Many survivors, even Loyalists – perhaps particularly Loyalists – tried to forget the whole dreadful episode. When Lawrence Lebogue was encountered by a member of the Bligh family and was asked about his voyage in the Launch, his response was quick: ‘Oh damn me, I never think about the boat.’22 Lebogue drowned in 1795, when HMS Jason, which he was serving on, was shipwrecked.
•
Although the court martial of Captain Edward Edwards for losing the Pandora exonerated him, he was never appointed to a sea-going naval command again. Nevertheless, like a character from a Gilbert and Sullivan musical, his career on land prospered remarkably regardless, as he rose steadily through the ranks, eventually being made an Admiral in 1810. Upon retirement, he ran a lodging in Cornwall which he called, yes, The Pandora Inn. I do wonder if any of the men he put in Pandora’s box, who survived, ever passed by and stayed there? He died in 1815, aged 73.
•
After the court martial, Michael Byrn, the Blind Fiddler, served on the Prompte with Bligh’s nephew Francis Bond. At his uncle’s behest, Bond interviewed Byrn to see if his testimony might counter the lies being put out by the wretched Professor Christian.
For example, on the morning of the Mutiny, did you hear Midshipman George Stewart clap his hands together and say that this was the happiest day of his life?
Byrn thinks for a moment then says, ‘No.’
Oh well.
‘I heard Mr Heywood say so.’23
Good Lord! Such testimony at the court martial would have seen Peter Heywood swinging from the end of a rope, and one can only imagine how furious Uncle William would have been to hear it, long after Peter Heywood had been pardoned.
The fate of the Blind Fiddler thereafter is lost.
•
Few were more helpful to Edward Christian after the court martial than William Purcell, as he went well above and beyond the call of duty to put on the record that the real cause of the Mutiny was the bastardry of Captain Bligh himself. He then went off to spend the rest of his working life on ships in the West Indies. Sir John Barrow, in The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of HMS Bounty, claims Purcell was in a ‘madhouse’ in 1831 – perhaps Bedlam, right opposite Bligh’s grave, I can’t help but wonder? – and George Mackaness, in The Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh, says Purcell died at Haslar Hospital on 10 March 1834. I do hope they buried him with his tool box, or, even better, in it. Mr Purcell was very fond of that tool box, and there surely could have been no better resting place for it than with him for eternity. That way, the bastards could never get their hands on it. Either way, he died as the last officer left standing of the Bounty.
•
Matthew Flinders, of course, went on to great fame as the first to circumnavigate Australia, which voyage he completed in 1803. One episode of that feat bears repeating here. For the coast off what we now know as North Queensland, Flinders had two maps – one by Captain Cook and one by Captain Bligh.
Whose map, do you suppose, proved to be more accurate? The one made by the starving Bligh, in a rocking, packed Launch? Or the one done by Cook, in full comfort of a ship, with all instruments?
Bligh’s was better.
Flinders, comparing the accurate map he had drawn, with those of Cook and Bligh, was firm. His own map had ‘less agreement both in situation and appearance with Captain Cook’s Chart, than they have with that made by Captain Bligh in the Bounty’s launch’.24
Flinders was stunned.
It has been to me a cause of much surprise, that under such distress of hunger and fatigue, and of anxiety still greater than these, and whilst running before a strong breeze in an open boat, Captain Bligh should have been able to gather materials for a chart; but that this chart should possess a considerable share of accuracy, is a subject for admiration. [I] pride myself in being, in some sort, [Captain Cook’s] disciple; my first acquirements in nautical science having been made under one who mostly gained his from that great master himself: untoward circumstances shall not prevent me repeating the name of Bligh.25
•
Glimpses of the fate of Tahiti itself come through the ages, with the deterioration spotted by Captain Bligh in 1792 continuing with alarming pace. By the mid-1790s whalers and other ships started arriving once or twice a year and by 1800 the population had halved as a result of European diseases.
