Читать книгу The Mutiny on the Bounty - Complete Trilogy - James Norman Hall, Charles Nordhoff - Страница 9

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One sultry afternoon, before we picked up the southeast trades, Bligh sent his servant to bid me sup with him. Since the great cabin was taken up with our breadfruit garden, the captain messed on the lower deck, in an apartment on the larboard side, extending from the hatch to the bulkhead abaft the mainmast. I dressed myself with some care, and, going aft, found that Christian was my fellow guest. The surgeon and Fryer messed regularly with Bligh, but Old Bacchus had excused himself this evening.

There was a fine show of plate on the captain’s table, but when the dishes were uncovered I saw that Bligh fared little better than his men. We had salt beef, in plenty for once, and the pick of the cask, bad butter, and worse cheese, from which the long red worms had been hand-picked, a supply of salted cabbage, believed to prevent scurvy, and a dish heaped with the mashed pease seamen call “dog’s body.”

Mr. Bligh, though temperate in the use of wine, attacked his food with more relish than most officers would care to display. Fryer was a rough, honest old seaman, but his manners at table put the captain’s to shame; yet Christian, who had been a mere master’s mate only a few days before, supped fastidiously despite the coarseness of the food. Christian was on the captain’s right, Fryer on his left, and I sat opposite, facing him. The talk had turned to the members of the Bounty’s company.

“Damn them!” said Bligh, his mouth full of beef and pease, which he continued to chew rapidly as he spoke. “A lazy, incompetent lot of scoundrels! God knows a captain has trials enough without being cursed with such a crew! The dregs of the public houses....” He swallowed violently and filled his mouth once more. “That fellow I had flogged yesterday; what was his name, Mr. Fryer?”

“Burkitt,” replied the master, a little red in the face.

“Yes, Burkitt, the insolent hound! And they’re all as bad. I’m damned if they know a sheet from a tack!”

“I venture to differ with you, sir,” said the master. “I should call Smith, Quintal, and McCoy first-class seamen, and even Burkitt, though he was in the wrong....”

“The insolent hound!” repeated Bligh violently, interrupting the master. “At the slightest report of misconduct, I shall have him seized up again. Next time it will be four dozen, instead of two!”

Christian caught my eye as the captain spoke. “If I may express an opinion, Mr. Bligh,” he said quietly, “Burkitt’s nature is one to tame with kindness rather than with blows.”

Bligh’s short, harsh laugh rang out grimly. “La-di-da, Mr. Christian! On my word, you should apply for a place as master in a young ladies’ seminary! Kindness, indeed! Well, I’m damned!” He took up a glass of the reeking ship’s water, rinsing his mouth preparatory to an attack on the sourcrout. “A fine captain you’ll make if you don’t heave overboard such ridiculous notions. Kindness! Our seamen understand kindness as well as they understand Greek! Fear is what they do understand! Without that, mutiny and piracy would be rife on the high seas!”

“Aye,” admitted Fryer, as if regretfully. “There is some truth in that.”

Christian shook his head. “I cannot agree,” he said courteously. “Our seamen do not differ from other Englishmen. Some must be ruled by fear, it is true, but there are others, and finer men, who will follow a kind, just, and fearless officer to the death.”

“Have we any such paragons on board?” asked the captain sneeringly.

“In my opinion, sir,” said Christian, speaking in his light and courteous manner, “we have, and not a few.”

“Now, by God! Name one!”

“Mr. Purcell, the carpenter. He....”

This time Bligh laughed long and loud. “Damme!” he exclaimed, “you’re a fine judge of men! That stubborn, thick-headed old rogue! Kindness.... Ah, that’s too good!”

Christian flushed, controlling his hot temper with an effort. “You won’t have the carpenter, I see,” he said lightly: “then may I suggest Morrison, sir?”

“Suggest to your heart’s content,” answered Bligh scornfully. “Morrison? The gentlemanly boatswain’s mate? The sheep masquerading as a wolf? Kindness? Morrison’s too damned kind now!”

“But a fine seaman, sir,” put in Fryer gruffly; “he has been a midshipman, and is a gentleman born.”

