Chapter 1
Towards the end of November I joined the Bounty at Spithead. It makes me smile to-day to think of the box I brought down on the coach from London, packed with clothing and uniforms on which I had laid out more than a hundred pounds: blue tail-coats lined with white silk, with the white patch on the collar known in those days as a “weekly account”; breeches and waistcoats of white nankeen, and a brace of “scrapers”—smart three-cornered reefer’s hats, with gold loops and cockades. For a few days I made a brave show in my finery, but when the Bounty sailed it was stowed away for good, and worn no more.
Our ship looked no bigger than a longboat among the tall first-rates and seventy-fours at anchor near by. She had been built for the merchant service, at Hull, three years before, and purchased for two thousand pounds; ninety feet long on deck and with a beam of twenty-four feet, her burthen was little more than two hundred tons. Her name—Bethia—had been painted out, and at the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks she was rechristened Bounty. The ship had been many months at Deptford, where the Admiralty had spent more than four thousand pounds in altering and refitting her. The great cabin aft was now rigged as a garden, with innumerable pots standing in racks, and gutters running below to allow the water to be used over and over again. The result was that Lieutenant Bligh and the master, Mr. Fryer, were squeezed into two small cabins on either side of the ladderway, and forced to mess with the surgeon, in a screened-off space of the lower deck, aft of the main hatch. The ship was small to begin with; she carried a heavy cargo of stores and articles for barter with the Indians, and all hands on board were so cramped that I heard mutterings even before we set sail. I believe, in fact, that the discomfort of our life, and the bad humour it brought about, played no small part in the unhappy ending of a voyage which seemed ill-fated from the start.
The Bounty was copper-sheathed, a new thing in those days, and with her bluff, heavy hull, short masts, and stout rigging, she looked more like a whaling vessel than an armed transport of His Majesty’s Navy. She carried a pair of swivel guns mounted on stocks forward, and six swivels and four tour-pounders aft, on the upper deck.
All was new and strange to me on the morning when I presented myself to Lieutenant Bligh, the ship was crowded with women,—the sailors’ “wives,”—rum seemed to flow like water everywhere, and sharp-faced Jews, in their wherries, hovered alongside, eager to lend money at interest against pay day, or to sell on credit the worthless trinkets on their trays. The cries of the bumboat men, the shrill scolding of the women, and the shouts and curses of the sailors made a pandemonium stunning to a landsman’s ears.
Making my way aft, I found Mr. Bligh on the quarter-deck. A tall, swarthy man was just ahead of me.
“I have been to the Portsmouth observatory, sir,” he said to the captain, “the timekeeper is one minute fifty-two seconds too fast for mean time, and losing at the rate of one second a day. Mr. Bailey made a note of it in this letter to you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Christian,” said Bligh shortly, and at that moment, turning his head, he caught sight of me. I uncovered, stepping forward to present myself. “Ah, Mr. Byam,” he went on, “this is Mr. Christian, the master’s mate; he will show you your berth and instruct you in some of your duties. And, by the way, you will dine with me on board the Tigress; Captain Courtney knew your father and asked me to bring you when he heard that you would be on board.” He glanced at his large silver watch. “Be ready in an hour’s time.”
I bowed in reply to his nod of dismissal and followed Christian to the ladderway. The berth was a screened-off space of the lower deck, on the larboard side, abreast of the main hatch. Its dimensions were scarcely more than eight feet by ten, yet four of us were to make this kennel our home. Three or four boxes stood around the sides, and a scuttle of heavy discoloured glass admitted a dim light. A quadrant hung on a nail driven into the ship’s side, and, though she was not long from Deptford, a reek of bilge water hung in the air. A handsome, sulky-looking boy of sixteen, in a uniform like my own, was arranging the gear in his box, and straightened up to give me a contemptuous stare. His name was Hayward, as I learned when Christian introduced us briefly, and he scarcely deigned to take my outstretched hand.
When we regained the upper deck, Christian lost his air of preoccupation, and smiled. “Mr. Hayward has been two years at sea,” he remarked, “he knows you for a Johnny Newcomer. But the Bounty is a little ship; such airs would be more fitting aboard a first-rate.”
He spoke in a cultivated voice, with a trace of the Manx accent, and I could barely hear the words above the racket from the forward part of the ship. It was a calm, bright winter morning, and I studied my companion in the clear sunlight. He was a man to glance at more than once.
