First Man In

by Ant Middleton

  ‘Listen, we’re on our own now,’ I told them from my place up at the tiller. ‘Get that safety ship out of your heads. That’s not fucking happening. It’s just us. The only people who can get us out of this situation are ourselves, as a team. You can always choose to get back on that safety boat if you like. But if you do, you’re not stepping foot back on Bounty’s End. We have a job to do. Let’s get those sails up.’

  As the safety boat disappeared over the edge of our watery world, we began to feel as lost, tiny and vulnerable as a midge that had been fired into space. Our first task was to get into the nearest island, which was about a day away. I knew it was called Tofua and that this was obviously the location Bligh went to, but beyond that I didn’t know much about the original voyage we were meant to be tracking. I deliberately didn’t read up on Bligh himself or read his journal of the voyage, which was published as The Mutiny on the Bounty. I didn’t want to poison my mind by thinking how someone else did it. I wanted to do it my way. I was charting his journey, but doing it as me. Besides, it was also about authenticity. Captain Bligh didn’t have a book to guide him, and I didn’t want one either.

  That night, a terrible storm blew in. The wind picked up in the early evening and, by 7 o’clock we were miserable, wet-through and being tossed about like a leaf in the wind. And we were starving. Our ration was three ship’s biscuits per day. Not only were they tasteless, they were so hard I broke a tooth on one of them. For our evening meal we’d be treated to thirty-three grams of biltong, which amounted to barely a mouthful. The dryness of the food wasn’t helped by the lack of water, which we were rationed to a litre and a half a day each. Enough to survive but, in that heat, nowhere near enough to provide anything like comfort. Making the situation worse was the fact that people weren’t sleeping when they should’ve been. As hard as they might try, they were finding it impossible. It was freezing, water was coming over the side of the boat and drenching them, and they were in a state of chronic shock.

  The next day, the weather had stilled, and a beautiful morning dawned on the coast of Tofua. I’d decided that three of us would go onto land, while everyone else stayed on board, making sure the boat didn’t crack up against the rocks. I took Chris with me and instructed him to find coconuts, while I tried to locate a water source to bolster our supplies, with Dan in tow, filming. Before I headed inland I found a little camp where we’d sleep the night, with good visuals of the boat around two hundred metres away.

  ‘You can be the liaising point to the ship,’ I said to Chris. ‘Shout if you need me. But while you’re here, I want you to collect firewood and make this campsite a bit more liveable, so we can have a half-comfortable sleep tonight.’

  ‘Yeah fine, mate,’ he said.

  What I didn’t realise, as I tracked into the bush, was that he’d taken this badly. For some reason he’d interpreted my perfectly standard request as treating him ‘like a ten-year-old’. When Dan and I were safely out of the way, he started moaning, mucking about and jumping off the high, jagged rocks into the sea.

  The boys in the boat were shouting at him, ‘Get off the rocks! Stop jumping! You’re going to injure yourself.’

  His attitude was simply, ‘Fuck off. I can do what I like.’

  While all this was going on, Dan and I were enduring a tough and fruitless search for water, climbing the slopes of a volcanic island with the power of the midday South Pacific sun set to maximum. We had nothing to drink – all the liquids were still on the boat. We ended the day with nothing to show but serious dehydration and a bunch of coconuts.

  The next morning we hauled the coconuts back onto Bounty’s End. As soon as I was back on board, Conrad pulled me to one side.

  ‘Why did you let Chris jump off the rocks?’ he said.

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘Yeah, we were shouting at him not to be so stupid, but he took no notice.’

  ‘Well, mate, I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘I was up a volcano looking for water. But you know, Chris is all right. He was busy getting firewood. It’s fine.’

  I was a bit perturbed at what I was hearing, but my priority was to maintain team unity. Even though I’d stuck up for Chris, I knew I’d have to keep a close eye on his attitude. It was only day two, and already he’d knocked a crack into the precious relationship between me and the crew.

