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

Before dawn on 23 March, the goats and single dog on board began to agitate, and the men declared that the animals could smell land. Soon, in the moonlight, hills could be made out to the west, and when daylight broke the mountains of Tierra del Fuego could be seen, mostly free of snow.

‘I realy look upon the bad or Winter Weather not yet to be set in,’ Bligh wrote. ‘But as I must expect it hourly I have no right to loose a Moment…’

Skirting Le Maire Strait, they passed the desolate, mountainous country of Staten Island to the east. Now, at nearly the 55° latitude south, the Bounty was fast approaching the Horn. A hint of the weather they were in for hit the ship on 27 March, with the arrival of a strong gale and an ‘exceedingly High’ sea.

‘It would not be possible for a laboursome Ship to keep her Masts,’ Bligh observed. His ship, as he had often proudly noted, was not ‘laboursome’, but well behaved. Her hatches were all battened down, and although towering seas broke over her, so far the men kept ‘tolerably dry’. The temperature was now in the upper thirties, and the weather wet and raw.

‘I Ordered the People to have Wheat [porridge] served every day with Sugar & Butter to enable them to have a comfortable hot breakfast,’ Bligh logged. Hour after hour, his men were required to reef and hand the sails; then reset them; then reef again, up and down the perilous, pitching rigging in the menacing cold. The sea, Bligh wrote wonderingly, ‘exceeds any I have seen.’

When the gale moderated, Bligh ordered the belowdecks cleaned and dried. The sea was still so huge that he had difficulty taking sightings, as the mountainous waves swamped his horizon. Over the next few days the gales moderated, then increased, moderated, then ‘blew a Storm of Wind and the Snow fell so heavy that it was scarce possible to haul the sails up and furl them from the Weight and Stiffness.’ With the great sea running confused and contrary, sleet and hail began to fall.

‘At 6 In the Morning the Storm exceeded anything I had met with and a Sea higher than I had ever seen before,’ Bligh entered in his log. The ship was carrying only her staysails, all the canvas that could be risked.

‘My next business was to see after my People who had undergone some fatigue,’ Bligh wrote, his ship safe for the time being. A fire blazed continuously in the galley and someone was set to dry clothes around the clock. Bligh ordered large quantities of the ‘Portable Soup’ of which he was very proud, added to the men’s ‘Pease’, or pea pudding, ‘which made a Valuable and good dinner for them.’

Incredibly, the gales increased, carrying blasts of snow and sleet, the sharp winds piling the sea to windward ‘like a Wall’. Still, Bligh could note that blue petrels and pintados, ‘two beautiful kinds of birds,’ followed their wake. The Bounty was losing ground, being driven back the hard-won miles. At the close of 3 April, she was farther north than she had been six days before.

‘All I have to do now is to Nurse my people with care and attention,’ wrote Bligh, ‘and like Seamen look forward to a New Moon for a Change of Wind and Weather.’ The gale moderated in the early hours of the following morning, and although a cold rain fell, the men were able to check and service rigging as well as clean up and dry below. With fresh gales and mere squalls, the Bounty made headway, and over the next few days, under close-reefed sails, clawed her way to 60° 14’ south; this was to be the extreme limit of her southing. For ten days, Bligh pushed the Bounty and her men through squalls of sleet and hail, ‘dark wet nights’ and strong gales, through fog and high confused seas. At midnight on the thirteenth, the ship was hit by so severe a gale that the decks were ‘twice filled with the Sea.’ Now all pumps were worked every hour. Although the hatches were closed – and had been for close to three months – the belowdecks was awash and Bligh turned over his great cabin ‘to the Use of those poor fellows who had Wet Births.’ It is not noted if Bligh himself slept at all.

Despite all exertions – the constant fires, dry clothes, dry berths and hot food at every meal – the weeks since passing Staten Island had begun to take their toll. Huggan had his shoulder thrown out when the ship lurched, and in the midst of a ‘Very Severe’ gale and ‘a high breaking sea’, Thomas Hall, the cook, fell and broke a rib. William Peckover, the gunner, and Charles Norman, carpenter’s mate, were laid up with rheumatic complaints. Every man out of commission increased the burden of the remaining small crew.

‘I have now every reason to find Men and Ship Complaining, which Will the soonest determine this point,’ Bligh confided to his log.

That point soon came, and on 17 April, Bligh determined to abandon the Horn. Only shortly before his departure from England, almost as an afterthought, he had received (through the intercession of Joseph Banks) discretionary orders from the Admiralty to make for the Cape of Good Hope if the Horn proved impossible. This Bligh now determined to do. From there, he would approach the South Seas from the opposite side of the globe. The detour would add some ten thousand miles to the voyage, but there was nothing to be done. After twenty-five days of battle with the sea, the Bounty was, at 59° 05’ south, more or less where she had begun.

At eleven in the morning of the seventeenth, Bligh summoned all hands aft and publicly thanked them for attending to their duties throughout the trials of the last month. He then announced that he had decided to bear away for southern Africa. The General Joy in the Ship was very great on this Account,’ Bligh noted. His announcement was received with three hearty cheers.

It was, for Bligh, a bitter, difficult decision – so difficult that only days later when the weather took a moderate turn he was induced to make one last attempt, but this was quickly abandoned. Eight men were now on the sick list, mostly with ‘Rheumatick complaints’. This, as Bligh ruefully noted, was ‘much felt in the Watches, the Ropes being now Worked with much difficulty, from the Wet and Snow.’ The men aloft on whom fell the monstrous task of handling the sails were at times incapable of getting below in the face of the storm blasts, and when they did return they ‘sometimes for a While lost their Speech.’ Reconciling himself to defeat, Bligh ‘ordered the Helm to be put a Weather,’ and the Bounty headed for the Cape of Good Hope.

She arrived in False Bay, the preferred anchorage across the spit from Cape Town, on 24 May, after an uneventful passage. The sick men had recovered during the intervening four weeks, and refurbishment of the ship began almost at once. The day after mooring, Bligh administered a second punishment: six lashes for John Williams, a seaman from Guernsey, for neglect of duty ‘in heaving the lead’. In this case there was no expression of regret from Bligh.

The Bounty remained in False Bay for thirty-eight days, during which time she was overhauled from top to bottom, from her rigging to new ballast in her hold, as well as resupplied. Fresh meat, celery, leeks, onions, cabbages and – as a luxury – soft bread were brought on board for storage, while Bligh’s log daily notes ‘Fresh Meat & Greens’ served at dinner. This sojourn also allowed some pleasant diversions. In Colonel Robert Gordon, the half-Dutch, half-Scottish commander of the now considerable Dutch forces at this Dutch settlement, Bligh found an entertaining companion who shared a fondness for natural history and amateur exploration. Needless to say, Sir Joseph Banks had an associate out this way, botanizing at his behest. Francis Masson, once an under-gardener at Kew, had been at the Cape for a number of years, sending back specimens and seeds to Banks. From Masson’s collections would come plants familiar to generations of British gardeners – gladioli, geraniums and freesias.