Lost ships and lonely seas

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

The fourteen mutineers had built a little schooner only thirty-five feet long, in which they were hoping to flee to an island more remote, but the Pandora swooped down before they were quite ready to embark. Captain Edwards seized this vessel to use as a tender, and manned her with two petty officers and seven sailors, who sailed away on a cruise of their own to assist in the search for the rest of the pirates, as they were called. The voyage of this tiny cock-boat of a schooner is one of the most remarkable tales in the history of South Sea discovery, but not even a diary or log remains to relate it in detail.

These adventurers were the first white men to set foot on the great group of the Fiji Islands, which Tasman and Cook had passed by. The exploit is sung to this day in one of the poems of the Fijian language which have handed down the traditions of the race from father to son. The little schooner was never seen again by the Pandora after they parted at Tahiti to go their separate ways; but after many months the master’s mate, the bold midshipman, and the seven handy seamen who comprised the crew came sailing into the Dutch East Indies.

The Pandora ransacked the South Seas in vain for Fletcher Christian and his party, and turned homeward after nine months of cruising on this quest. Having cleared the coast of New Guinea, the frigate crashed into the Great Barrier Reef while trying to find a passage through, and foundered after eleven hours of endeavor to keep her afloat by pumping. The discipline was admirable, and in the ship’s dying flurry four boats were filled and sent away, besides some rafts and canoes.

During those long hours, however, while the sailors were trying to save themselves and the frigate, the hapless mutineers were left in the “Pandora’s Box,” in leg-irons and manacles and utterly helpless. Three of them were finally allowed to work at the pumps, still wearing their chains, but Captain Edwards paid no heed to the prayers of the others, who foresaw they were to drown like rats in a trap. It was inhumanity almost beyond belief, for these prisoners could not have escaped if they had been released and allowed to swim for it with the rest of the crew.

His own officers and men interceded and begged permission to knock the shackles off the mutineers before the ship went down, but Captain Edwards threatened to shoot the first man who interfered with his orders, and to kill any of the captives who attempted to free themselves. He was the type of officer who is blindly, densely zealous and regards the letter of the law as to be obeyed under all circumstances. The Admiralty had told him to bring these fugitives back to England in chains. This settled the matter for him.

When the Pandora was about to plunge under, a council of officers formally decided “that nothing more could be done for the preservation of His Majesty’s ship.” The command was then given to quit her before she carried the crew to the bottom, but even then two sentries of the Royal Marines guarded the scuttle of “Pandora’s Box” with instructions to shoot if the mutineers tried to smash their irons.

The master-at-arms was a man with a heart, as well as a ready wit, and as he scrambled over the roof of the deck-house with the sea racing at his heels, he dropped his bunch of keys through the open scuttle. The frantic prisoners heard the keys fall and knew what they meant. In semi-darkness, with the water gurgling over the floor of their pen, they strove to fit the keys to the heavy handcuffs and the chains that were locked about their legs. It is a scene that requires no more words to appeal to the emotions a hundred and thirty years after these unhappy British sailors fought their last fight for life.

Ten of them succeeded in releasing themselves and were washed off into the sea, where the boats were kind enough to pick them up, but four of the mutineers were drowned with the ship, still wearing the irons from which Captain Edwards had refused to free them. It is probable that with the bunch of keys which the master-at-arms had dropped among them these four men had died while doing unto others as they would have been done by. It was almost impossible for a prisoner so heavily manacled to fit a key in the padlock that bound his own wrists together. One comrade helped another, perhaps, and so those who awaited their turn were doomed to die. And thus they redeemed the folly and the crime of that fantastic adventure in the Bounty.

Thirty men of the Pandora’s company were also drowned, but the survivors made a successful voyage of it in their open boats, across a thousand miles of the Indian Ocean, and reached the same Dutch port of Coupang where Lieutenant William Bligh had found refuge. Here they met the actors in still another thrilling drama of an open boat. A party of British convicts, including a woman and two small children, had stolen away from the penal settlement of Port Jackson on the coast of Australia in a ship’s gig, and had fled by sea all the way to Timor, living on shell-fish and seabirds and surviving ten weeks of exposure and peril.

They told the Dutch governor at Coupang that they were castaways from an English ship, and he believed the tale until the people of the Pandora came into port. Assuming they were survivors of the same wreck, a Dutch officer remarked to one of the convicts that the captain of their ship had reached Coupang. Caught off his guard, the fellow blurted: