The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
Caroline Alexander
Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PRELUDE
PANDORA
BOUNTY
VOYAGE OUT
TAHITI
MUTINY
RETURN
PORTSMOUTH
COURT-MARTIAL
DEFENSE
SENTENCE
JUDGMENT
LATITUDE 25° S, LONGITUDE 130° W
HOME IS THE SAILOR
A NOTE ON SOURCES
SELECT BI BLIOGRAPHY
Acknowledgements
INDEX
Praise for The Bounty
“With all the drama and intrigue of a rollicking adventure novel, Alexander’s beautifully written and painstakingly researched book goes a long way to rehabilitate one of history’s most notorious villains: Bounty commander Lt. William Bligh. Through letters, court testimony, and personal diaries, Alexander vividly re-creates the mutiny, the details of which changed, Rashomon-like, depending on the crew member telling the story.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A captivating and properly salty account. The Bounty is a retelling of a remembered story in the grand manner. Alexander is particularly good at bringing to the fore lesser-known parts of the Bounty’s story.”
—The Boston Globe
“Caroline Alexander has written a fine work of nonfiction, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, that will set the record straight and have readers searching for their Dramamine, so real is the action depicted therein. Her retelling of Bligh’s amazing feat of navigation—using the twenty-three-foot launch that he and a group of men were put into after the mutiny . . . would make a fine tale of seagoing heroism in itself. Alexander also gives us the story of the Pandora, the ship that collected some scattered mutineers for court-martial, and spins an amazing account of what happened to the Bounty, to Fletcher Christian and to the remaining mutineers who eventually settled on Pitcairn. All in all, The Bounty is a wealth of historical documentation, public record and narrative acumen. A breath of fresh, salty, sea air tossed upon the landlocked head of the unquestioning public. Alexander weaves various accounts and narratives into a seamless whole, making The Bounty the definitive word regarding one of the most infamous adventures ever to take place on the high seas.”—The Denver Post
“Alexander shows that this extraordinary story doesn’t need the [Hollywood] Dream Machine to enhance its inherent interest. Alexander helps both explain the popularity of this famous tale and dispel its many invented events.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Readers will find the true story in Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty, a fascinating book based on court testimony, diaries and other primary sources that draws a picture very different from the popular version. Alexander, author of the equally excellent volume The Endurance, produces a vivid narrative with psychological depth and a keen understanding of historical context.”
—BookPage
“In her captivating 1998 bestseller The Endurance, Alexander rescued from the mists of history the saga of Ernest Shackleton’s heroic 1914-1915 Antarctic expedition, shipwreck and small-boat voyage to safety against all odds. She does the same for William Bligh in The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty. The court-martial of the ten Bounty crewmen . . . reads like a courtroom thriller, so adeptly does Alexander compare the often contradictory statements of the accused and the witnesses. Alexander’s description of Bligh’s 3,618-mile forty-eight-day voyage to safety over the raging South Pacific in a tiny open boat under starvation rations is both fascinating and credible. [Bligh] died in 1813, honored by his navy but soon to be reviled by history. The Bounty ought to change all that.”—Chicago Sun-Times
“Alexander brilliantly shows how the rise of the Romantic hero in Western civilization served the treacherous Christian better than it did the irritable but courageous Bligh, whose forty-eight-day ordeal in an open boat remains one of history’s great feats of seamanship.”—Chicago Tribune
“Remembered as a villain, the Bounty’s captain was something closer to a hero . . . yet it is the mutineer who claims posterity’s sympathy, while ‘Bligh’ remains a byword for sadistic tyranny. . . . Against what Alexander characterizes as ‘the power of a good story’ Bligh stood no chance . . . [but] Alexander constructs a good story of her own from the historical record. The Bounty . . . will please its readers.”—Los Angeles Times
“Alexander has risen to the demands of an epic, adding even more resonance to one of the greatest mysteries of the sea.”
—The Seattle Times
“Alexander has done a remarkably skilled job of pulling together information from a multitude of sources . . . to retell a familiar story in a new light.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“[C]arefully documented . . . original and thought-provoking.”
—Library Journal
“Alexander takes and gives most pleasure in recounting the open boat voyage that Bligh and the few loyal members of his crew took in a small boat after the mutiny. She breaks new ground in scholarship in showing how the court-martial afterwards protected the well connected and condemned the possibly innocent and certainly poorer men. Alexander makes great arguments and turns the weight of historical opinion on its head . . . she does well enough to make the story feel new and even more complicated than before.”
