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

The Bounty was now as far south as the fortieth latitude, the ‘roaring forties’, and was drawing parallel with the coast of Patagonia. A wet, dense fog forbade sight of land, although south of Puerto Deseado the men ‘saw what was supposed to be the looming of it.’ Whales appeared in great numbers and seemed to enjoy lying in groups of two and three windward of the ship, expelling great blasts of spray over the men.

A strong gale arose on 20 March as the Bounty approached the Jasons, the northwesternmost of the Falkland Islands. Albatross, petrels and snowbirds flocked and hovered around the rigging, as if wishing to perch. The wind and sea became violent and Bligh was anxious to get south of the islands; he had by now given up his earlier plan of stopping here for wood and water. The weather was fast deteriorating and he could afford no delays.

Before dawn on 23 March, the goats and single dog on board began to agitate, and the men declared that the animals could smell land. Soon, in the moonlight, hills could be made out to the west, and when daylight broke the mountains of Tierra del Fuego could be seen, mostly free of snow.

‘I realy look upon the bad or Winter Weather not yet to be set in,’ Bligh wrote. ‘But as I must expect it hourly I have no right to loose a Moment…’

Skirting Le Maire Strait, they passed the desolate, mountainous country of Staten Island to the east. Now, at nearly the 55° latitude south, the Bounty was fast approaching the Horn. A hint of the weather they were in for hit the ship on 27 March, with the arrival of a strong gale and an ‘exceedingly High’ sea.

‘It would not be possible for a laboursome Ship to keep her Masts,’ Bligh observed. His ship, as he had often proudly noted, was not ‘laboursome’, but well behaved. Her hatches were all battened down, and although towering seas broke over her, so far the men kept ‘tolerably dry’. The temperature was now in the upper thirties, and the weather wet and raw.

‘I Ordered the People to have Wheat [porridge] served every day with Sugar & Butter to enable them to have a comfortable hot breakfast,’ Bligh logged. Hour after hour, his men were required to reef and hand the sails; then reset them; then reef again, up and down the perilous, pitching rigging in the menacing cold. The sea, Bligh wrote wonderingly, ‘exceeds any I have seen.’

When the gale moderated, Bligh ordered the belowdecks cleaned and dried. The sea was still so huge that he had difficulty taking sightings, as the mountainous waves swamped his horizon. Over the next few days the gales moderated, then increased, moderated, then ‘blew a Storm of Wind and the Snow fell so heavy that it was scarce possible to haul the sails up and furl them from the Weight and Stiffness.’ With the great sea running confused and contrary, sleet and hail began to fall.

‘At 6 In the Morning the Storm exceeded anything I had met with and a Sea higher than I had ever seen before,’ Bligh entered in his log. The ship was carrying only her staysails, all the canvas that could be risked.

‘My next business was to see after my People who had undergone some fatigue,’ Bligh wrote, his ship safe for the time being. A fire blazed continuously in the galley and someone was set to dry clothes around the clock. Bligh ordered large quantities of the ‘Portable Soup’ of which he was very proud, added to the men’s ‘Pease’, or pea pudding, ‘which made a Valuable and good dinner for them.’

Incredibly, the gales increased, carrying blasts of snow and sleet, the sharp winds piling the sea to windward ‘like a Wall’. Still, Bligh could note that blue petrels and pintados, ‘two beautiful kinds of birds,’ followed their wake. The Bounty was losing ground, being driven back the hard-won miles. At the close of 3 April, she was farther north than she had been six days before.

‘All I have to do now is to Nurse my people with care and attention,’ wrote Bligh, ‘and like Seamen look forward to a New Moon for a Change of Wind and Weather.’ The gale moderated in the early hours of the following morning, and although a cold rain fell, the men were able to check and service rigging as well as clean up and dry below. With fresh gales and mere squalls, the Bounty made headway, and over the next few days, under close-reefed sails, clawed her way to 60° 14’ south; this was to be the extreme limit of her southing. For ten days, Bligh pushed the Bounty and her men through squalls of sleet and hail, ‘dark wet nights’ and strong gales, through fog and high confused seas. At midnight on the thirteenth, the ship was hit by so severe a gale that the decks were ‘twice filled with the Sea.’ Now all pumps were worked every hour. Although the hatches were closed – and had been for close to three months – the belowdecks was awash and Bligh turned over his great cabin ‘to the Use of those poor fellows who had Wet Births.’ It is not noted if Bligh himself slept at all.