  Our next leg – to Yadua Island – was going to be around five hundred miles, and a few days into it we found ourselves heading right into the centre of an epic storm. Conditions became so bad that if we’d run into life-threatening trouble, the safety boat wouldn’t have been able to get us. They couldn’t risk the lives of their crew by sending men out in a small boat, and if the main ship pulled up beside us, the waters were so fierce there’d be a serious risk of it smashing Bounty’s End to pieces.

  On and on it went, hour after hour, water pouring over the sides of the boat as if it wasn’t us but the whole world that was being violently thrown about. It’s no exaggeration to say that we weren’t floating anymore – we were literally surfing the swells. The men were huddled in the hull, praying. During the night we lost communication with the safety ship.

  ‘Guys, this is fucking serious now,’ I said. ‘If we flip, we’re dead. I need everyone to be alert.’

  As conditions grew worse still, I ordered Conrad to man the helm with me and instructed everyone to bed down where they could and keep as dry as possible, using material we kept to repair damage to the sails as cover. They didn’t have to do any work. Their only job was to stay alive. Conrad and I would take care of the rest.

  As morning dawned on the second day of the storm, nothing looked any better. The swell was still huge, and the men were wet, cold and shaking, just as you would be if you’d been soaking in a bathtub of freezing water for thirty-six hours. We’d been so relentlessly wet, for so long, that our fingers started to rot. It had come to feel as if the rain was hitting through our skulls and impacting our brains directly. Sam the cameraman, who’d been struggling valiantly to capture what he could of our situation, had chunks of skin sloughing off his fingers. Fred was shitting and vomiting at the same time and involving himself in the mad gymnastics of simultaneously trying to get both ends of his dribbling body facing out towards the sea. Meanwhile, Chris the sailor was so catatonic that Conrad and I had to undress him, rinse out his clothes and put them back on again for him. Even in the midst of all that misery and discomfort, the irony brought a smile to my face: he’d complained of being treated like a ten-year-old and now, because of his own lack of sea legs, we were being forced to treat him like a ten-month-old.

  Finally, on day three, we exited the eye of the storm. It was scant relief. We still had the rest of the system to push through. We would, I guessed, be dealing with another two days of this. At some point that morning Ben shuffled over to me, with a face on him like an abused dog.

  ‘Ant,’ he said. ‘I need to dry off. I really do. I need to get on the safety boat. Just to get dry. Then I’m back in.’

  ‘That’s not an option,’ I told him. ‘If you get on that boat, you’re not coming back. That’s it.’

  He crawled back down to the other end of the boat and reported back what I’d said to the rest of them. Beneath the roar of the swell and the beating of the sails, my ears focused into their voices.

  ‘We can’t be treated like this,’ said someone.

  ‘Yeah,’ said someone else. ‘No one ever told us it would be like this.’

  I couldn’t let this continue for another second.

  ‘Oi!’ I shouted. ‘That’s enough of that fucking negativity. The only people who put you into this situation is yourselves. We’re all volunteers here. Nobody’s forced us on this boat. You have two options. You can get off this boat and know you’re not coming back on it. Or we can all gather together as a team and fucking smash through this together. Before you know it, we’ll be on the next island. You’ll be able to rest up, get your kit dry and maybe even have some decent food.’

/>   I was met with nothing but sorry silence from the crew. In the end, the storm raged, and the rain came down, for ninety-six straight hours.

  By the time we landed on Yadua I felt my position as captain had finally been earned. I’d not slept. I’d kept the boat upright and sailing in the right direction. I’d got them through it, just as I’d promised. What’s more, I’d come to respect Conrad, and he’d come to respect me. As my second-in-command, he’d truly stepped up.

  With the relief of hitting dry, still land for a three-day stint, the stress lifted and the less attractive edges to some of the crew started to show. Ben, especially, was highlighting himself with his laziness, leaving his mess everywhere around the camp. When I pulled him up on it, he dismissed the rules I was trying to impose as ‘just campfire games’. I tried to impress upon him that, aside from morale, it was important keep everything squared away in case anything went wrong. We needed to be able to grab all our kit and escape in a hurry if necessary.

