Читать книгу Sextant: A Voyage Guided by the Stars and the Men Who Mapped the World’s Oceans - David Barrie - Страница 12

Day 5: Took the 0400 watch again. Another brilliant day with southerly force 2–3 wind, occasionally 4. Scarcely any cloud except on the southern horizon where there always seems to be a patch of cumulus.

After breakfast we checked our DR which puts us somewhere near the Tail of the Bank. I did another mer alt and Colin plotted our exact position using an earlier timed sun sight^fn1 – latitude 42° 42' N, longitude 52° 13' W. Still on a course of 120° at about 5 knots.

Over supper I mentioned how I had first heard of the sextant when I saw Mutiny on the Bounty. This triggered a string of reminiscences from Colin, who recalled the mutiny that broke out in 1931 at Invergordon in Scotland aboard some of the Royal Navy’s greatest ships – including the famous battle cruiser HMS Hood. Pay cuts were blamed at the time, but low morale on the big ships was the main factor, he thought. The smaller, more tightly knit crews of destroyers and frigates had caused fewer problems. I asked what he thought of Bligh. Colin did not think the film had painted a fair portrait of him: Bligh had been a great seaman and navigator and, like Cook, had risen from the ranks. Maybe his explosive temper reflected some kind of social insecurity. Colin also objected that, since Bligh was in his mid-thirties when he commanded the Bounty, Trevor Howard had been far too old to play him.

Colin was right about Bligh’s skills as a navigator. Bligh had sailed with Cook as master of the Resolution, a post to which he was appointed at the unusually early age of twenty-one. He seems to have enjoyed Cook’s approval; he certainly demonstrated great skill as a surveyor and draughtsman. But he was a difficult man. J. C. Beaglehole, in his magisterial life of Cook, says that he ‘saw fools about him too easily’, and that even at this early stage in his career he displayed ‘the thin-skinned vanity’ that was always to be his curse: ‘Bligh learnt a good deal from Cook: he never learnt that you do not make friends of men by insulting them.’¹

Bligh was actually involved in not one but three mutinies. These tempestuous events did not stop him reaching the rank of vice admiral,^fn2 but they have overshadowed his substantial achievements. Of these the most remarkable was his voyage in an overloaded 23-foot open boat after being set adrift by the Bounty mutineers in the Tonga Islands. The mutineers, led by the master’s mate, Fletcher Christian, comprised more than half the Bounty’s crew, and they were – in Bligh’s words – ‘the most able men of the ship’s company’.² Bligh later speculated that the temptations of Tahiti were the main cause of the mutiny. The crew had just spent twenty-three lazy weeks there while the gardener prepared the breadfruit seedlings for transplantation to the West Indies, and discipline had inevitably suffered.

Bligh was not surprised that ‘a set of sailors, most of them void of connections’, should wish to ‘fix themselves in the midst of plenty on one of the finest islands of the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond anything that can be conceived’. However, he claimed to be aware of no discontent and bitterly complained that he had thought himself to be on the friendliest terms with Christian. So he felt not only shock but also a personal sense of betrayal when, just before sunrise on 28 April 1789, Christian, accompanied by three other men, came into Bligh’s cabin, tied his hands behind his back and threatened him ‘with instant death’ if he made the least noise. While Christian held a bayonet to his throat, the members of the crew who had refused to join the mutiny were put over the ship’s side into the launch. The captain’s clerk tried to save Bligh’s surveys and drawings, but was forbidden to do so. Nor was Bligh allowed to take the chronometer or any charts. At last he himself was forced to board the open boat, which was promptly cast adrift. Equipped only with a sextant and compass,³ and very limited supplies of bread, pork, water, rum and wine, Bligh now faced the almost overwhelming challenge of bringing to safety the eighteen men who accompanied him.⁴

Bligh decided first to lay in a supply of breadfruit and water at the nearby island of Tofoa (now Tofua), but this plan went badly wrong. They were able to obtain very little in the way of provisions, and the natives – some of whom recalled Bligh from his visit to the Tongan archipelago with Cook fifteen years earlier – turned hostile when they realized the sailors were poorly armed and quite alone. Eventually they gathered on the beach, menacingly knocking stones together, and Bligh – who had witnessed Cook’s death – saw that an attack was imminent. He ordered all his men to get aboard the boat as quickly as possible, but stones began to fly and a member of the crew who had run back up the beach to cast off was clubbed to death. Bligh cut the painter and they escaped, under a barrage of well-aimed missiles, leaving their unfortunate comrade behind.

