Fletcher of the Bounty

by Graeme Lay

  Thursday October Christian (1790–1831). The first child born on Pitcairn after the arrival of the mutineers and their Tahitian women, Thursday was only three when his father was killed. At the age of sixteen he married Teraura, also known as Susannah, formerly Ned Young’s consort, who was then about thirty. Tall young Thursday impressed the visitors on the ships that called at Pitcairn in 1808 and 1814. They admired his open countenance and respectful manner. During his brief visit to HMS Tagus in 1814, Thursday had his portrait drawn. In it he wears a straw hat decorated with rooster’s feathers. Tagus’s Captain Pipon described him as ‘a tall fine young Man about 6 feet high . . . with a great share of good humour & a disposition & willingness to oblige, we were very glad to trace in his benevolent countenance, all the features of an honest English face’. Thursday also spoke good English. Later informed that his father had not taken the loss of a day into account while sailing east on the Bounty, Thursday changed his Christian name to Friday. In 1831 a group of Pitcairners, including Thursday-Friday, sailed to Tahiti, where he died of an infectious disease. He and Susannah had six children. She died in 1850.

  Isabella-Mauatua-Maumiti-Mainmast Christian (176?–1841). It is said that she remembered Cook’s last visit to Tahiti in 1777, which means that she was probably older than Fletcher. After his death she became the partner of Ned Young. She had two sons and a daughter by Fletcher and one son and two daughters by Young. She returned to Tahiti in 1831 with a party of Pitcairners, but found her homeland defiled by contacts with dissolute Europeans and went back to Pitcairn. White-haired in her old age, she was well-known for the stories she related to other members of her family.

  Peter Heywood (1772–1831). Although he played no active role in the 1789 mutiny, Bligh cited Heywood as one of the mutineers. Now eighteen, he was arrested and taken back to England aboard Pandora to be court-martialled. Along with five others he was sentenced to death by hanging. However, after his influential family lobbied on his behalf, mercy was recommended and he was pardoned by King George III. Resuming his naval career, Heywood was given his first command at twenty-seven and made a post-captain at thirty-one. He remained in the navy until 1816, earning a reputation as a fine hydrographer. He married Frances Joliffe but they had no children. In his retirement Heywood published his dictionary of the Tahitian language.

  Pitcairn Island: The Aftermath

  During the first decades of the nineteenth century the population of Pitcairn Island increased rapidly. The descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian women lived peacefully and communally, gardening, fishing and raising goats, pigs and chickens, much as Fletcher Christian envisaged that they might before the conflicts and killings erupted. Law-abiding and God-fearing, physically strong and healthy, the next generation of Pitcairners knew little of the outside world, had no need of money, and displayed an innocence and devoutness which impressed those who visited the island. They were, in a manner of speaking, true Christians.

  By 1831 the population of the island had reached eighty-seven, and it was feared by the outside authorities that the small island could not sustain any further increase. At the instigation of an English missionary, all the Pitcairners were uplifted from the island and transported on the Lucy Ann to Tahiti, the land of so many of their forebears.

  Tahiti had now been exposed to the wider world for over half a century, and many European ships had called at the island. The Pitcairn people were horrified at what they found there. They considered the Tahitians and the Europeans who lived there to be dissolute and promiscuous. They could not accept their lax morality. Furthermore, the Pitcairners contracted diseases such as tuberculosis and venereal disease from the much more worldly Tahitians. Eleven Pitcairn adults and children died over the next two months, including Thursday October Christian, Fletcher and Mauatua’s first-born. The transfer had been a tragic mistake. Consequently a ship was chartered and the Pitcairners were returned to their home island.

  Pitcairn became a British colony officially in 1838. That year, led by the strong Tahitian women, the island was among the first territories in the world to extend voting rights to females.

  The population continued to increase rapidly. By the mid-1850s there were nearly two hundred Pitcairners living on an island only one and three-quarter square miles (4.5 square kilometres) in size, less than ten percent of which was arable land. The population again needed to be evacuated, but where could they move to this time?

