Читать книгу The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty - Caroline Alexander, Caroline Alexander - Страница 9

England, 1787

The passion for exploration and discovery, the hunger to learn all things about all aspects of the physical world, the great and preposterous optimism that held that such truths were in fact discoverable – these remarkable traits that so characterized the British eighteenth century were embodied by one remarkable eighteenth-century man, the admired, envied and uniquely influential Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was forty-four years old in 1787 and already a national treasure, as powerful in his way as any member of government. And it was the interest of Banks, more than any other consideration, that ensured that the government undertook the Bounty’s breadfruit mission to the South Seas.

Banks had been born in 1743, to a prosperous and well-connected landowning family. Somehow he had managed to be educated at both Eton and Harrow and at Oxford, although under a tutor he had privately hired from Cambridge. He was only eighteen when his father died and he had inherited the first of his estates, and from this time, for the remainder of his life, Banks was the master of his own destiny. From an early age he had shown a passion for natural history, above all botany, and this he now pursued. At the age of twenty-one, having established himself in London society, where he quickly became the friend of distinguished men some decades his senior, Banks set out for a summer of botanizing along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Returning with a professionally compiled collection of novel specimens never before seen in Europe, and the basis of what would become his world-famous herbarium, he was, at twenty-three, elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Still restless, still implausibly young, Banks then decided that his next venture in gentlemanly enquiry would be with Lieutenant James Cook in the Pacific.

The first of what would be Cook’s three magnificent voyages left England in the Endeavour in August 1768. The primary objective was to enable British astronomers to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti, but after accomplishing such observations, the expedition was to proceed in search of the fabled Southern continent, surveying New Zealand and other islands en route. Banks was footing the bill for his own passage as well as that of his considerable entourage – his colleague and employee Dr Daniel Solander, a distinguished Swedish naturalist and disciple of Linnaeus, two artists to make records of what was seen, his secretary, four servants and his two greyhounds. It was popularly rumoured that Banks’s expenses for the trip had cost him some ten thousand pounds.

Cook’s first voyage made discoveries in New Zealand, Australia (where Botany Bay was named for Banks’s botanizing) and a multitude of new islands, but it was the visit to Tahiti that became most memorably etched in the English imagination. Tahiti had been ‘discovered’ before Cook – Captain Samuel Wallis of the Dolphin had touched here, on what he called ‘King George III Island’, in 1767 – but it did not become a subject of popular and fashionable fascination until the return of the Endeavour in 1771.

And at least one reason for the fascination was Joseph Banks. He had not just returned to England with thousands of unknown and expertly preserved botanical specimens, professional botanical drawings and watercolours (as well as landscapes and ethnological studies) from his artists; Banks had also returned as the subject of romantic, even titillating stories. With his zeal for new experiences, he had thrown himself into Tahitian life, learning its language, attending burials and sacrifices and dances, endearing himself to its people, even having himself discreetly tattooed. The happy promiscuity of the Tahitian women was already well known from Wallis’s reports and Banks’s adventures on this front provided additional spice. Outstanding among the stories that made the rounds of London social circles was the tale of the theft of Mr Banks’s fine waistcoat with its splendid silver frogging, stolen, along with his shoes and pistol, while he lay sleeping with his ‘old Freind Oberea’ in her canoe:

Didst thou not, crafty, subtle sunburnt strum

Steal the silk breeches from his tawny bum?

Calls’t thouself a Queen? and thus couldst use

And rob thy Swain of breeches and his shoes?

The romance of Banks and Queen Oberea, broadcast in facetious verse and ‘letters’, helped ensure that the most-talked-about phenomenon to emerge from Cook’s long, exotic voyage was Joseph Banks. To paraphrase one historian, Banks had no need to return to London with a lion or tiger – he was the lion of London. A few years after his return, he would make one more far-flung journey of discovery, this time a self-financed expedition to Iceland. In the course of his three rather eccentrically determined voyages, he had pursued natural history from Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, from extreme northern to extreme southern latitudes – a range unmatched by any naturalist of his day.

With these travels behind him, Banks purchased a London town house in fashionable Soho Square and settled into the sedate but stimulating routine he was to maintain until the end of his life. In 1778, he was elected president of the Royal Society – and would be re-elected annually for the next forty-two years – and he was raised to a baronetcy as ‘Sir Joseph’ in 1779. On his return from the South Seas, he had been introduced to King George, who also shared Banks’s enthusiasm for natural history; Banks had been appointed botanical adviser to the King, and the two men became enduring friends. From their conversational strolls together were laid the plans for what would become the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, an enterprise made successful by Banks’s energetic enthusiasm and dazzling connections with botanists and collectors throughout the world. This dedication would continue from his appointment in 1775 until his death. Banks’s nearby villa, Spring Grove, and its extensive land became a model of experimental farming, another interest he shared with the King. The stud stock of Spanish merino sheep, which he had acquired with much difficulty and bred at Spring Grove, was, with the royal stud, which he also managed, the foundation for the growth of the British export wool trade in the next century.

But mostly what occupied Banks, apart from his duties at the Royal Society, was his correspondence. In his town house, with his fine library and unique collection of specimens, beautifully mounted in cabinets of his own design, he was furnished with much of what he required for his further researches. The rest came to him from the eager outside world. Reports of the prodigious appetite of a cuckoo raised by hand, and of the tonal qualities of Tahitian wind instruments; descriptions of battles between spiders and flies; introductions to promising students of botany and natural history; queries about prospective African expeditions, proper methods of raising ships from riverbeds, the correct authorship of ‘God Save the King’; reports of unicorn sightings, of the later years of the famous German Wild Boy and his fondness for gingerbread; descriptions of destruction done to wall fruit by insects, the superiority of olives to other oil-producing trees; gifts of newly published treatises, specimens of seed, of insects, of fighting flies and remains of the spiders they had conquered – all streamed into 32 Soho Square. The kangaroos, opossums and plants that would so inconvenience the Gorgon in 1792 were all destined for Joseph Banks.

His correspondence, most of it now lost, is estimated to have comprised anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 letters. His correspondents included great names such as William Pitt the Younger, Lord Nelson, Benjamin Franklin and distinguished scholars of many nations. But there were also captains who offered interesting specimens from their travels, farmers and a letter forwarded from a schoolmaster giving testimony that he had seen a mermaid.

Anywhere in the world, everywhere in the British Isles, people noted curious phenomena, came up with curious questions, observations or theories and thought, ‘I’ll write to Joseph Banks.’ When Samuel Taylor Coleridge wanted ‘hashish’, he contacted Banks. Without straying far from London and his well-managed Lincolnshire estates, Banks knew everyone, and everything. Studiously apolitical, he was respected and trusted by most parties. Few British expeditions of discovery of any kind, whether to Africa or Iceland, were mounted without consultation with Sir Joseph Banks. In Banks’s correspondence is mirrored the British eighteenth century, with all its energetic, questing optimism, its dazzling sophistication and its occasional startling innocence; an age in which geographical and scientific discoveries surpassed anything previously dreamt of, and yet an age in which it was still, just barely, possible to believe in mermaids and unicorns.

Amid this flood of gloriously mixed correspondence came an insistent trickle from those with interest in the plantations of the West Indies, with the suggestion that the importation of exotic fruit-bearing trees would be useful to the islands. As early as 1772, Valentine Morris, a planter who would later be governor of St Vincent, had approached Banks regarding the ‘possibility of procuring the bread tree, either in seed or plant so as to introduce that most valuable tree into our American Islands.’

The virtues of the Artocarpus incisa – the handsome, broad-leafed tropical tree that bore fruit the size of a man’s head – had been related by early explorers, who gave accounts of the fruit’s tastiness and uncanny similarity to bread. Lord Anson’s account of his circumnavigation of the world, published in 1748, told how on the Pacific island of Tinian, where his scurvy-stricken crew had fortuitously washed up, the breadfruit had been ‘constantly eaten by us instead of bread: and so universally preferred that no ship’s bread was expended in that whole interval.’

Such reports by Anson, Cook and others were taken very seriously by the West India Committee, which was composed of merchants and property owners with island interests. At a meeting in February 1775, a letter was read to the chairman ‘relative to the introduction into England of the Bread-fruit tree and Mangostan from the East Indies, in order for their being sent over and propagated in the West Indies.’ A month later, a resolution was passed offering a hundred pounds to ‘the captain of an East India ship, or any other person’ who brought ‘the true Bread-fruit tree in a thriving vegetation’ to England. The matter dragged on over the years, the subject of various letters, treatises and resolutions put forth by the committee. And thus things might have remained indefinitely, with a vague and rather lowly bounty offered to any willing taker, if the enterprise had not caught the interest of Joseph Banks.