“I know, I know!” said Bligh in his most offensive way, “and no higher in my estimation for all that.” He turned to me, with what he meant to be a courteous smile. “Saving your presence, Mr. Byam, damn all midshipmen, I say! There could be no worse schools than the berth for the making of sea officers!” He turned to Christian once more, and his manner changed to an unpleasant truculence.

“As for Morrison, let him take care! I’ve my eye on him, for I can see that he spares the cat. A boatswain’s mate who was not a gentleman would have had half the hide off Burkitt’s back. Let him take care, I say! Let him lay on when I give the word or, by God, I have him seized up for a lesson from the boatswain himself!”

I perceived, as the meal went on, that the captain’s mess was anything but a congenial one. Fryer disliked the captain, and had not forgotten the incident of the cheeses. Bligh made no secret of his dislike for the master, whom he often upbraided before the men on deck; and he felt for Christian a contempt he was at no pains to conceal.

I was not surprised, a few days later, to learn from Old Bacchus that Christian and the master had quitted the captain’s mess, leaving Bligh to dine and sup alone. We were south of the line by this time.

At Teneriffe, we had taken on board a large supply of pumpkins, which now began to show symptoms of spoiling under the equatorial sun. As most of them were too large for the use of Bligh’s table, Samuel was ordered to issue them to the men in lieu of bread. The rate of exchange—one pound of pumpkin to replace two pounds of bread—was considered unfair by the men, and when Bligh was informed of this he came on deck in a passion and called all hands. Samuel was then ordered to summon the first man of every mess.

“Now,” exclaimed Bligh violently, “let me see who will dare to refuse the pumpkins, or anything else I order to be served. You insolent rascals! By God! I’ll make you eat grass before I’ve done with you!”

Everyone now took the pumpkins, not excepting the officers, though the amount was so scanty that it was usually thrown together by the men, the cooks of the different messes drawing lots for the whole. There was some murmuring, particularly among the officers, but the grievance might have ended there had not all hands begun to believe that the casks of beef and pork were short of their weight. This had been suspected for some time, as Samuel could never be prevailed on to weigh the meat when opened, and at last the shortage became so obvious that the people applied to the master, begging that he would examine into the affair and procure them redress. Bligh ordered all hands aft at once.

“So you’ve complained to Mr. Fryer, eh?” he said, shortly and harshly. “You’re not content! Let me tell you, by God, that you’d better make up your minds to be content! Everything that Mr. Samuel does is done by my orders, do you understand? My orders! Waste no more time in complaints, for you will get no redress! I am the only judge of what is right and wrong. Damn your eyes! I’m tired of you and your complaints! The first man to complain from now on will be seized up and flogged.”

Perceiving that no redress was to be hoped for before the end of the voyage, the men resolved to bear their sufferings with patience, and neither murmured nor complained from that time. But the officers, though they dared make no open complaints, were less easily satisfied and murmured frequently among themselves of their continual state of hunger, which they thought was due to the fact that the captain and his clerk had profited by the victualing of the ship. Our allowance of food was so scanty that the men quarreled fiercely over the division of it in the galley, and when several men had been hurt it became necessary for the master’s mate of the watch to superintend the division of the food.

About a hundred leagues off the coast of Brazil, the wind chopped around to north and northwest, and I realized that we had reached the southern limit of the southeast trades. It was here, in the region of variable westerlies, that the Bounty was becalmed for a day or two, and the people employed themselves in fishing, each mess risking a part of its small allowance of salt pork in hopes of catching one of the sharks that swam about the ship.

The landsman turns up his nose at the shark, but, to a sailor craving fresh meat, the flesh of a shark under ten feet in length is a veritable luxury. The larger sharks have a strong rank smell, but the flesh of the small ones, cut into slices like so many beefsteaks, parboiled first and then broiled with plenty of pepper and salt, eats very well indeed, resembling codfish in flavour.

I tasted shark for the first time one evening off the Brazilian coast. It was dead calm; the sails hung slack from the yards, only moving a little when the ship rolled to a gently northerly swell. John Mills, the gunner’s mate, stood forward abreast of the windlass, with a heavy line coiled in his hand. He was an old seaman, one of Christian’s watch—a man of forty or thereabouts who had served in the West Indies on the Mediator, Captain Cuthbert Collingwood. I disliked the man,—a tall, rawboned, dour old salt,—but I watched with interest as he prepared his bait. Two of his messmates stood by, ready to bear a hand—Brown, the assistant botanist, and Norman, the carpenter’s mate. The mess had contributed the large piece of salt pork now going over the side; they shared the risk of losing the bait without results, as they would share whatever Mills was fortunate enough to catch. A shark about ten feet long had just passed under the bows. I craned my neck to watch.

