Caroline Alexander - The Bounty - The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty

Little is known of William Cole, the boatswain and another of the warrant officers, apart from the fact that this was the third naval ship on which he had served. A great deal is known, however, about the boatswain’s mate, James Morrison – fortunately, for he was to play an important role in the story of the Bounty. Morrison was a native of Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis off the western coast of Scotland. His family was descended from several generations of educated Lewismen and even local hereditary judges, while his father was a merchant and land entrepreneur of education and some means. As events would show, the twenty-seven-year-old Morrison was exceptionally – dangerously – well educated, and although almost certainly Gaelic speaking, fluent and literate in English, and with at least a passing knowledge of Latin. One of the ways in which Morrison was to exercise his superior intellect was by writing a narrative of the Bounty voyage, which included a lengthy and well-observed description of life on Tahiti, as well as the voyage and aftermath of the Pandora. It was written several years after the events described, while he was a prisoner on the Hector awaiting trial for his life, circumstances that very directly coloured some of his ‘recollections’.

At five foot eight, Morrison was of above-average height and of slender build, with sallow skin and long black hair; a musket wound on his arm was a memento of action seen in service. He had joined the navy at the age of eighteen, and had since served on several ships in an intriguing variety of capacities: as a clerk on the Suffolk , a midshipman on the Termagant , acting gunner on the Hind. In 1783, at twenty-three, Morrison passed his master gunner’s examination, having shown proficiency, according to the examiners, in ‘Vulgar and Decimal Arithmetic, the extraction of the Square and Cube Roots, and in practical Problems of Geometry and Plain Trigonometry.’ This success, however, did not provide any material advantage. Like many during those ‘weak, piping times of peace’, Morrison seems to have been without a ship. At any rate, he does not surface in any known naval records until he appears as a boatswain’s mate on the muster of the Bounty.

In this capacity, his duties were to assist William Cole in his continual inspection of sails, rigging and boats. It was also Morrison who would administer all floggings; on a ship of the line, the boatswain’s mate was said to be ‘the most vocal, and the most feared, of the petty officers.’ Still, boatswain’s mate was a step down from master gunner and one must suspect either an urgent need for employment or a passion to see something of the world in his willingness to sign on to the Bounty in this lower position.

William Peckover, the Bounty ’s actual gunner, had sailed with Cook on every one of his voyages. He therefore knew Tahiti and was also known to Bligh from the third expedition. William Purcell, the carpenter, made up the complement of warrant officers; the Bounty was his first ship of naval service. All of these men were at least minimally educated, as the Admiralty regulations stated that no person could be placed in charge of stores ‘unless he can read and write, and is sufficiently skilled in arithmetic to keep an account of them correctly’; all warrant officers had responsibilities for stores of some kind. Importantly, too, no warrant officer could be flogged.

Joseph Coleman, the thirty-six-year-old armourer, had also sailed with Cook and Bligh, having been mustered as an AB on the Discovery in 1776. Another man from Cook’s third voyage was David Nelson, the gardener, who had originally been recommended to Banks by a Hammersmith nurseryman. Banks had personally selected him for the breadfruit voyage on respectable terms of £50 a year. According to a shipmate from the Discovery , Nelson was ‘one of the quietest fellows in nature’. His assistant, William Brown, aged twenty-three and from Leicester, had also been selected by Banks. Although now a gardener, Brown had formerly served as a midshipman, when he had seen fierce action against the French – how or why he had gone from the one profession to the other is not known. Both Nelson and Brown were practical, hands-on gardeners, not botanists; Banks was adamant that there be no competing interests to the sole object of caring for the shipment of plants.

The three men joining the Bounty who had sailed on Cook’s last voyage were old acquaintances of Bligh’s – they had all been paid off together in 1780, seven years before. A more substantial number of the crew, however, had sailed with Bligh more recently, and were joining the Bounty from the West Indian ships Bligh had commanded for Duncan Campbell. These men knew Bligh as a commanding officer: Lawrence Lebogue, age forty, the sailmaker from Nova Scotia; John Norton, a quartermaster, age thirty-four, from Liverpool; Thomas Ellison, able seaman, age fifteen, from Deptford, where the Bounty now lay; and Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate, aged twenty-three, cited on the muster as being from Whitehaven, in Cumberland.

According to Bligh, Fletcher Christian was ‘Dark & very swarthy’, with ‘Blackish or very dark brown’ hair. Standing about five foot nine, he was strongly built, although his ‘knees stands a little out and may be called a little bow legged’. Others would later describe his ‘bright, pleasing countenance, and tall, commanding figure’. While born in Cumberland, Christian had more recently been based on the Isle of Man, where his family had old, strong connections, and where Bligh had been living after his marriage.

Fletcher, it was said by his family, had ‘staid at school longer than young men generally do who enter into the navy’. His first sea experience had been as a midshipman on the Eurydice in 1783, when he was eighteen and a half years of age – remarkably late in the day for a young man with his sights set on a naval career. After six months spent at anchorage in Spithead, the Eurydice had sailed for India, and for the next twenty-one months, Christian had been exposed to some of the most exotic parts of the world: Madeira, Cape Town, Madras and the Malabar Coast. Christian’s biographer would conjure the steaming coastal settlements the new midshipman encountered on this first voyage: most notably, the British Fort Saint George at Madras, defiantly set to survey the sea and surrounded by the residences of the English traders and officials, the busy traffic of lumbering oxen and sweating palanquin bearers, the rowdy trade of fine cotton, spices and green doves. The Eurydice was a ship of war, with a complement of 140 men, including a unit of marines, and Christian had also experienced for the first time British naval life in all its coarseness – bad food, complete lack of privacy, irregular sleep and rough discipline. Yet he must have prospered, or at least shown promise, for the ship’s muster indicates that some seven months out from England, he had been promoted from midshipman to master’s mate.

Christian had returned from India in high spirits, telling a relative that ‘it was very easy to make one’s self beloved and respected on board a ship; one had only to be always ready to obey one’s superior officers, and to be kind to the common men.’ This promising start was somewhat derailed by the inconvenient peace, which had put so many ships out of commission and, like Bligh, Christian had turned his sights from naval service to the merchant trade. The decision to approach Bligh, then working for Duncan Campbell, had been prompted, as a relative advised, because ‘it would be very desirable for him to serve under so experienced a navigator as Captain Bligh, who had been Sailing-master to Captain Cook.’