A Mutiny Waiting to Happen

A new book published just in time to hit the shelves and gift book lists last Christmas, reexamines the Bounty mutiny, which occurred 223 years ago this past Saturday. Entitled BLIGH: William Bligh in the South Sea, its author, Anne Salmond, is a respected New Zealand anthropologist. Despite her credentials and thorough research of the extant letters that Bligh mailed to his wife, this book hypothesizes what set the stage for the mutiny just as previous other books, three major motion pictures, and a few songs have also attempted to do, often with great liberty concerning the facts. If Salmond’s new book proved anything, it is that this story of a mutinous non-story continues to capture the public imagination even today.

 

Mutinies weren’t all that rare in the 18^th century, particularly among the Royal Navy. Ships’ crews were often press-ganged into service, which for ordinary and able seaman – the bottom of the pecking order – was a notch above seaborne slavery. Ship Captains were a notch below God, and most of them were unspeakably cruel in meting out punishment for the slightest infraction, often administered by the lash, commonly called the cat o' nine tails.

Voyages often lasted a year or more. Crew members suspected of being “flight risks” were not allowed off of the ship until it returned to its home port. Food was abominable. Water was putrid. Beriberi and pellagra were commonplace. The ship’s surgeon was so poorly-trained, even in 18^th century medicine, that an accident or illness at sea – entirely curable today – were a death sentence to a vitamin deficient body of that day.

Two major mutinies, known in history as the Spithead and Nore mutinies, occurred in 1797. Otherwise, minor outbreaks in discipline – more like strikes – were frequent and harshly put down since the King put Royal Marines aboard each capital ship to back up the Captain’s authority. Their cause was often fueled by pay and conditions. But the mother of all mutinies occurred aboard the Hermione, a 32-gun frigate of Royal Navy, which was captained by 27-year-old Hugh Pigot, In his previous assignment as the Captain of His Majesty’s ship, Success, Pigot had ordered 85 floggings – whipping  nearly half his crew – and these beating were given in the space of just nine months! He had to have won the award for the cruelest ship’s captain in the Royal Navy, and when his men had had their fill of it, they murdered or mutilated all of the officers and the boatswain, throwing their bodies into the sea. One of the victims thrown overboard was just 13 years old. It was the bloodiest uprising in Royal Naval history.

If there had been an Internet or international news service, the Bounty mutiny would have gotten about as much press as a home break-in in Vancouver gets in the US. Much more newsworthy would have been the swearing in of George Washington as President of the new American Republic two days after Fletcher Christian took control of the Bounty. Or an even better international news flash would have been the separation of the royal and noble heads from their royal bodies, which occurred two and a half months after Fletcher Christian separated Lieutenant William Bligh from his ship.

A British ship was a floating class system. Warships were commanded by Captains with several subordinate lieutenants who would have in turn commanded warrant officers – the surgeon, boatswain, sailing master, purser, and gunner. All of them were considered gentlemen and addressed as such. The warrants could someday become commissioned officers and perhaps Captains. No warrant officer or above could be flogged nor have his rank changed by the Captain.

Below the warrants were the petty officers, some of whom were gentlemen who were in training to become officers. Others were not gentlemen and were skilled tradesmen. At the bottom were the able seamen and ordinary seamen, depending on experience. All served in their positions at the tolerance of the Captain.

The Bounty was little more than an armed cutter displacing 220 tons. It was commanded by one commissioned officer – a Lieutenant, Bligh in this case, who also served as the master of the ship. It carried no marines and a small crew of 46. Bligh was not born to the sea. His father was a customs clerk and as a young man with no money and no connections, the Navy was his best bet to become a professional with a reputation someday. After serving with Lord Nelson, Bligh signed on to accompany Captain Cook on his third and final voyage to the South Sea Islands. Cook had been Bligh’s mentor, teaching him many of the skills in cartography and seamanship that likely saved his life later in the Bounty mutiny. In the Cook expedition, the 32-year old Bligh was the sailing master of Cook’s exploration sloop, the HMS Resolution. During one of those exploratory sailings, Bligh witnessed the killing of Captain Cook in the Hawaiian Islands.