Next moment a small striped fish like a mackerel flashed this way and that about the bait. “Pilot fish!” cried Norman. “Take care—here comes the shark!”

“Damn you!” growled Mills. “Don’t dance about like a monkey—you’ll frighten him off!”

The shark, an ugly yellowish blotch in the blue water, was rising beneath the bait, and all eyes were on him as he turned on his side, opened his jaws, and gulped down the piece of pork. “Hooked, by God!” roared Mills as he hove the line short. “Now, my hearties, on deck with him!” The line was strong and the messmates hove with a will; in an instant the shark came struggling over the bulwarks and thumped down on deck. Mills seized a hatchet and struck the fish a heavy blow on the snout; next moment six or seven men were astride of the quivering carcass, knives out and cutting away for dear life. The spectacle was laughable. Mills, to whom the head belonged by right of capture, was seated at the forward end; each of the others, pushing himself as far aft as possible, to enlarge his cut of shark, was slicing away within an inch of the next man’s rump. There were cries of “Mind what you are about, there!” “Take care, else I’ll have a slice off your backside!” And in about three minutes’ time the poor fish had been severed into as many great slices as there had been men bestriding him.

The deck was washed, and Mills was picking up the several slices into which he had cut his share of the fish, when Mr. Samuel, the captain’s clerk, came strolling forward.

“A fine catch, my good man,” he remarked in his patronizing way. “I must have a slice, eh?”

In common with all of the Bounty’s people, Mills disliked Samuel heartily. The clerk drank neither rum nor wine, and it was suspected that he hoarded his ration of spirits for sale ashore.

“So you must have a slice,” growled the gunner’s mate. “Well, I must have a glass of grog, and a stiff one, too, if you are to eat shark to-day.”

“Come! Come! My good man,” said Samuel pettishly. “You’ve enough fish there for a dozen.”

“And you’ve enough grog stowed away for a thousand, by God!”

“It’s for the captain’s table I want it,” said Samuel.

“Then catch him a shark yourself. This is mine. He gets the best of the bread and the pick of the junk cask as it is.”

“You forget yourself, Mills! Come, give me a slice—that large one there—and I’ll say nothing.”

“Say nothing be damned! Here—take your slice!” As he spoke, Mills flung the ten or twelve pounds of raw fish straight at Samuel’s face, with the full strength of a brawny, tattooed arm. He turned on his heel to go below, growling under his breath.

Mr. Samuel picked himself up from the deck, not forgetting his slice of shark, and walked slowly aft. The look in his eye boded no good fortune to the gunner’s mate.

The news spread over the ship rapidly, and for the first time aboard the Bounty Mills found himself a popular man, though there was little hope that he would escape punishment. As Old Bacchus put it that night, “The least he can hope for is a red-checked shirt at the gangway. Samuel’s a worm and a dirty worm, but discipline’s discipline, begad!”

I believe that a day will come when flogging will be abolished on His Majesty’s ships. It is an over-brutal punishment, which destroys a good man’s self-respect and makes a bad man worse. Landsmen have little idea of the savagery of a flogging at the gangway. The lashes are laid on with the full strength of a powerful man’s arm, with such force that each blow knocks the breath clean out of the delinquent’s body. One blow takes off the skin and draws blood where each knot falls. Six blows make the whole back raw. Twelve cut deeply into the flesh and leave it a red mass, horrible to see. Yet six dozen are a common punishment.

As had been predicted, Mills spent the night in irons. The kind hearts of our British seamen were evident next morning when I was told that his messmates had saved their entire allowance of grog for Mills, to fortify him against the flogging they considered inevitable. At six bells Mr. Bligh came on deck, and bade Christian turn the hands aft to witness punishment. The weather had grown cooler, and the Bounty was slipping southward with all sail set, before a light northwest breeze. The order was piped and shouted forward; I joined the assembly of officers aft, while the people fell in on the booms and along the ship’s side. All were silent.