Sir Joseph Banks noted in 1806:
Tahiti is said to be at present in the hands of about one hundred white men, chiefly English convicts [from New South Wales] who lend their assistance as warriors to the chief whoever he may be, who offers them the most acceptable wages payable in women, hogs etc; and we are told that these banditti have by the introduction of diseases, by devastation, murder and all kinds of European barbarism, reduced the population of that one interesting island to less than one tenth of what it was when the Endeavour visited it in 1769.26
When the missionaries arrived in the 1820s it must have been a hard sell – particularly to the older Natives – to maintain that the Lord was smiling upon them, but virtually the whole population was indeed converted to Christianity.
On the famous voyage of the Beagle to the South Pacific in 1835, Charles Darwin himself defined Tahiti as ‘that fallen Paradise’, while still being impressed by the surviving Natives, recording ‘there is a mildness in the expression of their countenances which at once banishes the idea of a savage; and an intelligence which shows that they are advancing in civilization’.27
Geopolitically, in the 1840s, Tahiti came under the French sphere of influence and was annexed as a territory of France in 1843. In 2004 the status was upgraded and Tahiti became un Pays d’Outremer, overseas land, making all Tahitians French citizens, just as they have been in New Caledonia since 1853.
Today the economy thrives, and an international airport and a university are at Oparre, not far from where the Bounty was moored in Matavai Bay.
•
The fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines, who Captain Bligh gave us such a penetrating, poignant glimpse of, would be devastating. The brief, curious and peaceful pen portraits provided by James Cook and William Bligh of that people are rich in pathos for the fact that their entire way of life would soon be overwhelmed by a cataclysm of bloody, brutal and fatal events stemming from British engagement with the most remote people on earth.
•
The future of Pitcairn would be problematic, as by the early 1830s its population of 135 had outgrown the capacity of the island to sustain them. Hearing of their plight, with great generosity, Tahiti’s Queen Pomare offered a return to her island’s wayward children – all of them, after all, having descended from Tahitian women – and in February 1831, they were welcomed back. It was, alas, a disaster. So long isolated, their resistance to disease common to Tahitians was all but non-existent and their numbers were decimated in the six months before they decided to return to Pitcairn. Those who died included none other than Thursday October Christian.
In 1838, the island was formally made a colony of Great Britain, which saw such a flood of immigrants that, together with the natural population expansion by the descendants of the Mutineers and the Natives, by the mid-1850s, the population had effectively outgrown the island again.
The solution, for the British government, was to move them all to the just abandoned penal colony of Norfolk Island, a slightly bigger island some 3500 miles to their west. On 3 May 1856, the entire population of 194 people set sail for Norfolk on board the Morayshire, arriving on 8 June after what they thought was a merely miserable five-week trip. Ah, but true misery would only come on Norfolk Island. They were so homesick that two brothers, Moses and Mayhew Young – descendants of Ned Young – took their wives and 12 children and led what would be an exodus once more to Pitcairn, with another 27 following them by 1864.
As to how things worked on such a small island as Pitcairn, with such a small population, as the generations passed, it was Mark Twain himself who summed it up in 1879, reminding readers that when th
e population are descended from such a small base, there are inevitably tight connections between just about everyone. ‘The relationships are wonderfully, even astoundingly, mixed up and complicated. A stranger, for instance, says to an islander: “You speak of that young woman as your cousin; a while ago you called her your aunt.”
‘“Well, she is my aunt, and my cousin, too. And also my stepsister, my niece, my fourth cousin, my thirty-third cousin, my forty-second cousin, my great-aunt, my grandmother, my widowed sister-in-law – and next week she will be my wife.”’28
Pitcairn Island would once again gain infamy as in the late 1990s it became apparent that an abhorrent culture of underage sexual abuse was entrenched in certain circles on the island. Defenders claimed such an approach to underage sex was a legacy of the Tahitian libertine approach in the late 1700s. Prosecutors countered it had no place in the modern era and the judge and jury agreed. Six male residents were successfully prosecuted and served time in a specially constructed prison on the island.