Just before Christmas in 1787, Bounty left Spithead for Tahiti bound on a voyage whose mission was to transport breadfruit trees to the West Indies where they were expected to provide a cheap, nutritious food source for slaves. The crew tried for a month to round Cape Horn at the tip of South America, but the weather and risks finally defeated them, and Bligh ordered a reverse course to sail east and transit the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa, crossing the Indian Ocean and around the southern end of Australia to make Tahitian landfall. This kept the crew at sea for ten months before weighing anchor in Tahiti, which they call “Otaheite.”

The delay meant living in Tahiti for five and half months before the plants reached a mature enough stage to allow them to be potted for the journey to the West Indies. However, during the voyage, Bligh’s true temperament began to be displayed. While author Salmond attempts to make the case that Bligh resorted to the lash a good deal less than his contemporaries of the day, his temper and ability to belittle and humiliate his direct reports in the presence of their subordinates and the Tahitians, who were uncommonly sensitive to such behavior, was without parallel.

On the voyage to Tahiti, Bligh demoted John Fryer, the ship’s sailing master, and appointed in his stead Fletcher Christian, thus setting the stage for a mutiny waiting to happen. Bligh was unfit to command long voyages at sea in close quarters with crew on a small ship and Christian was too thin-skinned to accept abuse or criticism which he always took as a personal affront.

During the almost half year the crew lived among the sexually permissive Tahitians, many of the men formed “connections” with Tahitian women and Christian married one of them who went by the name Maimiti. Venereal disease broke out among the sailors and natives, though it is uncertain who gave it to whom, since the women had been promiscuous with other crews who landed there. Bligh went on a rampage accusing Christian in front of his men and the natives of failing to maintain discipline and order among the crew. Christian simply was unable to absorb the insults. 

Moreover, the natives would periodically steal from the ship’s company – mostly iron tools, which were valued in a primitive society. Instead of confronting the native chiefs about the thefts, with whom Bligh worked hard at maintaining a good relationship (recalling the fate of Captain Cook), he instead flogged the crew from whom the tools were stolen.

Floggings had been resorted to only infrequently as the ship traveled to Tahiti. Now they were becoming commonplace. As a consequence, three crewmen decided to desert but were quickly recaptured. Their belongings implicated Christian and another crew member. Both denied a role in the escape and without evidence, Bligh was unable to pursue his suspicions.

But the closer the date of the ship’s departure came, the more paranoid Bligh became. His outbursts and behavior became unhinged. One witness to this period said that whatever the fault that might be found, Mr. Christian would bear its brunt. Bligh was anxious to get underway, but he failed to account for the loss of discipline and dissipation among a crew that had lived for six months in a society where every want was readily available and sexual permissiveness was paradisaical. In contrast months of hard sailing lay ahead, part of it through uncharted waters, and all of it with a commander with unpredictable behavior.

Bounty weighed anchor and navigated west to pass Palmerston and Tofua Islands where it was hoped armed crews could go ashore for water and food. Instead of two watches, Bligh organized three, putting Christian on one of the watches as they neared Tofua. Christian had obviously made up his mind. He seized control of the firearms during his night watch, broke into Bligh’s quarters, and hauled him to the deck still clothed only in a nightshirt.

The men were about equally divided whether to revolt or remain loyal to Bligh. But it had been a bloodless coup. Bligh and 18 of his loyalists (mutiny was a capital crime so they might not all have been Bligh loyalists, however, John Fryer was counted among the loyalists) were loaded into a 23 foot launch so full that water was only inches below the gunwales. They were given food, water, cutlasses but no firearms, a quadrant and compass, but no charts. Four loyalists remained aboard Bounty because there was no room for them in the launch. Those in the launch had less than a 50/50 of making it to the modern day province of Indonesia called Timor.