“Rig the gratings,” ordered Mr. Bligh, in his harsh voice.

The carpenter and his mates dragged aft two of the wooden gratings used to cover the hatches. They placed one flat on the deck, and the other upright, secured to the bulwarks by the lee gangway.

“The gratings are rigged, sir,” reported Purcell, the carpenter.

“John Mills!” said Bligh. “Step forward!”

Flushed with the rum he had taken, and dressed in his best, Mills stepped out from among his messmates. His unusual smartness was designed to mollify the punishment, yet there was in his bearing a trace of defiance. He was a hard man, and he felt that he had been hardly used.

“Have you anything to say?” asked Bligh of the bare-headed seaman before him.

“No, sir,” growled Mills sullenly.

“Strip!” ordered the captain.

Mills tore off his shirt, flung it to one of his messmates, and advanced bare-shouldered to the gratings.

“Seize him up,” said Bligh.

Norton and Lenkletter, our quartermasters—old pigtailed seamen who had performed this office scores of times in the past—now advanced with lengths of spun yarn, and lashed Mills’s outstretched wrists to the upright grating.

“Seized up, sir!” reported Norton.

Bligh took off his hat, as did every man on the ship, opened a copy of the Articles of War, and read in a solemn voice the article which prescribes the punishments for mutinous conduct. Morrison, the boatswain’s mate, was undoing the red baize bag in which he kept the cat.

“Three dozen, Mr. Morrison,” said Bligh as he finished reading. “Do your duty!”

Morrison was a kindly, reflective man. I felt for him at that moment, for I knew that he hated flogging on principle, and must feel the injustice of this punishment. Yet he would not dare, under the keen eye of the captain, to lighten the force of his blows. However unwilling, he was Bligh’s instrument.

He advanced to the grating, drew the tails of the cat through his fingers, flung his arm back, and struck. Mills winced involuntarily as the cat came whistling down on his bare back, and the breath flew out of his body with a loud “Ugh!” A great red welt sprang out against the white skin, with drops of blood trickling down on one side. Mills was a burly ruffian and he endured the first dozen without crying out, though by that time his back was a red slough from neck to waist.

Bligh watched the punishment with folded arms. “I’ll show the man who’s captain of this ship,” I heard him remark placidly to Christian. “By God, I will!” The eighteenth blow broke the iron of Mills’s self-control. He was writhing on the grating, his teeth tightly clenched and the blood pouring down his back. “Oh!” he shouted thickly. “Oh, my God! Oh!”

“Mr. Morrison,” called Bligh, sternly and suddenly. “See that you lay on with a will.”

Morrison passed the tails of the cat through his fingers to free them of blood and bits of flesh. Under the eye of the captain he delivered the remaining lashes, taking a time that seemed interminable to me. When they cut Mills down he was black in the face and collapsed at once on the deck. Old Bacchus stumped forward and ordered him taken below to the sick-bay, to be washed with brine. Bligh sauntered to the ladderway and the men resumed their duties sullenly.

Early in March we were ordered to lay aside our light tropical clothing for warm garments which had been provided for our passage around Cape Horn. The topgallant masts were sent down, new sails bent, and the ship made ready for the heavy winds and seas which lay ahead. The weather grew cooler each day, until I was glad to go below for my occasional evenings with Bacchus and his cronies, or to my mess in the berth. The surgeon messed with us now, as well as Stewart and Hayward, my fellow midshipmen, Morrison, and Mr. Nelson, the botanist. We were all the best of friends, though young Hayward never forgot that I was his junior in service, and plumed himself on a knowledge of seamanship certainly more extensive than my own.

Those were days and nights of misery for every man on board. Sometimes the wind hauled to the southwest, with squalls of snow, forcing us to come about on the larboard tack; sometimes the gale increased to the force of a hurricane and we lay hove-to under a rag of staysail, pitching into the breaking seas. Though our ship was new and sound, her seams opened under the strain and it became necessary to man the pumps every hour. The hatches were constantly battened down, and when the forward deck began to leak, Bligh gave orders that the people should sling their hammocks in the great cabin aft. At last our captain’s iron determination gave way, and to the great joy and relief of every man on board he ordered the helm put up to bear away for the Cape of Good Hope.

