The single most interesting detail of this “spectacle” is of course that its writer understood that the hero of this story, whether in fact dead or alive, must be Fletcher Christian. John Adams, venerable patriarch and survivor though he may have been, did not possess the drawing power of the arch-mutineer. This very public fantasy that Fletcher Christian was alive and ruling an island kingdom did not appear to raise eyebrows in any circles.
Following this new account, British ships became not infrequent visitors to the remote island colony. Sir William Sidney Smith, who had been in command of the South American station at the time Captain Folger made his report, now learning of plans to “send some succour to the semi british colony” and feeling it his duty as an Englishman to contribute to the moral and intellectual improvement of his countrymen, begged the Admiralty to forward the islanders a gift. His gift was “the academic edition,” as he emphasized, of Robinson Crusoe, with its elaborate and instructive notes, which would doubtless be of value to these ingenious islanders—one can imagine the face of Alexander Smith, now John Adams, as he cautiously handled the unexpected volume.
One more ship, the American whaler Sultan, under Captain C. Reynolds, in 1817, was to discover the island for herself, without prior knowledge of its history. The Sultan was also the first ship that Adams himself was induced to board. Apparently “elated” to feel the unsteady motion of a deck again beneath his feet, the old mutineer had pulled at the rigging and sung songs, to the appreciation of the Yankee crew. The Sultan carried away much of importance. Adams presented Captain Reynolds with “an old spy glass, and two blank books which belonged to the Bounty,” doubtless the spoils of Captain Bligh’s possessions. As it turned out, one of the notebooks was not entirely blank, for it contained Adams’s touching efforts at writing his own biography: “I was Born at Stanford Hill in the parrish of St. John Hackney, Middellsex of poor But honast parrents My farther Was Drouned in the Theames thearfore he left Me and 3 More poore Orfing.”
One of these other poor orphans was Adams’s brother Jonathan who, while his brother had been reinventing himself as a Pacific island patriarch, was himself more prosaically employed as a fireman of the London Assurance Company. In time, through the medium of visiting ships and the friendly assistance of the occasional fully literate visitor, the two brothers were able to enjoy an intermittent correspondence:
Pitcairn’s Island, March 3, 1819
Dear Brother,
. . . it gives me much pleasure to hear that you are in health . . . hope with the blessings of Providence you will continue so, and likewise that your worldly circumstances will be improved: but we must leave all to the all-wise disposer of events. As to my coming to England, that is not much to be expected. . . .
As the years passed, a visit to the Pitcairn Island community became a kind of obligatory port of call for Pacific-going ships anywhere in the vicinity, which dropped off clothes, farm implements, fishing hooks, bedding and improving texts donated by missionary groups or other well-wishers. For as long as Adams was alive, a meeting with the “patriarch”—as he was invariably called, despite being only in his fifties—became an equally obligatory component of the pilgrimage. Always the early history of the community, if not the events of the mutiny, was discussed, and as the years passed each ship departed bearing with it some new, often contradictory fact or detail: the massacre of the white men had not happened in a single night, but over several years, with McCoy and Quintal escaping to the woods, while Adams and Edward Young lived in the village with the women. Christian’s wife had not died, but was in fact still alive, although there is no evidence that a single visitor solicited her reminiscences. It was Edward Young who had taught Adams to read and write; Young, who was half West Indian and half English, appears to have been the only mutineer to have maintained good relations with the Tahitian “blacks”: Young had died of asthma in 1800, and had not been killed. As for Christian, he variously committed suicide, went insane, was killed by the blacks who shot him in the back while he was tilling his yam field. In this last account, his final words, on falling in his field, had been “Oh dear.” On the other hand, Captain Folger himself was reported to have stated in some private correspondence that Adams had reassured him that Christian “became sick and died a natural death.”
The visit of one ship in particular produced especially important narratives. In 1825, the Blossom under Captain Frederick Beechey enjoyed a lengthy sojourn off the island—sixteen days, as opposed to the usual half-day tour. The Blossom was by most accounts the sixteenth ship to visit Pitcairn (counting the Tagus and the Briton as a single visit). By this time Adams was confident that he would never be carried away, that indeed it increasingly seemed that in the eyes of the English authorities justice had been served, and the books closed on the Bounty. Adams was now one of only six remaining of the original party that had walked off the Bounty—although again it does not appear that Beechey interviewed any of the five surviving women. This visit had been looked forward to with much anticipation and fanciful speculation by the Blossom’s crew; as the first lieutenant allowed, there were some who looked forward to finding in Adams “Fletcher Christian the Master’s Mate.” Evidently, the “Melo Dramatic Ballet” had picked up on a wishful, popular theory.
According to Beechey, Adams had achieved “considerable corpulency.” Beechey’s sure eye caught a number of telling details. The patriarch had retained his sailor’s rolling gait and wore a low-crowned hat, which he instinctively doffed and held in his hand, “smoothing down his bald forehead whenever he was addressed by the officers.” The old mutineer had never surrendered his British loyalties—it was he and he alone who had instilled in the young colonists the belief that they were servants of King George—and this in turn gave Captain Beechey of His Majesty’s Navy an advantage over his American counterparts when it came to an interview. Beechey was also wise enough to avail himself of a previously underexamined source of information—the diary of Edward Young, now dead these twenty-five years.