  I know a few of them were looking around at our situation, camping out on a paradise beach, and thinking, ‘What exactly could go wrong in a place like this?’ But twelve hours after our arrival a tsunami warning came over the emergency radio. We were in the middle of cooking a big crab stew and, because I’d insisted on camp discipline, we were all safely on high ground, crab stew and all, within minutes. When the threat had passed I took Ben aside for a quiet word.

  ‘Look, I know you’ve got loads more in you. I need you to step up. I need more self-confidence. You need to stop hiding behind your humour because when that goes, you’re a burden.’

  The next leg was a big one. Two weeks and seven hundred miles lay between us and Vanuatu. But by the time we launched off, everyone was raring to go. If we’d survived that four-day storm, we could survive anything. Even Ben was bucking his ideas up. We hadn’t been long back at sea, though, before Chris started to struggle getting out of bed in time for his shifts. First he was five minutes late, then ten minutes. His kit was everywhere. He was supposed to be helping with the navigation, using the sextant and charts, but he kept making mistakes. After a while I began to wonder whether he even knew how to use it but, when questioned, he’d insist that he did. Before long I found myself having to haul him up, and every time I did I’d be met with a variation on the same response, which was that either me – or everyone else – was treating him like a kid.

  ‘We’re not treating you like a kid,’ I’d say. ‘We’re asking you to be a member of this crew. Do you need some help? If you don’t understand something, that’s all right, but you have to tell me. I’ll help you.’

  ‘I don’t need any help. I’m not a ten-year-old. I’ve sailed round bloody Britain.’

  If sleeping in and leaving his mess everywhere wasn’t frustrating enough in that small space, he’d stopped washing. When it was calm, the rest of us would jump into the water and have a good scrub, but he refused. He stunk like a rotting badger. And the layer of dirt he was living beneath soon started to have knock-on effects. He cut his leg, somehow, and the wound became heavily infected. He was getting ulcers in his skin, including one in his armpit that burst open. Freddy, the young lad that was unfortunate enough to be sharing boat space with him, was livid.

  One night he was on shift, navigating with the sextant while I was taking the opportunity to get my head down. By the time I woke up, the light was just starting to break into morning. As Chris crawled in bed, I inspected the charts to see the navigational marks he’d made on them. I couldn’t see any there.

  ‘Chris, mate?’ I said. ‘Have you taken the sextant reading? Where’s the mark?’

  ‘I didn’t take a reading,’ he said. ‘Whoever left the sextant like that set it up wrong.’

  This made exactly zero sense.

  ‘What do you mean “set it up wrong”? When you pick up a sextant, you put all the settings back to normal.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t record our position because …’

  ‘Chris, do you know how to use it?’

  ‘’Course I fucking do.’

  ‘Come up and show me then,’ I demanded. ‘Show me how to use it.’

  As Conrad and Freddy looked on, he demonstrated quickly that he had no idea at all. ‘How the fuck can you not know how to use it?’ I said.

  ‘You’re treating me like a kid and belittling me,’ he wailed. ‘I’m sick of this.’

  Because of Chris’s fear of admitting any form of weakness, we’d sailed twenty miles off course. Nobody expected him to know how to sail an eighteenth-century boat. I’d have shown him in a heartbeat and that would’ve been that. But all that time he’d been dodging the truth and letting it grow in his head, and now it had come back at him. He’d allowed his mistake to win.

  And because he had, the rest of the crew were deciding they’d finally had enough. The whispers went round the boat, as soft and seductive as the warm breeze that was lifting off the Pacific’s crystalline surface: ‘He’s sleeping in again’; ‘He stinks’; ‘He’s got a bad attitude’; ‘He’s isolating himself’; ‘I want him gone.’ One day he slept through three shifts straight. When he eventually did wake up he had the audacity to complain: ‘Fucking hell, I’ve had no sleep.’

