Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

MAPUHI, though a zealous Mormon, was not illiberal in his posture toward other faiths. In his long years he had entertained a number of them as ways to salvation before the apostles of Salt Lake sent their evangelists to Takaroa. A day or two after landing he brought to Nohea’s hut two aliens, whom, he said, I should know, because their language was my own. He introduced them as Jabez Leek, mahana maa mitinare, a “Saturday missionary,” and Mayhew December Christian, his assistant. They had come to the atoll to dive in living waters for souls. A few words and they were revealed as exceptional men, from far-away places. The Reverend Jabez Leek was my countryman, as were the opposing elders I had met here and at Kaukura. He said, with our half-defiant local pride, that he came from the home of “postum and grape nuts.” A divine of the Seventh Day Adventist persuasion, he cheerfully associated diet and religion, as do most sects, the Jews with kosher foods and no pork; the Catholics with abstinence from meat on certain days, and Mormons from alcohol, coffee, and tea; and Protestants with the partaking of the Lord’s Supper.

“I am hoping to win for the true Christ a few souls for saving from the lake of fire in that final day,” said the Reverend Mr. Leek, with the accent of sincerity. There are few hypocrites among missionaries. They believe in their remedies.

Mapuhi, when Mr. Leek’s declaration was interpreted to him by Mayhew December Christian, was stirred. He said so, and the most interesting subject in the world to elderly people the world over—the state of man after death—was discussed eagerly, though with the reserve of proselytizing disputants. They agreed that in Mormonism and Seventh Day Adventism they had in common the personal reign of Christ on earth and prophecy. Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, the pastor from Battle Creek, Michigan, compared with the God-inspired Ellen G. White, who, he said, had led humanity back to the infallibility and perfection of the Bible as the sole rule of life and faith. They both believed in a Supreme God, and that only in the last century, two thousand years after his son had been here in person, God had raised up men and women to conduct sinners to paradise. It had been a revolutionary century in revealed religion. The Battle Creek preacher began to tell of the apocalyptic Mrs. White and her prophetic announcements, and Mapuhi was beginning to prick up his big brown ears when he was called away. The Mormon elders needed him in a conference. The slow, interpreted speech of the minister flowed into rapid English as he directed his words to me and Mr. Christian. The latter was evidently of mixed blood, with Anglo-Saxon features, light-brown hair, dark-blue eyes, but a dark skin and the voluptuous mouth of these seas. His voice, too, had a unique timbre, and his English was slightly confused by Polynesian arrangement of sentences.

“God has set his seal upon rebellion for his own purposes,” continued Leek. “The conflict with Satan is fiercer every year, but the Lord listens to those who supplicate him. He is proof of his mercy.”

He put his hand on the shoulder of Mayhew December Christian.

“The first white settlers in the South Seas were rebels. They were traitors to their king, murderers, and revolters against religion, morals, and society. They were in the hands of Satan, and some of them must perish in the lake of fire after the final judgment. But Christian here is a true sample of the strange way God works out his plans. He is a great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny of the British ship Bounty, and he is a Seventh Day Adventist and a missionary of our denomination.”

The mutiny of the Bounty! A phrase projects a hazy page of history or raises the curtain upon an almost-forgotten episode. Fletcher Christian! There was a name. They frightened children with it while he was still alive, and it became a synonym for insubordination at sea. A thousand sailors in two generations were spread-eagled or hailed to the mast and given the cat while the offended officer shouted, “You’d be a damned Christian, would you? I’ll take the Christian out o’ you!” He and his desperate gang had committed the most romantically infamous crime of their time, and their story had been for a hundred years singular in the manifold annals of violent deeds in the tropics. Their rebellion and its outcome was written scarlet in the records of admiralty, and for long was a mysterious study for psychologists, a dreadful illustration to the godly of sin’s certain punishment, and the most fascinating of temptations to seamen and adventurers.

The Bounty had gone to Tahiti from England to transport breadfruit-trees to the West Indies. George III was on the throne of maritime England, and between the equator and the polar circle his flag flew almost undisputed. Captain Cook had carried home knowledge of the marvelous fruit in Tahiti, “about the size and shape of a child’s head, and with a taste between the crumb of wheaten bread and Jerusalem artichoke.” The West Indies had only the scarcely wholesome roots of the manioc and cassava as the main food of the African slaves, and their owners believed that if the breadfruit were plentiful there, the negroes would be able to work harder. Lieutenant Bligh, Cook’s sailing-master, was despatched with forty-four men in the two-hundred-ton Bounty to secure the trees in the Society Islands, and fetch them to St. Vincent and Jamaica. When they at last reached maturity there, the slaves refused to eat them, and another dream of perfection went by the board.

Bligh was a hell-roarer of the quarter-deck, of the stripe less common to-day than then, only because of such mutinies as it prompted. Crowded in a leaky ship, with moldy and scanty provisions, half around Cape Horn, and all around Cape of Good Hope, after twenty-seven thousand miles of sailing, and a year and two months of harsh discipline and depressing lack of decent food or sufficient water, the green and lovely shores of Tahiti were a haven to the weary tars. They were greeted as heaven-sent, and for six months they ate the fruits of the Isle of Venus, swam in its clear streams, and were made love to by its passionate and free-giving women in its groves. When, with a thousand breadfruit shoots aboard, Bligh ordered up-anchor and away, the contrast between the sweets of the present and the prospect of another year of Bligh’s tyranny, with a certainty of poverty in England or hardship at sea, turned the scale against the commander. An attempt to wreck the ship by cutting its cable failed, but the second night of the homeward voyage Fletcher Christian, master’s mate, who had made three voyages under Bligh, being in charge of the deck, led a mutiny. Bligh was seized in his bunk, bound, and, with eighteen of the crew who were not in the plot, and a small amount of food and water, set adrift in a small boat. Bligh’s party reached Malaysia after overcoming overwhelming dangers and sufferings, and most of them went from there in a merchant’s ship to London, where Bligh’s account of the mutiny, and his and his loyal men’s wanderings, “filled all England with the deepest sympathy, as well as horror of the crime by which they had been plunged into so dreadful a situation.” The frigate Pandora, with twenty-four guns and 166 fighting men, blessed by bishops, and with a special word from the king, but just temporarily recovered from his recurrent insanity, sailed speedily to “apprehend the mutineers.”

Those hearties had meanwhile arranged their own fates. The Bounty was now a democracy with Christian as president, and the vote, after an experiment in another islet, was to go back to the fair ones in the groves of Tahiti. There sixteen of the twenty-five aboard, determined to become landsmen, and, with the joyous shouts and hula harmonies of their native friends, transferred their share of the plunder on the ship to the shore, and went to dancing among the breadfruits. Christian was shrewder. He knew well the long arm of the British monarchy, and warned his shipmates their haven would be but for a little while. They were capering to the pipes of Pan and would not listen, and so with nine Englishmen, six Tahitian men, ten Tahitian belles, and a girl of fifteen, the Bounty weighed and steered a course unknown to those who stayed.