The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty

A party under the command of Lieutenants Robert Corner and Hayward was now dispatched to intercept the remaining men. Aiding them in their search was one John Brown, an Englishman deposited on Tahiti the year before by another ship, the Mercury, on account of his troublesome ways, which had included carving up the face of a shipmate with a knife. The Mercury had departed Tahiti only weeks before Christian’s final return with the boat – she had even seen fires burning on the island of Tubuai, where the mutineers had first settled, but decided not to investigate. Brown, it became clear, had not been on terms of friendship with his compatriots.

At Papara, Edwards’s men discovered that the mutineers, hearing of their approach, had abandoned their schooner and fled to the mountain forest.

‘Under cover of night they had taken shelter in a hut in the woods,’ wrote the Pandora’s surgeon, George Hamilton, in his account of this adventure, ‘but were discovered by Brown, who creeping up to the place where they were asleep, distinguished them from the natives by feeling their toes.’ British toes apparently lacked the telltale spread of unshod Tahitians’.

‘Tuesday, March 29th,’ Edwards recorded in the Pandora’s log. ‘At 9 the Launch returned with James Morrison, Charles Norman and Thomas Ellison belonging to His Majesty’s Ship Bounty – prisoners.’ Also taken in tow was the mutineers’ schooner, the Resolution, an object for them of great pride and now requisitioned by the Pandora as a tender, or service vessel.

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.

For three months the mutineers struggled to make a settlement on the tiny island. Construction was begun on a defensive fort that measured some fifty yards square, surrounded by a kind of dry moat or ditch. A drawbridge was planned for the entrance facing the beach, while the walls were surmounted by the Bounty’s four-pounder cannons and swivel guns. Patriotically, the mutineers had christened their fortress Fort George, after their king.

Again, there were early signs that this would not be a successful experiment.

‘On 5th July Some of the people began to be mutinous,’ according to an extract made by Edwards from Peter Heywood’s journal. ‘& on 6th 2 of the Men were put in Irons by a Majority of Votes – & drunkenness, fighting & threatening each other’s life was so common that those abaft were obliged to arm themselves with Pistols.’ The following day, an attempt was made to heal the growing breach and ‘Articles were drawn up by Christian and Churchill specifying a mutual forgiveness of all past grievances which every Man was obliged to swear to & sign,’ according to an extract from Stewart’s journal. ‘Mathew Thompson excepted who refused to comply.’ Despite this gesture, an inner circle evolved around Christian. When John Sumner and Matthew Quintal spent the night onshore without leave, declaring that they were now their own masters and would do as they pleased, Christian clapped the pistol he now always carried to the head of one, and had both placed in leg irons.

Violence also escalated without as well as within this fractious company, erupting as the Bounty men fought with the Tubuaians over property and women. In one particularly bloody encounter, Thomas Burkett was stabbed in the side by a spear and Christian wounded himself on his own bayonet. When the dust settled, sixty-six Tubuaians were dead, including six women, and the Bounty men were masters of the field. One of the gentle Tahitian youths who had journeyed to Tubuai with his English friends, according to James Morrison, ‘desired leave to cut out the jaw bones of the kill’d to hang round the quarters of the Ship as Trophies,’ and was much displeased when this request was denied.

In September, in recognition that the different factions could not coexist, a collective decision was made to return once more to Tahiti. Here, the ship’s company would divide. Those who chose to remain on the island could do so; the rest would depart with Christian, taking to sea once again in the Bounty. Each man remaining onshore was given a musket, a pistol, a cutlass, a bayonet, a box of cartridges and seventeen pounds of powder from the ship’s arms and lead for ball – everyone save Michael Byrn, that is, who, as Morrison stated, ‘being blind and of a very troublesome disposition it was thought that arms put into his hands would be only helping him to do some mischief.’

On anchoring for the third and final time in Matavai Bay, Christian and many of the eight men who had cast their lots with him did not even bother to go ashore. Arriving on 21 September 1789, they departed secretly the same night, quietly cutting the Bounty’s anchor cable. Joseph Coleman, the most relentless loyalist, had been once again held against his will for his skills as an armourer; but as the ship slipped away, he dived overboard and swam to land. At dawn, the sixteen men deposited onshore saw their ship hovering off Point Venus; by midmorning she was gone.