  Things came to a head on Vanuatu. I’d never seen a place so perfect, and everyone was sensationally happy, on a high better than any drug. We fell in with some wonderful locals, ate from their gardens – replanting everything we’d picked – and went pig hunting with them. The only blot on the landscape was Chris. For some unknown reason he made the decision to go wild pig hunting with all his thermal underwear on. He was sweating and struggling and moaning, playing the victim as usual and slowing the rest of us down. We were embarrassed by him. As a leader I felt I was representing all of these lads in front of the Vanuatuans, who I’d come to think extremely highly of. He was shaming all of us. I just wanted him to disappear.

  That night, I was grabbing a bit of kip in my hut when I was suddenly woken up. It was Conrad.

  ‘The guys want to have a bit of a chat,’ he told me ‘It’s about Chris.’

  I rubbed my eyes and staggered onto the moonlit beach. I’d had a feeling this was coming. It turned out that Chris was sleeping, too, and the lads had taken the opportunity to let me know what was on their minds.

  ‘Right, guys,’ I said. ‘If you’ve got an issue about Chris, you need to voice it.’

  After a moment of quiet, Freddy spoke up.

  ‘I know this sounds bad,’ he said, ‘but if I knew he was going to be on that boat for the rest of the trip and he was going to be the same, I don’t think I’d do it, to be honest. He’s driving everybody mad.’

  ‘You want him off then?’ I asked. ‘Who else feels like this?’

  ‘In the last few days I realise how little he does for the group,’ said mild-mannered Luke. ‘Essentially, we’re carrying him. And it’s pissing me off.’

  After they’d all voiced their opinions, I went round, one by one, asking for a simple yes or no answer to the question, ‘Do you want Chris on the boat with you?’ Only Ben said yes. I promised I’d make a decision and inform them of it the next day. I tried to sleep but couldn’t, and ended up staring into the dying flames of the fire for hours. What was I going to do? I’d put my head on the chopping block many times for Chris, and each time he’d let me down. But it was by no means a straightforward decision. Losing a man like this would be a failure, in my eyes. Yet feelings were running very high. It was turning out to be a test of my leadership. I’d somehow found myself teetering on the brink of a genuine mutiny.

  First thing the next morning, I pulled Chris aside. Perched on a piece of fallen tree, I asked him to sit down next to me. I gave it to him straight.

  ‘None of them want you on the boat.’

  ‘I don’t get it. What have I done wrong?’

  ‘The lads don’t think you’re a team player, you’re dangerous on the boat and you’re a hindrance to the team.’

  He shook his head
in shock and confusion, as if I was telling him the moon was made out of cheese.

  ‘That’s just ridiculous.’

  ‘They’re saying to me, “Ant, why are you allowing him to get away with all this?”’

  ‘I carried the water …’ he interrupted me.

  ‘Listen! Listen! Listen!’

  But he kept talking.

  ‘Fucking listen to me!’ I shouted. ‘Listen to what I’ve got to say. I’m trying to help you out, here, but you’re talking over me. You’re pissing me off.’

  After we’d spoken, he promised to go away and think about it. But, predictably, he made his crewmates the issue and started having a pop at them for being ‘two-faced’ for coming to me. He had no conception whatsoever of how his own actions had contributed to the situation. As far as he was concerned, the only problem on Bounty’s End was everyone else.

  And unfortunately for Chris, his only ally on the team was running into his own problems. It soon came to light that, through fear of being kicked off the boat, Ben had been hiding a serious infection in his hand from a cut he’d sustained at some point during the previous sail. His hand was swollen like a cadaver’s and the poison, hard and painful, was spreading up his arm.

  The sadness of the situation was that Ben was just coming into his own. He was using his carpentry skills to help the locals build houses, and you could tell that this was an important, precious experience for him. He was inspired. Even the stupid jokes had almost stopped. When the decision was made that his hand was in a bad enough state to require urgent hospital treatment, he was devastated. We stood on the beach and watched him leave for the safety boat, and more than one of the lads were crying genuine tears. Perhaps they were sorry to see him go; perhaps they were upset that it wasn’t Chris we were watching vanish into the endless blue.

  But it wasn’t. After his tantrum, Chris came to me, apologised and promised to drop the attitude.