The fine weather which followed and our rapid passage east did much to raise the spirits of the men on board. We had caught great numbers of sea birds off Cape Horn and penned them in cages provided by the carpenter. The pintado and the albatross were the best; when penned like a Strasburg goose and well stuffed with ground corn for a few days, they seemed to us as good as ducks or geese, and this fresh food did wonders for our invalids.

With the returning cheerfulness on board, the Bounty’s midshipmen began to play the pranks of their kind the world over, and none of us escaped penance at the masthead—penance that was in general richly deserved. No one was oftener in hot water than young Tinkler, a monkey of a lad, beloved by every man on the ship. Bligh’s severity to Tinkler, one cold moonlight night, when we were in the longitude of Tristan da Cunha, was a warning to all of us, and the cause of much murmuring among the men.

Hallet, Hayward, Tinkler, and I were in the larboard berth. The gunner’s watch was on duty, and Stewart and Young on deck. We had supped and were passing the time at Ablewhackets—a game I have never seen played ashore. It is commenced by playing cards, which must be named the Good Books. The table is termed the Board of Green Cloth, the hand the Flipper; the light the Glim, and so on. To call a table a table, or a card a card, brings an instant cry of “Watch,” whereupon the delinquent must extend his Flipper to be severely firked with a stocking full of sand by each of the players in turn, who repeat his offense while firking him. Should the pain bring an oath to his lips, as is more than likely, there is another cry of “Watch,” and he undergoes a second round of firking by all hands. As will be perceived, the game is a noisy one.

Young Tinkler had inadvertently pronounced the word “table,” and Hayward, something of a bully, roared, “Watch!” When he took his turn at the firking, he laid on so hard that the youngster, beside himself with pain, squeaked, “Ouch! Damn your blood!” “Watch!” roared Hayward again, and at the same moment we heard another roar from aft—Mr. Bligh calling angrily for the ship’s corporal. Tinkler and Hallet rushed for their berth on the starboard side; Hayward doused the glim in an instant, kicked off his pumps, threw off his jacket, and sprang into his hammock, where he pulled his blanket up to his chin and began to snore, gently and regularly. I wasted no time in doing the same, but young Tinkler, in his anxiety, must have turned in all standing as he was.

Next moment, Churchill, the master-at-arms, came fumbling into the darkened berth. “Come, come, young gentlemen; no shamming, now!” he called. He listened warily to our breathing, and felt us to make sure that our jackets and pumps were off, before he went out, grumbling, to the starboard berth. Hallet had taken the same precautions as ourselves, but poor little Tinkler was caught red-handed—pumps, jacket, and all. “Up with you, Mr. Tinkler,” rumbled Churchill. “This’ll mean the masthead, and it’s a bloody cold night. I’d let you off if I could. You young gentlemen keep half the ship awake with your cursed pranks!” He led him aft, and presently I heard Bligh’s harsh voice, raised angrily.

“Damme, Mr. Tinkler! Do you think this ship’s a bear garden? By God! I’ve half a mind to seize you up and give you a taste of the colt! To the masthead with you!”

Next morning at daylight Tinkler was still at the main topgallant crosstrees. The sky was clear, but the strong west-southwest wind was icy cold. Presently Mr. Bligh came on deck, and, hailing the masthead, desired Tinkler to come down. There was no reply, even when he hailed a second time. At a word from Mr. Christian, one of the topmen sprang into the rigging, reached the crosstrees, and hailed the deck to say that Tinkler seemed to be dying, and that he dared not leave him for fear he would fall. Christian himself then went aloft, sent the topman down into the top for a tailblock, made a whip with the studding-sail halliards, and lowered Tinkler to the deck. The poor lad was blue with cold, unable to stand up or to speak.

We got him into his hammock in the berth, wrapped in warm blankets, and Old Bacchus came stumping forward with a can of his universal remedy. He felt the lad’s pulse, propped his head up, and began to feed him neat rum with a spoon. Tinkler coughed and opened his eyes, while a faint colour appeared in his cheeks.

“Aha!” exclaimed the surgeon. “Nothing like rum, my lad! Just a sip, now. That’s it! Now a swallow. Begad! Nothing like rum. I’ll soon have you right as a trivet! And that reminds me—I’ll have just a drop myself. A corpse reviver, eh?”