  Three thousand seven hundred miles (5955 kilometres) west of Pitcairn is another much larger Pacific island, named Norfolk in 1774 by James Cook, its first European discoverer. For most of the first half of the nineteenth century Norfolk was an English penal colony, a place so harsh in its treatment of transported convicts that its very name struck horror in the hearts of even hardened felons. Two mutinies occurred on the island, in 1834 and 1846. Both failed, and wholesale executions followed.

  Word of the cruelty and depravity of the Norfolk Island penal regime eventually moved the authorities in England. After agitation from prominent members of the English clergy, in 1854 the Norfolk Island gulag was abandoned and its convicts shipped to Port Arthur, in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).

  The leaders of Pitcairn Island had written to Queen Victoria requesting her help to find another home. In a compassionate gesture she offered them recently evacuated Norfolk Island. At first there was some resistance to the move, but on 3 May 1856 the entire population of 193 people was uplifted from Pitcairn and transferred to the ship Morayshire.

  The voyage west to Norfolk Island took five weeks and conditions aboard were miserable, but on 8 June 1856 Morayshire stood off the island — which like Pitcairn has no sheltered harbour — and the immigrants were lightered ashore.

  For the Pitcairners, this must have been like arriving on another planet. The new island seemed massive, although it was only five miles by three miles (eight kilometres by five kilometres). There were things the Pitcairners had never set eyes on before, such as stone houses and civic buildings, horses and cows, roads and wagons. But the settlers brought with them their unique shared history, the laws and customs as they had evolved on Pitcairn, their language and their Christian faith.

  Later some of the migrants returned to Pitcairn: seventeen members of the Young family in 1858, then some of the Christian clan in 1864. The rest remained on Norfolk Island, where many of their descendants still live.

  Today, one third of Norfolk Island’s population is directly descended from the Pitcairners. Every 8 June the anniversary of the arrival of the Morayshire is celebrated with Bounty Day, when a re-enactment of the landing is held at Emily Bay and period costumes are worn.

  Like today’s Pitcairn islanders, the people of Norfolk have their own language, a blend of eighteenth-century English and Tahitian. On a wall in many houses is the triskelion, the flag of Fletcher Christian’s first island, the Isle of Man, along with those of Tahiti and Norfolk. In other homes there are scale models of the Bounty, copies of the Robert Dodd painting of Bligh’s launch being set adrift, pictures of Pitcairn and photographs of their forebears. Norfolk Island place names also commemorate the Bounty mutiny participants: Captain [sic] Quintal Drive, Edward Young Road, Fletcher Christian Road. There are so many Christians living on Norfolk that there is a special section in the phone book where one can more usefully ‘fast find’ (‘faasfain’ in the Pitcairn patois) particular Christians just by their nicknames. Trent Christian, country and western singer, greets visitors to Norfolk with songs he performs in the centre of the island’s principal town, Burnt Pine. Just outside the town is a fine Cyclorama depicting the events of the mutiny, the settlement of Pitcairn Island and the move to Norfolk Island.

  Other Bounty mutineer surnames in the Norfolk Island phone book are: Adams, McCoy and Quintal. But there is no feature on either Norfolk or Pitcairn Island named after William Bligh. He is commemorated geographically only by Bligh Water, the stretch of sea in Fiji that lies between Viti Levu and the Yasawa Isl
ands. Bligh and the men loyal to him sailed through this sea in Bounty’s launch, during their epic voyage to Timor. Truly it can be said of William Bligh, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’

  Pitcairn Island in the 21st Century

  Pitcairn Island today is a British Overseas Territory, with the same status as other vestiges of Britain’s empire, such as Ascension Island, Bermuda and Gibraltar.

  Although Pitcairn is now connected to the internet and has efficient telecommunications with the rest of the world, it remains one of the most isolated islands on earth. Ships can stand off the island and transfer passengers only when sea conditions are favourable. This does not occur often. A supply ship brings cargo and some passengers to the island three times a year, with goods and people being transferred to the island by longboats skilfully deployed by the Pitcairn men.

  Most of the island’s population follow the teachings of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which was introduced to Pitcairn by a missionary in 1890.

