Mutiny on the Bounty

by Nordhoff

  Mutiny on the Bounty

  Mutiny on the Bounty (1932)

  by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

  Illustrations by N C Wyeth

  Grosset and Dunlap, publishers: 1945

  MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY

  To

  Captain Viggo Rasmussen, Schooner Tiaré Taporo , Rarotonga

  and Captain Andy Thomson, Schooner Tagua , Rarotonga

  Old friends who sail the seas the Bounty sailed

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER I. LIEUTENANT BLIGH

  CHAPTER II. SEA LAW

  CHAPTER III. AT SEA

  CHAPTER IV. TYRANNY

  CHAPTER V. TAHITI

  CHAPTER VI. AN INDIAN HOUSEHOLD

  CHAPTER VII. CHRISTIAN AND BLIGH

  CHAPTER VIII. HOMEWARD BOUND

  CHAPTER IX. THE MUTINY

  CHAPTER X. FLETCHER CHRISTIAN

  CHAPTER XI. THE LAST OF THE _BOUNTY_

  CHAPTER XII. TEHANI

  CHAPTER XIII. THE MOON OF PIPIRI

  CHAPTER XIV. THE PANDORA

  CHAPTER XV. DOCTOR HAMILTON

  CHAPTER XVI. THE ROUNDHOUSE

  CHAPTER XVII. THE SEARCH FOR THE _BOUNTY_

  CHAPTER XVIII. THE LAST OF THE PANDORA

  CHAPTER XIX. TEN WEARY MONTHS

  CHAPTER XX. SIR JOSEPH BANKS

  CHAPTER XXI. H.M.S. DUKE

  CHAPTER XXII. THE CASE FOR THE CROWN

  CHAPTER XXIII. THE DEFENSE

  CHAPTER XXIV. CONDEMNED

  CHAPTER XXV. TINKLER

  CHAPTER XXVI. WITHYCOMBE

  CHAPTER XXVII. EPILOGUE

  The route of the Bounty's launch after being cast away by the mutineers on April 28 1789

  The route of the Bounty after her capture by the mutineers on April 28 1789

  H. M. S. Bounty

  They made a handsome couple

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  Captain Bligh was standing by the mizzenmast

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  For a long time neither of us spoke

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  This was the only bit of land above water anywhere about

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  Well we knew what was happening there

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  OFFICERS AND CREW OF H.M.S. BOUNTY

  Lieutenant William Bligh, Captain John Fryer, Master Fletcher Christian, Master's Mate Charles Churchill, Master-at-Arms William Elphinstone, Master-at-Arms's Mate "Old Bacchus," Surgeon Thomas Ledward, Acting Surgeon David Nelson, Botanist William Peckover, Gunner John Mills, Gunner's Mate William Cole, Boatswain James Morrison, Boatswain's Mate William Purcell, Carpenter Charles Norman, Carpenter's Mate Thomas McIntosh, Carpenter's Crew Joseph Coleman, Armourer Midshipmen: Roger Byam Robert Tinkler

  Thomas Hayward Edward Young

  John Hallet George Stewart

  Quartermasters: John Norton

  Peter Lenkletter

  George Simpson, Quartermaster's Mate Lawrence Lebogue, Sailmaker Mr. Samuel, Clerk Robert Lamb, Butcher William Brown, Gardener Cooks: John Smith

  Thomas Hall

  Able Seamen: Thomas Burkitt John Williams

  Matthew Quintal Thomas Ellison

  John Sumner Isaac Martin

  John Millward Richard Skinner

  William McCoy Matthew Thompson

  Henry Hillbrandt William Muspratt

  Alexander Smith Michael Byrne

  PREFACE

  On the twenty-third of December, 1787, His Majesty's armed transport Bounty sailed from Portsmouth on as strange, eventful, and tragic a voyage as ever befell an English ship. Her errand was to proceed to the island of Tahiti (or Otaheite, as it was then called), in the Great South Sea, there to collect a cargo of young breadfruit trees for transportation to the West Indies, where, it was hoped, the trees would thrive and thus, eventually, provide an abundance of cheap food for the negro slaves of the English planters.

