Title: Mutiny on the Bounty (1932)
Author: Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
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Title: Mutiny on the Bounty (1932)
Author: Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall



The Bounty Trilogy
Wyeth Edition

Comprising the Three Volumes:
Mutiny on the Bounty (1932)
Men Against the Sea (1933)
Pitcairn's Island (1934)

[This file contains only MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY]

by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

Illustrations by N C Wyeth

Grosset and Dunlap, publishers: 1945

* * *


MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1932)


* * *

To
Captain Viggo Rasmussen, _Schooner Tiaré Taporo_, Rarotonga
and
Captain Andy Thomson, _Schooner Tagua_, Rarotonga
Old friends who sail the seas the _Bounty_ sailed

* * *


OFFICERS AND CREW OF H.M.S. _Bounty_

Lieutenant William Bligh, _Captain_
John Fryer, _Master_
Fletcher Christian, _Master's Mate_
Charles Churchill, _Master-at-Arms_
William Elphinstone, _Master-at-Arms's Mate_
"Old Bacchus," _Surgeon_
Thomas Ledward, _Acting Surgeon_
David Nelson, _Botanist_
William Peckover, _Gunner_
John Mills, _Gunner's Mate_
William Cole, _Boatswain_
James Morrison, _Boatswain's Mate_
William Purcell, _Carpenter_
Charles Norman, _Carpenter's Mate_
Thomas McIntosh, _Carpenter's Crew_
Joseph Coleman, _Armourer_

_Midshipmen:_
Roger Byam         Robert Tinkler
Thomas Hayward     Edward Young
John Hallet        George Stewart

_Quartermasters:_
John Norton
Peter Lenkletter

George Simpson, _Quartermaster's Mate_
Lawrence Lebogue, _Sailmaker_
Mr. Samuel, _Clerk_
Robert Lamb, _Butcher_
William Brown, _Gardener_

_Cooks:_
John Smith
Thomas Hall

_Able Seamen:_
Thomas Burkitt     John Williams
Matthew Quintal    Thomas Ellison
John Sumner        Isaac Martin
John Millward      Richard Skinner
William McCoy      Matthew Thompson
Henry Hillbrandt   William Muspratt
Alexander Smith    Michael Byrne




CONTENTS:

PREFACE
CHAPTER I. LIEUTENANT BLIGH
CHAPTER II. SEA LAW
CHAPTER III. AT SEA
CHAPTER IV. TYRANNY
CHAPTER V. TAHITI
CHAPTER VI. AN INDIAN HOUSEHOLD
CHAPTER VII. CHRISTIAN AND BLIGH
CHAPTER VIII. HOMEWARD BOUND
CHAPTER IX. THE MUTINY
CHAPTER X. FLETCHER CHRISTIAN
CHAPTER XI. THE LAST OF THE _BOUNTY_
CHAPTER XII. TEHANI
CHAPTER XIII. THE MOON OF PIPIRI
CHAPTER XIV. THE PANDORA
CHAPTER XV. DOCTOR HAMILTON
CHAPTER XVI. THE ROUNDHOUSE
CHAPTER XVII. THE SEARCH FOR THE _BOUNTY_
CHAPTER XVIII. THE LAST OF THE PANDORA
CHAPTER XIX. TEN WEARY MONTHS
CHAPTER XX. SIR JOSEPH BANKS
CHAPTER XXI. H.M.S. DUKE
CHAPTER XXII. THE CASE FOR THE CROWN
CHAPTER XXIII. THE DEFENSE
CHAPTER XXIV. CONDEMNED
CHAPTER XXV. TINKLER
CHAPTER XXVI. WITHYCOMBE
CHAPTER XXVII. EPILOGUE




PREFACE


On the twenty-third of December, 1787, His Majesty's armed transport
_Bounty_ sailed from Portsmouth on as strange, eventful, and tragic
a voyage as ever befell an English ship. Her errand was to proceed to the
island of Tahiti (or Otaheite, as it was then called), in the Great South
Sea, there to collect a cargo of young breadfruit trees for
transportation to the West Indies, where, it was hoped, the trees would
thrive and thus, eventually, provide an abundance of cheap food for the
negro slaves of the English planters.

The events of that voyage it is the purpose of this tale to unfold.
_Mutiny on the Bounty_, which opens the story, is concerned with the
voyage from England, the long Tahiti sojourn while the cargo of young
breadfruit trees was being assembled, the departure of the homeward-bound
ship, the mutiny, and the fate of those of her company who later returned
to Tahiti, where the greater part of them were eventually seized by H. M.
S. _Pandora_ and taken back to England, in irons, for trial.

The authors chose as the narrator of this part of the tale a fictitious
character, Roger Byam, who tells it as an old man, after his retirement
from the Navy. Byam had his actual counterpart in the person of Peter
Heywood, whose name was, for this reason, omitted from the roster of the
_Bounty's_ company. Midshipman Byam's experience follows closely
that of Midshipman Heywood. With the license of hisorical novelists, the
authors based the career of Byam upon that of I Heywood, but in depicting
it they did not, of course, follow the latter n every detail. In the
essentials, relating to the mutiny and its aftermath, they have adhered
to the facts preserved in the records of the I British Admiralty.