  Isolation, a lack of employment and educational opportunities mean that Pitcairn has suffered a steady loss of population since the beginning of this century. Email has decimated the once-profitable philatelic industry. In 2011 the island’s population was sixty-eight; in 2016 it had declined to forty-nine. Young Pitcairners are sent to New Zealand for their secondary schooling, and seldom return.

  Pitcairn’s reputation was severely damaged by a series of sexual assault trials in 2004. Charges were laid against seven men living on the island and six living overseas. After lengthy trials which divided the island’s tiny community, in October 2004 nearly all those charged were convicted. After their final appeals were lost, the British government set up a prison on the island, a prefabricated building made in New Zealand, and in 2006 the convicted men began serving their sentences. By 2010 they had either completed their sentences or been granted home detention. In 2016 a former mayor of the island, Michael Warren, was convicted of possessing multiple images and videos of child pornography on his computer. This dealt another blow to Pitcairn’s reputation.

  Today’s Pitcairners, although numerically in decline, have a sincere wish to move on from these traumatic events and build a positive future for their island. Tourism is the best prospect. Aware of Pitcairn’s unique history, the islanders know that many people would like to visit their island and see for themselves the place where the Bounty mutineers found sanctuary. It is possible to dive at the site where the Bounty was scuttled, in Bounty Bay, and see remnants of the ship. The graves of John Adams and his wife, and the main graveyard below Adamstown, tell the story of the island’s history.

  A plaque on the Edge, above Bounty Bay, lists the names of all the Tahitian women who accompanied the mutineers and contributed so much to the eventual survival of the Pitcairn community.

  Everywhere on Pitcairn there are reminders of the Bounty mutineers and the settlement they established on the island 226 years ago: the Hill of Difficulty, now a sealed road; Christian’s Cave below Lookout Point; a cannon from the Bounty in Adamstown’s square; evocative place names — McCoy’s Valley Road, Point Christian, Brown’s Water, John Mills’ Road.

  Isolation remains an impediment, as neither Pitcairn nor her three sister islands — Henderson, Ducie and Oeno — have any air connections. The nearest inhabited island is Mangareva in French Polynesia, hundreds of miles to the north-west.

  One significant recent development is the construction of a second jetty, at Tedside on the north coast of the island. Funded by the European Union, this major addition to Pitcairn’s infrastructure will allow ships to moor here when weather conditions are unfavourable on the island’s east coast.

  Like their forebears, the people of the island are hard-working and resourceful — and they still speak the distinctive Pitkern dialect.

  Acknowledgements

  Much has been written about William Bligh and the mutiny on the Bounty, and there have been several movies based on the story, the last released in 1984. Not so much has been written about the early life of Fletcher Christian, or how he and Bligh came to be together on the Bounty.

  Fletcher of the Bounty is a work of fiction, but it is based on real events. It might thus be classed as ‘imagined fact’. Some episodes – such as Fletcher’s defence of the boy Wordsworth, and the attack on Fletcher at Madras – are products of the novelist’s imagination. Several characters too are invented, such as Meike the Dutch woman in Cape Town, and the American journalist Nathaniel Wescott, on Pitcairn.

  The sources of those facts are many and varied. There has been a multitude of publications documenting the Bounty mutiny story. Of these, five books in particular were of help in acquainting me with the facts of Fletcher Christian’s life.

  It was my good fortune when I visited Pitcairn Island in 2011 to have in my suitcase a manuscript copy of a work by Glynn Christian, the great-great-great-great-grandson of Fletcher Christian: Mrs Christian, Bounty Mutineer (Ashton Books, 2011). Having learnt that I was going to Pitcairn, Glynn sent me the manuscript and asked that I present it to Betty Christian, a relative of Glynn’s by marriage and an island resident. I was happy to do so, because I had earlier read and much admired Glynn’s book Fragile Paradise (Doubleday, 1999). This account of the mutiny and subsequent events was extremely helpful in understanding Fletcher Christian’s part in it. The book also disproves some of the mutiny myths which have sprung up over the years. Fragile Paradise was more than a reference, it was a guiding light.