  The events of that voyage it is the purpose of this tale to unfold. Mutiny on the Bounty , which opens the story, is concerned with the voyage from England, the long Tahiti sojourn while the cargo of young breadfruit trees was being assembled, the departure of the homeward-bound ship, the mutiny, and the fate of those of her company who later returned to Tahiti, where the greater part of them were eventually seized by H. M. S. Pandora and taken back to England, in irons, for trial.

  The authors chose as the narrator of this part of the tale a fictitious character, Roger Byam, who tells it as an old man, after his retirement from the Navy. Byam had his actual counterpart in the person of Peter Heywood, whose name was, for this reason, omitted from the roster of the Bounty's company. Midshipman Byam's experience follows closely that of Midshipman Heywood. With the license of hisorical novelists, the authors based the career of Byam upon that of I Heywood, but in depicting it they did not, of course, follow the latter n every detail. In the essentials, relating to the mutiny and its aftermath, they have adhered to the facts preserved in the records of the I British Admiralty.

  Men Against the Sea , the second part of the narrative, is the story of Captain Bligh and the eighteen loyal men who, on the morning of lie mutiny, were set adrift by the mutineers in the Bounty's launch, an open boat twenty-three feet long, with a beam of six feet, nine inches. In this small craft Captain Bligh carried his men a voyage of 3600 miles, from the island of Tofoa (or Tofua, as it is now called), in the Friendly, or Tongan Group, to Timor, in the Dutch East Indies. The wind and weather of Men Against the Sea are those of Captain Bligh's own log, a series of brief daily notes which formed the chief literary source of this part of the tale. The voyage is described in the words of one of those who survived it—Thomas Ledward, acting surgeon of the Bounty , whose medical knowledge and whose experience in reading men's sufferings would qualify him as a sensitive and reliable observer.

  Pitcairn's Island , which concludes the tale, is perhaps the strangest and most romantic part of it. After two unsuccessful attempts to settle on the island of Tupuai (or Tubuai, as the name is now more commonly spelled), the mutineers returned to Tahiti, where they parted company. Fletcher Christian, acting lieutenant of the Bounty and instigator of the mutiny, once more embarked in the ship for an unknown destination. With him were eight of his own men and eighteen Polynesians (twelve women and six men). They sailed from Tahiti in September 1789, and for a period of eighteen years nothing more was heard of them. In February 1808, the American sealing vessel Topaz , calling at Pitcairn, discovered on this supposedly uninhabited crumb of land a thriving community of mixed blood: a number of middle-aged Polynesian women and more than a score of children, under the benevolent rule of a white-haired English seaman, Alexander Smith, the only survivor of the fifteen men who had landed there so long before.

  Various and discrepant accounts have been preserved concerning the events which took place on Pitcairn during the eighteen years preceding the visit of the Topaz . The source of them all, direct or indirect, was Alexander Smith (or John Adams, as he later called himself). He told the story first to Captain Folger, of the Topaz ; then, in 1814, to Captains Staines and Pipon, of the English frigates Briton and Tagus ; then to Captain Beechey, of H. M. S. Blossom , in 1825; and finally, in 1829, to J. A. Moerenhout, author of Voyages aux Îles du Grand Océan . Later accounts were recorded by Walter Brodie, who set down, in 1850, a narrative obtained from Arthur, Matthew Quintal's son; and by Rosalind Young, in her Story of Pitcairn Island , which gives certain details retained in the memory of Eliza, daughter of John Mills, who reached the advanced age of ninety-three.

  Each of these accounts is remarkable for its differences from th
e others. The authors, therefore, after careful study of every existing account, adopted a chronology and selected a sequence of events which seemed to them to render more plausible the play of cause and effect.

  The history of those early years on Pitcairn was tragic, perhaps inevitably so. Fifteen men and twelve women, of two widely different races, were set down on a small island, one of the loneliest in the world. At the end of a decade, although there were many children, only one man and ten women remained; of the sixteen dead, fifteen had come to violent ends. These are the facts upon which all the accounts agree. If, at times, in the Pitcairn narrative, blood flows over-freely, and horror seems to pile on horror, it is not because the authors would have it so: it was so, in Pitcairn history.