—Orlando Sentinel
“Alexander shows her skill for bleeding drama from the seemingly parched carcass of history. . . . This important, gripping history is about very human misjudgments and their tragic consequences.”
—Seattle Weekly
“Retelling a familiar story, yet taking a fresh look at the drama . . . Alexander’s reconstruction of the mutiny and its aftermath is almost as remarkable as Bligh’s feat. Separating facts from falsehoods in the closing chapters . . . Alexander’s work is destined to become the definitive, enthralling history of a great seafaring adventure.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Alexander shows us in compelling detail a far more complex set of characters and situations than we usually encounter in the many tellings of this story. . . . From these pages, Bligh emerges as a masterly commander during times of serious crisis.”—Rocky Mountain News
“[A] compelling sea adventure . . . [and] an extraordinary work of historical research. The Bounty deserves to be read as a wild and fascinating story of British history and adventure on the high seas in an age of unparalleled exploration and naval superiority. But perhaps Alexander serves a greater need: she shows that truth is elusive, subject to the interpretation of historical social movements, and can be radically reinterpreted, even after centuries.”
—The Oregonian (Portland)
“A riveting, exhaustively researched narrative.”
—Boston Herald
“Blending a smooth interpretation of events with primary-source material, Alexander profiles history’s most famous mutiny in the same stylish manner she brought to Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. There is no dearth of original material to work from when piecing together what happened aboard the Bounty in 1789 . . . and Alexander has harvested all the best of it. She offers fascinating and credible explanations for the rise of the Fletcher Christian myth, and the devolution of Bligh to join the ranks of Quisling and Legree. A great sea story, handled with dexterity to capture characters and circumstances with faithfulness to the record and a steady feeling of anticipation for history in the making.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The definitive account.�
�—Newsday
“[A]bsorbing.”—Daily News (New York)
“Why the details of this obscure adventure at the end of the world remain vivid and enthralling is as intriguing as the truth behind the legend. In giving the mutiny its historical due, Caroline Alexander . . . revivifies the entire saga, and the salty, colorful language of the captured men themselves conjures the events of that April morning in 1789, when Christian’s breakdown impelled every man on a fateful course.”
—Staten Island Advance
“The actual mutiny is only one of several fantastic stories related to the Bounty—and Alexander does justice to all of them: the amazing voyages of Bligh and his supporters, the capture and trial of some of the mutineers, and the escape to Pitcairn Island by Christian and the others.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“As Caroline Alexander argues in this meticulously researched and smoothly readable revisionist history, the central part of the Bounty legend—that William Bligh was a tyrannical captain and Fletcher Christian a heroic rebel—simply is not true. Her own contribution to lifting the fog of romance and falsification from the story is valuable, and her book is interesting from first to last.”—The Washington Post
Included on the following lists:New York Times Editors’ Choice Best Books of 2003
Chicago Tribune Best Nonfiction of 2003
Amazon Editor’s Top 50 Picks of 2003
Selected as one of the Best Books of 2003 by:
San Jose Mercury News
Newsday
Chicago Sun-Times
Library Journal
The Oregonian (Portland)
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE BOUNTY
Caroline Alexander is the author of the international bestseller The Endurance and four other nonfiction books. She has written for The New Yorker, Granta, Smithsonian, Outside, and National Geographic. She is also the writer and coproducer of the award-winning documentary The Endurance. She lives on a farm in New Hampshire.
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First published in 2003 by Viking,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2004
Copyright © Caroline Alexander, 2003
eISBN : 978-0-142-00469-2
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TO SMOKEY
SHIP’S COMPANY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Every attempt has been made to use and quote from firsthand source material wherever available. In such quotations, the original and often erratic spelling, punctuation, grammar and typographical conventions (e.g., liberal use of uppercase initial letters) have been retained. In the case of John Fryer’s “Narrative” alone, punctuation has on occasion been added for more straightforward reading. Similarly, a few abbreviations common in the era (“wr.” for “weather,” “larbd.” for “larboard”) but now unfamiliar have been spelled out so as not to cause unnecessary stumbling over sense.
