PORTRAYED IN COUNTLESS movies and dramas as the demented sadist in command of a ship called HMS Bounty, William Bligh was not a captain of advancing years but a thirty-four-year-old lieutenant in charge of a converted merchantman called HMAV (His Majesty’s Armed Vessel) Bounty. The Bounty was dispatched to Tahiti in 1787 to collect samples of breadfruit to see if it would provide a cheap and sustainable resource to feed slaves in the West Indies. The traditional perception of the regime aboard that ship is one of Bligh treating the vessel as his personal and sadistic fiefdom in which the crew, protected to a certain degree by the noble first mate, Fletcher Christian, suffered humiliations and punishments until Christian, unable to exert any restraint on the increasingly unhinged Bligh, was reluctantly forced to lead the men in the most famous mutiny in the history of the British Navy.
In reality, Fletcher Christian was something of a petulant fop with ideas above his station. He had sailed under Bligh before and was keen to join his expedition to Tahiti. Equally keen to have him along for the ride, Bligh submitted a written request to the Navy Board suggesting Christian be appointed Master’s Mate for the trip, but the board, concerned at Christian’s lack of seniority and length of service, appointed one John Fryer to that position. Halfway through the voyage and concerned at Fryer’s lack of efficiency, Bligh replaced him with Christian, whom he further promoted to Acting Lieutenant, so it can be inferred from that alone that there was no bad blood between the two at the time.
As for Bligh being possessed of a sadistic streak that afforded him something akin to homoerotic thrills from seeing men lashed within an inch of their lives, this too is nonsense. Several of the aforementioned cinematic character assassinations also show him keel-hauling his men but that practice – which involved tying a miscreant to a rope and dragging him under the keel of the ship, from one side to the other, while it was under way – had been abandoned by the Royal Navy in about 1720, decades before either Christian or Bligh had even been born.
In fact, all the records and testimony of those who elected to throw in their lot with Bligh during the mutiny reveal him to have been excessively lenient for his day, only resorting to the lash when absolutely necessary. Frequently on that expedition, he had given up his cabin to men coming off watch soaking wet and frozen – hardly the action of a sadistic brute. While carrying out their mission to harvest breadfruit from Tahiti, most of the men were seduced by the friendly paradise and the openly permissive attitude to sex held by the local girls – so much so that three of the crew, Charles Churchill, John Millward and William Muspratt, deserted and hid in order to remain after the Bounty had sailed. When they were captured, Bligh, sympathetic to the temptations that had prompted their actions, only gave them the lash; any other commander of his day would have strung them up from the yardarm. In general, the log of the Bounty clearly demonstrates that Bligh issued rebukes for shortcomings that would have had almost any other commander reaching for the lash, and he invariably resorted to corporal punishment for crimes that would normally have incurred a death sentence.
So, why today do we suffer from the misperception of Bligh as the beastly villain and Christian as a man reluctantly driven to mutiny to save the crew from his tyranny? The answer to that lies in the efforts of the Christian family and that of another equally well-connected mutineer, Peter Heywood.
On 28 April 1789, with the Bounty twenty-four days into her homeward journey and the lure of the lifestyle in Tahiti still so fresh in the men’s minds, Christian led about half of the crew in a bloodless takeover of the ship. With Bligh appealing to his friend to be reasonable and think of what he was about to do, Christian could only repeat, over and over again, ‘I am in Hell,’ as he paced the deck. So, perhaps the kindest interpretation one could place on his mutiny is that it resulted from his having some sort of breakdown; Bligh himself would later state that Christian had been in a ‘state of fugue’ throughout. Those who survived the subsequent and abortive settlement of Pitcairn Island by the mutineers certainly recalled his violent mood swings and that he spent a lot of time alone in his favourite cave, where he could be heard either crying or laughing maniacally.
Be that as it may, Bligh and eighteen of the forty-two-strong crew were bundled into the Bounty’s longboat with limited supplies, instruments and the ship’s log – but no charts – and then set adrift. Other crew members who had expressed a desire to remain loyal were told by Bligh there was no room for them in the boat so they should remain with the Bounty, secure in his promise that he would speak for them should he make it back to England. Basically left for dead, Bligh navigated that longboat the 3,600 miles to Timor using only a sextant, his pocket watch and the stars. Completed in forty-seven days, this is still internationally recognized as the most remarkable feat of navigation in maritime history. Given a hero’s welcome on his return to Britain in 1790, Bligh was cleared of any responsibility for the loss of the Bounty by a board of inquiry and returned to duty to immediately undertake his so-called Second Breadfruit Journey. Returning to Tahiti, his mission this time was to take breadfruit to the West Indies before returning with samples of ackee fruit, which the Royal Society named Blighia sapida in his honour.
