Bligh’s responses.

  (“What scurrilous Abuse!” Charles Christian wrote in his own, never published memoir. “What provoking Insult to one of the chief Officers on Board for having taken a Cocoa Nut from a Heap to quench his Thirst when on Watch—base mean-spirited Wretch!!”)

  “[F]lesh and blood cannot bear this treatment,” someone had heard Christian say; the master’s mate had been driven to tears, the only time he had been known to cry. After the coconut incident, Christian first planned to set out from the Bounty on a raft—in itself a wonderful image—and had that afternoon set about shredding all his personal papers and giving away all his Otaheite souvenirs. But the fireworks over Tofua brought too many men on deck for him to effect this in secret, and so the idea was laid aside. There then occurred the conversation that, all Edward’s witnesses agreed, had triggered the mutiny. George Stewart, the husband of poor Peggy, the special friend and messmate of Peter Heywood, knowing of Christian’s plans for the raft, had said to him, “When you go, Christian, we are ripe for any thing.”

  Passing back and forth from one representation to another, from event to event, the document Edward Christian eventually produced was a mass of vivid, confused, riveting statements and details, which had few counterparts in the court-martial testimony. When it was published in 1794, it also contained a number of embarrassments for the Heywoods. That George Stewart and Peter had been close friends had never been concealed; it was Stewart, Peter claimed at his trial, who had told him that he should leave the ship with Bligh. It was Stewart with whom he built his little cottage on Tahiti. How now to account for Stewart’s fatal words “we are ripe for any thing”? And how to account for the fact (which “ought not to be concealed,” as Edward allowed) that during the mutiny itself Stewart “was dancing and clapping his hands in the Otaheite manner,” and saying “It was the happiest day of his life”? Stewart was eventually appointed Christian’s second-in-command, although a number of the seamen, it had seemed, had favored Mr. Heywood for this position because of Stewart’s renowned “severity.”

  Edward’s published report listed the name of each individual participant of his informal committee along with his address—“38 Mortimer Street,” “Lincoln’s Inn”—presumably so that each could be further questioned by interested readers. That Edward was confident he had reported the proceedings his colleagues had witnessed cannot be in doubt. What must be doubted, however, was his committee’s capacity to understand salient aspects of the story unfolded for them.

  “Hence the resolution was taken to put the Capt in a boat, a small distance from Otahitee,” William Gilpin reported to a visiting cousin in May 1794, excitedly passing on what had transpired at the Crown and Sceptre; he himself had been present at “several” of Edward’s interviews. “Every proper precaution was taken with respect to the safety and convenience of those that went—Notwithstanding, the Capt. made a very contrary report when he came home, declaring their intention to drown him. It is true that afterward he was not suffered to land on Otahitee which was accounted for by Capt. B. on a former occasion having made himself odious to the inhabitants.”

  That anyone on Edward’s panel could have sat through even a single interview and come away with the idea that “every proper precaution was taken with respect to the safety and convenience” of those in the Bounty launch must raise serious questions about the entire proceedings. Every man, loyalist and mutineer alike, had testified that to join the launch had seemed, in Peter’s words, “a kind of act of suicide.” Nor obviously had Bligh touched on Tahiti; nor had he been rebuffed there by the islanders; nor had he made himself odious to them. . . .

  William Gilpin’s cousin was able to peruse a copy of Edward’s pamphlet at the time of his visit, noting that “it was ready for press.” Matters were, then, pretty far along at the time of this exchange. In the event, Edward’s published version of the inconvenient fact of the boat journey was that the launch had been dangerously laden only because “almost all Captain Bligh’s property in boxes and trunks was put on board.” Others who had gone voluntarily into the launch “were sure of getting to shore, where they expected to live, until an European ship arrived”—besides, they had the carpenter with them, and he could build a bigger boat. And although the sufferings in the boat were distressful, “they were not the occasion of the death of Mr. Nelson at Timor, or of those who died at Batavia.” In any event, Fletcher Christian had been heard to declare that “he would readily sacrifice his own life, if the persons in the launch were all safe in the ship again.”

  Fletcher Christian’s tortured state of mind following the mutiny was another of the indelible images to arise from this new testimony. He was “always sorrowful and dejected after the mutiny; and . . . had become such an altered man in his looks and appearance, as to render it probable that he would not long survive this dreadful catastrophe.” After the mutiny, he assumed command of the ship reluctantly, and only after the men “declared
that he should be their Captain.” Although he kept discipline on the ship, “he was generally below, leaning his head upon his hand.” When asked for orders, “he seldom raised his head to answer more than Yes, or No.” How could it be otherwise if he deserved the good character “which all unite in giving him”? In fact, severe as had been the sufferings of Captain Bligh and his boat companions, they were “perhaps but a small portion of the torments occasioned by this dreadful event.” Before returning to Tahiti for the last time, he had addressed his men in an emotional speech, seeking one favor: “that you will grant me the ship . . . and leave me to run before the wind.”

  Reformers, men of the cloth, lawyers . . . with the single exception of Captain Wordsworth, the members of Edward’s committee were a lubberly crowd and appear to have had not an inkling of life at sea. With their eyes on such issues as social reform and the treatment of slaves, they would have undoubtedly been horrified by much that was matter-of-factly related by the agreeable and pliant seamen—the cramped conditions, bad rationed food and strong language.

  “I have heard the Captain damn the people, like many other captains,” Lawrence Lebogue would later go on record as saying, “but he was never angry with a man the next minute, and I never heard of their disliking him.”