The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (54 page)

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Authors: Caroline Alexander

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Great Britain, #Military, #Naval

BOOK: The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
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But, whether the letter came to Edward as a great surprise or as a piece in a carefully constructed design, it did the trick. Fletcher’s brother now had a respectable pretext to enter the debate—and to conduct his own public “investigation” of what had happened on the
Bounty.
Consequently, by the time Bligh returned to England, Edward had engaged in his
Bounty
researches for close to a year. Evidently, he passed on some of his findings to Joseph Banks, who gave no sign that he had been especially shaken by them, and shortly after the
Providence
’s return Banks in turn passed the papers he had received from Edward on to Bligh.
 
By way of preface, the
Cumberland Pacquet
suggested that the contents of Peter’s anonymous letter would enable the public “to correct the erroneous opinions, which, from a certain false narrative they have long entertained, and to distinguish between the audacious and hardened depravity of the heart which no suffering can soften, and the desperation of an ingenious mind torn and agonized by unprovoked and incessant abuse and disgrace.” The “false narrative” referred to Bligh’s published account; the “ingenious mind torn and agonized by unprovoked and incessant abuse and disgrace” referred to Fletcher Christian.
 
 
Though there may be certain actions, which even the torture and extremity of provocation cannot justify, yet a sudden act of phrenzy, so circumstanced, is far removed in reason and mercy from the foul deliberate contempt of every religious and virtuous sentiment and obligation, excited by selfish and base gratifications.—For the honour of this county we are happy to assure our readers that one of its natives, FLETCHER CHRISTIAN, is not the detestable and horrid monster of wickedness, which with extreme and perhaps unexampled injustice and barbarity to him and his relations he has long been represented, but a character of whom every feeling heart must now sincerely grieve and lament.
 
 
 
A gentleman who had attended the court-martial as an advocate, the newspaper announced, would shortly “communicate,” or publish, astonishing new information arising from the court-martial. As it would turn out, this advocate was to be not Aaron Graham but the more inscrutable Stephen Barney.
 
But no such revelations had in fact arisen in the court-martial, certainly nothing to raise the eyebrows of twelve seasoned naval captains. Four points could have invited further questioning by the curious: Peckover, the gunner, had reported that David Nelson had said “we know who is to blame”; jeers about living on “three fourths of a Pound of Yams a day” had been aimed at Bligh as he was put in the launch; Christian had been “in hell” for two weeks before the mutiny—according to Fryer, on account of the frequent quarrels with Bligh; and finally, the night before the mutiny Bligh had charged his officers with stealing coconuts. Yet, in a profession in which a captain enjoyed almost total and arbitrary power over all who served under him, the knowledge that Bligh had severely chastised his men over stolen coconuts was not the kind of event to rivet attention. Nor was it likely that any of the presiding captains had served on ships in which there had not been grousing over rations. Whatever concerns had arisen during the period of the court-martial would not seem to have been raised within the actual courtroom.
 
Following his receipt of this revelatory letter, Edward Christian summoned and interviewed “three other officers” and two of the sailors who had been acquitted at the court-martial, “being all the persons belonging to the
Bounty
who could be found in the neighborhood of London,” as the newspapers reported.
 
Thus began Edward’s diligent, in some ways admirable but ultimately mischievous, informal commission of inquiry, the results of which he went on to publish. A panel of eleven legal associates and friends was convened to witness his interviews with the various
Bounty
men. This panel never met as a body, but various combinations of members met sometimes with one witness, sometimes with several; some participants may have attended only once out of curiosity, others may have taken a lively ongoing interest in the cause—the ground rules of participation were not spelled out. Some of the interviews were conducted in Edward’s Gray’s Inn chambers, but a number were also conducted at a Greenwich public house, the Crown and Sceptre. Built of weathered timber, with back windows that looked out on the Thames, the Crown and Sceptre was not the most respectable venue available, but it was conveniently close to Greenwich Hospital, where three of the
Bounty
men had been admitted.
 
The pub also provided the kind of familiar, unthreatening atmosphere in which ordinary seamen like Coleman and Byrn would feel most at ease. As it was, some of the comments made by these humble men to Edward Christian and the “several respectable gentlemen” who were his colleagues reeked of class-conscious, cap-in-hand deference, not to mention a little gentlemanly editing:
 
“Oh ! he was a gentleman, and a brave man,” McIntosh was reported to have said “with honest simplicity” of Fletcher Christian. “[E]very officer and sailor on board the ship, would have gone through fire and water to have served him.”
 
“His Majesty might have his equal, but he had not a superior officer in the service.”
 
“He was adorned with every virtue, and beloved by all.”
 
“As much as I have lost and suffered by him, if he could be restored to his country I should be the first to go without wages in search of him.”
 
Edward Christian’s committee membership was both eccentric and impressive. At the top of the list was Samuel Romilly, one of the most distinguished legal reformers of his day and a friend of Edward’s from their days as law students. An enthusiastic and engaged supporter of the revolution in France, Romilly had been entertained by Lafayette during a visit to France in the late 1780s when they had “talked together of ‘American’ ideas of patriotism and liberty.”
 
Four theologians were involved. The Reverend Dr. John Fisher had been recently appointed rector of Nether Stowey, where he was shortly to become friends with two young poets resident in the area, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Now a canon of Windsor, Dr. Fisher enjoyed close contact with the King; he was also a close friend of the Laws, another of the Christian family’s gifted and well-connected first cousins. The Reverend Mr. William Cookson was also, since 1792, a canon of Windsor. Cookson was in every sense a very weighty man, being close to the King, and also having allowed himself to balloon to almost three hundred pounds. His sister was William Wordsworth’s mother. The Reverend Dr. John Frewen had previously been William Wordsworth’s tutor at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where Edward Christian had also gone. The Reverend Mr. Antrobus, chaplain to the Bishop of London, was from Cockermouth, with family still in the area.
 
Of John Farhill nothing is known except his address, as stated by Edward. Similarly, little more is known of John Atkinson than that his was a Cumberland name, and he held a position at the College of Arms, the institution that advised on matters of heraldry.
 
William Gilpin, originally of Cumberland and now of the Strand, was a landscape gardener and watercolor artist, but as a biographer observed, the “inferior quality of his work as a painter was, however, very evident at the first exhibition.” William’s father was Sawrey Gilpin, a Royal Academy artist of some distinction who specialized in animal paintings, a fact that had undoubtedly helped launch his son’s unexceptional career. William was a neighbor of Joseph Christian, the linen draper whom John Fryer had gone to see shortly after his return to England; both men had country residences in Surrey, and town quarters in the Strand.
 
John France, who was originally from Yorkshire, was a lawyer with chambers in the Inner Temple and a commissioner in bankruptcy. John Wordsworth was a captain in the East India Company (until 1787 under the directorship of Edward’s relative Sir Henry Fletcher) and William Wordsworth’s father’s cousin.
 
Finally, James Losh, resident for most of his time in Penrith, Cumberland, was, like Romilly, a legal activist and reformer with strong sympathies for the revolutionary cause in France. Also a Cambridge man, Losh was to become a close friend of Wordsworth through radical friends in Bristol. He was also on social terms with John Christian Curwen and with the Speddings—the family of Peter Heywood’s mother—and very close to other branches of the Christian family.
 
Even a very casual glance at this list of participants revealed clear, if curious, fault lines. The Cumberland connection was strong, as less expectedly were the associations with William Wordsworth, at this time a promising if unestablished poet. The Wordsworths and Christians knew one another well. It will be recalled that Fletcher and William had been schoolmates at Cockermouth, and that William was later, very briefly, a pupil at Hawkshead School, where Edward had been headmaster. Edward and William shared a wide circle of college friends and associates. And Edward Christian successfully represented William and his siblings in a legal suit to obtain their father’s inheritance, held up for years by the unscrupulous Lord Lonsdale. “We have got a very clever man on our side but as he is young he will not have much authority. His name is Christian,” William’s sister Dorothy had written in June 1791, regarding the Lonsdale suit. “[H]e is a friend of my Uncle, knows my brother William very well and I am very well acquainted with him, and a charming man he is.”
 
But there were also other more subtle associations. The great majority of Edward’s panel were fervent abolitionists. In some cases, as with Romilly and Losh—and William Wordsworth—this arose from strong revolutionary sympathies. St. John’s College, where so many of the men had connections, was an important disseminator of the abolitionist movement. William Wilberforce, the great leader of the antislavery movement, had gone here. Wilberforce was in fact an old friend of Edward’s from these university days and had written to him a sympathetic letter when news of the mutiny reached England. Edward was also quick to report to his old friend the result of his “inquiry.” “Captain Bligh is a detestable villian,” he wrote at the end of 1792, “against whom on his return every door must be shut.” Wilberforce’s closest friend was Prime Minister William Pitt—the brother of Lord Chatham, whom Bligh would wait so long in vain to see.
 
Edward Christian gave no account of his method of choosing his colleagues. It may be that other men had been asked to participate and declined; it may be the men who were eventually gathered had caught wind of the campaign and volunteered for inclusion. The radical-abolitionist aspect of the eventual “committee” may have been a simple accident of the entirely reasonable association so many of them had with St. John’s. But whatever the mechanism by which it had fallen in place, this abolitionist sympathy would prove significant to the outcome.
 
While Joseph Banks may have been beguiled by the botanical aspects of the
Bounty
voyage, the real goal of the breadfruit expedition had been succinctly expressed by one West Indian planter. Breadfruit would be “of infinite importance to the West Indian Islands, in affording a wholesome and pleasant food to our negroes, which would have the great advantage of being raised with infinitely less labour than the plaintain.” By “our negroes,” the author meant the thousands of African slaves who worked the vast West Indian plantations, and on whose labor the sugar industry depended. The principal object of the
Bounty
’s voyage, then, was to enable plantation owners to feed their human chattel as cheaply and as efficiently as possible.
 
William Bligh, purveyor of slave provisions, was unlikely to have aroused much natural sympathy among the men Edward had congregated. In addition, Bligh had worked for his wife’s uncle ferrying rum and sugar from the islands. This association with Duncan Campbell in itself was not likely to have impressed Edward’s associates.
 
In short, while Bligh’s ship had been renamed
Bounty
for her humane contribution to West Indian Negroes, in certain eyes the bread-fruit voyages were nothing to celebrate. And when Edward Christian began his inquiries, William Bligh was back in Tahiti, engaged once again in this same unsavory mission.
 
Into this atmosphere of radical sympathizers and ardent abolitionists was now flung the saga of the
Bounty
—a story of a young gentleman who, “agonized by unprovoked and incessant abuse and disgrace,” stood up for his natural rights and overthrew the oppressive tyrant who was his captain. Bucking the despised authority, he sailed away to freedom in the South Pacific.
 
That at least some of Edward’s committee did in fact make the association between Christian’s acts and their own radical interests is evident from James Losh’s private diary. In conversation with friends one evening, talk had “turned principally upon the invasion of the liberty. . . . We all agreed that were there any place to go emigration wou’d be a prudent thing for literary men and the friends of freedom,” he had recorded with gloomy melodrama. “I explained the real state of a Christian’s mutiny.” His companions, one of whom was Wordsworth’s friend and fellow poet Robert Southey, had been “much struck” by this almost encoded reference to the
Bounty
mutiny.

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