Fletcher Christian was at that time in his twenty-fourth year—a fine figure of a seaman in his plain blue, gold-buttoned frock—handsomely and strongly built, with thick dark brown hair and a complexion naturally dark, and burned by the sun to a shade rarely seen among the white race. His mouth and chin expressed great resolution of character, and his eyes, black, deep-set, and brilliant, had something of hypnotic power in their far-away gaze. He looked more like a Spaniard than an Englishman, though his family had been settled since the fifteenth century on the Isle of Man. Christian was what women call a romantic-looking man; his moods of gaiety alternated with fits of black depression, and he possessed a fiery temper which he controlled by efforts that brought the sweat to his brow. Though only a master’s mate, a step above a midshipman, he was of gentle birth—better born than Bligh and a gentleman in manner and speech.
“Lieutenant Bligh,” he said, in his musing, abstracted way, “desires me to instruct you in some of your duties. Navigation, nautical astronomy, and trigonometry he will teach you himself, since we have no schoolmaster on board, as on a man-of-war. And I can assure you that you will not sup till you have worked out the ship’s position each day. You will be assigned to one of the watches, to keep order when the men are at the braces or aloft. You will see that the hammocks are stowed in the morning, and report the men whose hammocks are badly lashed. Never lounge against the guns or the ship’s side, and never walk the deck with your hands in your pockets. You will be expected to go aloft with the men to learn how to bend canvas and how to reef and furl a sail, and when the ship is at anchor you may be placed in charge of one of the boats. And, last of all, you are the slave of those tyrants, the master and master’s mates.”
He gave me a whimsical glance and a smile. We were standing by the gratings abaft the mainmast, and at that moment a stout elderly man, in a uniform much like Bligh’s, came puffing up the ladderway. His bronzed face was at once kindly and resolute, and I should have known him for a seaman anywhere.
“Ah, Mr. Christian, there you are!” he exclaimed as he heaved himself on deck. “What a madhouse! I’d like to sink the lot of those Jews, and heave the wenches overboard! Who’s this? The new reefer, Mr. Byam, I’ll be bound! Welcome on board, Mr. Byam; your father’s name stands high in our science, eh, Mr. Christian?”
“Mr. Fryer, the master,” said Christian in my ear.
“A madhouse,” Fryer went on, “Thank God we shall pay off tomorrow night! Wenches everywhere, above decks and below.” He turned to Christian. “Go forward and gather a boat’s crew for Lieutenant Bligh; there are a few men still sober.”
“There’s discipline on a man-of-war at sea,” he continued; “but give me a merchant ship in port. The captain’s clerk is the only sober man below. The surgeon…Ah, here he is now!”
Turning to follow Fryer’s glance, I saw a head thatched with thick snow-white hair appearing in the ladderway. Our sawbones had a wooden leg and a long equine face, red as the wattles of a turkey cock; even the back of his neck, lined with deep wrinkles like a tortoise’s, was of the same fiery red. His twinkling bright blue eyes caught sight of the man beside me. Holding to the ladder with one hand, he waved a half-empty bottle of brandy at us.
“Ahoy there, Mr. Fryer!” he hailed jovially, “Have you seen Nelson, the botanist? I prescribed a drop of brandy for his rheumatic leg; it’s time he took his medicine.”
“He’s gone ashore.”
The surgeon shook his head with mock regret. “He’ll give his good shillings to some Portsmouth quack, I’ll wager. Yet here on board he might enjoy free and gratis the advice of the most enlightened medical opinion. Away with all bark and physic!” He flourished his bottle. “Here is the remedy for nine tenths of human ills. Aye! Drops of brandy! That’s it!” Suddenly, in a mellow, husky voice, sweet and true, he began to sing:
“And Johnny shall have a new bonnet
And Johnny shall go to the fair,
And Johnny shall have a blue ribbon
To tie up his bonny brown hair.”
With a final flourish of his bottle, our surgeon went hopping down the ladderway. Fryer stared after him for a moment before he followed him below. Left to myself in the midst of the uproar on deck, I looked about me curiously.
Lieutenant Bligh, an old hand in the Navy, was nowhere to be seen. On the morrow the men would receive two months’ wages in advance, and on the following day we should set sail on a voyage to the other side of the world, facing the hardships and dangers of seas still largely unexplored. The Bounty might well be gone two years or more, and now, on the eve of departure, her crew was allowed to relax for a day or two of such amusements as sailors most enjoy.