•
Which leaves us with … Fletcher Christian. As the decades rolled past, other theories of the true story of the Mutiny emerged.
One particularly far-fetched one maintained that when Christian made Heywood and Stewart promise to find his family should they survive, to tell them the real reason he mutinied, that reason was one that ‘dare not speak its name’.
In 1965, in her book Captain Bligh in Wapping, the writer Madge Darby speculated that it might have been because Bligh, ‘made his young friend pay for privilege with his body’.29
I strongly reject this as a possibility. All indications are that Bligh was totally devoted to Betsy and Fletcher Christian had a long record of heterosexual relationships.
Far more likely is something to do with Christian being in monetary debt to Bligh, as the original Captain of the Bounty had indeed lent money to the Master’s Mate, in Cape Town. Either way, there is no doubt that Peter Heywood, as revealed in Chapter 17, did indeed seek out Christian’s family, most particularly Edward Christian. Had he made any revelations of Captain Bligh committing the ‘detestable sin of buggery’ as the Articles of War indelicately put it, then a sin punishable by death in the Royal Navy – it is inconceivable that the Professor would not have at least hinted at that behaviour, if not necessarily applying it to his own brother. If it were true, can we believe that Peter Heywood, on trial for his life, would not have raised it in his defence, or, at the very least, have told his influential relatives in the Navy?
When, at the time, people pressed Heywood on the ‘secret’ he intimated that, though it was not scandalous, it still could not be told. Again, that fits with debt being the most likely secret – a want of money that ‘dared not speak its name’. But the reason it had to be whispered only is because of the embarrassment of a gentleman like Fletcher Christian owing money to a man of the lower classes, like Bligh.
Bligh himself wrote of this to Sir Joseph Banks, complaining of Edward Christian’s impudence given the fact that the Professor ‘knows from his Brother’s Note of Hand (which he received) that he was supplied by him [Bligh] with that money he wanted’.30
So why did Fletcher Christian rise up? Not because of sexual abuse, just outright abuse: mental and verbal. The bizarre coconut episode was the last straw, for a man worn down to what amounted to an only tentative hold on mental equilibrium. The fact that Fletcher Christian seriously considered getting off a ship and on a raft in the middle of the ocean is as sure a sign as exists that he was not stable at the time of the Mutiny.
On the matter of his stability, allow me to float another theory, courtesy of one of my researchers, Dr Peter Williams. Bligh, you will recall, notes that his one-time favourite, Fletcher, ‘is subject to violent perspiration and particularly in his hands so he soils anything he handles’.31
Is that the clue? For Dr Williams notes that, ‘studies show that a third of those with this condition, “hyperhydrosis”, also have mental health issues, including occasional outbursts of irrational behaviour and depression. Perhaps Fletcher Christian had such an outburst at the time of the Mutiny?’
And was Christian’s fate, indeed, the generally accepted one, described earlier in this book? For there remains an intriguing theory about his actual fate that has endured through the centuries. As a prelude to revealing it, allow me to note I write this as one who has long pooh-poohed many modern conspiracy theories. I do believe that President John F. Kennedy was shot by a loser named Lee Harvey Oswald, and it was neither the Russians, nor the Mafia, nor the CIA or FBI, wot dunnit. I think Elvis died, just as reported, from eating too many cheeseburgers. And I think the most salient factors in the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, were that she was in the car with a drunken driver, and was not wearing her seatbelt – rather than a hit ordered by the Queen or Prince Philip or MI5.
So I don’t easily embrace anything other than the traditional conclusion that Christian died at the hands of the Natives.
But … a few things really don’t add up.
In 1809, in his official report to the Admiralty, Sir Sydney Smith recorded what the second mate of the Topaz was told: ‘Christian the ringleader became insane shortly after their arrival on the island and threw himself off the rocks into the sea.’32
Yet the diary of one of Captain Mayhew Folger’s close friends equally firmly records, ‘Folger was very explicit in his statement that Alec Smith told him Christian got sick and died a natural death.’33
Another version comes from Captain Pipon, who reported he was told about a ‘sullen & morose’ Christian, who, after his wife died, ‘forcibly seized on one belonging to the Tahitian men’, whereupon he was murdered for his trouble, ‘whilst digging in his own field’.34 (At least one part of this is demonstrably false, as we know that the only wife Christian ever had survived until 1841.)