Bligh took charge and made for Tofua for supplies but was repelled by natives who stoned to death one of his men before they could reboard and push out to sea. Bligh by-passed the Fiji Islands since he lacked firearms to deal with the violent natives living there, and managed to navigate almost 3,700 miles in open sea, landing in Timor after 47 days at sea. He had lost only one man on Tofua although several others soon died due to diseases contracted in Batavia where they waited for a ship to return to England and report the mutiny.

Christian and the 18 men who remained with him returned to Tahiti aboard Bounty. About half of the men decided to stay in Tahiti, knowing it would be the first place to look for them if Bligh survived and got his story to England. The others took Bounty, some Tahitian men and women, and began looking for a place to hide. They found it on Pitcairn Island which was not on any British sea charts in its correct location. Settling there, they burned the Bounty, not only to prevent their discovery but also to prevent defections. Life on Pitcairn Island descended into a Hobbesian hell. Murders, vengeance killings, and natural death eventually decimated the inhabitants to ten survivors – one man, John Adams, and nine women. In 1808 an American seal-hunting ship, Topaz, landed on Pitcairn and learned their story, whether it is true or not. (Adams often contradicted himself.) The mutineers who had perished had, however, already had children with their Tahitian wives. Most of these children were still living when Topaz visited.

Adams and Maimiti claimed Christian had been killed while working near a pond while his wife, Maimiti, was pregnant. They had sons named Thursday October Christian, Charles Christian, and a girl, Mary Ann Christian. They are the ancestors of most people living today in the Norfolk Islands with that name. The “war” that killed Christian, later killed the Tahitian men. One of the mutineers got drunk and fell to his death from a cliff. Another was killed by the two surviving mutineers, one of whom died of asthma, leaving Adams.

Bligh made it back to England and told his story, encouraging the British to send a ship to hunt down the mutineers. It did. The Pandora found those who stayed on Tahiti and returned them to England. Three were hanged at Spithead. However, several of the mutineers were drowned when the Pandora foundered on the Great Barrier Reef and sunk. No one removed their chains. Others were held in a makeshift jail on deck and a kindly sailor unlocked their cage to allow them to swim free of the ship although they were later recaptured.

Ironically Fletcher Christian’s brother represented several of the mutineers and got their charges dropped. Edward Christian also put an end to William Bligh’s new-found fame in England by spreading the story that he was a tyrant and had caused the Bounty mutiny.

It didn’t help his reputation that Bligh was one of the Captains whose crews mutinied in the Spithead affair over pay and conditions. He was again involved in a mutiny during the Nore affair, where he later learned his nickname was the “Bounty bastard.”

Bligh then became the Governor of New South Wales, where his confrontational style caused another mutiny leading to his arrest and imprisonment. This incident is known in history as the Rum Rebellion. On January 26, 1808 – about the time the Topaz crew was learning the fate of the Pitcairn mutineers – a New South Wales settler, Major George Johnston, a British veteran of the Battle of Bunker Hill, led an assault on Government House in Sydney and arrested Bligh. He was held a prisoner for two years.

Bligh would finish his career in the Navy rising to the rank of Vice Admiral. His mentor James Cook had been promoted to the rank of ship’s Captain at age 47, holding the rank for only the last four years of his life before being killed. Bligh, on the other hand, was promoted to Captain at 36, holding the rank for 21 years before becoming a Rear Admiral and then a Vice Admiral. Bligh was an Admiral for longer than Cook was a Captain.

And yet, when Cook was killed by a Hawaiian warrior, an English man traveling abroad in Europe learned of his death in a letter from a friend in England. Responding, the traveler wrote back, “Poor Cook is truly a great loss to the Universe.”

No such comments were ever forthcoming when England learned of the death of Admiral William Bligh on December 7, 1817.