  But the outcome of those early turbulent years was no less extraordinary than the threads of chance which led to the settlement of the island. All who were fortunate enough to visit the Pitcairn colony during the first quarter of the nineteenth century agree that it presented a veritable picture of the Golden Age.

  Those who are interested in the source material concerning the Bounty mutiny will find an exhaustive bibliography of books, articles, and unpublished manuscripts in the Appendix to Mr. George Mackaness's Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh , published by Messrs. Angus and Robertson, of Sydney, Australia. Among the principal sources consulted by the authors were the following: "Minutes of the Proceedings of a Court-Martial on Lieutenant William Bligh and certain members of his crew, to investigate the cause of the loss of H. M. S. Bounty "; A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty's Ship "Bounty ," by William Bligh; A Voyage to the South Sea , by William Bligh; The Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H. M. S. "Bounty ," by Sir John Barrow; Pitcairn island and the Islanders , by Walter Brodie; Mutineers of the "Bounty" and Their Descendants in Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands , by Lady Belcher; Bligh of the "Bounty ," by Geoffrey Rawson; Voyage of H. M. S. "Pandora," by E. Edwards and G. Hamilton; The Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh , by George Mackaness; The Story of Pitcairn Island , by Rosalind Young; Captain Bligh's Second Voyage to the South Seas , by I. Lee; Pitcairn Island Register Book; New South Wales Historical Records ; Cook's Voyages ; Hawkesworth's Voyages ; Beechey's Voyages ; Ellis's Polynesian Researches; Ancient Tahiti , by Teura Henry; and A Memoir of Peter Heywood . Two excellent studies of the present-day descendants of the Bounty mutineers, from the point of view of an anthropologist, have been made by Dr. Harry Shapiro in his Descendants of the Bounty Mutineers and The Heritage of the Bounty .

  We wish to express our cordial thanks to Mr. N. C. Wyeth, whose illustrations lend so much colour and vividness to the story of the Bounty and her men.

  June, 1940 .

  J. N. H. C. N.

  CHAPTER I.—LIEUTENANT BLIGH

  The British are frequently criticized by other nations for their dislike of change, and indeed we love England for those aspects of nature and life which change the least. Here in the West Country, where I was born, men are slow of speech, tenacious of opinion, and averse—beyond their countrymen elsewhere—to innovation of any sort. The houses of my neighbours, the tenants' cottages, the very fishing boats which ply on the Bristol Channel, all conform to the patterns of a simpler age. And an old man, forty of whose three-and-seventy years have been spent afloat, may be pardoned a not unnatural tenderness toward the scenes of his youth, and a satisfaction that these scenes remain so little altered by time.

  No men are more conservative than those who design and build ships save those who sail them; and since storms are less frequent at sea than some landsmen suppose, the life of a sailor is principally made up of the daily performance of certain tasks, in certain manners and at certain times. Forty years of this life have made a slave of me, and H continue, almost against my will, to live by the clock. There is no reason why I should rise at seven each morning, yet seven finds me dressing, nevertheless; my copy of the Times would reach me even though I failed to order a horse saddled at ten for my ride down to Watchet to meet the post. But habit is too much for me, and habit finds a powerful ally in old Thacker, my housekeeper, whose duties, as I perceive with inward amusement, are lightened by the regularity she does everything to encourage. She will listen to no hint of retirement. In spite of her years, which must number nearly eighty by now, her step is still brisk and her black eyes snap with a remnant of the old malice. It would give me pleasure to speak with her of the days when my mother was still living, but when I try to draw her into talk she wastes no time in putting me in my place. Servant and master, with the churchyard only a step ahead! I am lonely now; when Thacker dies, I shall be lonely indeed.

  Seven generations of Byams have lived and died in Withycombe; the name has been known in the region of the Quantock Hills for five hundred years and more. I am the last of them; it is strange to think that at my death what remains of our blood will flow in the veins of an Indian woman in the South Sea.

  If it be true that a man's useful life is over on the day when his thoughts begin to dwell in the past, then I have served little purpose in living since my retirement from His Majesty's Navy fifteen years ago. The present has lost substance and reality, and I have discovered, with some regret, that contemplation of the future brings neither pleasure nor concern. But forty years at sea, including the turbulent period of the wars against the Danes, the Dutch, and the French, have left my memory so well stored that I ask no greater delight than to be free to wander in the past.