Banks had privately discussed the possibility with several eager planters and botanists: needless to say, he had himself tasted the fruit on Tahiti, but had personally preferred plantains, finding that breadfruit ‘sometimes griped us’. By 1785, Matthew Wallen, a botanist living in Jamaica to whom Banks had sent various exotic seeds for experimental planting, wrote to Banks with the bold observation that the ‘King ought to send a Man of War, a Botanist & Gardener for the Plants we want,’ adding he would not then ‘want the Example of the King of France who sends Duplicates & Triplicates of all valuable Plants to his Colonies.’ Banks was in agreement that a proper government-sponsored expedition was desirable; it was also the case that he lacked breadfruit specimens of his own for Kew. That the British had fallen behind the French on this front provided useful leverage, and in February 1787, a breadfruit expedition was formally announced to the West India Committee by Prime Minister Pitt.

Simultaneous with these proposals for the breadfruit expedition were the plans, now well under way, for the transportation of the first convicts from England to Botany Bay in New South Wales. Banks, who was instrumental to both ventures, had originally intended to combine the two, and had at first proposed an ambitious itinerary: a single vessel would carry the convicts to New South Wales, deposit them and then continue on to collect breadfruit in Tahiti. It did not take long, however, for Banks to awake to the fact that the two enterprises, although destined for roughly the same part of the globe, had wholly distinct requirements. An expedition devoted solely to the breadfruit was, he allowed in March 1787, ‘more likely to be successful’.

Thus some months later, Lord Sydney, a principal secretary of state, informed Banks that the Admiralty had ‘purchased a Vessel for the purpose of conveying the Bread-Fruit Tree and other useful productions from the South Sea Islands to His Majesty’s West India Possessions.’ The ship, formerly named Bethia, was one Banks had approved, and it had been purchased by the Admiralty for the sum of £1950. She was to be commissioned within a few days, according to Sydney, and was ‘to be called The Bounty, and to be commanded by Lieutenant Bligh.’

Exactly how, or through whose recommendation, William Bligh came to receive the command of the Bounty is not known. It does not appear to be the case that Banks knew Bligh personally, although he had undoubtedly heard of him, since Bligh had served as sailing master of the Resolution on Cook’s last expedition, which had departed England eleven years before, in 1776. It is possible that Banks had made a recommendation that the breadfruit expedition was best entrusted to one of Cook’s men. William Bligh, on the other hand, had certainly heard of Joseph Banks, and in his mind there was no question of to whom he was indebted.

‘Sir, I arrived yesterday from Jamaica,’ Bligh wrote to Banks on 6 August, with an outflowing of gratitude. ‘…I have heard the flattering news of your great goodness to me, intending to honor me with the command of the vessel which you propose to go to the South Seas, for which, after offering you my most grateful thanks, I can only assure you I shall endeavour, and I hope succeed, in deserving such a trust’

William Bligh had been christened on 9 September 1754, in the great naval town of Plymouth, where his father, Francis Bligh, was chief of customs. The Blighs were originally from Cornwall, and could claim such distinguished men as Admiral Sir Richard Rodney Bligh and the Earls of Darnley. Bligh’s mother, Jane Pearce, had been a widow when she married Francis Bligh, and had died before her son was sixteen. William Bligh appears to have been the only child of this union. Francis Bligh married twice again after the death of his wife, and had himself passed away at the age of fifty-nine in December 1780 – three months after his son’s return to England from Cook’s third Pacific voyage.

Bligh first appears in naval records in 1762, as a captain’s servant on the Monmouth, when he would have been all of seven years old. This should not be taken to mean that young William had actually gone to sea; more likely, he had been entered on the books of an accommodating captain. This well-established, if strictly improper, tradition enabled a captain to draw extra rations and the child to enjoy some early friendly patronage and ‘sea time’. Widespread as the practice was, it was only extended to families with some degree of ‘interest’, or influential connections. In Bligh’s case this appears to have come through a relative of his mother, although his father undoubtedly had connections through the customs office. Bligh’s name does not appear again in naval records until 1770, shortly after his mother’s death, when he was entered on the muster of the Hunter as an ‘able seaman’, a common, temporary classification for ‘young gentlemen’, or potential officers in training who found themselves on ships where the official quota of midshipmen was already filled. And indeed, six months after signing on, a midshipman position did open up and Bligh was duly promoted.

Bligh was to serve on his next ship, the Crescent, for three years as a midshipman, or from the age of seventeen to a few weeks short of twenty. This period, which saw tours to Tenerife and the West Indies, was undoubtedly a formative period of his professional life. Paid off in 1774, Bligh next joined the Ranger – not as a midshipman, but once again, initially, as an able seaman; such was the expected fickleness of a naval career. The Ranger’s principal duty was hunting smugglers, and she had been based where smuggling was known to be particularly egregious, across the Irish Sea at Douglas, on the Isle of Man. Manx men and women were to figure heavily in Bligh’s later life.

Then, at the age of twenty-one, Bligh received the news that would represent a turning point in his life: he had been chosen to join Captain Cook on his third expedition as master of the Resolution. Again, how or by whom he had been singled out for this prestigious commission is not known. Cook himself had stated that the young officers under his direction ‘could be usefully employed in constructing charts, in taking views of the coasts and headlands near which we should pass, and in drawing plans of the bays and harbours in which we should anchor.’ Given Bligh’s later proven abilities, it may be that even at the age of twenty-one a reputation for these skills had preceded him and recommended him to Cook. To work side by side, in this capacity, with the greatest navigator of the age was for Bligh both a great honour and an unparalleled opportunity.

It was also, however, strictly speaking, if not a step backward in the command hierarchy of his profession, at least a step sideways. For a young man of Bligh’s background and aspirations, the desired position following a successful midshipman apprenticeship was that of lieutenant, which would put him securely on the promotional ladder leading to the post of captain. A master, on the other hand, for all the rigour of his responsibilities, received his appointment not as a commission from the Admiralty, but by a warrant from the Naval Board. These were important distinctions, professionally and socially. And while it was not unusual for a young man to bide his time by serving as a master until a lieutenancy was offered, there was the danger of proving too useful in that rank and advancing no further. Most masters had not been young gentlemen and were not destined for the captain’s list. In Bligh’s case the risk seemed justified. If he did his job well, he could count on the ‘interest’ and recommendation of Captain Cook, the most highly regarded royal naval officer of his day as a cartographer and explorer.

With Cook’s expedition, Bligh sailed to Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand, Tahiti, and the Pacific islands. He patrolled the west coast of North America and searched for the Northwest Passage. Cook was justly famous for maintaining the health of his crew on his long, demanding voyages, and Bligh’s own later practices would reveal that he had closely observed and learned from his mentor’s innovations in diet and ship management.

From Cook’s own log, one catches only glimpses of the earnest young sailing master, usually being sent ahead of the ship in a reconnaissance boat to make a careful survey of some ticklish coast or bay. After Cook himself, Bligh was responsible for most of the charts and surveys made in the course of this last expedition, and had thus honed his already exceptional abilities.

Most unforgettably, Bligh had been present at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, when on 14 February 1779, James Cook was murdered by the island natives. The events that led to this shocking tragedy would be long disputed; dispassionate reading of the numerous, often conflicting accounts suggests that Cook behaved with uncharacteristic rashness and provocation to the islanders – but that at the moment of crisis he had been betrayed by the disorder and panic of the armed marines whose duty had been to protect him. In the horrified and frightened aftermath of their loss, Cook’s officers assembled an account of the events at Kealakekua Bay that vindicated most and made a scapegoat of only one man, a Lieutenant Rickinson. Some years later, William Bligh would record his disgust with this closing of the ranks in marginal annotations made in a copy of the official publication of the voyage: ‘A most infamous lie’; ‘The whole affair from the Opening to the end did not last 10 Minutes, nor was their a spark of courage or conduct shown in the whole busyness’; ‘a most Hypocritical expression’; ‘A pretty Old Woman Story’.

In Bligh’s opinion, the principal cause of the tragedy at Kealakekua Bay lay with the marines: they had failed to do their duty. After firing a first panicked volley, they had fallen back from the menacing crowd of islanders in fear, splashing and flailing to their waiting boat. ‘The Marines fir’d & ran which occasioned all that followed for had they fixed their bayonets & not have run, so frightened as they were, they might have drove all before them.’ The person most responsible for the marines’ disorder was their commander, Lieutenant Molesworth Phillips, characterized by Bligh as a ‘person, who never was of any real service the whole Voyage, or did anything but eat and Sleep.’

Bligh was at least in some position to pass judgement, for the day following Cook’s murder he had been sent onshore to oversee a party of men repairing the Resolution’s damaged mast. Shortly after landing, Bligh had found himself faced with a menacing crowd and had ordered his men to stand and fire; and he had held this position until joined by reinforcements from the ship.

The shock and tragedy apart, Cook’s death deprived Bligh of the valuable interest he had counted on at the expedition’s end, and which it would appear by this time he otherwise lacked; his own modest connections had been sufficient to secure him a young gentleman’s entry to naval service, but do not appear to have been extensive enough to have advanced him further. In both the subsequent flurry of promotions and the published account of the voyage, Bligh found himself somewhat marginalized; whether this was because he had made known his highly impolitic views of the expedition cannot be determined. But to his intense annoyance and mortification, the carefully drawn charts he had made throughout the voyage were published under another’s name.

Following his return to England, Bligh had indulged in a rare holiday and returned to the Isle of Man, with, as subsequent events would suggest, a determined objective; only months after his return, in February 1781, William Bligh was married to Elizabeth Betham, the pretty, twenty-seven-year-old daughter of well-to-do and exceptionally well-educated parents. Richard Betham, Elizabeth’s father, was the receiver general, or collector of customs, in Douglas, and the friend of such distinguished men as philosopher David Hume and economist Adam Smith, with whom he had been a student at university. William Bligh, prudent, diligent and ambitious, would have had much to recommend him as a husband. For Elizabeth Betham, intelligent and brought up in a family of enlightened thinkers, Bligh’s participation in a high-profile expedition of discovery and exploration was also an attraction, evidence that the young officer was a cut above the usual naval man. By now Bligh had not only served with, and been deeply affected by, the most progressive sea captain of his age, but also, as his ship logs would reveal, he shared Cook’s unflagging interest in recording not only the coasts and harbours but also the people and places he encountered. As Elizabeth Bligh had undoubtedly appreciated, William Bligh not only was ambitious in the naval line, but also possessed the diligent, enquiring curiosity that might destine him for association with the ‘scientifically’ minded men of the Royal Society.

Following his marriage, Bligh had served as a fifth or sixth lieutenant in a series of short commissions during the winding down of the American War of Independence. By 1782, the navy had begun to scale back and reverted to offering the meagre fare of peacetime – two shillings a day and no opportunity for prize money from enemy ships. William Bligh, newly married and now with a young daughter to support, had at first lain low in the Isle of Man, where life was famously cheap, and where, as he told a relative, he could at least get plenty of books and ‘improve’ himself by reading. But these circumstances were tolerable for only so long, and by the middle of 1783, Bligh had received permission from the Admiralty to take mercantile employment abroad; so for four years, until his appointment to the Bounty, Bligh had plied the rum and sugar trade from England to the West Indies for his wife’s wealthy merchant uncle, Duncan Campbell.

Bligh was of average to below-average height. His hair was black, his skin ‘of an ivory or marble whiteness’; in later years, it would be remarked of him that ‘his face, though it had been exposed to all climates, and to the roughest weather, was, even as years began to tell upon him, far from appearing weather-beaten, or coarse.’ He did not, then, have the look of a rough ‘salt’. Nonetheless, he was widely experienced, having served in time of war, in voyages of discovery and in the merchant trade, from the Pacific to the West Indies. Other considerations are likely to have recommended him in Admiralty eyes. While it was the often expressed opinion of Joseph Banks that the Bounty voyage was now exclusively about breadfruit transportation, the Admiralty had one other, highly regarded objective, as was clear from the sailing orders Bligh eventually received: after leaving Tahiti, his orders instructed him, ‘you are to proceed from thence through Endeavour Streights (which separate New Holland from New Guinea).’ The navigation and survey of this important, little-known and dangerous passage – where Cook himself had run aground – was of great interest to the Admiralty, and there were few naval men better qualified, or available, to undertake this than Captain Cook’s able sailing master.

For William Bligh, now not quite thirty-three years old and a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Navy, the command of Sir Joseph Banks’s prestigious breadfruit journey implied more than a return to naval service from the obscurity of the sugar trade – it put Bligh squarely in Cook’s footsteps.

The object of all the former voyages to the South Seas,’ Bligh himself wrote, ‘has been the advancement of science, and the increase of knowledge. This voyage may be reckoned the first, the intention of which has been to derive benefit from those distant discoveries.’

The vessel that Bligh would refer to with habitual affection as ‘my little ship’ awaited him at Deptford Dockyard, on the Thames. The Bounty was a beautiful craft, lying solid and low in the water like the full-bodied merchant ship she was, blunt-nosed and square-sterned, surmounted by her three spirelike masts. Fixed under her bowsprit was the painted figurehead of a lady dressed in a riding habit. But for all the neatness of her lines, Bligh could have been forgiven for a momentary loss of heart at his first sight. Resolution and Discovery, the two ships carefully chosen by Captain Cook for his last expedition, had been 462 and 295 tons, respectively – and Discovery, as a consort, was markedly smaller than any of Cook’s previous ships, which averaged around 350 tons burthen. The Bounty was of 220 tons. At 85 feet 1¹/₃ inches long, and with a beam of 24 feet 4 inches, she was rated as only a cutter. Of more consequence to Bligh, a cutter did not rate a captain as her commanding officer, or even a commander (the rank Cook had held on his second voyage). William Bligh would therefore not be promoted as he had optimistically hoped, but would sail as a lieutenant; if he were addressed as ‘Captain Bligh’, it would be only out of courtesy. Given that he was to be gone for at least two years, this was an acute disappointment; at the very least, it meant two years more on a lieutenant’s pay.

It was Banks who, in consultation with David Nelson, the gardener chosen for the voyage, had made the final selection of the vessel from the few candidates the Admiralty had deemed suitable. A merchantman had been chosen, since carrying capacity was the main object. Banks had very definite ideas about how exploration vessels should be fitted out – so definite that they had cost him a place on Cook’s second expedition of 1772. At that time, it had been assumed by everyone, including Banks, that he would participate in this next grand adventure. But after the ship selected by Cook had been completely reconfigured under Banks’s supervision to accommodate his entourage – heightened, redecked, fitted with a new raised poop to compensate for the scientists’ quarters – the ship had proved too top-heavy to sail. She was restored to her original state, and Banks withdrew from the enterprise in pique.

Fifteen years later, Banks’s ideas on how botanical expeditions were to be conducted were still adamantly precise. ‘As the sole object of Government in Chartering this Vessel in our Service at a very considerable expense is to furnish the West Indian Islands with the Bread-Fruit & other valuable productions of the East,’ Banks wrote in a draft of his instructions in early 1787, ‘the Master & Crew of her must not think it a grievance to give up the best part of her accommodations for that purpose.’ There were to be no dogs, cats, monkeys, parrots, goats or any of the other animals traditionally found on ships, excepting those kept in coops for food. Arsenic must be kept out for cockroaches and rats and ‘the Crew must not complain if some of them who may die in the ceiling make an unpleasant smell.’ Banks had estimated that ‘a Brig of less than 200 Tons Burthen would be fully sufficient.’ He also wanted a small crew – ‘no more than 30 Souls’, including the gardener – so as not to take up space that could be used by plants. An astronomer had also sought to go along ‘to observe the expected comet’, but Banks refused; in his eyes, the Bounty’s voyage had one object only – breadfruit.

This was made clear to Bligh personally from the moment he first looked over his new ship. Descending the companionway from the upper deck, Bligh entered the great cabin, the captain’s private quarters that encompassed the breadth of the vessel and extended from the transom almost to the mainmast. Paned windows at the stern and quarter windows flooded the spacious area with light. This was where the captain could retire for privacy and rest, where he could invite his officers and young gentlemen. For a navigator and draftsman like Bligh, it was also his library, where he could spread out his charts and drawings, and store his collection of books.

But the Bounty’s great cabin was not destined for the personal use of Lieutenant Bligh – it was to be converted into a nursery for the plants. Fitted with skylights and air scuttles, it would contain staging cut with holes for 629 pots; it also had a stove to ensure that the plants would be warm in cold weather. An ingenious drainage system provided a catchment for surplus water, which could be recycled. Bligh’s quarters would be improvised immediately forward of the nursery, to the starboard side of the companionway. A windowless cabin measuring eight by seven feet would form his sleeping area. Adjoining it was a small pantry where he would take his meals; if he wished to invite others to his table, they would meet him here, in this cramped, undignified space. Cook, too, on his first voyage, had shared his day cabin with Banks and his scientist and draftsman, but on that occasion the usurpation of the captain’s space into a kind of gentleman’s working library had not resulted in any symbolic loss of dignity. Unlike Cook, Bligh was not to enjoy an active and collegial engagement with his partner in this enterprise. Shunted into his cramped, dark solitude by the pots of Joseph Banks, he was effectively relegated to the role of botanical courier.

With the interior refinements out of his hands, Bligh spent the months of August and September making his ship as seaworthy as possible for her long, dangerous voyage. Her masts were shortened so as to make her more stable, and her wooden hull was sheathed with copper against the ravages of ship worm. Nineteen tons of iron ballast were stowed instead of the customary forty-five; Bligh reckoned that the eighteen months of stores he was carrying would make up the balance.

The Bounty’s rating as a cutter also determined the establishment she would carry. There would be no commissioned officers apart from Bligh; the warrant officers would include a master, boatswain, carpenter, gunner and surgeon. In the interest of economy, and as was not uncommon, the role of purser had been dispensed with. A purser, the purveyor of all official stores, in effect purchased provisions from the Navy Board at the outset of a voyage, and sold back what had not been used on his return. Because he was expected to supplement his lowly salary by profits received, he had strong self-interest to stint on provisions, for which reason he was generally regarded by the sailors with suspicion and contempt. On the Bounty, the duties of this office were to be fulfilled by the commanding officer – Lieutenant Bligh.