While I waited for Bligh in the uproar, I diverted myself in studying the rigging of the Bounty. Born and brought up on the west coast of England, I had loved the sea from childhood and lived amongst men who spoke of ships and their qualities as men gossip of horses elsewhere.
The Bounty was ship-rigged, and to a true landsman her rigging would have seemed a veritable maze of ropes. But even in my inexperience I knew enough to name her sails, the different parts of her standing rigging, and most of the complex system of halliards, lifts, braces, sheets, and other ropes for the management of sails and yards.
She spread two headsails—foretopmast-staysail and jib; on fore and main masts she carried courses, topsails, topgallants, and royals, and the mizzenmast spread the latter three sails. That American innovation, the crossjack, had not in those days been introduced. The crossjack yard was still, as the French say, a vergue sèche—a barren yard—and the Bounty’s driver, though loose at the foot, was of the gaff-headed type, then superseding the clumsy lateen our ships had carried on the mizzen for centuries.
As I mused on the Bounty’s sails and ropes, asking myself how this order or that would be given, and wondering how I should go about obeying were I told to furl a royal or lend a hand at one of the braces, I felt something of the spell which even the smallest ship casts over me to this day. For a ship is the noblest of all man’s works—a cunning fabric of wood, and iron, and hemp, wonderfully propelled by wings of canvas, and seeming at times to have the very breath of life. I was craning my neck to stare aloft when I heard Bligh’s voice, harsh and abrupt.
“Mr. Byam!”
I gathered my wits with a start and found Lieutenant Bligh, in full uniform, at my side. He gave a faint quizzing smile and went on, “She’s small, eh? But a taut little ship—a taut little ship!” He made me a sign to follow him over the Bounty’s side.
Our boat’s crew, if not strictly sober, were able to row, and put their hacks into it with a will. We were soon alongside Captain Courtney’s tall seventy-four. The Tigress paid Mr. Bligh the compliment of piping the side. Side boys in spotless white stood at attention by the red ropes to the gangway; the boatswain, in full uniform, blew a slow and solemn salute on his silver whistle as Bligh’s foot touched the deck. Marine sentries stood at attention, and all was silent save for the mournful piping. We walked aft, saluting the quarter-deck, where Captain Courtney awaited us.
Courtney and Bligh were old acquaintances; he had been with Bligh on the Belle Poule, in the stubborn and bloody action of Dogger Bank six years before. Captain Courtney was a member of a great family—a tall, slender officer, with a quizzing glass and a thin-lipped ironic mouth. He greeted us pleasantly, spoke of my father, whom he had known more by reputation than otherwise, and led us to his cabin aft, where a red-coated sentry stood at the bulkhead, a drawn sword in his hand. It was the first time I had been in the cabin of a man-of-war, and I gazed about me curiously. Its floor was the upper gun-deck and its ceiling the poop; so the apartment seemed very lofty for a ship.
The ports were glazed, and a door aft gave on the stern-walk, with its carvings and gilded rail, where the captain might take his pleasure undisturbed. But the cabin itself was furnished with Spartan bareness: a long settee under the ports, a heavy fixed table, and a few chairs. A lamp swung in gimbals overhead; there were a telescope in a bracket, a short shelf of books, and a stand of muskets and cutlasses in a rack about the mizzenmast. The table was laid for three.
“A glass of sherry with you, Mr. Bligh,” said the captain, as a man handed the glasses on a tray. He smiled at me in his courtly way, and raised his glass. “To the memory of your father, young man! We seamen owe him a lasting debt.”
As we drank, I heard a great stir and shuffling of feet on deck, and the distant sound of a drum. Captain Courtney glanced at his watch, finished his wine, and rose from the settee.
“My apologies. They’re flogging a man through the fleet, and I hear the boats coming. I must read the sentence at the gangway—a deuced bore. Make yourselves at home; should you wish to be spectators, I can recommend the poop.”
Next moment he passed the rigid marine at the bulkhead and was gone. Bligh listened for a moment to the distant drumming, set down his glass, and beckoned me to follow him. From the quarter-deck a short ladder led up to the poop, a high point of vantage from which all that went on was visible. Though the air was crisp, the wind was the merest cat’s-paw and the sun shone in a blue and cloudless sky.