Coughing as the fiery liquor ran down his throat, Tinkler smiled in spite of himself. Two hours later he was on deck, none the worse for his night aloft.

On the twenty-third of May we dropped anchor in False Bay, near Cape Town. Table Bay is reckoned unsafe riding at this time of year, on account of the strong northwest winds. The ship required to be caulked in every part, for she had become so leaky that we had been obliged to pump every hour during our passage from Cape Horn. Our sails and rigging were in sad need of repair, and the timekeeper was taken ashore to ascertain its rate. On the twenty-ninth of June we sailed out of the bay, saluting the Dutch fort with thirteen guns as we passed.

I have few recollections of the long, cold, and dismal passage from the Cape of Good Hope to Van Diemen’s Land. Day after day we scudded before strong westerly to southwesterly winds, carrying only the foresail and close-reefed maintopsail. The seas, which run for thousands of miles in these latitudes, unobstructed by land, were like mountain ridges; twice, when the wind increased to a gale, Bligh almost drove his ship under before we could get the sails clewed up and the Bounty hove-to. I observed that as long as the wind held southwest or west-southwest great numbers of birds accompanied us,—pintados, albatross, and blue petrels,—but that when the wind chopped around to the north, even for an hour or two, the birds left us at once. And when they reappeared their presence was always the forerunner of a southerly wind.

On the twentieth of August we sighted the rock called the Mewstone, which lies near the southwest cape of Van Diemen’s Land, bearing northeast about six leagues, and two days later we anchored in Adventure Bay. We passed a fortnight here—wooding, watering, and sawing out plank, of which the carpenter was in need. It was a gloomy place, hemmed in by forests of tall straight trees of the eucalyptus kind, many of them a hundred and fifty feet high and rising sixty or eighty feet without a branch. Long strips of bark hung in tatters from their trunks, or decayed on the ground underfoot; few birds sang in the bush; and I saw only one animal—a small creature of the opossum sort, which scuttled into a hollow log. There were men here, but they were timid as wild animals—black, naked, and uncouth, with hair growing in tufts like peppercorns, and voices like the cackling of geese. I saw small parties of them at different times, but they made off at sight of us.

Mr. Bligh put me in charge of a watering party, giving us the large cutter and instructing me to have the casks filled in a gully at the west end of the beach. Purcell, the carpenter, had rigged his saw pit close to this place, and was busy sawing out plank, with his mates, Norman and McIntosh, and two of the seamen detailed to the task. They had felled two or three of the large eucalyptus trees, but the carpenter, after inspecting the wood, had declared it worthless, and instructed his men to set to work on certain smaller trees of a different kind, with a rough bark and firm reddish wood.

I was superintending the filling of my casks one morning when Bligh appeared, a fowling piece over his arm and accompanied by Mr. Nelson. He glanced toward the saw pit and came to a halt.

“Mr. Purcell!” he called harshly.

“Yes, sir.”

The Bounty’s carpenter was not unlike her captain in certain respects. Saving the surgeon, he was the oldest man on board, and nearly all of his life had been spent at sea. He knew his trade as well as Bligh understood navigation, and his temper was as arbitrary and his anger as fierce and sudden as Bligh’s.

“Damme, Mr. Purcell!” exclaimed the captain. “Those logs are too small for plank. I thought I instructed you to make use of the large trees.”

“You did, sir,” replied Purcell, whose own temper was rising.

“Obey your orders, then, instead of wasting time.”

“I am not wasting time, sir,” said the carpenter, very red in the face. “The wood of the large trees is useless, as I discovered when I had cut some of them down.”

“Useless? Nonsense.... Mr. Nelson, am I not right?”

“I am a botanist, sir,” said Nelson, unwilling to take part in the dispute. “I make no pretense to a carpenter’s knowledge of woods.”

“Aye—that’s what a carpenter does know,” put in old Purcell. “The wood of these large trees will be worthless if sawn into plank.”

Bligh’s temper now got the better of him. “Do as I tell you, Mr. Purcell,” he ordered violently. “I’ve no mind to argue with you or any other man under my command.”

“Very well, sir,” said Purcell obstinately. “The large trees it is. But I tell you the plank will be useless. A carpenter knows his business as well as a captain knows his.”

Bligh had turned away; now he spun about on his heel.

