Something moving in the dawn! It proves to be three white men coming out of the greenery and making their way down to the beach, where they present themselves to Lieutenant Corner of the Pandora, who they find asleep in a canoe. When he comes to with a start, they introduce themselves.
‘I am James Morrison of the Bounty, sir.’
‘I am Charles Norman of the Bounty, sir.’
‘I am Thomas Ellison of the Bounty, sir.’37
On the instant, Lieutenant Corner places them in the Launch under guard, while he and 18 of his men set out to find the rest of the missing Mutineers, using Brown as their eager guide.
Many hours later, in the middle of the hot afternoon, Morrison still remains in the Launch, burning up, when he looks up to see new uniformed arrivals. It proves to be none other than Thomas Hayward, arriving in a boat of his own, and surrounded by 20 armed Marines.
With nary a word of greeting, and the only sign that he recognises the prisoners being his look of pure disgust, Hayward simply barks: ‘Tie their hands!’38
Morrison returns the glare, indignant. Morrison wasn’t even involved in the Mutiny, and Hayward knows that! Surely Hayward remembers the last words they spoke to each other, an agreement to attack the Mutineers with clubs?
‘There are tools enough!’39 Morrison had said, only to find Hayward had not the stomach for the act and had slipped away to the Launch instead. But now things have changed. Now Hayward has no further need of courage, for he has the two things that truly count – authority, and an extraordinary capacity to totally forget a past that surely embarrasses him.
‘Where are the others?’ Hayward snarls to his prisoners.
‘We don’t know,’ they reply.
‘Take the men and proceed to the ship,’40 Lieutenant Hayward snaps to a Midshipman.
With that, Morrison, raging at Hayward’s terse treatment of him, is finally getting his wish – to go to the ship.
And yet, of course, no sooner do they arrive on deck than they are placed in heavy manacles and marched below, more Mutineers presumptively locked up on the Pandora, while six are still at large on the island.
•
Yes, at large, but living small. High in the Tahitian mountains, the six Mutineers huddle together in the night, knowing what is coming but trying to sleep anyway – unsuccessfully. So far, there is no word of any white men arriving in the mountains to find them, but it can only be a matter of time. Surely.
30 March 1791, Tahiti, the trail goes cold
It is no easy thing to be visitors to a strange land, searching for men who do not want to be found, confronted by locals who have no desire to help. At Papara, the inquiries of Hayward and Corner get them nowhere, and they can find absolutely no trace of the Mutineers. There is nothing for it but to return to the ship, where they find the Carpenter and his assistants sawing, nailing, carrying, constructing – building something that is a cross between a poop and a coop, essentially a small wooden cage on the aft-deck to house the Mutineers on the journey home.
Now all they need to do is to get all the Mutineers to fill it.
But it will not be easy. Yes, bits and pieces of intelligence flow to them from various Natives, but they are wildly divergent and no common theme emerges. There remains a cluster of Mutineers at large, likely somewhere in the mountains around Papara. But where, precisely, is a mystery.
7 April 1791, Tahiti, closing in on the last Mutineers left standing
’Neath the tropical moon, in the still of the night, suddenly all is … not still. Yes, it has been a difficult trip up from the beach at Papara in the darkness for Hayward and his men, but at least they now have a chance to redeem the humiliation of the previous attempts.
Shhhhh!
Just up ahead, beyond the dying embers of the fire, they can see a hut – just where John Brown had said it would be – and, clearly, from the sounds, there are a lot of people sleeping inside.
But are these the Mutineers, or are they Natives? Hayward has no way of knowing. Ah, but Brown has. Very carefully, he crawls forward and, with no little delicacy, reaches his hand through a gap and carefully feels around for a naked foot.
They’re European feet! These are the Mutineers, right here!
Yes, extraordinary as it might seem, Brown is able to distinguish them from Natives by feeling their toes – ‘People unaccustomed to wear shoes are easily discovered from the spread of their toes,’41 he tells a bemused Hayward in a whisper.
These toes are tight together. They are European.
Very well then, Mr Brown.