Despite the desperate shortage of supplies, Bligh and his companions decided not to risk landing on any of the neighbouring islands. Instead they headed west for Timor, in the Dutch East Indies, some 3,600 nautical miles away, as it was the nearest place where they could be sure to find help – and report the mutiny. To give some sense of the scale of this voyage, that is roughly the distance from Land’s End to the north-east coast of Brazil.

Shortly after leaving Tofua they were caught in a heavy gale:

the sea ran very high, so that between the seas the sail was becalmed, and when on the top of the sea it was too much to have set: but we could not venture to take in the sail for we were in very imminent danger and distress, the sea curling over the stern of the boat, which obliged us to bail with all our might. A situation more distressing has perhaps seldom been experienced.⁵

Everything now depended on Bligh’s exceptional navigational skills and remarkable memory. Taking observations with the sextant to determine their latitude – a difficult feat in an overcrowded boat often tossed about in heavy seas – while keeping track of their westerly progress with the help of a makeshift log-line,^{6 fn3} Bligh sailed towards the Great Barrier Reef, setting their course in accordance with his apparently detailed recollection of the charts he had been forced to leave behind. The food and water now had to be very strictly rationed. Such was Bligh’s devotion to duty that, even in these desperate circumstances, he continued to keep careful notes of the islands they passed – including the Fiji group which they were the first Europeans to discover – recording their latitudes and estimating their longitudes as best he could. In addition to their growing hunger and thirst, the lack of space made life on board the boat ‘very miserable’. Bligh kept half the crew sitting up on watch while the other half lay down in the bottom, or on the chest in which they kept their small supply of bread:

Our limbs were dreadfully cramped, for we could not stretch them out; and the nights so cold, and we so constantly wet, that, after a few hours sleep, we could scarce move.⁷

After three weeks things were starting to look hopeless. An occasional teaspoon or two of rum or wine helped to keep their spirits up, and the redoubtable Bligh survived almost without sleep. Another gale brought them to the brink of disaster, but even then Bligh was still taking sights:

At noon it blew very hard, and the foam of the sea kept running over our stern and quarters; I however got propped up, and made an observation of the latitude, in 14° 17' S; course N 85° W, distance 130 miles; longitude made 29° 38' W.

The misery we suffered this night exceeded the preceding. The sea flew at us with great force, and kept us bailing with horror and anxiety … At dawn of day I found everyone in a most distressed condition, and I began to fear that another such night would put an end to the lives of several, who seemed no longer to support their sufferings.⁸

When the weather eventually improved the heat of the sun became a serious problem, but the appearance of large numbers of birds, and the sight of stationary clouds on the western horizon, at last suggested that they were approaching land. In the middle of the night the helmsman heard the sound of breakers, and Bligh woke to see them ‘close under our lee, not more than a quarter of a mile distant from us’: they had made their landfall on the Great Barrier Reef, just as Bligh had intended. The following day they began to search for a gap through which they could pass:

The sea broke furiously over every part … I now found that we were embayed, for we could not lie clear with the sails, the wind having backed against us; and the sea set in so heavy towards the reef, that our situation was become unsafe. We could effect but little with the oars, having scarce the strength to pull them; and I began to apprehend that we should be obliged to attempt pushing over the reef. Even this I did not despair of effecting with success, when happily we discovered a break in the reef …⁹

Having passed within the reef Bligh took a mer alt in order to determine the latitude of the channel through which he had just passed – 12 degrees 51 minutes South – and recorded his DR longitude: 40 degrees 10 minutes West of Tofua. In fact the distance is more like 32 degrees, which goes to show just how hard it is to estimate the rate of progress at sea, even for an expert like Bligh. They then headed north, looking for a convenient place to land where they would not be at risk of attack from the natives. They found a suitable island and feasted on oysters and berries, their morale much improved. It now began to look as if they might have a chance of surviving. To be able to sleep ashore was, in Bligh’s view, almost as valuable to them as food.

