It was Commander Bligh himself who took to England the first tidings of the mutiny of the Bounty, which aroused great popular interest and indignation. In 1790 he published an account of his sufferings and the heroic voyage to Timor, and in response to the public clamor the Admiralty speedily fitted out the frigate Pandora to hunt down Fletcher Christian and his fellow-criminals and fetch them home for trial and punishment. The voyage of the Pandora resulted in tragic shipwreck and another sensational episode of open boats. As a sequel it is inseparable from the strange and unhappy romance of the Bounty and her people.
Captain Edwards of the Pandora frigate was a martinet of a naval officer, without sympathy or imagination, and the witchery of the South Seas held no lure for him. His errand was to run down the mutineers as outlaws who deserved no mercy and to take them home to be hanged.
First touching at Tahiti, the Pandora found that a number of the sentimental sinners still remained on that island, but that Fletcher Christian and the rest had sailed away in the Bounty to search for a retreat elsewhere. With a hundred and fifty bluejackets to rake the valleys and beaches of Tahiti, Captain Edwards soon rounded up fourteen fugitives, who were marched aboard the Pandora and clapped into irons.
EARLY AMERICAN SHIP OF THE 18TH CENTURY
A small house was knocked together on deck to serve as a jail for them, and was rightly enough dubbed “Pandora’s Box” by the sailors. It was only eleven feet long, without windows or doors, and was entered by a scuttle in the roof. In this inhuman little den the fourteen mutineers were kept with their arms and legs in irons, which were never removed to permit exercise. Sweltering in a tropical climate, the wonder is that they did not perish to a man.
There was suffering far worse to endure, however—the anguish of broken hearts. All of these men were torn from the native wives to whom they had been faithful and true, and their infants were left fatherless. Pitiful was the story of “Peggy,” the beautiful Tahitian girl who was beloved by Midshipman Stewart of the mutineers and to whom she had borne a child. She was allowed to visit him in the wretched deck-house of the Pandora, but her grief was so violent that she had to be taken ashore by force, and the young husband begged the officers not to let her see him again.
The light of her life had gone out, and she died of sorrow a few months later, leaving her infant son as the first half-caste born in Tahiti. Six years after this, a band of pioneering English missionaries visited Tahiti and heard of the boy and his story. They took this orphan of British blood under their own care and brought him up and educated him.
It is quite evident that Captain Edwards isolated his prisoners and treated them so harshly because of his fear that the bluejackets of his frigate might be stirred to a sympathetic mutiny of their own. It must have wrung the hearts of these honest British tars, who had sweethearts waiting at the end of the long road home, when, as the story runs:
The families of the captives were allowed to visit them, a permission which gave rise to the most affecting scenes. Every day the wives came down with their infants in their arms, the fathers weeping over their babes who were soon to be bereft of paternal care and protection, and husband and wife mingling cries and tears at the prospect of so calamitous a separation.