ANOTHER MUTINY
Few are aware that William Bligh was central to another and much larger mutiny in Australia after his appointment as Governor of New South Wales in 1805. He was under orders to crack down on the illegal rum trade in the colony. With his ill-deserved reputation as the Bastard of the Bounty preceding him, none in Australia relished his arrival. The settlers and even the New South Wales Corps (the troops supposedly under the control of the governor) were all doing very well out of the rum-running that they knew he was coming to crush.
Bligh attacked the problem head on, which brought him into immediate conflict with John Macarthur, Sydney’s leading citizen, whose protestations at Bligh’s strict policies resulted in a warrant being issued for his arrest. Instead of acting on this, the Corps, under the command of Major George Johnston, a close friend of Macarthur and fellow rum-runner, marched on the Governor’s House to arrest Bligh instead.
After a short period of confinement, Bligh returned to the UK with few reprisals, if any, being visited on the mutineers.
Another strong indication as to the state of Christian’s mind at the time is the fact that he hadn’t a clue what to do next; he simply had not thought it through. Meeting with a hostile reception on a couple of islands, the mutineers eventually returned to Tahiti where Heywood and a dozen others elected to remain while Christian, keen to have servants and sexual diversion, lured aboard eighteen Tahitians – six men and twelve women – under false promise of a party, but instead set sail for Pitcairn Island. To be fair, this was a canny choice of bolthole. Although named after Robert Pitcairn, who first spotted it in 1767 (his father, Major John Pitcairn, had been the man in charge of the British troops at Lexington, Massachusetts, when the first shots of the American War of Independence were fired), Christian knew it to be either incorrectly indicated or completely missing from Admiralty charts.
As the Christian contingent of mutineers and their kidnapped Tahitians dug in on Pitcairn, HMS Pandora arrived at Tahiti to arrest Heywood and the others who had chosen to remain there. At first Heywood tried to bluff his way, rowing out to greet the warship enthusiastically, informing the officers that he had been one of the unfortunate men who, although loyal to Bligh, had been excluded from the longboat and bundled below decks. It might have worked too but onto the deck stepped Lt Thomas Hayward who, having made the Timor journey with Bligh, informed his captain that Heywood had been on deck and beside Christian throughout the affair. By the time of Heywood’s trial in September 1792, Hayward was deployed on the other side of the world and so, with his continued perjury thus left unchallenged and with his family’s relentless campaign, Heywood was pardoned and avoided the rope that claimed his co-defendants.
From this point on, the Christian and Heywood families, with ties to each other and many strings to pull between them, campaigned tirelessly to salvage their own reputations and those of their sons by blackening that of Bligh. Heywood was presented as a man of sensitivity who, although understanding of the mutineers’ motives, remained steadfastly loyal to his demonic captain, while Christian was likewise painted as a man driven to the unthinkable by the tyrannical bestiality of a megalomaniac on the brink of homicidal actions. Although this was scoffed at within the Admiralty, the court of public opinion lapped it up to such a degree that this is still very much the modern perception, consistently reinforced by cinematic portrayals of Bligh as the gimlet-eyed sadist while Christian is played by charismatic ‘hunks’ such as Marlon Brando or, more recently, Mel Gibson. In reality, Christian was described as being of short stature, dark and swarthy with an ‘unpleasantly sweaty aspect, especially his hands which soiled all they touched’.
Once ensconced on Pitcairn, the mutineers reverted to type, treating the Tahitian males like slaves and the women like sex objects and, eventually, it was the women who led the mutiny against Christian and his cohorts, murdering most of them in their sleep.
Unbelievably, consequences of the Christian–Bligh feud have rolled on for another 225 years. Brenda Christian, who took over as Mayor of Pitcairn after her brother, Steve, was incarcerated for the rape of minors, was so incensed by the opinions that Dea Birkett, author of Serpent in Paradise (1997), expressed about Christian and the mutineers’ descendants, that she said, ‘I’d like to see her hanged.’ Birkett said in 2014, ‘Even now I wouldn’t risk going to Pitcairn if my last name were Bligh.’ Sydney-based celebrity chef Glynn Christian likewise threatened to punch Maurice Bligh in the face for making uncomplimentary remarks about Fletcher Christian on Australian television. However, in May 2004, Jacqui Christian travelled to Tahiti to meet Maurice Bligh and return to him William Bligh’s Bible, which had been stolen from his cabin during the mutiny. Maurice then symbolically gave the book back to Jacqui so it could be returned to Pitcairn for ever. And there, for the time being at least, the matter rests.