Bligh followed the coast of Cape York Peninsula to the north, and passed through the Torres Strait into the open sea to the west, just as Cook had done in 1770. Given the extraordinary intricacy of the navigation among the many reefs and islands, he dutifully felt he should record directions, and regretted his failure to do so:

I … think that a ship coming from the southward, will find a fair strait in the latitude of 10° S. I much wished to have ascertained this point; but in our distressful situation, any increase of fatigue, or loss of time, might have been attended with the most fatal consequences. I therefore determined to pass on without delay.¹⁰

The remainder of the voyage was, if anything, even more testing than the earlier passage from Tonga. They survived on dried clams, and Bligh managed to catch a booby with his bare hands: he divided the blood among those who were in the worst condition and kept the rest of the bird for the next day. A small dolphinfish later gave them some relief, but the crew were growing steadily weaker, and Bligh began to fear that some of them would not last much longer. The boatswain ‘very innocently told me that he thought I looked worse than anyone in the boat. The simplicity with which he uttered such an opinion amused me and I returned him a better compliment.’

At three in the morning of 12 June 1789 they at last sighted land:

It is not possible for me to describe the pleasure which the blessing of the sight of this land diffused among us. It appeared scarcely credible to ourselves that, in an open boat, and so poorly provided, we should have been able to reach the coast of Timor in forty-one days after leaving Tofoa, having by that time run, by our log, a distance of 3618 miles; and that, notwithstanding our distress, no one should have perished in the voyage.¹¹

Bligh recalled that the Dutch settlement was at the south-west end of the island, so he headed that way, and finally found his way to Cupang (now Kupang), where he landed on 14 June. Although only one of the castaways had died (in the native attack on Tofua at the outset of the voyage), Bligh and his crew were a shocking sight, some scarcely able to walk as they struggled ashore:

An indifferent spectator would have been at a loss which most to admire: the eyes of famine sparkling at immediate relief, or the horror of their preservers at the sight of so many spectres, whose ghastly countenances, if the cause had been unknown, would rather have excited terror than pity. Our bodies were nothing but skin and bones, our limbs were full of sores, and we were clothed in rags: in this condition, with the tears of joy and gratitude flowing down our cheeks, the people of Timor beheld us with a mixture of horror, surprise and pity.¹²

Unfortunately, their problems were by no means over. The Dutch East Indies were extremely unhealthy and the various endemic tropical illnesses, including malaria and dysentery, were to take a heavy toll on Bligh’s crew – as they did on so many European visitors. The Dutch Governor, himself fatally sick, nevertheless made sure that the castaways were well looked after, and on 20 August Bligh was at last able to take passage to Batavia (modern Jakarta) in a small schooner. On 14 March 1790 he reached Portsmouth with eleven out of the open boat’s original crew of nineteen. The remainder had died of illness either in Indonesia or on the homeward voyage. Fourteen of the mutineers who had decided to settle in Tahiti were hunted down there, and four of them drowned when the ship in which they were being brought home for trial was wrecked off the Great Barrier Reef. The ship’s name was Pandora and, predictably, the cage in which the unfortunate prisoners were being held came to be known as ‘Pandora’s box’. Three of the surviving mutineers were hanged, but another, the young midshipman Peter (‘Pip’) Heywood, was pardoned and later enjoyed an illustrious career as a marine surveyor.¹³ The ringleader, Fletcher Christian, and eight others, together with some men and women from Tahiti, escaped to Pitcairn Island, where they remained unmolested even after they were discovered there in 1808. Their descendants live there today.

To have brought an overladen open boat across nearly 4,000 miles of tropical sea, without charts and with grossly inadequate provisions, stands as one of the most remarkable feats in the history of seafaring. Of course luck must have played a part in Bligh’s survival and that of his crew, as did their powers of endurance: they were certainly a tough group of men. Bligh’s own bloody-minded determination to see the mutineers brought to justice probably helped to keep him going. Were it not for his skill with the sextant and geographical memory, however, they would have had no hope of reaching Cupang. The mutineers no doubt had reason to complain about their commander’s behaviour, but they fatally underestimated his extraordinary navigational abilities.