  A more traditional source was The Bounty by Richard Hough (Corgi Books, 1984). An experienced naval man himself, and someone who had been to Pitcairn Island, Hough brings a seaman’s viewpoint to the saga. More pro-Bligh than some accounts, The Bounty nevertheless sheets home a key catalyst for the mutiny, Bligh’s inability to see events through anyone else’s eyes except his own. I, too, felt that this failure of the imagination by Bligh was a key reason for Christian’s actions aboard the Bounty after the ship left Tahiti in April, 1789.

  There is no more comprehensive biography of Bounty’s commander than Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas by Anne Salmond (Viking, 2011). This must be the definitive account of Bligh’s remarkable life and career. It is particularly illuminating with regard to Bligh’s time with James Cook during his third and fatal world voyage aboard HMS Resolution.

  For background reading, the novel Transit of Venus by Rowan Metcalfe (Huia, 2004) is unique. Also a descendant of Fletcher Christian and Mauatua-Isabella, and a prize-winning short story writer, Rowan tells the Bounty story from the perspective of the Tahitian women. Although fiction, it provides many insights into traditional Tahitian cultural practices. Transit of Venus is rendered more moving by the fact that Rowan died tragically in 2003, shortly before the novel was published.

  Fish and Ships! Food on the Voyages of Captain Cook (Captain Cook Memorial Museum, 2012) provided me with specialist information regarding the preparation and serving of food on Royal Navy vessels in the eighteenth century.

  While on Pitcairn Island I spent a good deal of time in the company of Dave Evans, a geophysicist from Alaska. Dave had earlier worked on Pitcairn and knew the island intimately. As well as showing me its every crevice and gully via quad-bike, he presented me with a copy of his booklet, Pitkern Ilan (2007). This proved to be a little gem, filled with relevant information about Pitcairn, past and present. I referred constantly to Dave’s map of the island in the booklet.

  I am also grateful to my Tahitian-Kiwi friend, Lola Carter, for providing me with the Tahitian phrases which are included at times in the text. Lola and I have made several visits to the islands of French Polynesia in the course of our work, and no one is more familiar with the culture of Tahiti and her sister islands than she is. Mauruuru Lola, for all your help.

  Thanks, too, to Robert Thompson and Tahiti Tourisme for assisting me with travel to Mangareva in French Polynesia, the stepping stone to Pitcairn Island.

  On Pitcairn I stayed with Charlene and Vaine Warren-Peu. They
and their extended family could not have been kinder to me while I was on the island, and I have the most affectionate memories of my time with them.

  I wish to thank the New Zealand company Stoney Creek Shipping, which sponsored my visit to Pitcairn Island aboard their vessel Claymore II. It was this visit which was the catalyst for my interest in the mutiny on the HMAV Bounty and the life of Fletcher Christian.

  Thanks also to Betty Christian, who is now living in Auckland, for providing me with additional information about Fletcher Christian.

  I am greatly indebted to maritime historian and renowned author Joan Druett for her expert advice regarding the nautical world.

  My gratitude also to my editor, Stephen Stratford, for his unerring judgments and eagle eye for anachronisms, and to my tireless agent Linda Cassells, who takes my books into the wider world. I wish to thank HarperCollins’ senior editor in Sydney, Nicola Robinson, for her thorough professionalism, and my publishers at HarperCollins, Shona Martyn and Alex Hedley, for their advice, support and good humour.

  About the Author

  GRAEME LAY was born in 1944 in Foxton. He grew up in two small coastal towns in Taranaki, first in Oakura, where he began school, then Opunake. Growing up on the coast instilled in him a great love of the sea.

  Graeme Lay began writing short stories in the late 1970s. After several of his stories were published in magazines, he began his first novel, The Mentor, which was published in 1978. His first collection of short stories, Dear Mr Cairney, was published in 1985. Since then he has published or edited forty works of fiction and non-fiction, including novels for adults and young adults, two more collections of short stories and three books of travel writing. In the late 1990s and early 2000s he also devised and edited five collections of New Zealand short short stories, three of which became bestsellers.