Hayward makes his plans, and gives his orders. They are to surround the camp, quietly. They are to wait till dawn. He will fire a shot at first light, and they are to storm forward, surrounding the hut, with bayonets drawn, ready to kill at the first sign of resistance.
•
And … now.
The sound of the musket shot shatters the dawn, and on the instant, the 20 sailors storm forward, surrounding the Mutineers’ hut. It all happens so quickly – from a deep sleep to staring right into the jaws of eternity as you look up into the barrel of a musket pointed right at your face, held by a man – Hayward! – who is clearly just bursting to fire it. He seems so … angry.
Well, come to think of it, they had left him in a tub in the middle of the ocean with few supplies and a maniacal commander, laughing and cheering as they sailed away, but still …
The captured Mutineers are soon on their way to the Pandora, at the point of many guns.
•
May the Good Lord help them all. By 9 April, this construction of the Devil himself, this cage on the quarter-deck, is completed and all of the 14 men who have been kept in irons below are brought up, blinking in the sunlight, scarce believing their eyes at what awaits them.
It is a wooden box reinforced with lots of iron; a specially constructed prison, 11 feet by 18 feet and so low that even Monkey, who is just a little over five feet, is peering over it. In the whole wretched thing there are two small windows of nine inches square, with iron grates, to let in a very little air.
From the point of view of Edwards, he is doing no more than following his orders, from the Lords of the Admiralty, to the letter: You are to keep the Mutineers as closely confined as may preclude all possibility of them escaping … that they may be brought home to undergo the Punishment due to their Demerits.42
Young Peter Heywood, raised in opulence and wide open spaces in that isle of plenty which is the Isle of Man, and a wide-ranging man thereafter, can barely fathom it. It is an outrage that he is in irons in the first place, but now this? This box? To hold all of them? All the way back to England?
Yes. One by one, with both their legs and arms trailing their heavy chains, they are shuffled forward, to struggle up a small ladder before being dropped down into the box via a hatch that measures no more than 20 by 20 inches. As the last man drops down, all arms and legs and chains onto this human soup of other arms and legs and chains and groaning, cursing men, the hatch comes down hard above them, and the heavy bolt is thrust into its iron slot. Edwards’ description of it as a ‘round house … airy and healthy’43 does not quite capture it, but it certainly captures them.
Clutching tightly to his chest the cherished few possessions he has been able to take with him – his book of prayers, his notebooks and his pencils – young Peter Heywood looks around the box with stupefied horror. In these confines, they will have to live, breathe, sleep, eat, drink, urinate and defecate with none for company bar themselves and the tens of thousands of lice that have come with the filthy hammocks that have been thrown in after them. His whole body shudders, his eyes grow misty from welling tears.
To make sure no-one can take pity on them, the Captain has given strict orders that only the Master-at-Arms may speak to the prisoners, and even then it can only be on the subject of provisions – a conversation that surely won’t take long, as they are to be given little. Within a day, as the heat rises, a foetid stench come
s from the box, as the sweat pours from their persons and flows in streams to the scuppers where, before long, maggots begin to hatch.
Between the heat, the vermin and the lice, the men soon abandon their clothes, to lie naked.
With the last ounce of humour remaining them, they crown their new prison cell ‘Pandora’s box’.
•
And so they come. As the Mutineers have now been living in Tahiti for the better part of the last two and a half years, they have formed many deep bonds with the Natives, and none more so than with the women, some of whom are mothers to their children.
For those women and children, it is a special agony to be on the shore gazing at the wooden prison on the Pandora and knowing that their loved ones are inside. And so, as Morrison would recount, their women ‘came frequently under the stern (bringing their children, of which there were six born, four girls and two boys; several of the women were big with child). They cut their heads till the blood discoloured the water about them.’44
Likely none is more traumatised than Stewart’s wife, Peggy.
There is something about Peggy and her baby girl. So extraordinarily upset is she, so imploring of Edwards to allow them to see Stewart for just a few minutes, that even one with so hard a heart as he, wavers …
…
All right then!