Although a number of the Blossom’s officers were to go ashore to explore the island, Beechey’s principal interview with Adams took place in the privacy of his own cabin, with only his clerk in attendance to take notes. Beechey ensured that on this occasion at least Adams’s story would be professionally recorded and unfolded at leisure, without the distraction of the twelve eager young men who had accompanied him excitedly to the ship and were now entertaining the officers below. Yet, despite these precautions, it was the opinion of one officer, Lieutenant Edward Belcher, that Beechey “did not get as accurate an account” as he and other of the officers were to come by later, when Adams returned to the ship as a “Guest in the Gun Room.” Additionally, Beechey’s published report of this historic interview, as will be seen, displayed some tactful editing. It also incorporated some “additional facts” derived, as he claimed, from other inhabitants, but in some cases betraying his own prior understanding of the story.
According to Adams, the falling-out between Bligh and Christian had begun at the Cape, where Christian came “under some obligations to him of a pecuniary nature, of which Bligh frequently reminded him when any difference arose.” Bligh’s relations with his officers had suffered throughout the voyage—this much had been clear from Bligh’s own log, although Master John Fryer and Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian were the only two men singled out by name, in Adams’s recollection, as objects of Bligh’s criticism. But, Adams told Beechey, “whatever might have been the feelings of the officers, there was no real discontent among the crew; much less was there any idea of offering violence to their commander.”
Sometime before the by now infamous coconut incident, Christian, smarting under Bligh’s nagging, had “in a moment of excitation told his commander that sooner or later a day of reckoning would arrive.” So at least John Adams in hindsight recalled those events of thirty-six years ago. Following the blowup over the coconuts, Christian declined Bligh’s invitation to dinner. It was n
ow the night of April 28, 1789, “one of those beautiful nights which characterize the tropical regions, when the mildness of the air and the stillness of nature dispose the mind to reflection”: Were these the words of seaman Adams, or of the reflective Captain Beechey? In any event, it was on this still, limpid night that Christian planned his escape from Bligh’s constant tongue-lashings. “New connexions” had been formed at Otaheite (Beechey had earlier apologized to his readers for spelling Tahiti in the “old” way), making him receptive to “ideas which the situation of the ship and the serenity of the moment particularly favoured”; again, one catches the echo of Beechey’s editorializing.
This had been the moment when Christian had conceived his mad plan to float away on a raft—a plan “strange as it must appear,” Beechey could not help adding, “for a young officer to adopt, who was fairly advanced in an honorable profession.” In this case, Beechey’s bluff aside reveals that the instinctive reaction of a career officer to the events described was incomprehension. Nothing Adams had related—of Bligh’s conduct or anything else—apparently explained Christian’s conduct to Beechey. Why, the master’s mate was well advanced in his career! What business had he with rafts and such?! This voyage would soon blow over—so it would seem, if one may editorialize on Beechey, that he had reasoned.
Now came the fateful intervention of Christian’s Iago, the voice in his ear at this moment of mortal weakness in the predawn hours.
“Take the ship.” By all accounts—from Adams, from the men Edward Christian interviewed, on every occasion this event was described—this speaker was George Stewart. Stewart, as was by this time well-known, was passionately attached to his “Peggy,” the woman he had left behind on Otaheite; his objective, at least, for wishing to return required little speculation. In Beechey’s published narrative, Stewart is identified as “a young officer, who afterwards perished in the Pandora.” In his working manuscript, however, Beechey named him as “Stewart.” The reason for this slight revision—as much else about the Blossom’s visit—would shortly be revealed.
Stirred by Stewart’s words, Christian now relieved the officer on duty, Peckover, and assumed charge of the morning watch. Turning to Quintal, “the only one of the seamen, who Adams said, had formed any serious [female] attachment at Otaheite,” Christian sounded him out about taking the ship. Unexpectedly, Quintal, demurred, saying “he thought it a dangerous attempt, and declined taking a part.” Annoyed with the rebuff, Christian dramatically opened his jacket to reveal “a hand lead slung to his neck, adding that would soon carry him out of reach”; this detail was reported by Beechey’s officers. It was, then, do or die. “What, are you afraid?” Christian taunted Quintal, urging him to consider that “success would restore them all to the happy island, and the connexions they had left behind.” But still Quintal refused, telling Christian that he had better sound out someone else. That someone else was Isaac Martin, who slapping his thigh, declared, “By God, he was for it; it was the very thing.”
