In 1788, the British Admiralty vessel Bounty sailed from England
to Tahiti, with a mission to collect breadfruit
seedlings intended to provide a cheap source of food for Britain's plantation
slaves in the West Indies. But the say in Tahiti's mellow climate proved so much
better than life on board the Bounty that on the return journey in April
1789 the crew mutinied, led by the officer Fletcher Christian. Along with 18 crew
who refused to join in the mutiny, Captain William Bligh was set adrift in a longboat
far out in the Pacific, while the mutineers returned to Tahiti intending to settle
there.
Things didn't go as planned however. After an incredible feat of navigation over
3600 nautical miles of open sea, in June Bligh and all but one of his companions
reached the Portuguese colony of Timor, emaciated but still alive, from where
Bligh lost no time in catching a vessel back to England,
arriving there in March 1790. His report on the mutiny immediately saw the Admiralty
dispatch the frigate Pandora off to Tahiti under the cold-hearted Captain
Edwards, with instructions to bring back the mutineers to stand trial in London.
Meanwhile in Tahiti, Christian and seven of the mutiny's
ringleaders - knowing that sooner or later the Admiralty would try to find them
- had, along with a group of Tahitians, taken the Bounty and sailed off into the
Pacific. Fourteen of the Bounty's crew stayed behind on Tahiti, however,
and when the Pandora arrived in March 1791, they were rounded up, clapped
in chains and incarcerated in the ships brig - a 3m long wooden cell known as
Pandoras Box.
Having spent a fruitless few months island hopping in search of the Bounty, Captain
Edwards headed up the east coast of Australia,
where on the night of August 29, the Pandora hit a northern section of
the Great Barrier Reef. As waves began to break up the vessel on the following
day, Edwards ordered the longboats to be loaded with supplies and abandoned the
ship, leaving his prisoners still locked up on board; it was only thanks to one
of the crew that ten of them managed to scramble out as the Pandora slid
beneath the waves.
In a minor replay of Bligh's voyage, the Pandora's survivors took three weeks
to make it to Timor in their longboats and arrived back in England the following
year. Edwards was castigated for the heartless treatment of his prisoners but
otherwise held blameless for the wreck. The ten surviving mutineers were court-martialled
- four were acquitted, three hanged, and three had their death sentences commuted.
Captain Bligh was later made Governor of New South Wales, where he suffered another
mutiny known as the Rum Rebellion. And the Bounty's whole project proved a failure
- when breadfruit trees were eventually introduced in the West Indies, the slaves
refused to eat them.
Seventeen years later, the American vessel Topaz stopped mid-Pacific at
the isolated rocky fortress of Pitcairn Island
and to the amazement of its crew, found it settled by a small colony of English
speaking people. These turned out to be the descendants of the Bounty mutineers,
along with the last survivor, the elderly John Adams (aka Alexander Smith). Adams
told the Topaz's crew that having settled Pitcairn and burned the Bounty,
Christian and the mutineers had fought with the Tahitian men over the women, and
in the fighting all but Adams and three mutineers had been killed. the other had
later died, leaving only Adams, the women and the mutineers children on the island.
After Adam's death, Pitcairn's population eventually outgrew the island and were
moved to Norfolk Island in the 1850s.
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