In what would be the sole kind gesture to be marked, Edwards grants a brief meeting.
Stewart is allowed out of the cage briefly, as he, she, and their baby howl in a manner that moves all.
It is all so overwhelming, that after Peggy and her baby have been forcibly extricated from him, and sent back in her canoe, Stewart himself, unable to bear any more heart-rending scenes, begs that she not be admitted on board again.
8 May 1791, Tahiti, paradise lost
A little under two months after arriving in Tahiti, the Pandora is ready to leave, its full cargo of naked, swollen, vermin-ridden Mutineers still caged in their putrid wooden prison on the aft-deck. On the shore watching them go are many weeping women.
Edwards’ task now is to comb the South Pacific looking for Christian and the rest of the Mutineers. Where to begin the search?
After consideration, Edwards charts a course west-south-west for the island of Wytootacke, an island that Fletcher had talked extensively of to the Tahitian Chiefs. Right behind the Pandora comes the Resolution, officially commissioned by Edwards as his ship’s tender – the first Tahiti-built schooner of His Majesty’s mighty fleet, an enormous honour for the caged James Morrison – and placed under care of an eight-man crew under 19-year-old Master’s Mate William Oliver, in his first command.
And behind both of them?
‘Every canoe almost in the island was hovering … and they began to mourn.’45
Captain Edwards does not care. The Pandora carries on. Inside the living hell of the box on the back deck, the prisoners do their best to remain calm. Alas, once out on the open ocean, buffeted by endless waves, they are no sooner squashed up against each other on one wall than they are flung across the box when the next wave hits, with faeces and urine swishing about their naked chained bodies – and of course it is all the worse when they hit storms, as not only is the motion of the ocean so much more violent, but their cage offers no shelter from the weather as they are lashed by wind and rain.
At least in the genuinely calm, dry moments, Peter Heywood takes solace by writing poems and sketching his memories of the outside world – a horse and carriage, a church, a lady with a parasol. Most of his companions, however, just lie there, their eyes firmly shut against the depravity that surrounds them, hoping, usually in vain, to sleep.
In such a situation, there can be few upsides, but at least one is that day after day, they can hear the growing frustration of Captain Edwards and the crew that they can find no sign of Christian and the other Mutineers.
Their relief might be less out of loyalty to them, than fear that Edwards would simply throw more prisoners into Pandora’s box, but relief it is.
Edwards first tries Wytootacke, for no result. Pushing west to Palmerston Island things become even worse, as not only is there no sign of Christian and the others, but in shockingly stormy conditions they lose their Cutter and five sailors, never to be seen or heard from again. A remarkably similar thing happens at the Navigators Islands in late June, when they lose contact with the Resolution in a storm. No amount of searching reveals the smallest sign of it or its nine crew. They light fires, they fire guns. Still there is nothing. They head to Annamooka in the Friendly Islands, to see if the Resolution has turned up at their previously designated rendezvous point, but find that the islands are not so friendly after all. They are not welcome, and one stray sailor, an Irishman, is fallen upon, beaten and stripped naked, to be left with just one shoe … which he uses to accommodate his dignity, the best he can.
‘We soon discovered the great Irishman,’ the ship’s Surgeon would recount, ‘with his shoe full in one hand, and a bayonet in the other, naked and foaming mad with revenge on the natives …’46
What on earth possesses the Natives to behave so? Lieutenant Hayward knows the answer, as does James Morrison and every man-jack who sailed on the Bounty. It is because on Captain Bligh’s last visit, he had kidnapped the Chiefs, made them peel pumpkins, and the pumpkin-peelers are not happy about it!
Meanwhile, the Pandora’s searches for Fletcher Christian and the Mutineers continue to be fruitless, but not without incident. One memorable day, they have no sooner anchored near the island of Tutuilia than a stunning naked woman comes on board to greet them.