Despite all exertions – the constant fires, dry clothes, dry berths and hot food at every meal – the weeks since passing Staten Island had begun to take their toll. Huggan had his shoulder thrown out when the ship lurched, and in the midst of a ‘Very Severe’ gale and ‘a high breaking sea’, Thomas Hall, the cook, fell and broke a rib. William Peckover, the gunner, and Charles Norman, carpenter’s mate, were laid up with rheumatic complaints. Every man out of commission increased the burden of the remaining small crew.

‘I have now every reason to find Men and Ship Complaining, which Will the soonest determine this point,’ Bligh confided to his log.

That point soon came, and on 17 April, Bligh determined to abandon the Horn. Only shortly before his departure from England, almost as an afterthought, he had received (through the intercession of Joseph Banks) discretionary orders from the Admiralty to make for the Cape of Good Hope if the Horn proved impossible. This Bligh now determined to do. From there, he would approach the South Seas from the opposite side of the globe. The detour would add some ten thousand miles to the voyage, but there was nothing to be done. After twenty-five days of battle with the sea, the Bounty was, at 59° 05’ south, more or less where she had begun.

At eleven in the morning of the seventeenth, Bligh summoned all hands aft and publicly thanked them for attending to their duties throughout the trials of the last month. He then announced that he had decided to bear away for southern Africa. The General Joy in the Ship was very great on this Account,’ Bligh noted. His announcement was received with three hearty cheers.

It was, for Bligh, a bitter, difficult decision – so difficult that only days later when the weather took a moderate turn he was induced to make one last attempt, but this was quickly abandoned. Eight men were now on the sick list, mostly with ‘Rheumatick complaints’. This, as Bligh ruefully noted, was ‘much felt in the Watches, the Ropes being now Worked with much difficulty, from the Wet and Snow.’ The men aloft on whom fell the monstrous task of handling the sails were at times incapable of getting below in the face of the storm blasts, and when they did return they ‘sometimes for a While lost their Speech.’ Reconciling himself to defeat, Bligh ‘ordered the Helm to be put a Weather,’ and the Bounty headed for the Cape of Good Hope.

She arrived in False Bay, the preferred anchorage across the spit from Cape Town, on 24 May, after an uneventful passage. The sick men had recovered during the intervening four weeks, and refurbishment of the ship began almost at once. The day after mooring, Bligh administered a second punishment: six lashes for John Williams, a seaman from Guernsey, for neglect of duty ‘in heaving the lead’. In this case there was no expression of regret from Bligh.

The Bounty remained in False Bay for thirty-eight days, during which time she was overhauled from top to bottom, from her rigging to new ballast in her hold, as well as resupplied. Fresh meat, celery, leeks, onions, cabbages and – as a luxury – soft bread were brought on board for storage, while Bligh’s log daily notes ‘Fresh Meat & Greens’ served at dinner. This sojourn also allowed some pleasant diversions. In Colonel Robert Gordon, the half-Dutch, half-Scottish commander of the now considerable Dutch forces at this Dutch settlement, Bligh found an entertaining companion who shared a fondness for natural history and amateur exploration. Needless to say, Sir Joseph Banks had an associate out this way, botanizing at his behest. Francis Masson, once an under-gardener at Kew, had been at the Cape for a number of years, sending back specimens and seeds to Banks. From Masson’s collections would come plants familiar to generations of British gardeners – gladioli, geraniums and freesias.

A few days after mooring, Bligh set out for Cape Town proper to pay his respects to the governor. The twenty-five-mile journey was made by carriage along a partly treated, mostly sandy road that led across a central tableland skirted by mountains. Bligh was greeted warmly by Governor van der Graaff, who most gratifyingly expressed his wonderment that ‘any ship would have ventured to persist in a passage’ around Cape Horn.

