Lost ships and lonely seas

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

The women of Tahiti are handsome, mild, and cheerful in manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much attached to our people that they rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise and even made them promises of large possessions. Under these circumstances it ought hardly to be the subject of surprise that a set of sailors, most of them without home ties, should be led away where they had the power of fixing themselves in the midst of plenty and where there was no necessity to labor and where the allurements to dissipation are beyond any conception that can be formed of it. The utmost, however, that a commander could have expected was desertions, such as have always happened more or less in the South Seas, and not this act of open mutiny, the secrecy of which was beyond belief.

It was a bloodless uprising and conducted with singular neatness and despatch. At sunrise of April 28, 1789, Fletcher Christian and an armed guard entered the commander’s cabin and hauled him out of bed in his night-shirt. His arms were bound, and he was led on deck, where he observed that some of his men were hoisting out a boat. Those of the ship’s company who had remained loyal, seventeen officers and men, were already clapped under hatches to await their turn in the very orderly program. A few of the mutineers damned the commander to his face and growled threats at him, but this was by way of squaring personal grudges, and he was not otherwise mistreated.

The boat was lowered and outfitted with twine, canvas, cordage, an eight-and-twenty gallon cask of water, a hundred and fifty pounds of bread, or ship’s biscuit, a little rum and wine, some salt pork and beef, a quadrant, a compass, and four cutlasses for arms. The seventeen loyal mariners were bundled overside, but Lieutenant Bligh hung back to argue the matter until Fletcher Christian roughly exclaimed:

“Come, Captain Bligh, your officers and men are now in the boat and you must go with them. If you attempt to make the least resistance, you will be instantly put to death.”

The commander of the Bounty was in no mood to carry it off with a high hand. He implored the master’s mate to forego the mad enterprise, and pledged his honor that if the men would return to duty he would make no report of it in England. He spoke of his own wife and children and the mercy due on their account, but Fletcher Christian cut him short and cried:

“I say no, no, Captain Bligh. If you had any honor or manly feeling in your breast, things had not come to this. Your wife and family! Had you any regard for them, you would have thought of them before now and not behaved so like a villain. I have been used like a dog all this voyage and am determined to bear it no longer. On you must rest the consequences.”

This ended the argument, and the boat was soon cast adrift, while the mutineers shouted a cheery farewell, and then roared out “Huzza for Tahiti!” while the Bounty swung off and filled away with a pleasant breeze. Lieutenant Bligh assumed that it was the deliberate intent to leave him to perish, because dead men tell no tales; but if this were true, the mutineers would not have been so careful to stock the boat with food and water and stores to last the party at least a fortnight without severe hardship.

They were within easy sailing distance of peopled islands, on some of which they might hope to find a friendly reception. By drowning them, Fletcher Christian could have obliterated all traces of the mutiny, and the Bounty would have vanished from human ken, gone to the port of missing ships. So infrequented were the islands of the South Seas that the mutineers might have lived and died there unmolested and unsought. Fletcher Christian was too humane a man for such a deed, the most upright and pious outlaw that ever risked the gallows.

The tale of the Bounty and of the tragic fate which overtook these rash and childlike wanderers in search of Elysium had been familiar to later generations, but the wonderful voyage of Lieutenant Bligh and his exiles in the open boat has been forgotten and unsung. Even to this day it deserves to be called one of the prodigious adventures of seafaring history. A man disgraced and humiliated beyond expression by the ridiculously easy manner in which his ship had been taken from him, Bligh superbly redeemed himself and wiped the stain from his record by keeping his open boat afloat and his men alive through a voyage and an experience unequaled before or since.

The boat was a small, undecked ship’s yawl only twenty-three feet long, such as one may see hanging from a schooner’s davits. Eighteen men were crowded upon the thwarts, and their weight sank her almost to the gunwale. They were adrift in an unknown ocean which teemed with uncharted reefs and perils, there was only a few days’ supply of food and water, and four cutlasses were the weapons against hostile attack. In the boat, besides Commander Bligh, were the master, the acting surgeon, botanist, gunner, boatswain, carpenter, three mates, two quartermasters, the sail-maker, two cooks, the ship’s clerk, the butcher, and a boy.