“You mutinous old bastard—you have gone too far! Mr. Norman, take command of the work here. Mr. Purcell, report yourself instantly to Lieutenant Christian for fifteen days in irons.”

It was my task to ferry Purcell out to the ship. The old man was flushed with anger; his jaw was set and his fists clenched till the veins stood out on his forearms. “Calls me a bastard,” he muttered to no one in particular, “and puts me in irons for doing my duty. He hasn’t heard the last of this, by God! Wait till we get to England! I know my rights, I do!”

We were still on the shortest of short rations, and Adventure Bay offered little in the way of refreshment for our invalids, or food for those of us who were well. Though we drew the seine repeatedly, we caught few fish and those of inferior kinds, and the mussels among the rocks, which at first promised a welcome change in our diet, proved poisonous to those who partook of them. While Mr. Bligh feasted on the wild duck his fowling piece brought down, the ship’s people were half starved and there was much muttering among the officers.

The whole of our fortnight in Adventure Bay was marred by wrangling and discontent. The carpenter was in irons; Fryer and Bligh were scarcely on speaking terms, owing to the master’s suspicions that the captain had lined his pockets in victualing the ship; and just before our departure, Ned Young, one of the midshipmen, was lashed to a gun on the quarter-deck and given a dozen with a colt.

Young had been sent, with three men and the small cutter, to gather shellfish, crabs, and whatever he might find for our sick, who lived in a tent pitched on the beach. They pulled away in the direction of Cape Frederick Henry and did not return till after dark, when Young reported that Dick Skinner, one of the A. B.’s and the ship’s hairdresser, had wandered off into the woods and disappeared.

“Skinner saw a hollow tree,” Young told Mr. Bligh, “which, from the bees about it, he believed to contain a store of honey. He asked my permission to smoke the bees out and obtain their honey for our sick, saying that he had kept bees in his youth and understood their ways. I assented readily, knowing that you, sir, would be pleased if we could obtain the honey, and an hour or two later, when we had loaded the cutter with shellfish, we returned to the tree. A fire still smouldered at its foot, but Skinner was nowhere to be seen. We wandered through the woods and hailed till nightfall, but I regret to report, sir, that we could find no trace of the man.”

I chanced to know that Bligh had called for the hairdresser, requiring his services that very afternoon, and had been incensed at Young when it was learned that Skinner had accompanied him. Now that the man was reported missing, Mr. Bligh was thoroughly enraged.

“Now damn you and all other midshipmen!” roared the captain. “You’re all alike! If you had gotten the honey, you would have eaten it on the spot! Where the devil is Skinner, I say? Take your boat’s crew this instant and pull back to where you saw the man last. Aye, and bring him back this time!”

Young was a man grown. He flushed at the captain’s words, but touched his hat respectfully and summoned his men at once. The party did not return till the following forenoon, having been nearly twenty-four hours without food. Skinner was with them this time; he had wandered off in search of another honey tree and become lost in the thick bush.

Bligh paced the quarter-deck angrily as the boat approached. By nature a man who brooded over grudges till they were magnified out of all proportion to reality, the captain was ready to explode the moment Young set foot on deck.

“Come aft, Mr. Young!” he called harshly. “I’m going to teach you to attend to your duty, instead of skylarking about the woods. Mr. Morrison!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Come aft here and seize up Mr. Young on that gun yonder! You’re to give him a dozen with a rope’s end.”

Young was an officer of the ship and rated as a gentleman, a proud, fearless man of gentle birth. Though Bligh was within his powers as captain, the public flogging of such a man was almost without precedent in the Service. Morrison’s jaw dropped at the order, which he obeyed with such evidence of reluctance that Bligh shouted at him threateningly, “Look alive, Mr. Morrison! I’ve my eye on you!”

I shall not speak of the flogging of Young, nor tell how Skinner’s back was cut to ribbons with two dozen at the gangway. It is enough to say that Young was a different man from that day on, performing his duties sullenly and in silence, and avoiding the other midshipmen in the berth. He informed me long afterwards that, had events turned out differently, it was his intention to resign from the Service on the ship’s arrival in England, and call Bligh to account as man to man.

On the fourth of September, with a fine spanking breeze at northwest, we weighed anchor and sailed out of Adventure Bay. Seven weeks later, after an uneventful passage made miserable by an outbreak of scurvy and the constant state of starvation to which we were reduced, I saw my first South Sea island.

