[2] Asserted as a fact.
The opportunity soon came, and one day when he was in John Adams’ house, he was set upon and overpowered by the two other men. By means of a hatchet the dreadful work of death was soon completed. The daughter of John Mills (who lived to the age of ninety-three), then a young girl of eight or nine years of age, was an eyewitness of the awful deed, and used to relate how terrified were all of the little band of women and children who beheld the blood-bespattered walls. The dreadful scene was vividly pictured on her mind and memory through the long course of more than eighty years.
CHAPTER III.
The Mutineers Discovered
THE two chief causes of trouble and mischief being now removed, there was prospect of enjoying more tranquillity and peace than had ever been known before. Of the fifteen males who landed on the island, only two now remained. These two, Adams and Young, having the whole responsibility of the young and increasing colony devolving upon them, arose to the exigency of the case. Young was naturally of a thoughtful and serious cast of mind, and the scenes which he and Adams had witnessed, and in which they had participated, had the effect of deepening the serious impressions that had been made upon them both, and they resolved to train, as best they could, their own children and those of their unfortunate companions, in the paths of virtue and right. Young’s superior education better fitted him for the grave undertaking; but he did not long survive his repentance. He had long been afflicted with the asthma, and died of that complaint in the year 1800, about a year after Quintall’s death.
John Adams was now sole survivor. With a deep and abiding repentance for his former course of life, he strove to amend the misdoings of years by instilling into the minds of the young and rising generation around him right principles. Alone and unaided in the gigantic task, he suffered not his courage to fail in the endeavor, and his earnestness of purpose, directed in a right channel, could not fail to win some measure of success. The number of children that had been born to the mutineers was twenty-three. Fletcher Christian left three children; John Mills, two; William McCoy, three; Matthew Quintall, five; Edward Young, six; and John Adams, four. John Williams, a Frenchman, Isaac Martin, an American, and William Brown, an Englishman, left no children.
John Adams used to relate that it was through the influence of a dream that he was first led seriously to consider the condition of the helpless and ignorant youths who were so suddenly and unexpectedly left on his hands, and to arouse himself to the heavy responsibility that rested on him, as the only instructor that could be had for them, totally unfit for the task though he might be. It was a late beginning, but he engaged in the work with all his heart. A Bible and prayer book saved from the Bounty were the only means at his command in teaching the young people to read. But, with the blessing of God upon his humble efforts, John Adams had the satisfaction of seeing the children of such disreputable parentage growing up around him, quiet, peaceable, industrious, and happy, and with an increasing love of virtue and strict morality. A beautiful feature of the whole was the love that united them as one family under the fatherly control of John Adams. Such was the condition of life on Pitcairn Island when, in 1808, Captain Mayhew Folger, of the American ship Topaz, accidentally discovered that the island was inhabited. Following is part of a letter received by the writer from Mr. Robert Folger (a son of the captain above named), who kindly gave permission to make use of it. The letter was dated Massillon, Stark County, Ohio, August 4, 1882. After giving his reasons for writing, the letter proceeds as follows:—
“My brother, sister, and myself are the only surviving children of Captain Mayhew Folger, of the ship Topaz, of Boston, the discoverer, in February, 1808, of the colony on Pitcairn’s Island. I do not like to refer to the survivor of the Bounty crew on the island as a mutineer, for I cannot help feeling that the cruelty of Bligh to his men was such as to justify almost anything on the part of the people on board.... I may now say that I have been for nearly twenty-five years gathering facts in regard to Pitcairn’s Island.