The order to turn all hands aft to witness punishment was being piped by the boatswain and shouted by his mates. The marines, with muskets and side-arms, were hastening aft to fall in before us on the poop. Captain Courtney and his lieutenants stood on the weather quarter-deck, and the junior officers were gathered to leeward of them. The doctor and purser stood further to leeward, under the break of the poop, behind the boatswain and his mates. The ship’s company was gathered along the lee bulwarks—some, to see better, standing in the boats or on the booms. A tall ninety-eight and a third-rate like the Tigress lay at anchor close by, and I saw that their ports and bulwarks were crowded with silent men.
The half-minute bell began to sound, and the noise of drumming grew louder—the doleful tattoo of the rogue’s march. Then, around the bows of the Tigress, came a procession I shall never forget.
In the lead, rowed slowly in time to the nervous beat of the drum, came the longboat of a nearby ship. Her surgeon and master-at-arms stood beside the drummer; just aft of them a human figure was huddled in a posture I could not make out at first. Behind the longboat, and rowing in time to the same doleful music, came a boat from every ship of the fleet, manned with marines to attend the punishment. I heard an order “Way enough!” and as the rowing ceased the longboat drifted to a halt by the gangway. I glanced down over the rail. My breath seemed to catch in my throat, and without knowing that I spoke, I exclaimed softly, “Oh, my God!” Mr. Bligh gave me a sidelong glance and one of his slight, grim smiles.
The huddled figure in the bows of the boat was that of a powerful man of thirty or thirty-five. He was stripped to his wide sailor’s trousers of duck, and his bare arms were bronzed and tattooed. Stockings had been bound around his wrists, which were stoutly lashed to a capstan bar. His thick yellow hair was in disorder and I could not see his face, for his head hung down over his chest. His trousers, the thwart on which he lay huddled, and the frames and planking of the boat on either side of him were blotched and spattered with black blood. Blood I had seen before; it was the man’s back that made me catch my breath. From neck to waist the cat-o’-nine-tails had laid the bones bare, and the flesh hung in blackened, tattered strips.
Captain Courtney sauntered placidly across the deck to glance down at the hideous spectacle below. The surgeon in the boat bent over the mutilated, seized-up body, straightened his back, and looked at Courtney by the gangway.
“The man is dead, sir,” he said solemnly. A murmur faint as a stir of air in the treetops came from the men crowded on the booms. The Captain of the Tigress folded his arms and turned his head slightly with raised eyebrows. He made a gallant figure, with his sword, his rich laced uniform, his cocked hat and powdered queue. In the tense silence which followed he turned to the surgeon again.
“Dead,” he said lightly, in his cultivated drawl. “Lucky devil! Master-at-arms!” The warrant officer at the doctor’s side sprang to attention and pulled off his hat. “How many are due?”
“Two dozen, sir.”
Courtney strolled back to his place on the weather side and took from his first lieutenant’s hand a copy of the Articles of War. As he swept off his cocked hat gracefully and held it over his heart, every man on the ship uncovered in respect to the King’s commandments. Then, in his clear, drawling voice, the captain read the Article which prescribes the punishment for striking an officer of His Majesty’s Navy. One of the boatswain’s mates was untying a red baize bag, from which he drew out the red-handled cat, eyeing it uncertainly, with frequent glances to windward. The captain concluded his reading, replaced his hat, and caught the man’s eye. Again I heard the faint sighing murmur forward, and again deep silence fell before Courtney’s glance. “Do your duty,” he ordered calmly, “two dozen, I believe.”
“Two dozen it is, sir,” said the boatswain’s mate in a hollow voice as he walked slowly to the side. There were clenched jaws and gleaming eyes among the men forward, but the silence was so profound that I could hear the faint creak of blocks aloft as the braces swayed in the light air.
I could not turn my eyes away from the boatswain’s mate, climbing slowly down the ship’s side. If the man had shouted aloud, he could not have expressed more clearly the reluctance he felt. He stepped into the boat, and as he moved among the men on the thwarts they drew back with set stern faces. At the capstan bar, he hesitated and looked up uncertainly. Courtney had sauntered to the bulwarks and was gazing down with folded arms.
“Come! Do your duty!” he ordered, with the air of a man whose dinner is growing cold.