Bligh’s commission had commenced on 16 August, and was followed only days later by the appointment of the first warrant officers. John Fryer, the Bounty’s new master, was slightly older than Bligh; with his rather refined features and pensive air, he called to mind a dignified school headmaster. Fryer had been assigned the small cabin opposite Bligh’s, on the other side of the aft hatchway.

Only weeks before he joined the Bounty, Fryer, a widower, had married a ‘Spinster’ named Mary Tinkler, from Wells-next-the-Sea, in Norfolk, where he too had been born. This marriage held some consequence for the voyage. Fryer, using his modest interest, had secured a position for his brother-in-law, Robert Tinkler, nominally as an AB, or able seaman, with the understanding that he was to be considered a young gentleman. Although Tinkler was entered on the ship’s muster as being seventeen years of age, he was in fact only twelve.

Fryer had entered the navy only seven years earlier. As was common for a master, he had transferred from the merchant service, where he had seen some excitement; around 1776, he had been mate on a vessel captured by French privateers and had spent over a year and a half in prison. John Fryer’s role as master on the Bounty was the same as that played by Bligh on Cook’s Resolution. However, Bligh had been a precocious twenty-one-year-old lieutenant-in-waiting, while John Fryer was a thirty-five-year-old man who was unlikely to advance higher in nominal rank.

Bligh’s failure to gain promotion for this breadfruit voyage bore implications well beyond the fact that he would continue to be paid as a lieutenant, and nowhere were the consequences to become more overtly apparent than in his relationship with Master Fryer. While Bligh considered himself to be only a formality away from the coveted promotions that would secure him his captaincy, in the eyes of John Fryer, Mr Bligh was still merely a lieutenant. In theory, the master bore responsibility for the navigation of a ship; however, William Bligh was by now an expert navigator, trained under Captain Cook, and one of the few men in the British navy with experience in the South Seas. It was not then to be expected that he would surrender his own expertise on so critical a subject to the middle-of-the-road know-how of Master Fryer. Under William Bligh, the master was in fact redundant.

Thomas Huggan, an alcoholic surgeon, was the second warrant officer appointed. ‘My surgeon, I believe, may be a very capable man, but his indolence and corpulency render him rather unfit for the voyage,’ Bligh wrote as tactfully as he could to Sir Joseph Banks, whom he was careful to keep apprised of all developments. ‘I wish I may get him to change.’

Although this proved impossible, Banks did succeed in getting the Admiralty to agree to an assistant surgeon. Eventually this position was taken by Thomas Denman Ledward, a man in his late twenties from a distinguished family of apothecaries and physicians and the first cousin of Thomas Denman, destined to become Lord Chief Justice.

‘I am to enter as A.B.!’ Ledward wrote to his uncle shortly before sailing – the ever handy ‘able seaman’ designation being invoked to comply with the ship’s official numerical establishment. ‘But the Captain is almost certain that I shall get a first Mate’s pay, & shall stand a great chance of immediate promotion,’ and – a further agreeable incentive – ‘if the Surgeon dies (& he has the character of a drunkard) I shall have a Surgeon’s acting order.’ An additional inducement to take on what surely promised to be a thankless job was that Sir Joseph Banks had offered his ‘interest to any surgeon’s mate who would go out as able seaman.’

On the same day that Fryer and Huggan were appointed, Thomas Hayward also joined the Bounty, nominally as another AB but shortly to be promoted to one of the two coveted midshipman allotments. This nineteen-year-old officer had been recommended by one of Banks’s old and admired colleagues, William Wales, who had been the astronomer on Cook’s second voyage, and who was now mathematical master at Christ’s Hospital, that extraordinary charity school that educated, among other luminaries, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; indeed, some of the haunting ice imagery of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ comes from William Wales’s description of crossing into Antarctic waters on Cook’s voyage. Wales taught mathematics, astronomy, navigational skills and surveying at Christ’s Hospital, the object of his particular attention being that circle of boys destined for sea careers. Lamb, describing his old teacher, claimed that ‘all his systems were adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to encounter. Frequent and severe punishments, which were expected to be borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to be his only aim.’

Wales was also secretary to the Board of Longitude and had been responsible for publishing the scientific observations of Cook’s voyage – he was, then, a man for whom Banks had high regard.

‘I beg leave to trouble you with the Name of the Young Gentleman who is desirous of going with Capt. Bligh and whom I mentioned to you sometime since,’ Wales wrote to Banks on 8 August. ‘It is Mr. Thomas Hayward, Son of Mr. Hayward, a surgeon at Hackney.’ The young man who was the object of Wales’s interest was the eldest son of nine surviving children. Thomas Hayward had entered the navy’s books as a captain’s servant aboard the Halifax at the tender age of seven, where he served, on the books at least, for the next four years. From age eleven to fourteen, however, Hayward was not at sea, but was presumably being schooled. In 1782, he was back on the navy’s books and for the next five years served as able seaman or midshipman aboard a number of ships. He came to the Bounty from the 24-gun frigate Porcupine, which had been patrolling off the Irish coast. Possibly no other promising young gentleman in His Majesty’s Royal Navy was to endure such a spectacular run of bad professional fortune as Thomas Hayward.

Over the next weeks, the rest of the crew continued to trickle in, acquired from other ships, from former service with Bligh or from those with interest to get them their positions. A number of these deserted: the names John Cooper, George Armstrong, William Hudson, Samuel Sutton, marked ‘R’ for ‘Run’, are among those that appear on the Bounty muster only briefly before vanishing from this story. These desertions included the company’s only two pressed men, seamen forced against their will into the King’s service. Bligh claimed that it was only after leaving Tenerife that he ‘now made the ship’s company acquainted with the intent of the voyage’, but it is unlikely that the men had remained in ignorance until this time; the preparations themselves would have given much away. Thomas Ledward, the young assistant surgeon, reported excitedly to his uncle before the Bounty sailed that he had agreed to go ‘to Otaheite to transplant Bread fruit trees to Jamaica’, which would indicate there were no secrets here. It is a striking fact that, with the desertion of the pressed men, the Bounty carried an all-volunteer crew; surely her destination – Tahiti, the Pacific islands – was one reason.

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.’

To Christian’s request for a position, however, Bligh had returned the polite response that he already had all the officers he could carry. This was undoubtedly true, but the fact that Bligh did not stretch himself to accommodate the eager young man, as he was to do for so many young gentlemen on the Bounty, suggests that he was not in any way beholden to the Christian family; Fletcher had approached Bligh, it would appear, without benefit of interest.

Upon receiving this rebuff, Christian was undeterred; indeed, he rose to the occasion, volunteering to work before the mast until a vacancy arose among the officers.

‘Wages were no object, he only wished to learn his profession,’ he had told Bligh, adding, ‘we Mid-shipmen are gentlemen, we never pull at a rope; I should even be glad to go one voyage in that situation, for there may be occasions, when officers may be called upon to do the duties of a common man.’

To this honourable request Bligh had responded favourably. Christian was taken on board the Britannia as a seaman, and on his return from the West Indies, according to his brother, ‘spoke of Captain Bligh with great respect’. He had worked hard alongside the common sailors, but ‘the Captain had been kind to him’, instructing him in the art of navigation. At the same time Christian had observed ‘that Captain Bligh was very passionate; yet he seemed to pride himself in knowing how to humour him.’ On their second voyage Christian was entered as nominal ‘gunner’ but, as Bligh made clear, was to be treated as an officer. Christian, it would seem, had become Bligh’s protégé. Bligh had taken pains not only to instruct the ambitious young man, but to elevate him, regularly inviting him to join him and his officers at his table for dinner. Christian for his part must have passed muster with his captain, for Bligh was not one to suffer fools, and it was Bligh who recommended Christian to the Admiralty as midshipman on the Bounty. ‘As it was understood that great interest had been made to get Midshipmen sent out in this ship,’ Fletcher’s brother would write, ‘Christian’s friends thought this recommendation…a very great obligation.’ On the return from the South Seas, Fletcher could expect to be promoted to lieutenant.

This promising naval career had not been in the Christian family’s original plans for its second-youngest son; and as the family itself was to play a significant part in the shaping of the events ahead, it is well to introduce its members here. Fletcher Christian was born on 25 September 1764, in his parents’ home in Cumberland, and had been baptized that same day, in Brigham Church, some two miles distant. Baptism on the day of birth was unusual, and implies that the newborn child was not expected to live. His parents, Charles and Ann, had already lost two infants.

Charles Christian came from an old Manx family that had been settled on the English mainland since the seventeenth century. At the age of twenty-two he had married Ann Dixon, the daughter of a dyer and a member of the local gentry well connected with other important north-country families. Ann’s mother was a Fletcher, another old and established Cumberland family. It was after his grandmother’s family that Fletcher Christian was named.

