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

Over the next two days, all the ship’s craft – a cutter, two yawls and the mutineers’ schooner – were dispatched to examine the island as well as islets and even reefs in the vicinity. The belief that the mutineers might be at large nearby caused everyone to move with great circumspection. One party camping overnight on the island were woken abruptly when a coconut they had placed on their campfire exploded. ‘Expecting muskets to be fired at them from every bush,’ Dr Hamilton explained, ‘they all jumped up, seized their arms, and were some time before they could undeceive themselves, that they were really not attacked.’

As the various small craft tacked to and fro around the island, Edwards remained with Pandora , cruising offshore and making the occasional coconut run. On the afternoon of 24 May, one of the midshipmen, John Sival, returned in the cutter with several striking painted canoes; but after these were examined and admired, he was sent back to complete his orders. Shortly after he left, thick weather dosed in, obscuring the little craft as she bobbed dutifully back to shore, and was followed by an ugly squall that did not lift for four days. When the weather cleared on the twenty-eighth, the cutter had disappeared. Neither she nor her company of five men was ever seen again.

‘It may be difficult to surmise what has been the fate of these unfortunate men,’ Dr. Hamilton wrote, adding hopefully that they ‘had a piece of salt-beef thrown into the boat to them on leaving the ship; and it rained a good deal that night and the following day, which might satiate their thirst.’

By now, too, it was realized that the tantalizing clues of the Bounty ’s presence were only flotsam.

‘The yard and these things lay upon the beach at high water Mark & were all eaten by the Sea Worm which is a strong presumption they were drifted there by the Waves,’ Edwards reported. It was concluded that they had drifted from Tubuai, where the mutineers had reported that the Bounty had lost most of her spars. These few odds and ends of worm-eaten wood were all that were ever found by Pandora of His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty.

The fruitless search apart, morale on board had been further lowered by the discovery, as Dr Hamilton put it, ‘that the ladies of Otaheite had left us many warm tokens of their affection.’ The men confined within Pandora’s Box were also far from well. Their irons chafed them badly, so much so that while they were still at Matavai Bay, Joseph Coleman’s legs had swollen alarmingly and the arms of McIntosh and Ellison had become badly ‘galled’. To the complaint that the irons were causing their wrists to swell, Lieutenant John Larkan had replied that ‘they were not intended to fit like Gloves!’ Edwards had an obsessive fear that the mutineers might ‘taint’ his crew and, under threat of severe punishment, had forbidden any communication between the parties whatsoever; but from rough memos he made, it seems he was unsuccessful. ‘Great difficulty created in keeping the Mutineers from conversing with the crew,’ Edwards had jotted down, elsewhere noting that one of his lieutenants suspected that the prisoners had ‘carried on a correspondence with some of our people by Letter.’

From Duke of York Island down to the rest of the Union Islands (Tokelau), thence to the Samoas, the Pandora continued her futile search. To aid them in making rough landfalls, Lieutenants Corner and Hayward donned cork jackets and plunged boldly into the surf ahead of the landing boats. Parakeets were purchased on one island, splendid birds resembling peacocks on another, and on others still the use of the islands’ women. Striking sights were enjoyed – the large skeleton of a whale, for example, and a deserted shrine with an altar piled with white shells. They had even discovered whole islands, whose newly bestowed names would form a satisfying addition to the report Edwards would eventually turn over to the Admiralty. In short, the Pandora had discovered a great deal – but nothing at all that pertained to the missing mutineers and the Bounty.

Thousands of miles from England, adrift in one of the most unknown regions of the earth, Hamilton, who seems to have enjoyed this meandering sojourn, mused tellingly on the strange peoples he had seen and their distance from civilized life: ‘And although that unfortunate man Christian has, in a rash unguarded moment, been tempted to swerve from his duty to his king and country, as he is in other respects of an amiable character, and respectable abilities, should he elude the hand of justice, it may be hoped he will employ his talents in humanizing the rude savages,’ he wrote, in an astonishing wave of sympathy for that elusive mutineer who had, after all, consigned his captain and eighteen shipmates to what he had thought was certain death.

‘So that, at some future period, a British Ilion may blaze forth in the south,’ Hamilton continued, working to a crescendo of sentiment, ‘with all the characteristic virtues of the English nation, and complete the great prophecy, by propagating the Christian knowledge amongst the infidels.’ Even here, at the early stage of the Bounty saga, the figure of Christian himself represented a powerful, charismatic force; already there is the striking simplistic tendency to blur the mutineer’s name – Christian – with a Christian cause.

In the third week of June, while in the Samoas, Edwards was forced to report yet another misfortune: ‘Between 5 & 6 o’clock of the Evening of the 22nd of June lost sight of our Tender in a thick Shower of Rain,’ he noted tersely. Edwards had now lost two vessels, this one with nine men. Food and water that were meant to have been loaded onto the tender were still piled on the Pandora ’s deck. Anamooka (Nomuka), in the Friendly Islands, was the last designated point of rendezvous in the event of a separation, and here the Pandora now hastened.

The people of Anamooka are the most daring set of robbers in the South Seas,’ Hamilton noted matter-of-factly. Onshore, parties who disembarked to wood and water the ship were harassed as they had not been elsewhere. Edwards’s servant was stripped naked by an acquisitive crowd and forced to cover himself with his one remaining shoe. ‘We soon discovered the great Irishman,’ Hamilton reported, ‘with his shoe full in one hand, and a bayonet in the other, naked and foaming mad.’ While overseeing parties foraging for wood and water, Lieutenant Corner was momentarily stunned on the back of his neck by a club-wielding islander, whom the officer, recovering, shot dead in the back.

There was no sign of the tender.

Leaving a letter for the missing boat in the event that it turned up, Edwards pressed on to Tofua, the one island on which Bligh, Thomas Hayward and the loyalists in the open launch had briefly landed. One of Bligh’s party had been stoned to death here, and some of the men responsible for this were disconcerted to recognize Hayward.

From Tofua, the Pandora continued her cruising before returning to Anamooka, where there was still no word of the missing tender.

It was now early August. Edwards’s laconic report reveals nothing of his state of mind, but with two boats and fourteen men lost, uncowed mutineers on board and a recent physical attack on the most able of his crew, it is safe to hazard that he was anxious to return home. His own cabin had been broken into and books and other possessions taken as improbable prizes (James Morrison, with discernible satisfaction, had earlier reported that ‘a new Uniform Jacket belonging to Mr. Hayward’ had been taken and, as a parting insult, donned by the thief in his canoe while in sight of the ship). Now, ‘thinking it time to return to England,’ Edwards struck north to Wallis Island, then west for the long run to the Endeavour Strait, the route laid down by the Admiralty out of the Pacific – homeward bound.