We had gotten our easting in the high southern latitudes, and once in the trade winds we made a long board to the north on the starboard tack. We were well into the tropics now and in the vicinity of land. Man-of-war hawks hovered overhead, their long forked tails opening and shutting like scissor-blades; shoals of flying fish rose under the ship’s cutwater to skim away and plunge into the sea like whiffs of grapeshot. The sea was of the pale turquoise blue only to be seen within the tropics, shading to purple here and there where clouds obscured the sun. The roll of the Pacific from east to west was broken by the labyrinth of low coral islands to the east of us,—the vast cluster of half-drowned lands called by the natives Paumotu,—and the Bounty sailed a tranquil sea.

I was off watch that afternoon and engaged in sorting over the articles I had laid in, at the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks, for barter with the Indians of Tahiti. Nails, files, and fishhooks were in great demand, as well as bits of cheap jewelry for the women and girls. My mother had given me fifty pounds for the purchase of these things, and Sir Joseph had added another fifty to it, advising me that liberality to the Indians would be amply repaid. “Never forget,” he had remarked, “that in the South Sea the Seven Deadly Sins are compounded into one, and that one is meanness.” I had taken this advice to heart, and now, as I looked over my store of gifts, I felt satisfied that I had laid out my hundred pounds to good effect. I had been a lover of fishing since childhood, and my hooks were of all sizes and the best that money could buy. My sea chest was half filled with other things—coils of brass wire, cheap rings, bracelets, and necklaces; files, scissors, razors, a variety of looking-glasses, and a dozen engraved portraits of King George, which Sir Joseph had procured for me. And down in one corner of the chest, safe from the prying eyes of my messmates, was a velvet-lined box from Maiden Lane. It contained a bracelet and necklace, curiously wrought in a design like the sinnet seamen plait. I was a romantic lad, not without my dreams of some fair barbarian girl who might bestow her favours on me. As I look back over the long procession of years, I cannot but smile at a boy’s simplicity, but I would give all my hard-earned worldly wisdom to recapture if only for an hour the mood of those days of my youth. I had returned them to my chest when I heard Mr. Bligh’s harsh, vibrant voice. His cabin was scarcely fifteen feet aft of where I sat.

“Mr. Fryer!” he called peremptorily. “Be good enough to step into my cabin.”

“Yes, sir,” replied the master’s voice.

I had no desire to eavesdrop on the conversation that followed, but there was no way to avoid it without leaving my open chest in the berth.

“To-morrow or the day after,” said Bligh, “we shall drop anchor in Matavai Bay. I have had Mr. Samuel make an inventory of the stores on hand, which has enabled him to cast up an account of the provisions expended on the voyage so far. I desire you to glance over this book, which requires your signature.”

A long silence followed, broken at last by Fryer’s voice. “I cannot sign this, sir,” he said.

“Cannot sign it? What do you mean, sir?”

“The clerk is mistaken, Mr. Bligh. No such amounts of beef and pork have been issued!”

“You are wrong!” answered the captain angrily. “I know what was taken aboard and what remains. Mr. Samuel is right!”

“I cannot sign, sir,” said Fryer obstinately.

“And why the devil not? All that the clerk has done was done by my orders. Sign it instantly! Damme! I am not the most patient man in the world.”

“I cannot sign,” insisted Fryer, a note of anger in his voice; “not in conscience, sir!”

“But you can sign,” shouted Bligh in a rage; “and what is more, you shall!” He went stamping up the ladderway and on to the deck. “Mr. Christian!” I heard him shout to the officer of the watch. “Call all hands on deck this instant!”

The order was piped and shouted forward and, when we assembled, the captain, flushed with anger, uncovered and read the Articles of War. Mr. Samuel then came forward with his book and a pen and ink.

“Now, sir!” Bligh ordered the master, “sign this book!”

There was a dead silence while Fryer took up the pen reluctantly.

“Mr. Bligh,” he said, controlling his temper with difficulty, “the ship’s people will bear witness that I sign in obedience to your orders, but please to recollect, sir, that this matter may be reopened later on.”

At that moment a long-drawn shout came from the man in the foretop. “Land ho!”