Charles had grown up in the Christians’ ancestral home, Ewanrigg, a forty-two-bedroomed mansion with crenellated battlements overlooking the sea. Reputedly, the property had been won by the Christians from the Bishop of Sodor and Man in a card game. Charles’s mother, Bridget Senhouse, could trace her ancestry back fourteen generations to King Edward I. Such distinctions bore little practical weight, however, and as a younger son (and one of eleven children), Charles inherited only his name and some shares in various family interests. Like all but the eldest son, he was expected to make his own way, which he did as an attorney-at-law, and later as coroner for Cumberland. The main boost to his fortune was his marriage – Ann brought with her a small but respectable property called Moorland Close, just outside Cockermouth, described locally as ‘a quadrangular pile of buildings, in the style of the mediæval manor house, half castle and half farmstead.’ The surrounding wall, originally built to rebuff Scottish border raiders, during Fletcher’s boyhood benignly enclosed an orchard and gardens, while the former guard stand had been converted into a little summer house.

Ten children were born to the young couple, six of whom survived infancy. Fletcher was the fifth surviving child, born twelve years after his eldest brother, John. Although Fletcher was raised in a large family, with cousins and relatives nearby in every direction, his childhood was made precarious by the early death of his father, who passed away in 1768. A month before he died, Charles Christian had written his will declaring himself ‘weak of body’, which suggests a protracted illness.

Ann Christian was now left to raise six children on her own. Fletcher was not yet four; his elder brothers, John, Edward and Charles, were sixteen, ten and six, respectively; his sister, Mary, was eight, while little Humphrey was just three months old. Money was, and evidently had long been, a problem. As early as the year of his first son’s birth, Charles Christian senior had borrowed from his eldest brother, and family records indicate a series of other large ‘loans’ made in later years. Still, under Ann’s management, care was given to Fletcher’s education, and he was sent first to Brigham’s one-room parish school and then to the Cockermouth Free School, which he attended for seven years – and where a younger contemporary was William Wordsworth, the future Poet Laureate.

Cockermouth and Moorland Close stood on the edge of the Lake District, ‘the wildest, most barren and frightful’ landscape in England. Years later, Wordsworth would romanticize and memorialize the savage grandeur of fractured crags and sweeping valleys, scored with streams and dark tarns. Cockermouth, situated against the backdrop of Mt Skiddaw on the Derwent and Cocker Rivers, was by all accounts a pleasant market town, its two main streets lined with stout stone houses roofed with thatch and blue slate.

Little is known of Fletcher Christian’s Cumberland upbringing, but his schoolmate William Wordsworth never forgot the wild freedom this countryside gave his childhood:

Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child,

In a small mill-race severed from his stream,

Made one long bathing of a summer’s day;

Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again

Alternate, all a summer’s day, or scoured

The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves

Of yellow ragwort; or when rock and hill,

The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,

Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone

Beneath the sky, as if I had been born

On Indian plains, and from my mother’s hut

Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport,

A naked savage, in the thunder shower.

While Fletcher Christian rode back and forth between the orchards and gardens of Moorland Close to Cockermouth, his two oldest brothers, John and Edward, went off to Cambridge and to professions in law. It was Edward who, as a new Fellow of his college, handled his mother’s affairs when her finances finally and fatally bottomed out. The crisis occurred in 1779, although to judge from the size of her debts it had been building for years. Somehow, together with her eldest son, John, she had managed to accumulate debts to the tune of £6490 os. 11d. The family, it appears, had been living for years with no regard for reality, and now Ann Christian was faced with the humiliating prospect of debtor’s prison. John Christian, her husband’s wealthy brother and head of the family, once again bailed them out, but seems to have made it clear that he could not be counted upon to do so again. In partial compensation, John Christian assumed ownership of Moorland Close and all effects attached to it.

Through Edward’s special pleading and contributions from his own modest Fellowship, he succeeded in scraping together an annuity of forty guineas per annum for his mother, with which, as he observed, she would ‘be able to live comfortably any where, so that if she is not secure from arrests at Moorland Close, I should have now no objections to the family’s removing to the Isle of Man.’ In the course of these negotiations with his wealthy uncle, Edward indicated the hope that ‘in time perhaps some of us may be in such circumstances as to think it a desirable object to redeem the place of our nativity.’ This touching aspiration was never to be realized. In October 1779, an advertisement was run on the front page of the Cumberland Pacquet for ‘that large commodious House situated in the Market Place of Cockermouth’ formerly belonging to John Christian, Fletcher and Edward’s oldest brother. Edward briefly became headmaster of Hawkshead Grammar School in Cumberland, where one of his pupils was Wordsworth. After seeking a position as a naval surgeon, Charles junior, the third son, entered the West Yorkshire Militia Regiment, commanded by Sir George Savile, who wrote glancingly of him, noting that ‘Mr. Christian [is] well satisfied & happy I believe in his situation. Indeed he is very deserving,’ which suggests the special attention of an aristocratic patron with ‘interest’ in his new recruit. When the regiment disbanded, Charles Christian went to Edinburgh to study medicine, and then qualified as a surgeon aboard an East India vessel called the Middlesex.

The fact that Ann Christian, with her daughter, Mary, and young Humphrey, emigrated to the Isle of Man suggests that she was not, after all, ‘secure from arrest’: debts acquired on the mainland could not be pursued here, and the island had become a haven for financially distressed gentry. Fletcher, now about fifteen, attended St Bees School, close to Whitehaven in Cumberland, but would have been a summer visitor to the island between school terms, where he encountered another part of his heritage. Here, on the Isle of Man, the Christians were an ancient and distinguished family who could trace their lineage back in an unbroken line of male successors to 1408, the year in which John MacCrysten, deemster or judge of the island, had put his signature on a deed.

It was not, however, in the magnificent, castle-like Christian family home of Milntown, with its sixteenth-century gardens and doors reputedly made from the wreckage of the Spanish Armada, that Ann and her family had settled. Bound to live within the means of her modest annuity, Ann Christian had taken her family to Douglas, where she rented property. Facing the Irish Sea and backed by miles of rolling, sparsely inhabited countryside, Douglas was more isolated and more remote than Cockermouth. It was home to just under three thousand souls. Herring sheds, a small shipyard and a brewery represented local industry. Douglas society, according to a contemporary English diarist, was ‘not of the best kind, much like that in our common Country Towns.’ But life here was cheap: no taxes, a ‘good living House at £8 a year’, and port wine for ten pence a bottle.

Between Cumberland and the Isle of Man, then, young Fletcher Christian had lived within the shadow of family greatness, even if the shadow was not cast by his own immediate kin. No evidence survives of how he passed the years between St Bees School and his sudden resurfacing in the muster roll of the Eurydice in 1783. The younger sons of Charles and Ann Christian would have been brought up to look forward to university and careers in law, following the paths of John and Edward; but the money had run out. Fletcher’s late coming to his profession, his staying ‘at school longer than young men generally do who enter into the navy’, may have been the result of family stalling, a hope that something ‘would come up’ to change their fortunes. Nevertheless, Fletcher’s proposal to Bligh – that ‘he would readily enter his ship as a Foremastman’ – indicates that the young man had accepted with great grace and optimistic courage this abrupt change of destinies.

Another of the Bounty’s newly recruited young gentlemen had a family background remarkably similar to that of Fletcher Christian. In fact, Peter Heywood was distantly related to the Christians: his great-aunt Elizabeth had married another John Christian of Douglas, and both the Christians and his mother’s family, the Speddings, had married into the ancient Cumberland family of Curwen. On his father’s side, Peter Heywood could trace his ancestry back to Piers E’Wood in 1164, who had settled after the Norman invasion near Heywood, Lancashire. A branch of the family eventually emigrated to the Isle of Man, of whom the most famous member had been Peter ‘Powderplot’ Heywood, who had apprehended Guy Fawkes and so forestalled the plot to blow up Parliament in 1605.

Peter was born on 5 June 1772, on the Isle of Man, in his father’s house, the Nunnery, a romantic former abbey set in extensive gardens about half a mile up the hill from Douglas, and the most imposing property in the area. Peter’s father, Peter John Heywood, like many of the Manx Christians before him, was a deemster of the island, and took a scholar’s interest in the Manx language, unusual for his time.

But while Heywood may have been a learned man, he appears not to have been highly practical. The next year, he was forced by debts to sell the Nunnery, surrender his position as deemster, and move to Whitehaven, close to where Fletcher Christian was to go to school.

Exactly how the Heywoods survived over the next few years remains unclear, but in 1781, Mr Heywood was offered the appointment as seneschal, or agent, of the Duke of Atholl’s estate and holdings on the Isle of Man. Young Peter had moved back to the island with his large family of ten brothers and sisters, and settled in Douglas, where Fletcher’s mother was now also residing, and where the presence of the Nunnery must have been a constant, bitter reminder of more prosperous days.