Bligh’s record of his visit to Cape Town speaks only of his own impressions and it is not clear whether he made this short trip alone; but it is very possible that Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian accompanied him, for it was here at the Cape that Bligh advanced Christian money. Bligh’s attitude towards his personal finances was, and would be throughout most of his life, one of incessant anxiety and concern. Although securely a ‘gentleman’, William Bligh had from an early age been forced to make his own way in the world and, like many an officer on half pay, he had become accustomed to count and turn every penny. The road ahead offered no immediate source of improvement, and Bligh, as fastidious in his personal economy as in the running of his ship, was reconciled to a life of calculation, self-discipline and sacrifice; to the slow accumulation of security and comfort that would come only through a steady career. Unlike the Christians and Heywoods, whose anciently established sense of entitlement allowed them unblushingly to pile up debts amounting to thousands of pounds beyond any possibility of repayment, Bligh expected to balance his books. Worries about money had beset him as he departed Spithead, since, as he had noted to everyone, taking the commission had resulted in a calamitous drop in pay. Bligh’s loan to Christian, then, amounted to a significant act of friendship – one wonders whether Christian fully appreciated the compromise and anxiety this must have entailed. For his part, although freely given, this was not a gift that Bligh allowed himself or Christian to forget.

Some three weeks after the Bounty came to anchor, the Dublin, an East Indiaman, arrived in False Bay carrying part of the Seventy-seventh Regiment, under Colonel Balfour, saluting Bounty with eleven guns, she was returned with nine. A few days later, Bligh, Colonel Gordon, botanist Masson and a Mr Van Carman were invited on board for dinner.

‘We had a very merry Day of it and a great deal of dancing with the Ladies in the Evening to fine Moon light,’ one officer who was present recorded in his diary; it is gratifying to imagine Lieutenant Bligh indulging in a little social levity. Colonel Gordon entertained the company with stories of his remarkable travels into the interior and, to the astonishment of his fellow diners, even managed a Gaelic song.

In these agreeable circumstances, amidst the sympathetic company of fellow seamen from around the world who well knew the dangers of the southern ocean, Bligh reflected on what he had accomplished. ‘A Dutch Ship came in to day having buried 30 Men & many are sent to the Hospital,’ he wrote to Campbell, ‘altho they have only been out since the last of January.’ He, Bligh, had been out since the end of December. This is a credit I hope will be given to me,’ Bligh continued, confessional as always to Campbell. ‘Indeed had I not been very conversant in these matters I believe poor Fellows they would scarce ever have got here’; Bligh was referring to his own men, for whose lives he took full credit.

‘Upon the whole no People could live better,’ he exclaimed to Campbell, embarking on a description of his nutritious hot breakfasts and portable soups. ‘I assure you I have not acted the Purser with them,’ he let Campbell know, ‘for profits was trifling to me while I had so much at Stake.’

It was not only in his private correspondence that Bligh enlarged upon this flattering theme of his own successful man-management. His official log offered a short dissertation on the subject: ‘Perhaps a Voyage of five Months which I have now performed without touching at any one place but at Tenarif, has never been accomplished with so few accidents, and such health among Seamen in a like continuance of bad Weather,’ he began, not mincing words. ‘And as such a fortunate event may be supposed to have been derived from some peculiar Mode of Management it is proper I should point out what I think has been the cause of it.’

The mode of management was, needless to say, hot breakfasts, clean dry clothes, clean hammocks and a clean ship (‘in cleaning Ship all dark holes and Corners the common receptacles of all filth were the first places attended to’), dancing, infusions of malt, portable soup and sauerkraut. Once again, it is evident that in Bligh’s eyes, his small ship and forty-six-member company were embarked upon a historic enterprise.

‘Seamen will seldom attend to themselves in any particular and simply to give directions…is of little avail,’ Bligh added, echoing the sentiments of many a captain. ‘They must be watched like Children.’

Bligh was not the only man to take advantage of the layover to send reports to England. Thomas Ledward, the assistant surgeon who had joined the Bounty at the eleventh hour, wrote to his uncle describing ‘a continual series of the most violent and distressing weather that ever was experienced.’ The ship was in danger of becoming unfit from her exertions, he reported, continuing that he had no doubt the captain ‘will gain much credit by his resolution & perseverance & by the extreme care he took of the Ship’s company.’