The man with the cat drew its tails through the fingers of his left hand, raised his arm, and sent them whistling down on the poor battered corpse. I turned away, giddy and sick. Bligh stood by the rail, a hand on his hip, watching the scene below as a man might watch a play indifferently performed. The measured blows continued—each breaking the silence like a pistol shot. I counted them mechanically for what seemed an age, but the end came at last—twenty-two, a pause, twenty-three…twenty-four. I heard a word of command; the marines fell out and trooped down the poop ladder. Eight bells struck. There were a stir and bustle on the ship, and I heard the boatswain piping the long-drawn, cheery call to dinner.
When we sat down to dine, Courtney seemed to have dismissed the incident from his mind. He tossed off a glass of sherry to Bligh’s health, and tasted his soup. “Cold!” he remarked ruefully. “Hardships of a seaman’s life, eh, Bligh?”
His guest took soup with a relish, and sounds better fitted to the forecastle than aft, for his manners at table were coarse. “Damme!” he said, “We fared worse aboard the old Poule!”
“But not in Tahiti, I’ll wager. I hear you are to pay the Indian ladies of the South Sea another call.”
“Aye, and a long one. We shall be some months in getting our load of breadfruit trees.”
“I heard of your voyage in Town. Cheap food for the West Indian slaves, eh? I wish I were sailing with you.”
“By God, I wish you were! I could promise you some sport.”
“Are the Indian women as handsome as Cook painted them?”
“Indeed they are, if you’ve no prejudice against a brown skin. They are wonderfully clean in person, and have enough sensibility to attract a fastidious man. Witness Sir Joseph; he declares that there are no such women in the world!”
Our host sighed romantically. “Say no more! Say no more! I can see you, like a Bashaw under the palms, in the midst of a harem the Sultan himself might envy!”
Still sickened by what I had seen, I was doing my best to make a pretense of eating, silent while the older men talked. Bligh was the first to mention the flogging.
“What had the man done?” he asked.
Captain Courtney set down his glass of claret and glanced up absently. “Oh, the fellow who was flogged,” he said, “He was one of Captain Allison’s foretopmen, on the Unconquerable. And a smart hand, they say. He was posted for desertion, and then Allison, who remembered his face, saw him stepping out of a public house in Portsmouth. The man tried to spring away and Allison seized him by the arm. Damme! Good topmen don’t grow on every hedge! Well, this insolent fellow blacked Allison’s eye, just as a file of marines passed. They made him prisoner, and you saw the rest. Odd! We were only the fifth ship; eight dozen did for him. But Allison has a boatswain’s mate who’s an artist, they say—left-handed, so he lays them on crisscross, and strong as an ox.”
Bligh listened with interest to Courtney’s words, and nodded approvingly. “Struck his captain, eh?” he remarked, “By God! He deserved all he got, and more! No laws are more just than those governing the conduct of men at sea.”
“Is there any need of such cruelty?” I asked, unable to keep silent, “Why did they not hang the poor fellow and have done with it?”
“Poor fellow?” Captain Courtney turned to me with eyebrows raised, “You have much to learn, my lad. A year or two at sea will harden him, eh, Bligh?”
“I’ll see to that,” said the Captain of the Bounty, “No, Mr. Byam, you must waste no sympathy on rascals of that stripe.”
“And remember,” put in Courtney, with a manner of friendly admonishment, “remember, as Mr. Bligh says, that no laws are more just than those governing the conduct of men at sea. Not only just, but necessary; discipline must be preserved, on a merchantman as well as on a man-of-war, and mutiny and piracy suppressed.”
“Yes,” said Bligh, “our sea law is stern, but it has the authority of centuries. And it has grown more humane with time,” he continued, not without a trace of regret. “Keel-hauling has been abolished, save among the French, and a captain no longer has the right to condemn and put to death one of his crew.”
Still agitated by the shock of what I had seen, I ate little and took more wine than was my custom, sitting in silence for the most part, while the two officers gossiped, sailor-like, as to the whereabouts of former friends, and spoke of Admiral Parker, and the fight at Dogger Bank. It was mid-afternoon when Bligh and I were pulled back to the Bounty. The tide was low, and I saw a boat aground on a flat some distance off, while a party of men dug a shallow grave in the mud. They were burying the body of the poor fellow who had been flogged through the fleet—burying him below tide mark, in silence, and without religious rites.
❒