In July 1787, only a month before Bligh received his orders for the Bounty, Peter’s father was unceremoniously dismissed by the Duke of Atholl when it was discovered that he not only had been wildly mishandling the Duke’s estate, but had also pocketed several thousand pounds of his employer’s income. Confronted with his wrongdoing, Mr Heywood had responded with self-righteous hauteur; among other tactics, he pointed out that his family could be traced as far back as the Atholls. This inability to assume any responsibility, let alone culpability, for his actions so incensed his employer that the Duke felt compelled to offer a personal rebuke. For years, he observed to Mr Heywood, ‘you have been living in a Stile of profusion far beyond your fortune, and to the detriment of your own Children spending money belonging to another.’

Mr Heywood’s sudden loss of employment had brought disaster to his family, who were forced to move out of their house, which was the Duke’s property. On the other hand, the disgrace of Mr Heywood’s offence was studiously concealed and there is no whisper of any misdeed in all the Heywood papers down through the decades after this. Apparently unashamed, the children seemed to have passed through life with all their illusions of superior gentility intact.

Peter had been sent away to school at the age of eleven, first to Nantwich school in Cheshire and then, briefly, also to St Bees, at which establishments he would have received a gentleman’s usual diet of religious instruction and Latin. His teacher at Nantwich had published books on Livy and Tacitus, and so one may hazard that young Peter had his fill of these. Unlike Fletcher, however, a seagoing career of some kind had probably been on the cards for Peter, regardless of changed family circumstances; the number of naval and military careers in the Heywood pedigree suggests this was an honoured tradition. Peter’s first naval service had been aboard the Powerful, in 1786. The Powerful, however, had never left Plymouth Harbour. As this represented his only naval experience prior to joining the Bounty, he had not yet served at sea.

Peter’s position as a young gentleman and an AB on the Bounty came through the sympathetic and pitying offices of William Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, a friend of the Heywoods. ‘He is an ingenious young Lad & has always been a favorite of mine & indeed every body here,’ Betham wrote to Bligh from Douglas, thanking him for taking Peter under his wing. ‘And indeed the Reason of my insisting so strenuously upon his going the Voyage with you is that after I had mentioned the matter to Mrs Bligh, his Family have fallen into a great deal of Distress on account of their Father’s losing the Duke of Atholl’s Business, and I thought it would not appear well in me to drop this matter if it cou’d possibly be done without any prejudice to you, as this wou’d seem deserting them in their adversity, and I found they wou’d regard it as a great Disappointment.’ Betham did not apparently envisage young Peter’s duties as being particularly nautical. ‘I hope he will be of some Service to you, so far as he is able, in writing or looking after any necessary matters under your charge,’ Betham had added, vaguely.

In the summer of 1787, Mr Heywood accompanied his son from the Isle of Man to Liverpool. Here he bade Peter goodbye, entrusting him to the care of friends who were travelling to London by chaise along the long, rough road, each carrying a pair of loaded pistols as a guard against highwaymen. Once at Deptford, as another token of Bligh’s efforts for the young man, Peter stayed with Bligh and his wife at their lodgings while the Bounty was being equipped. Christian had relatives in London of his own to visit, including an uncle and his brother John, who had moved here after his bankruptcy. Given Christian’s already close association with Bligh, it would be incredible that he too did not visit the Bligh household at this time. ‘You have danced my children upon your knee,’ Bligh would remind the master’s mate at a later date.

Also joining the Bounty, rated as a nominal AB, was another fallen aristocrat of sorts, twenty-one-year-old Edward Young. Edward was the nephew of Sir George Young, a distinguished naval captain and future admiral who had served in both the Royal Navy and the East India Company. ‘As I do not know all his exploits,’ one memorialist offered breezily, ‘I can only state that he was employed…in several services requiring nautical skill and British courage.’ Since 1784, George Young had been an advocate, with Sir Joseph Banks, of establishing the New South Wales colony, which he envisaged would serve as a port of call for ships on the China trade and more unexpectedly a centre for the cultivation of flax. A paper outlining his proposal became a cornerstone of the government’s eventual establishment of a penal colony near Botany Bay. It is probable that it was through his connection with Banks that Young had approached Bligh about a position for Edward.

However, there is no family record of a nephew called Edward. On the Bounty muster, Edward is entered as coming from ‘St Kitt’s’, and a near contemporary reference mentions him as ‘half-caste’. He was described by Bligh as roughly five foot eight in height, with a dark complexion ‘and rather a bad look’. Young had dark brown hair, was ‘Strong Made’ and had ‘lost several of his Fore teeth, and those that remain are all Rotten; a Small Mole on the left Side of the throat.’ If Edward was indeed a nephew of Sir George, it is most likely that his father had been Robert Young, a younger brother who had died in 1781 on St Helena while captain of the East India Company’s Vansittart. Whereas other distinguished families associated with the Bounty would be loud in their opinions, news of the mutiny was met with a thundering silence by the Youngs. If Edward had been born on the wrong side of the blanket, there may have been relief when he vanished from the picture altogether.

Yet another young gentleman, George Stewart from the Orkney Islands, joined the Bounty as a midshipman, but was rerated AB before the ship sailed (the ship’s fixed allotment of two midshipman positions required judicious management on Bligh’s part). Bligh had met Stewart seven years earlier, when the Resolution had called at Stromness at the end of her long and harrowing voyage. In their home, the Whitehouse, overlooking the harbour and the bustling town with its inns and taverns, Alexander and Margaret Stewart, George’s parents, had entertained Bligh.

Like so many of the Bounty’s young gentlemen, George Stewart could trace an old and distinguished lineage. His father’s family could be traced back to King Robert II, in the thirteenth century; his mother could trace her descent back to Danes who had settled the Orkneys in the ninth century. Alexander Stewart had been born and lived on Ronaldsay in the Orkneys, but had moved to Stromness for his children’s schooling; he and his wife had eight children, of whom George was the eldest. Apparently, when word of the Bounty’s voyage reached them, the Stewarts had reminded Bligh of their former acquaintance; surely the stories the young master had told the Stewart family seven years earlier, upon his return from the Pacific had made George’s interest in this particular voyage especially keen.

When he came down to Deptford to join the Bounty, George Stewart was twenty-one years old and ‘five feet seven inches high’, according to Bligh, who continued with an unprepossessing description: ‘High, good Complexion, Dark Hair, Slender Made, Narrow chested, and long Neck, Small Face and Black Eyes.’

The last of the Bounty’s young gentlemen was fifteen-year-old John Hallett from London, the son of John Hallett, an architect, and his wife, Hannah. He had four younger brothers, all of whom would later be employed by the East India Company, and one half-sister, the ‘natural child’ of Mr Hallett. Midshipman Hallett’s father was a wealthy man, with a residence in Manchester Buildings, a gentlemen’s row of private houses situated just off the Thames, almost opposite Westminster Bridge and in strolling distance of St James’s Park. The Halletts, like the Haywards, belonged to the energetic, gentlemanly professional class possessed of actual skills – doctors and architects as opposed to seneschals or bankrupt country lawyers.

Hallett Senior moved in a distinguished circle of artists, including members of the Royal Academy. His niece had married into a prosperous family of merchants and shipbuilders, with a home in fashionable Tunbridge, where Mr Hallett was often found. From diarist Joseph Farington, who recorded a number of dinners and other social occasions at which Mr Hallett was present, we are given a glimpse of the Bounty midshipman’s circle: ‘Mr. Hallett spoke of several persons who from a low beginning had made great fortunes,’ Farington noted after a London dinner, going on to describe a leather breeches maker now established on Bond Street and said to be worth £150,000. War with Russia would only ruin Russia’s trade, as England could do without her goods. A neighbour recently died having ‘expended £50,000 it was not well known how’ – all good solid, middle-class, mercantile discussion.

Young John Hallett was already well on the road to a naval career when he joined the Bounty. He had been entered on the books as a lieutenant’s servant in 1777, at the age of five, and on the books of four subsequent ships as a captain’s servant. Prior to joining the Bounty, he had been on the Alarm, which had paid off in Port Royal, Jamaica, when the ship was taken out of commission. This had occurred four years previously, and one assumes young Hallett, at age eleven, was getting his schooling during the interim. John Hallett Sr appears to have been acquainted with Banks, and wrote to him thanking him for getting his son’s position. While the Bounty was swarming with young gentlemen – officers in training, midshipmen in waiting – the only two to hold the coveted midshipmen’s slots were Thomas Hayward and John Hallett, both protégés of Banks.