Finally, Alec Smith would report to Captain Beechey that Christian was ‘always cheerful a happy and active’35 leader who was very popular.
My point is that it is extraordinary that the accounts of the key player in the piece, Fletcher Christian, should vary so much from so many eye-witnesses, or at least people intimately familiar with events. Does it not stand to reason that a very public, plebeian death would lend itself to a uniformity of accounts, while mystery lends itself to variance? Is it not also more than passing odd that such a man as Christian would have no known grave, if indeed he died in the manner accepted? Would it make sense that, if so killed, Smith would go to the effort of destroying almost all written records and journals?
And where was the missing boat? On arrival at Pitcairn, the Mutineers had the Bounty, the Cutter and the Jolly Boat. But when Captain Folger gets there in 1808 only the Jolly Boat is left. What happened to the Cutter? Could a sailor as experienced as Christian – perhaps on the day of the murders – have escaped, to navigate as far as an island more frequently visited by French, Dutch, Portuguese or Spanish ships, presented himself as the survivor of a shipwreck and gone on to live happily, if quietly, ever after? After all, Christian has all of Bligh’s personal maps of 20 years work, plus every single map that Bligh brought on the Bounty. With the right vessel, he could sail anywhere in the world. But when the Americans and English arrive at Pitcairn, Bligh’s entire library of prose books is preserved, with ‘Fletcher Christian’ having written his own name neatly under Bligh’s to indicate he now owns them, but all the maps are gone. Why? Could it be that Christian has taken them? Smith, of course, has no reason to destroy them.
And so, try the alternative, that he got away to remake his life elsewhere. Would that not fit with a variation of accounts, of no known grave, of destroying records so nothing would point to that escape from the island?
And how was William Wordsworth so sure that the purported ‘autobiography’ of Fletcher was a fake, when not even Bligh was sure? Could it be because he has either spoken to Fletcher Christian, or at least knows he is back in England?
Though Wordsworth will never wr
ite again of his friend – perhaps consistent with having him be forgotten – it seems another of Wordsworth’s close friends, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, very well may have, famously penning ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, the key character of which is able to tell the tale of a nightmarish sea tragedy. For you see, over a century later, a scholar going over Coleridge’s notebooks found a scribble in one of them, just prior to composition, noting ‘Adventures of Christian, the MUTINEER.’36
The parallels between the poem and Christian’s story are obvious, as witness some of the quotes from the poem in the opening chapters in this book. And those similarities could well include that the key protagonist survived to tell the tale.
Whatever else, let the record show, many roughly contemporary chroniclers came to much that conclusion, led by Sir John Barrow, who delicately observed in 1831, in the first version of the story, ‘the manner of Christian’s death has been reported differently to each different visitor’.37
So much so, in fact, that Sir John suggests so many differing accounts ‘might render his death on Pitcairn’s Island almost a matter of doubt’.38
There are other inconsistencies.
When the Bounty landed at Pitcairn it had a small fortune of ducats and Spanish dollars on board, as currency in the South Seas with anyone they could find to trade with. To this day, none of the coins has been found.
As to whether, most intriguingly, Christian made his way back to England, there is also evidence that supports this.
In 1808, Peter Heywood, now a respected Captain of the Royal Navy, confided in the secretary of the Royal Navy, Sir John Barrow, a story he would never put in the public domain – but Sir John makes a note of it, and will reveal it just after Heywood dies.
For you see, one afternoon back in 1808, Heywood had just returned from a voyage and was down near Plymouth Dock, up Fore Street way, you know the place, when he suddenly notices the man walking up yonder, well in front of him. Those shoulders! That trim! That strange, distinctive bow-legged way he is walking!
Mutiny on the Bounty Page 63