Personal names are particularly variable, and I have attempted to use the form the individual in question used where this can be ascertained, rather than to rely on Bounty story conventions. In the case of the ten mutineers brought to court-martial, this is not difficult to establish, as each of the ten defendants left a deposition signed with his signature: thus “Burkett,” not “Burkitt”; “Byrn,” not “Byrne”; although the alternate forms occur frequently in the language of second parties. In other cases, problematic names were established by correspondence, wills or similar personal documentation. Midshipman John Hallett’s father signed his correspondence “Hallett”—not, as Bligh and others wrote, “Hallet”—and so forth. There is strong evidence to suggest that Matthew Quintal, one of the mutineers, regarded himself as Matthew “Quintrell,” but here deference is made to the spelling adopted by his present-day descendants. Geographical places are referred to by their names at the time, with the modern equivalent in parentheses on first mention: Coupang (Kupang), Endeavor Strait (Torres Strait).
A nautical day began and ended at noon, with the noon sighting, not at midnight as in civil time. Thus the mutiny on the Bounty occurred on the morning of April 28, 1789, in both sea and civil time; some four hours later, however, it was April 29 by nautical reckoning. There is occasional awkwardness when the two systems collide, as when a returning ship comes into port, and a running commentary begun at sea resumes on land. No attempt has been made to convert sea to civil time; dates of events recorded at sea are given as stated in the ship’s log.
All mileage figures for distances at sea are given in nautical miles. A nautical mile consisted at the time of 6,116 feet, or one minute of latitude; a statute mile consists of 5,280 feet. All temperatures cited in the ship’s log are in degrees Fahrenheit.
One pound sterling (£1) comprised twenty shillings (20s.); a guinea equaled £1 plus 1s. The valuation of currency of this time can be gauged by certain standard-of-living indicators. Fletcher Christian’s mother expected to live comfortably on 40 guineas a year. A post-captain of a first-rate ship received £28 0s. 0d. (28 pounds, 0 shillings, 0 pence) a month in pay; a lieutenant, £7 0s. 0d. (7 pounds, 0 shillings, 0 pence); an able seaman, £1 4s. 0d. (1 pound, 4 shillings, 0 pence)—less deductions!
PRELUDE
Spithead, winter 1787
His small vessel pitching in the squally winter sea, a young British naval lieutenant waited restlessly to embark upon the most important and daunting voyage of his still young but highly promising career. William Bligh, aged thirty-three, had been selected by His Majesty’s government to collect breadfruit plants from the South Pacific island of Tahiti and to transport them to the plantations of the West Indies. Like most of the Pacific, Tahiti—Otaheite—was little known; in all the centuries of maritime travel, fewer than a dozen European ships had anchored in her waters. Bligh himself had been on one of these early voyages, ten years previously, when he had sailed under the command of the great Captain Cook. Now he was to lead his own expedition in a single small vessel called Bounty.
With his ship mustered and provisioned for eighteen months, Bligh had anxiously been awaiting the Admiralty’s final orders, which would allow him to sail, since his arrival at Spithead in early November. A journey of some sixteen thousand miles lay ahead, including a passage around Cape Horn, some of the most tempestuous sailing in the world. Any further delay, Bligh knew, would ensure that he approached the Horn at the height of its worst weather. By the time the orders arrived in late November, the weather at Spithead itself had also deteriorated to the extent that Bligh had been able to advance no farther than the Isle of Wight, from where he wrote a frustrated letter to his uncle-in-law and mentor, Duncan Campbell.
“If there is any punishment that ought to be inflicted on a set of Men for neglect I am sure it ought on the Admiralty,” he wrote irascibly on December 10, 1787, “for my thr
ee weeks detention at this place during a fine fair wind which carried all outward bound ships clear of the channel but me, who wanted it most.”
Nearly two weeks later, he had retreated back to Spithead, still riding out bad weather.
“It is impossible to say what may be the result,” Bligh wrote to Campbell, his anxiety mounting. “I shall endeavor to get round [the Horn]; but with heavy Gales, should it be accompanied with sleet & snow my people will not be able to stand it. . . . Indeed I feel my voyage a very arduous one, and have only to hope in return that whatever the event may be my poor little Family may be provided for. I have this comfort,” he continued with some complacency, “that my health is good and I know of nothing that can scarce happen but I have some resource for—My little Ship is in the best of order and my Men & officers all good & feel happy under my directions.”