In early October, Bligh prepared the Bounty to leave the Thames for Spithead, Portsmouth, where he was to await official orders to sail. The ship, now copper-sheathed, had been completely refitted and was stuffed with supplies – not just the food stores, clothing or ‘slops’, fuel, water, rum and bulk necessities, but all the miscellaneous minutiae of the gardener’s trade, as inventoried on a list supplied by Banks: paper, pens, ink, India ink, ‘Colours of all kinds’, spade, pins, wire, fly traps, an insect box, bottles, knives, ‘Journal Books & other usefull Books’, guns and gunpowder, shot and flints, and ‘Trinkets for the Natives’, which included mirrors and eighty pounds of white, blue and red glass beads. Bligh had also been given sixty-one ducats and forty-five Spanish dollars for the purchase of plants. Eight hundred variously sized pots for the breadfruit plants had been stowed, but as David Nelson reported to Banks plaintively, ‘as I have only room for 600, the remainder may possibly be broken.’ The pots had been made extra deep for drainage by ‘Mr. Dalton, potter’, near Deptford Creek.

Every British naval seaman brought certain expectations to each ship he joined. He expected to endure hard labour in raw conditions, and was ever mindful that he was vulnerable to harsh and often arbitrary punishment at the hands of his officers. He expected to eat very specifically measured amounts of rank food, and to drink much liquor. Above all, he expected to exist for the duration of his service in stifling, unhygienic squalor. There would be no privacy. As the official naval allotment of fourteen inches sleeping space for each man suggests, space was always at a premium – but nowhere more so than on the little Bounty, now crammed with supplies for eighteen months’ voyaging and trade. Her fo’c’sle, an unventilated, windowless area of 22 by 36 feet, was shared by thirty-three men, while the maximum height between decks amidships was 5 feet 7 inches – the average height of the men she carried. The master’s mates, midshipmen, and young gentlemen – Fletcher Christian and a William Elphinstone, Hayward and Hallett, Peter Heywood, George Stewart, Edward Young and Robert Tinkler – were all quartered directly behind Bligh’s little pantry, separated, it is suggested, merely by canvas walls.

On deck, amid the piles of stores, were the Bounty’s three boats. The Navy Board had placed an order for these as early as June, but the usual supplier, swamped with other work, had been forced to cry off. The Board then turned to a private contractor to build a launch of 20 feet in length with copper fastenings, and to the Deal boatyard for a cutter and a jolly boat of 18 and 16 feet, respectively. For reasons known only to himself, Bligh requested of the Navy Board that the launch and cutter, which had already been supplied, be replaced with larger models. The Board complied, and thus was acquired one of the most historic craft in maritime history, the Bounty’s 23-foot-long, 2-foot-9-inch-deep launch.

On 9 October 1787, a drear, dull day, the pilot arrived to take the Bounty out of the Thames on the first leg of her voyage. In the Long Reach she received her gunner’s stores. Officially designated as an ‘Armed Vessel’, she was equipped with ‘four short four-pounder carriage guns and ten half-pounder swivel guns’, to quote the Admiralty’s directive – a laughably meagre firepower. Additionally, there were small arms, muskets, powder and bayonets, all locked in the arms chest, supposedly at all times under the key of the ship’s master, John Fryer.

The Bounty herself was in her glory – newly fitted out to the tune of thousands of pounds, sails set, piled with stores, guns gleaming and swarming with her men, the midshipmen in their smart blue coats, Bligh in his blue-and-white-piped lieutenant’s uniform with its bright gilt buttons, and the seamen in their long, baggy trousers and boxy jackets: Charles Churchill, with his disfigured hand showing ‘the Marks of a Severe Scald’; German-speaking Henry Hilbrant, strong and sandy-haired, but with ‘His Left Arm Shorter than the other having been broke’; Alexander Smith, ‘Very much pitted’ with smallpox, and bearing an axe scar on his right foot; John Sumner, slender, fair and with a ‘Scar upon the left Cheek’; William McCoy, scarred by a stab wound in the belly; William Brown, the gardener, also fair and slender, but bearing a ‘remarkable Scar on one of his Cheeks Which contracts the Eye Lid and runs down to his throat.’ With the knowledge of hindsight, they are a piratical-looking crew.

The Bounty lingered at Long Reach for nearly a week before receiving orders to proceed to Spithead, the naval anchorage outside Portsmouth Harbour. But ‘the winds and weather were so unfavorable’, in Bligh’s words, that the short journey down the Thames and around the coast took nearly three weeks to complete.

‘I have been very anxious to acquaint you of my arrival here, which I have now accomplished with some risk,’ Bligh wrote to Banks on 5 November from Spithead. ‘I anchored here last night, after being drove on the coast of France in a very heavy gale.’ His plan, as he now related, was to make as swiftly as possible for Cape Horn in order to squeak through a diminishing window of opportunity for rounding the tempestuous Cape so late in the season; as he observed to Banks, ‘if I get the least slant round the Cape I must make the most of it.’ Bligh was awaiting not only a break in the weather, but also his sailing orders, without which he could not sail. He did not, however, anticipate any difficulties, noting that ‘the Commissioner promises me every assistance, and I have no doubt but the trifles I have to do here will be soon accomplished.’

The days passed and the weather broke, and still Bligh’s sailing orders did not arrive. As the delay lengthened, his wife, Betsy, broke off nursing their youngest daughter, who was stricken with smallpox, and came down from their home in Wapping to take lodgings in Portsmouth. With impotent exasperation, Bligh watched other ships weigh anchor and slip serenely down the Channel, in the fair, fine weather. Each day that passed, as he knew, reduced the odds of a good passage around the Horn.

There had already been warning signs that the Bounty’s voyage, so beloved to Joseph Banks, did not stand quite so high in Admiralty eyes. Back in September, Bligh had received a distinguished visitor at the Deptford docks. Lord Selkirk, a Scottish earl, ostensibly came down to use his interest to find a position for his son’s tutor, William Lockhead, who was ‘an enthusiast in regard to Natural History’ and ‘most anxious to go round the World with Mr. Bligh’; Selkirk’s son, the Honourable Dunbar Douglas, was already set to join the Bounty as yet another gentleman ‘able seaman’. With his own son destined to sail with her, Selkirk took a closer look than most at the Bounty; alarmed at what he had seen, he wrote a frank and urgent report to Banks, drawing attention to ominous deficiencies.

The rating of Bligh’s vessel as a cutter, and not a sloop of war, was ‘highly improper for so long a voyage’, Selkirk wrote on 14 September, pointing out that the ship’s establishment did not include ‘a Lieutenant, or any Marines’. Marines essentially served the role of the commander’s security force, and Cook had never sailed on his Pacific voyages with fewer than twelve.

But perhaps most troubling to Lord Selkirk was the issue of Bligh’s own status: ‘I was sorry to find…Mr. Bligh himself is but very indifferently used, or rather I think realy ill used,’ Selkirk had written with some force. ‘It would have been scrimply Justice to him to have made him Master & Commander before sailing: nay considering that he was, I believe, the only person that was not in some way or other prefer’d at their return of all who went last out with Capt. Cook, it would be no unreasonable thing to make him Post Captain now.’ Cook, on his very first Pacific voyage, had also sailed as a lieutenant – but the prestige of that voyage had never been in question.

Although Selkirk did not disclose the fact, he was an old friend of Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, and it is probable that he had been leaned upon to communicate family concerns to Banks. These concerns were openly expressed in the farewell letter Betham himself wrote to Bligh a week later, offering his good wishes for the long voyage ahead: ‘I own I have a different Idea of [the voyage] from what I had conceived before I was acquainted with the Circumstances of the Vessel, & the manner in which it is fitted out,’ he told his son-in-law. ‘Government I think have gone too frugally to work: Both the Ship and the Complement of Men are too small in my opinion for such a voyage. Lord Howe may understand Navy matters very well, but I suppose mercantile Projects are treated by him with Contempt.’

‘Contempt’ is perhaps too strong a word; but the accumulation of troubling details – the miserably small ship, the determinedly lower rating, Bligh’s own status and the apparent lack of urgency in getting sailing orders – tend to suggest that collecting breadfruit in Tahiti was not at the top of the Admiralty’s list. Among other things, England seemed poised for yet another war, this time with Holland.

‘Every thing here wears the appearance of War being at hand,’ Duncan Campbell had written to a Jamaican colleague on 29 September. ‘Seaman’s Wages & every naval Store have of course risen to War prices.’ To an Admiralty intent on mobilizing ships and men, the Bounty’s breadfruit run to the Pacific was only a distraction. Three weeks would pass before Bligh received his sailing orders, by which time the fair conditions had changed.

On 28 November 1787, Bligh headed the Bounty out to sea, and got as far as St Helens on the Isle of Wight, an inconsequential distance, where he was forced to anchor. For the next twenty-four days, the Bounty bounced between Spithead and St Helens as each successive attempt to get down Channel failed in the teeth of contrary winds. Master Fryer and William Peckover, the gunner, were laid up by the bad weather with ‘rheumatic complaints’ and a number of his men had severe colds. Resentment and anxiety that had been mounting in Bligh for months rose to the fore.

