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

The three newcomers were at first housed under the half-deck, and kept under around-the-clock sentry. Meanwhile, the ship’s carpenters were busy constructing a proper prison, a kind of low hut to the rear of the quarterdeck, where the prisoners would be placed, as Edwards reported to the Admiralty, ‘for their more effectual security airy & healthy situation.’ The prisoners in their turn assessed their circumstances somewhat differently, referring sardonically to the shallow, cramped structure, with its narrow scuttle, as ‘Pandora’s Box’.

At some point during the pursuit of James Morrison and the men on the Resolution, Michael Byrn, the almost blind fiddler of the Bounty, either was captured or came on board of his own accord. Insignificant at every juncture of the Bounty saga, Byrn, alone of the fugitives, arrived on the Pandora unrecorded. Eight men had now been apprehended and were firmly held in irons; six men remained at large, reported to have taken flight in the hill country around Papara.

Over the next week and a half, while searches were made for the fugitives under the guidance of the ever helpful Brown, Captain Edwards and his officers got a taste of life in Tahiti. Their immediate host was Tynah, the stately king, whose girth was proportionate to his outstanding nearly six-foot-four-inch height. Around forty years of age, he could remember William Bligh from his visit to the island in 1777, with Captain Cook, as well as his return eleven years later with the Bounty. Upon the Pandora’s arrival, Edwards and his men had been greeted by the islanders with their characteristic generosity, with streams of gifts, food, feasts, dances and offers of their women.

‘The English are allowed by the rest of the world…to be a generous, charitable people,’ observed Dr Hamilton. ‘But the Otaheiteans could not help bestowing the most contemptuous word in their language upon us, which is, Peery, Peery, or Stingy.’

Generous, loyal, sensual, uninhibited – the handsome people of Tahiti had won over most who visited them. By now the Bounty men were no longer strangers, but had lived among them, taken wives, had children…

‘Sure Friendship’s there, & Gratitude, & Love,’ young Peter Heywood would later write, exhibiting a poetic bent:

Sure Friendship’s there, & Gratitude, & Love,

Such as ne’er reigns in European Blood

In these degen’rate Days; tho’ from above

We Precepts have, & know what’s right and good…

Now, sitting shackled in the sweltering heat of Pandora’s Box, Heywood and his shipmates had more than usual cause, and time, to contemplate this disparity of cultures.

On Saturday, the last fugitives began to trickle in. Henry Hilbrant, an able seaman from Hanover, Germany, and Thomas McIntosh, a young carpenter’s mate from the north of England, were delivered on board; as predicted, they had been captured in the hill country above Papara. By the following evening, the roundup was complete. Able seamen Thomas Burkett, John Millward and John Sumner, and William Muspratt, the cook’s assistant, were brought in, also from Papara.

As the ‘pirates’ were led into Pandora’s Box, ship activities bustled around them. Carpenters and sailmakers were busy making repairs for the next stage of their long voyage and routine disciplinary activities continued. On Sunday, the ship’s company was assembled for the weekly reading of the Articles of War: ‘Article XIX: If any Person in or belonging to the Fleet shall make or endeavour to make any mutinous Assembly upon any Pretence whatsoever, every Person offending herein, and being convicted thereof by the Sentence of the Court-martial, shall suffer Death.’ After the reading, three seamen were punished with a dozen lashes each ‘for theft and drunkenness’. It was a cloudy evening and had rained the day before. This was the last the Bounty men would see of Pacific skies for several months.

Fourteen men were now crowded into the eleven-by-eighteen-foot space that was their prison. Onshore, they had kept themselves in different factions and were by no means all on good terms with one another. Strikingly, both Thomas McIntosh and Charles Norman, who had been among those who fled from the Pandora’s men, had been exonerated by Bligh. Perhaps family attachments on the island had made them think twice about leaving; or it may be, less trusting than Coleman who had so quickly surrendered, they did not believe that innocence would count for much in the Admiralty’s eyes.

Within the box, the prisoners wallowed in their own sweat and vermin.

‘What I have suffer’d I have not power to describe,’ wrote Heywood to his mother; he had characterized himself to her as one ‘long inured to the Frowns of Fortune’ and now waxed philosophical about his situation.

‘I am young in years, but old in what the World calls Adversity,’ he wrote; Peter Heywood was not quite nineteen. ‘It has made me acquainted with three Things, which are little known,’ he continued, doggedly. ‘First, the Villainy & Censoriousness of Mankind – second, the Futility of all human Hopes, – & third, the Enjoyment of being content in whatever station it pleases Providence to place me in.’

Among the possessions confiscated from the mutineers were journals kept by Stewart and Heywood in their sea chests, and from these Edwards was able to piece together the history of the Bounty following the mutiny, up to her final return to Tahiti. Two days after Bligh and his loyalists had been left in the Pacific, Fletcher Christian and his men had cut up the ship’s topsails to make jackets for the entire company – they were well aware of the impression made by a uniformed crew.

Soon all the breadfruit – 1015 little pots and tubs of carefully nurtured seedlings, all, as Bligh had wistfully reported, ‘in the most flourishing state’ – were thrown overboard. More sails were cut up for uniform jackets, and the possessions of those who had been forced into the boat with Bligh were divided by lot among the ship’s company. But in a telling report made by James Morrison, the Bounty boatswain’s mate and the mastermind behind the ambitious Resolution, ‘it always happend that Mr. Christians party were always better served than these who were thought to be disaffected.’

Tensions among the men already threatened to undermine Christian’s tenuous control. In this state of affairs, the Bounty made for Tubuai, an island lying some 350 miles south of Tahiti, and anchored there on May 24, nearly a month after the mutiny.

‘Notwithstanding they met with some opposition from the Natives they intended to settle on this Island,’ Edwards wrote in his official report, gleaning the diaries of Heywood and Stewart. ‘But after some time they perceived they were in want of several things Necessary for a settlement & which was the cause of disagreements & quarrels amongst themselves.’ One of the things they most quarrelled about was women.

Consequently, only a week after landing at Tubuai, the Bounty sailed back to Tahiti, where they had lived and loved for five memorable months while gathering Bligh’s breadfruit. Here, as the men knew, their loyal friends would give them all they required. The story they prepared was that they had fallen in with the great Captain Cook (in reality long dead), who was planning to found a settlement on the island of Whytootackee (Aitutaki), and that Bligh had remained with his old commander and delegated Christian to sail with the Bounty for supplies. The Tahitians, ever generous and overjoyed at the news that Cook, whom they regarded with worshipful esteem, would be so close to them, gave freely of hogs, goats, chickens, a variety of plants, cats and dogs. More important, nine women, eight men, seven boys and one young girl left with the Bounty when she returned to Tubuai.