When here with Bligh, each man had acquired a taio, or special protector and friend, and to these each now turned. Soon, the fugitives had settled down, either with their taios’ families or, like Heywood and Stewart, in cottages of their own. They took wives and some had children, and so a year and a half had passed, until the day the Pandora loomed out of the early morning to drag them back to England.

Now captured and pinned inside Pandora’s Box, the Bounty prisoners listened in anguish as their wives and friends wailed and grieved under the Pandora’s stern. Standing in canoes around the ship, the women enacted their terrible rites of mourning, hammering at their heads with sharp shells until the blood ran. As the day of departure approached, more canoes came from across the island, filling the harbour around the ship. Men and women stripped their clothes and cut their heads in grief, and as the blood fell, cut again and cried aloud. Tynah came on board and, with tears streaming down his cheeks, begged to be remembered to his friend, the King of England.

‘This I believe was the first time that an Englishman got up his anchor, at the remotest part of the globe, with a heavy heart, to go home to his own country,’ wrote Dr Hamilton – an astonishing admission from a naval official who had come in search of deserting mutineers.

On 8 May 1791, under pleasant breezes, the Pandora, recaulked and overhauled, left Tahiti with the mutineers’ schooner, Resolution, in tow. Edwards’s commission was far from fulfilled. Still missing was His Majesty’s stolen ship as well as the ringleader of the mutiny and his most hard-core followers.

‘Christian had been frequently heard to declare that he would search for an unknown or an uninhabited Island in which there was no harbour for Shipping, would run the Ship ashore, and get from her such things as would be useful to him and settle there,’ Edwards recorded in his official report to the Admiralty, continuing with admirable understatement, ‘but this information was too vague to be follow’d in an immense Ocean strew’d with an almost innumerable number of known and unknown Islands.’ Specifically, the Pacific contains more than twenty thousand islands scattered over some 64 million square miles. Christian and the Bounty had departed Tahiti in September 1789 – a twenty-month head start, long enough to have taken the Bounty not only as far as North or South America, but, in theory, around the globe.

Edwards’s instructions from the Admiralty offered some guidance: If no knowledge of the mutineers had been gained at Tahiti, he was to venture west to Whytootackee (Aitutaki), ‘calling, in your way, at Huaheine and Uliatea.’ If nothing was found here, he was to make a circuit of the neighbouring islands. If nothing here, he was to continue west to the Friendly Islands (Tonga), ‘and, having succeeded, or failed,’ to return to England, through the Endeavour Strait (Torres Strait) separating New Guinea from New Holland (Australia). Be mindful of prevailing winds, the Admiralty admonished, ‘there being no dependence (of which we have any certain knowledge) of passing the Strait after the month of September…’

For roughly the next three months Edwards doggedly followed the Admiralty’s prescribed itinerary in a desultory chase from island to island. At each landfall, a uniformed officer was disembarked and in the cloying heat tramped along the beach, offering presents and seeking information. Anchored offshore, the Pandora received the now customary canoe-loads of eager visitors. Spears, clubs and other curios were collected, differences among the islanders, who appeared ‘ruder’ and less civilized as the Pandora progressed, were duly noted, but no hint of the Bounty’s whereabouts emerged.

A week out from Tahiti, Hilbrant, one of the mutineers, volunteered that Christian had spoken to him on the day before his departure of his intention to make for an uninhabited island that he knew from earlier accounts to be ‘situated to the Westward of the Islands of Danger.’ This description seemed to refer to Duke of York Island (Atafu) but was to prove to be another dead end. En route, however, Edwards stopped off at Palmerston Island (Avarau) and sent his boats ashore to search that isle’s bays and inlets. Two of these returned in the late afternoon full of coconuts, and nothing more. But that night the tender arrived with hopeful news: it had discovered some spars and a yard marked ‘Bounty’s Driver Yard’ embossed with the Admiralty’s broad arrow mark.

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.