With this small momentum, Christian went to every man of his watch, working them over to him; then the “news soon spread like wild-fire through the crew.” To judge by his earlier tactics with Quintal, Christian’s argument to the crew would seem to have been that they could all return to “the happy island.” As a footnote to his narrative, almost an afterthought, Adams allowed to Beechey that in his opinion the reason “the majority of the Crew yielded so easily to the persuasions of Christian was, that the Captain stinted them in their allowance, and that during the greater part of the time the Ship was lying at Otaheite no Ships Provisions of any kind was served out and the Men were obliged to their own recourses to get a meal, except that when Hogs were received on board, after the Meat was cut from the bones, they were served out to the Crew. If a Man was detected bringing a yam or any thing else in the Ship for his own use it was taken from him and he was punished.”
Adams’s complaint echoed that of James Morrison, who had also been unmoved by Bligh’s directive that all food that came on board was to be considered common stock, and that trade was to be strictly regulated by a designated officer (Peckover) to ensure an orderly market. The hog meat that had been cut from the bones was for the salt pork that, as Bligh had noted with enormous satisfaction, filled his puncheons in readiness for the long voyage home. Bligh was very proud of the fact that, like Cook, he and his men had lived off the land during this sojourn, both eating incalculably better food than at any time in the voyage—if not in their lives—and safeguarding the precious ship stock for the months ahead.
To the men excitedly gathered on deck on the fine, calm night of April 28, however, pumped with the adrenaline of new and outrageous opportunity, the subtleties of Lieutenant Bligh’s ship “economy” were undoubtedly not discussed. Ahead lay travail and hardship and the certainty of being nagged and harangued through the Endeavour Strait—as the Providence voyage would show, navigation of the strait was hard work. Behind lay female “connexions” and the happy island of plenty.
Adams, lying peacefully asleep in his hammock, was at this point awokened. At first he declined to participate, as he said, but seeing “Christian handing the arms out of the Arm Chest and many of my friends employed thought I might as well make one of them.” Adams had been flogged with twelve lashes in Tahiti for allowing the rudder gudgeon to be stolen, a fact that may or may not have been of significance. Many men who had taken up arms innocently in the belief that they were to resist an attack by natives “now laid them down again.” Lieutenant Belcher, drawing on his gun-room interview, made an important observation: the actions of these briefly armed loyalists showed “the influence Christian possessed as they would not resist him.” Christian’s watch had included the gunner’s mate John Mills, Thomas Burkett and Thomas Ellison, as well as loyalists Charles Norman, Thomas Hayward and John Hallett.
Armed and full of fury, Christian went down with his party to Bligh’s cabin, “the door of which was always open.” Bligh was seized and rudely treated.
“I heard the Master at Arms strike him with the flat of the Cutlass,” Adams reported; but as the canny Lieutenant Belcher observed, it was more likely that this strike had been seen by Adams, not heard.
“And you too Smith against me,” Bligh said, standing bound by the binnacle and addressing Adams by his Bounty alias. “I went with the rest,” Adams replied to his captain.
Some ten leagues from Tofua, the overcrowded launch in tow behind the ship had been cast off, “and immediately ‘Huzza for Otaheite!’ echoed throughout the Bounty.”
The officers of the Blossom later made strenuous explorations of Pitcairn, traveling farther off the beaten track than ship companies before them. The strength and agility of the island’s youths as they ran and leaped along the undulating mountain trails were much admired: of George Young and Edward Quintal, the grown sons of the mutineers, it was claimed that each had on his own “carried, at one time, without inconvenience, a kedge anchor, two sledge hammers, and an armourer’s anvil, amounting to upwards of six hundred weight.” Lieutenant Belcher, “who was admitted to be the most active among the officers on board,” above all in his own estimation, was soon engaged in a kind of undeclared and ill-advised competition of strength with these youths. En route to Pitcairn, Belcher had entertained himself by testing his “swimming jacket” in high surf off various other islands and landfalls. Now, against the advice of his officer friends, Belcher plunged after one of the islanders down a “perilous descent,” and as Captain Beechey seemed pleased to report, “Mr. Belcher was obliged to profess his inability to proceed,” and to take the hand his native companion innocently offered in assistance.
According to Adams, once the Bounty departed Tahiti for the third and final time, following the failed settlement and bloodshed in Tubuai, there was no definite destination. The Marquesas Islands were first discussed, but Christian, availing himself of the volumes of voyages of discovery in Bligh’s library, read Captain Carteret’s description of Pitc
airn. The island was very remote, uninhabited and devoid of anchorage, ensuring that a passing ship would be less inclined to loiter; and so it was there he had steered the Bounty’s course.
On arrival, Christian and a reconnaissance party went ashore and returned greatly satisfied. They had found wood, water, fruit trees and rich soil. They had also discovered a mountainous and difficult land with narrow, easily defensible passes and a number of caves; the island was the perfect outlaw’s redoubt. (Christian had returned to the ship with “a joyful expression such as we had not seen on him for a long time past,” Adams told a later visitor.) The ship was slowly unloaded and then burned. While the settlement was being built, the mutineers lived under the Bounty’s sails; and when these were no longer required for shelter, the cloth had been cut up to fashion clothes. Thus had this small ship served her company to the very end. Her guns and anchors were observed by later visitors to be lying in the shallow water of Bounty Bay.
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty Page 44