Ledward had been in the habit of keeping a diary, but had just learned that all such private documents would have to be turned over to the Admiralty at journey’s end. While Ledward might not have known it, this had become standard practice since Cook’s first voyage, the purpose being to ensure that any officially sanctioned publication was not undercut by a private, competing work. Once the official account was out – in this case, to be written by Lieutenant Bligh – other accounts were usually permitted.

In the face of this new knowledge, Ledward determined, as he informed his uncle, to drop his diary. Other of his shipmates, however, were less circumspect. Someone, probably Charles Churchill, the master-at-arms, wrote an elegant memoir to the Reverend John Hampson, with the hint that he was ‘very desirous to have [it] publish’d and beg you will cause it to be inserted in the Public Papers as soon as possible.’ The report commenced with a brief essay on the breadfruit and references to Cook’s voyages and then briefly sketched the tempestuous voyage to Tenerife, the crossing of the ‘Equinoctial Line’, which he stated was celebrated with ‘the usual Ceremonies of Shaving and Ablution’ – no self-respecting seaman would confess that ducking, or ‘ablution’, had been prohibited.

Meanwhile, in the north of England, there appeared in the Cumberland Pacquet an ‘extract of a letter from a midshipman (aged sixteen) on board his Majesty’s ship “Bounty”’; this could only be from Peter Heywood. Either he too had requested publication, or his proud family felt the letter relating his adventures must be shared; they had already sent copies to various relations. Heywood’s report was mostly concerned with the attempted passage around Cape Horn, which had been ‘one continued gale as it seldom ceased for four hours together.’ But, echoing his captain’s sentiments, Heywood allowed that ‘the Bounty is as fine a sea boat as ever swam.’

All known firsthand contemporary accounts of the first five months of the Bounty’s outward voyage, then, indicate that after a passage of unprecedented severity, the Bounty’s crew were in good health, good spirits, forward-looking and, if anything, proud of what had so far been accomplished. There were not, judging from these letters, complaints worth writing home about.

The Bounty dropped anchor in Adventure Bay off the southern coast of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, seven weeks after departing the Cape. The passage had seen ferocious weather and much severe lightning; once the Bounty had been pitched almost on her beam ends, but as Bligh logged, ‘no damage was done but the overturning [of] some Tubs with Plants I had brought from the Cape.’ The plants were intended as useful gifts for the Tahitians.

With his ship safely anchored, Bligh set out by boat to scout the surroundings. The largely mountainous land appeared unchanged from when he, along with Nelson, Peckover and Coleman, had been here with Cook. Among the stands of massive trees that overlooked the island-studded bay, Bligh examined stumps that had been cut for the Resolution, eleven years previously. Later, Thomas Hayward pointed out to Bligh a tree trunk carved with a date from Cook’s second expedition, ‘as distinct as if it had not been cut a Month, even the very slips of the Knife were as discernable as at the first Moment.’ There was much Bligh encountered at Adventure Bay to put him in mind of his own voyage with Cook; ‘I cannot therefore help paying this humble tribute to Captn. Cook’s memory,’ he reflected in his log, ‘as his remarkable circumspection in many other things has shown how little he has been wrong.’

The following morning, Bligh divided his men into different parties, and sent them out on various duties. He had determined to work from Cook’s old base, where a gully disgorged water conveniently close to the chosen landing. One man was detailed to wash all dirty linen, while Nelson and his assistant, William Brown, set out to explore the country. Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian and William Peckover, the experienced and reliable gunner, were put in charge of the parties detailed to cask water and fell wood.

The weather blew squally, then fair, then squally with rain and rapid, racing clouds throughout the following days. The watering party rolled casks of water along the beach, loading them with difficulty into the waiting boats. The surf was troublesome enough to require the wood party, under Christian, to raft the timber out in bundles. In off-hours, some of the men went shooting and fishing with mostly disappointing results, although two black oystercatchers, largish black-and-white birds with long red bills, were shot by Mr Christian. All the men kept an inquisitive lookout for local people, but it was some days before any turned up. Dressed in little but kangaroo skins and with painted faces, they appeared to the Bounty men as ‘the most miserable creatures on the face of the Earth,’ as James Morrison bluntly put it.