‘If there is any punishment that ought to be inflicted on a set of Men for neglect I am sure it ought on the Admiralty for my three weeks detention at this place during a fine fair wind which carried all outward bound ships clear of the channel but me, who wanted it most,’ Bligh fumed in a letter to Duncan Campbell. It was 10 December, and he was back at St Helens, pinned in the cabin. This has made my task a very arduous one indeed for to get round Cape Horn at the time I shall be there. I know not how to promise myself any success and yet I must do it if the ship will stand it at all or I suppose my character will be at stake. Had Lord Howe sweetened this difficult task by giving me promotion I should have been satisfied.’

The question of promotion worried Bligh grievously. At the very least, as he had written to Banks, ‘that one step would make a material difference to Mrs. Bligh and her children in case of any accident to me.’ Moved by Bligh’s entreaties, Banks personally approached Lord Howe, the revered First Lord of the Admiralty, but without success, being told such advancement ‘was designed intirely as a reward to those who had engaged in the War equipment’; in other words, breadfruit expeditions did not count.

The hardship I make known I lay under, is that they took me from a state of affluence from your employ,’ Bligh continued, unburdening himself to Duncan Campbell, ‘with an income five hundred a Year to that of Lieut’s pay 4/- per day to perform a Voyage which few were acquainted with sufficiently to ensure it any degree of success.’

But interest had gone as far as it could. Meanwhile, if war was indeed at hand, this would be the occasion for promotions, although not for Lieutenant Bligh, off in the Pacific.

‘Poor fellow,’ Campbell would say of Bligh, somewhat later. Ignobly batted back and forth across the Channel entrance, Bligh, while not quite getting cold feet, was clearly assessing the risks of the voyage to which he was committed. Low pay was to have been compensated by promotion and the prestige of the undertaking; but there was no promotion and the prestige had already evaporated. Frustrated, demoralized, already tested by the weather, Bligh had not yet even left England.

‘It is wished to impress it strongly on your mind that the whole success of the undertaking depends ultimately upon your diligence and care,’ Banks wrote in an oppressively stern letter to the poor gardener David Nelson – but the warning applied equally to Bligh. ‘And that your future prospects in life will greatly depend upon your conduct on this occasion.’

One person on board, at least, benefited from the delay in the Bounty’s departure. Thanks to the rough weather, Fletcher Christian was able to meet his brother Charles, who had recently returned to England on the Middlesex, the East Indiaman on which he had been ship’s surgeon.

‘When the Middlesex returned from India, the Bounty lay near to where she was moored,’ Charles Christian recounted in an unpublished memoir many years later. ‘Fletcher came on Board coming up the River, and he and I and one of our Officers who had been in the Navy went on Shore, and spent the Evening and remained till next Day.’ There were family matters to discuss; their sister Mary had died in her twenty-sixth year, more than eighteen months before; their youngest brother, Humphrey, was soon to go to Africa. Doubtless, too, the brothers conferred over family finances. Things were looking up for Fletcher who, returned from the West Indies, could report that he was now off to Tahiti, with Cook’s sailing master.

But all of this was overshadowed by the news Charles Christian had to tell his younger brother. Certain events had transpired on the Middlesex that had shaken him to his core – indeed, they were eventually to lead to his mental breakdown. Two weeks before the arrival of the Middlesex in England, Charles Christian had been involved in a mutiny.

Trouble had begun as early as Fort Saint George, in Madras. David Fell, the second officer, claimed that he had been unlawfully confined on the ship, and that the governor of the fort had interceded and ordered him released. The Company’s surviving records tend to bear this out, showing that in July 1787 the Directors praised the governor for the ‘manner in which you interfered in the Disputes on board the Middlesex.’

The real trouble came to a head two months later, however, as the ship approached English shores. On 5 September, according to the log of Captain John Rogers, Mr Grece, seaman, was placed in irons ‘for Presenting a Loaded Pistol to my Breast with a threat that he would put the first Man to death who would offer to touch him.’ The first and second officers attempted to aid John William Grece and were dismissed ‘for aiding & assisting in the above Mutinous Conspiracy’ as well as ‘for Drunkeness, Insolent Language & striking at me on the Quarter Deck…The Surgeon also in the Conspiracy.’

Two days later, George Aitken, the dismissed first officer, came on deck when Captain Rogers was present, an action the captain interpreted as hostile. Calling on his other officers, Rogers had Aitken and David Fell confined below, ‘battened them both in their Cabbins,’ with a scuttle cut in the door for air. Twelve days later, the Middlesex reached the Downs, the sheltered anchorage between Dover and the Thames estuary.

The captain’s log, however, did not give the entire story. Upon return to England, the Middlesex officers and men sent a stream of furious and aggrieved letters to the East India Company’s Court of Directors, charging Captain John Rogers with brutal conduct.

‘I see myself bearing with Silence, insults, excessive severe to my Feelings, considering the Character I held,’ wrote seaman William Grece. Shortly before the fateful day of the mutiny, he claimed to have been ‘wantonly insulted’ by one of the passengers in the presence of the commander, who later ‘sent for me, Bent me, Ordered me to be Flogged to Death, and I believe, there was not much Hyperbole in this Order,’ Grece wrote, his rage still palpable in the fraught diction of his letter. ‘I am sure if He had dared, He would have done it, and ordered me in Irons, in which Situation, he treated me with inhumanity unparrelled, this every man in the Ship knows – all commanders of the Royal Navy allow Prisoners to do the necessary calls of Nature in another place than the small space, that they are confined in…

‘I think much Stress was laid with regard to the Pistol,’ poor Grece now ventured, knowing he was on thin ice: such an act in the navy would have meant his death. ‘I for a moment thought, to prevent myself being Seized, to be Flogged, but my conduct shews I had no intention of using it.’

The first and second officers leaped to Grece’s assistance, implicating themselves in the mutiny. They were joined by Charles Christian, whose own intervention resulted ‘from a sudden ebullition of passion springing from humane sympathy at seeing cruel usage exercised towards one who deserved far different treatment – on putting an ingenious, unoffending, insulted, oppressed, worthy young man into irons, by the capricious orders of tyranny influenced by a hollow sycophant,’ to quote Charles’s own, impassioned and inimitable account. Grece, Aitken and Fell were all roughly imprisoned, a punishment Charles escaped.

The Court of Directors deliberated, and handed out penalties all around. Captain Rogers was rebuked for not informing the Company of his actions towards his officers, and fined £500 and a year’s suspension for the unrelated offence of refusing passage to a Company seaman at Madras. Grece, Aitken, Fell and Christian were all handed suspensions – Grece for his lifetime, Charles Christian for two years.

But the incident did not end here. Although the final accounting would not be given until long after the Bounty had sailed, it has much bearing on Charles Christian’s credibility. The aggrieved parties brought civil suits against the captain.

‘I had to appear as the principal, the sole witness in their favour,’ Charles reported. ‘Lord Loughborough complimented me in court for the impartial and steady manner in which I gave my testimony.’ By juries’ verdicts, the plaintiffs were awarded £3000 in damages – an enormous sum, which must be taken as a reflection of the strength of their suit.

No doubt Charles Christian told the same story that had so impressed Lord Loughborough to his brother Fletcher, as they talked through the stormy night at the riverside inn. Charles’s friend First Officer George Aitken would have had his own heated version to relate of having been battened inside his cabin for his principled stand. But it seems that it was Charles who had been most affected by the events.

‘I went on board of this ship in hopes,’ he wrote, ‘as a tree in a state of pleasing promising blossom – full of life and active vigour. I returned as one withered with blight, palsy-struck, disappointed, dispirited, and full of heart-damping trouble.’ He was also impoverished. Before setting out he had borrowed £500 on credit for trade goods, but the ‘markets were glutted at Madras and at Canton in China, by the unusual number of ships sent out that season,’ and the money was lost.

For Fletcher Christian, these were unsettling stories to hear on the eve of departure, and he left his brother a broken man, with the judgement of the mutiny still hanging over him. In his turn, Charles’s last memory of Fletcher was more cheerful: ‘He was then full of professional Ambition and of Hope. He bared his Arm, and I was amazed at its Brawniness. “This,” says he, “has been acquired by hard labour.” He said “I delight to set the Men an Example. I not only can do every part of a common Sailor’s Duty, but am upon a par with a principal part of the Officers.”’

When the weather at last permitted the Bounty to sail on 23 December, both Bligh and Christian had much upon their minds – Bligh, demoralized and resentful; Christian, ambitious, but burdened with family matters, and shaken with the revelation of how a man could be broken by an oppressor’s tyranny. Both had everything to gain or lose on the Bounty voyage.

After many exertions on their behalf, neither Lord Selkirk’s son, the Honourable Dunbar Douglas, nor his eager tutor sailed with the Bounty. The tutor never obtained a position, and the young gentleman departed the ship just before she left Long Reach for the open sea. Perhaps his father had continued to mull over the ship’s troubling deficiencies – her improper size, Bligh’s lack of a single commissioned officer, the absence of marines to back his authority – and concluded that this was not, after all, an enterprise on which he cared for his own son to stake his life.