  My study, high up in the north wing of Withycombe, with its tall windows giving on the Bristol Channel and the green distant coast of Wales, is the point of departure for these travels through the past. The journal I have kept, since I went to sea as a midshipman in 1787, lies at hand in the camphor-wood box beside my chair, and I have only to take up a sheaf of its pages to smell once more the reek of battle smoke, to feel the stinging sleet of a gale in the North Sea, or to enjoy the calm beauty of a tropical night under the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere.

  In the evening, when the unimportant duties of an old man's day are done, and I have supped alone in silence, I feel the pleasant anticipation of a visitor to Town, who on his first evening spends an agreeable half-hour in deciding which theatre he will attend. Shall I fight the old battles over again? Camperdown, Copenhagen, Trafalgar—these names thunder in memory like the booming of great guns. Yet more and more frequently I turn the pages of my journal still further back, to the frayed and blotted log of a midshipman—to an episode I have spent a good part of my life in attempting to forget. Insignificant in the annals of the Navy, and even more so from an historian's point of view, this incident was nevertheless the strangest, the most picturesque, and the most tragic of my career.

  It has long been my purpose to follow the example of other retired officers and employ the too abundant leisure of an old man in setting down, with the aid of my journal and in the fullest possible detail, a narrative of some one of the episodes of my life at sea. The decision was made last night; I shall write of my first ship, the Bounty , of the mutiny on board, of my long residence on the island of Tahiti in the South Sea, and of how I was conveyed home in irons, to be tried by court-martial and condemned to death. Two natures clashed on the stage of that drama of long ago, two men as strong and enigmatical as any I have known—Fletcher Christian and William Bligh.

  When my father died of a pleurisy, early in the spring of 1787, my mother gave few outward signs of grief, though their life together, in an age when the domestic virtues were unfashionable, had been a singularly happy one. Sharing the interest in the natural sciences which had brought my father the honour of a Fellowship in the Royal Society, my mother was a countrywoman at heart, caring more for life at Withycombe than for the artificial distractions of town.

  I was to have gone up to Oxford that fall, to Magdalen, my father's college, and during that first summer of my mother's widowhood I began to know her, not as a parent, but as a most charming companion, of whose company I never wearied. The women of her generati
on were schooled to reserve their tears for the sufferings of others, and to meet adversity with a smile. A warm heart and an inquiring mind made her conversation entertaining or philosophical as the occasion required; and, unlike the young ladies of the present time, she had been taught that silence can be agreeable when one has nothing to say.

  On the morning when Sir Joseph Banks's letter arrived, we were strolling about the garden, scarcely exchanging a word. It was late in July, the sky was blue, and the warm air bore the scent of roses; such a morning as enables us to tolerate our English climate, which foreigners declare, perhaps with some justice, the worst in the world. I was thinking how uncommonly handsome my mother looked in black, with her thick fair hair, fresh colour, and dark blue eyes. Thacker, her new maid,—a black-eyed Devon girl,—came tripping down the path. She dropped my mother a curtsey and held out a letter on a silver tray. My mother took the letter, gave me a glance of apology, and began to read, seating herself on a rustic bench.

  "From Sir Joseph," she said, when she had perused the letter at length and laid it down. "You have heard of Lieutenant Bligh, who was with Captain Cook on his last voyage? Sir Joseph writes that he is on leave, stopping with friends near Taunton, and would enjoy an evening with us. Your father thought very highly of him."

  I was a rawboned lad of seventeen, lazy in body and mind, with overfast growth, but the words were like a galvanic shock to me. "With Captain Cook!" I exclaimed. "Ask him by all means!"

  My mother smiled. "I thought you would be pleased," she said.

  The carriage was dispatched in good time with a note for Mr. Bligh, bidding him to dine with us that evening if he could. I remember how I set out, with the son of one of our tenants, to sail my boat at high tide on Bridgwater Bay, and how little I enjoyed the sail. My thoughts were all of our visitor, and the hours till dinner-time seemed to stretch ahead interminably.