The cliffs to which their steps were directed were not more than an hour’s walk from the settlement at Bounty Bay, though, for Sally’s sake, the time occupied in going was about half-an-hour longer. It was a wild spot which had been selected. The towering walls of rock were rugged with ledges, spurs, and indentations, where sea-birds in myriads gave life to the scene, and awakened millions of echoes to their plaintive cries. There was a pleasant appearance of sociability about the birds which was powerfully attractive. Even Nehow, accustomed as he was to such scenes, appeared to be impressed. The middy and the botanist were excited. As for Sally, she was in ecstasies, and the baby seemed lost in the profoundest fit of wonder he had experienced since the day of his birth.
“Oh, Challie,” exclaimed his nurse in a burst of laughter, “what a face you’s got! Jis’ like de fig’r’ead o’ the Bounty.” (Sall quoted here!) “Ain’t they bootiful birds?”
She effectually prevented reply, even if such had been intended, by suddenly seizing her little charge round the neck and kissing his right eye passionately. Master Charlie cared nothing for that. He gazed past her at the gulls with the unobliterated eye. When she kissed him on the left cheek, he gazed past her at the gulls with the other eye. When she let him go, he continued to gaze at the gulls with both eyes. He had often seen the same gulls at a distance, from the lower level of Bounty Bay, but he had never before stood on their own giddy cliffs, and watched them from their own favourite bird’s-eye-view point; for there were thousands of them sloping, diving, and wheeling in the airy abyss, pictured against the dark blue sea below, as well as thousands more circling upwards, floating and gyrating in the bright blue sky above. It seemed as if giant snowflakes were trembling in the air in all directions. Some of the gulls came so near to those who watched them that their black inquiring eyes became distinctly visible; others swept towards them with rustling wings, as if intending to strike, and then glanced sharply off, or upwards, with wild cries.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to have wings?” asked Brown of Sally, as she stood there open-mouthed and eyed.
“Oh, wouldn’t it?”
“If I had wings,” said Young, with a touch of sadness in his tone, “I’d steer a straight course through the air for Old England.”
“I didn’t know you had such a strong desire to be hanged,” said Brown.
“They’d never hang me,” returned Young. “I’m innocent of the crime of mutiny, and Captain Bligh knows it.”
“Bligh would be but a broken reed to lean on,” rejoined Brown, with a shrug of contempt. “If he liked you, he’d favour you; if he didn’t, he’d go dead against you. I wouldn’t trust myself in his hands whether innocent or guilty. Depend upon it, Mr Young, Fletcher Christian would have been an honour to the service if he had not been driven all but mad by Bligh. I don’t justify Mr Christian’s act—it cannot be defended,—but I have great sympathy with him. The only man who deserves to be hanged for the mutiny of the Bounty, in my opinion, is Mr Bligh himself; but men seldom get their due in this world, either one way or another.”
“That’s a powerfully radical sentiment,” said Young, laughing; “it’s to be hoped that men will at all events get their due in the next world, and it is well for you that Pitcairn is a free republic. But come, we must go to work if we would have a kettle of fresh eggs. I see a ledge which seems accessible, and where there must be plenty of eggs, to judge from the row the gulls are making round it. I’ll try. See, now, that you don’t get yourself into a fix that you can’t get out of. You know that the heads of you landsmen are not so steady as those of seamen.”