‘She was,’ the Surgeon would recount, ‘six feet high, of exquisite beauty, and exact symmetry, being naked, and unconscious of her being so, added a lustre to her charms; for, in the words of the poet, “She needed not the foreign ornaments of dress; careless of beauty, she was beauty’s self.” Many mouths were watering for her; but Capt. Edwards, with great humanity and prudence, had given previous orders, that no woman should be permitted to go below.’47
And yet, and yet, while orders are orders, and both Captain Cook and Captain Bligh had set the standard when it came to the duty of the Captain to be removed from knowing local women in the biblical sense – through very un-biblical behaviours – Captain Edwards decides that in exceptional circumstances an exception can indeed be made. The naked Venus is, thus, personally escorted below deck by Captain Edwards and, as the Pandora’s surgeon dryly notes in his journal: ‘the lady was obliged to be contented with viewing the great cabin, where she was shewn the wonders of the Lord’.48
Indeed.
Beyond such excitements, reluctantly, Edwards must resign himself to the fact that Fletcher Christian and his brigands have vanished. Not only that, the nine men and the Resolution are very likely lost. He turns the Pandora to the west. It is time to head home with such Mutineers as he has, still securely in their cage on the aft-deck.
28 August 1791, Great Barrier of Reefs, beware the breakers
That ship trying to find a way through the extensive barrier of reefs off the coast of New Holland, just after dawn on this 28th day of August, 1791?
It is, of course, the Pandora on its journey back to ye olde England.
And they need to get to the calm side of the reef.
But it is not easy. Yes, there are a few gaps, but none large enough to sail the ship through, and when darkness comes, Edwards decides to drop anchor for the night … even as a sudden easterly gale whips up.
To the west, Edwards can hear the pounding on the reef, which a strong current is driving Pandora towards, aided by the gale. The roar is getting louder! The waves are rising up and crashing onto the solid reef that sits hidden just below the water’s surface, barrelling over it like a ball of dirty thunder.
The wind and currents are too strong. The anchor drags on the sandy bottom. They must make sail, and get further away, but …
It is too late.
In an instant the wind has captured the sails of the
Pandora and all who sail upon her, just as the current has gripped the hull, and is hurling her west, towards the jaws of the maw that awaits.
Sure enough …
In a split instant there is a mighty explosion of sound, of breaking wood, of screaming men, even as the reef roars out a victory – got another one!
In that moment, everyone on the deck of the Pandora is hurtled forward, just as those below are hurled from their bunks and hammocks and the men in the Pandora’s box are flung against their prison wall. The wind and waves have smashed the whole ship onto the reef with full force – shattering the wood at the bow on the port side, as the coral continues to tear a hole that is the equivalent of a bayonet slash, long and deep. It all happens so fast that even as the ship groans in its agony on this early evening of 28 August, the Pandora’s crew can barely comprehend what is happening.
Everything is conspiring – the wind, the current, the waves, Edward Edwards’ incompetence – to keep driving the ship onto the cruel rocks as water pours through the gaping hole and the stricken ship begins to list.
The sea-sprayed air is filled with screams and curses from the sailors and officers, mixed with shouted pleas from those in Pandora’s box to be let out, to have a chance to live, all as the wind continues to roar through the now impotently flapping sails, and wave after wave of the Pacific Ocean keep hammering the ship more and more onto the cruel coral barbs. Waves now crash up and over the deck, as the Pandora sinks still lower, and, encouraged, the ocean roars still louder at its fallen prey, rushing up, around and over that prey, seeking to devour it whole.
Aghast, Edwards barks orders for the ship’s guns to be hurled over the side in the hope that it will sufficiently lighten her and allow her to get off the reef, but it is to no avail. One gun even falls on a sailor in the process, killing him. All is carnage and catastrophe.
‘The ship was forced on to the reef with violent and repeated shocks,’ Morrison will chronicle, ‘and we expected every surge that the mast would go by the board.’49
While terror takes hold, nowhere is it greater than in the prison cage, as the whole ship shakes back and forth from stem to stern, a harpooned whale trying to shake itself free with a rhythm and urgency that are soon also its death throes. In the cage, the prisoners are smashed against each other, as the ship sinks ever lower and waves start to cascade over the sides.
Mutiny on the Bounty Page 49