On 23 August, there was the first unequivocal sign of trouble. Going onshore to inspect the various work parties, Bligh found William Purcell, the carpenter, cutting crude, unwieldy billets of wood. When Bligh complained that the billets were too long, Purcell accused his captain of coming onshore ‘on purpose to find fault’. Words were exchanged, Purcell became insolent and Bligh lost his temper and sent the carpenter back to the ship.

Now Bligh was made to feel the consequences of his inconveniently small company. He had no commissioned officer to turn to for authority and moral support – and no marines to back him up. Under the Articles of War, Purcell’s refusal to obey Bligh’s commands – let alone insolently talk back to him – was an offence punishable by court-martial. Yet, the prospect of holding a court-martial was well over a year away.

‘I could not bear the loss of an able Working and healthy Man,’ Bligh logged; ‘otherwise I should have committed him to close confinement untill I could have tryed him.’ As a warrant officer, the carpenter could not be flogged, and Bligh could find no recourse but to order him back to the ship to assist Fryer in other duties. Purcell seems to have had a keen appreciation of Bligh’s dilemma, for three days later Bligh was forced to log a second, lengthy complaint against him for disobeying Fryer’s orders to help load water.

Fryer informed Bligh of Purcell’s disobedience when Bligh returned to the ship with other members of the shore parties, who would have watched the encounter closely. Facing the broad Pacific and backed by a mountainous land so remote that only four ships from the outside world had ever previously touched it, Bligh had only his own authority with which to confront the carpenter.

‘My directions and presence had as little effect,’ Bligh recorded ominously. Purcell had refused to back down. Confinement of Purcell until such time as he could be brought to court-martial would rob Bligh of the carpenter’s skills and, in theory, other able-bodied work. Or so Bligh himself reasoned as he matter-of-factly devised a novel form of punishment: ‘I therefore Ordered the different Persons evidence to be drawn out and attested, and then gave Orders that untill he Worked he should have no provisions, and promised faithfully a severe Punishment to any Man that dared to Assist him.’

Bligh was satisfied with the result of this action, ‘which immediatly brought [him] to his senses…It was for the good of the Voyage that I should not make him or any Man a prisoner,’ Bligh concluded his account of the event. ‘The few I have even in the good State of health I keep them, are but barely sufficient to carry on the duty of the Ship.’

James Morrison gives an oblique, deliberately evasive reference to the confrontation, from which it is impossible to cull hard facts. But a single statement is unambiguous: here, says Morrison, in Adventure Bay ‘were sown seeds of eternal discord between Lieut. Bligh & the Carpenter, and it will be no more than true to say, with all the Officers in general.’ Fryer was probably one of these other officers; Bligh’s observation that he had to repeat his orders to the master (‘I repeated my injunctions to the Comm’g Officer Mr. Fryer’) is subtly troubling. Christian was in charge of the wood party, whose task of rafting timber through heavy surf seems to have been particularly difficult; now under personal obligation to Bligh, had he too been found lacking?

Bligh’s log ticked on, with descriptions of native encounters, lists of shrubs and herbaceous plants, and careful surveys of adjacent land. For him, the crisis with the carpenter had been satisfactorily addressed and the incident was closed.

The Bounty left the wooded shores of Adventure Bay on 5 September and headed into more wet, misty weather. A few days out, the southern lights, ‘as Red as blood’, inflamed the clouded sky. At night, phosphorescent medusae, long-tentacled jellyfish, glowed from beneath the sea. South of New Zealand, the ship unexpectedly came upon ‘a parcell of Rocky Islands’, devoid of all greenery, but patched with late snow – a discovery. Their position was duly laid down by Bligh and logged. ‘I have called them the Bountys Isles,’ he recorded solemnly.

The Bounty ploughed onward through often dark, cloudy weather and thick fogs, punctuated with gales of rain. Bligh’s log checked off each day’s consumed miles: 177, 175, 141. From England to Tahiti, the Bounty would eventually log 28,086 miles. Between his duties on deck, Bligh retired amid the pots to his cabin, and there, while his ship thrummed through the Pacific swells, carefully wrote up his log, made his natural history observations, and refined his charts and sketches. The odds and ends of plants he had collected at the Cape for Tahiti held majestic sway over the great cabin, where he checked them approvingly from time to time. There are few more touching images in his ship’s saga than this, the industrious lieutenant conscientiously acting the role of Captain Cook in his own miniature ship.