_Men Against the Sea_, the second part of the narrative, is the
story of Captain Bligh and the eighteen loyal men who, on the morning of
lie mutiny, were set adrift by the mutineers in the _Bounty's_
launch, an open boat twenty-three feet long, with a beam of six feet,
nine inches. In this small craft Captain Bligh carried his men a voyage
of 3600 miles, from the island of Tofoa (or Tofua, as it is now called),
in the Friendly, or Tongan Group, to Timor, in the Dutch East Indies. The
wind and weather of _Men Against the Sea_ are those of Captain
Bligh's own log, a series of brief daily notes which formed the chief
literary source of this part of the tale. The voyage is described in the
words of one of those who survived it--Thomas Ledward, acting surgeon of
the _Bounty_, whose medical knowledge and whose experience in
reading men's sufferings would qualify him as a sensitive and reliable
observer.

_Pitcairn's Island_, which concludes the tale, is perhaps the
strangest and most romantic part of it. After two unsuccessful attempts
to settle on the island of Tupuai (or Tubuai, as the name is now more
commonly spelled), the mutineers returned to Tahiti, where they parted
company. Fletcher Christian, acting lieutenant of the _Bounty_ and
instigator of the mutiny, once more embarked in the ship for an unknown
destination. With him were eight of his own men and eighteen Polynesians
(twelve women and six men). They sailed from Tahiti in September 1789,
and for a period of eighteen years nothing more was heard of them. In
February 1808, the American sealing vessel _Topaz_, calling at
Pitcairn, discovered on this supposedly uninhabited crumb of land a
thriving community of mixed blood: a number of middle-aged Polynesian
women and more than a score of children, under the benevolent rule of a
white-haired English seaman, Alexander Smith, the only survivor of the
fifteen men who had landed there so long before.

Various and discrepant accounts have been preserved concerning the events
which took place on Pitcairn during the eighteen years preceding the
visit of the _Topaz_. The source of them all, direct or indirect,
was Alexander Smith (or John Adams, as he later called himself). He told
the story first to Captain Folger, of the _Topaz_; then, in 1814, to
Captains Staines and Pipon, of the English frigates _Briton_ and
_Tagus_; then to Captain Beechey, of _H. M. S. Blossom_, in
1825; and finally, in 1829, to J. A. Moerenhout, author of _Voyages aux
Îles du Grand Océan_. Later accounts were recorded by Walter Brodie,
who set down, in 1850, a narrative obtained from Arthur, Matthew
Quintal's son; and by Rosalind Young, in her _Story of Pitcairn
Island_, which gives certain details retained in the memory of Eliza,
daughter of John Mills, who reached the advanced age of ninety-three.

Each of these accounts is remarkable for its differences from the others.
The authors, therefore, after careful study of every existing account,
adopted a chronology and selected a sequence of events which seemed to
them to render more plausible the play of cause and effect.

The history of those early years on Pitcairn was tragic, perhaps
inevitably so. Fifteen men and twelve women, of two widely different
races, were set down on a small island, one of the loneliest in the
world. At the end of a decade, although there were many children, only
one man and ten women remained; of the sixteen dead, fifteen had come to
violent ends. These are the facts upon which all the accounts agree. If,
at times, in the Pitcairn narrative, blood flows over-freely, and horror
seems to pile on horror, it is not because the authors would have it so:
it was so, in Pitcairn history.

But the outcome of those early turbulent years was no less extraordinary
than the threads of chance which led to the settlement of the island. All
who were fortunate enough to visit the Pitcairn colony during the first
quarter of the nineteenth century agree that it presented a veritable
picture of the Golden Age.

Those who are interested in the source material concerning the
_Bounty_ mutiny will find an exhaustive bibliography of books,
articles, and unpublished manuscripts in the Appendix to Mr. George
Mackaness's _Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh_, published by
Messrs. Angus and Robertson, of Sydney, Australia. Among the principal
sources consulted by the authors were the following: "Minutes of the
Proceedings of a Court-Martial on Lieutenant William Bligh and certain
members of his crew, to investigate the cause of the loss of H. M. S.
_Bounty_"; _A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty's Ship
"Bounty_," by William Bligh; _A Voyage to the South Sea_, by
William Bligh; _The Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H. M. S.
"Bounty_," by Sir John Barrow; _Pitcairn island and the Islanders_,
by Walter Brodie; _Mutineers of the "Bounty" and Their Descendants
in Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands_, by Lady Belcher; _Bligh
of the "Bounty_," by Geoffrey Rawson; _Voyage of H. M. S.
"Pandora,"_ by E. Edwards and G. Hamilton; _The Life of Vice-Admiral
William Bligh_, by George Mackaness; _The Story of Pitcairn
Island_, by Rosalind Young; _Captain Bligh's Second Voyage to the
South Seas_, by I. Lee; _Pitcairn Island Register Book; New South
Wales Historical Records_; Cook's _Voyages_; Hawkesworth's
_Voyages_; Beechey's _Voyages_; Ellis's _Polynesian Researches;
Ancient Tahiti_, by Teura Henry; and _A Memoir of Peter Heywood_.
Two excellent studies of the present-day descendants of the
_Bounty_ mutineers, from the point of view of an anthropologist,
have been made by Dr. Harry Shapiro in his _Descendants of the Bounty
Mutineers_ and _The Heritage of the Bounty_.

We wish to express our cordial thanks to Mr. N. C. Wyeth, whose
illustrations lend so much colour and vividness to the story of the
_Bounty_ and her men.

_June, 1940_.

J. N. H.
C. N.




CHAPTER I. LIEUTENANT BLIGH


The British are frequently criticized by other nations for their dislike
of change, and indeed we love England for those aspects of nature and
life which change the least. Here in the West Country, where I was born,
men are slow of speech, tenacious of opinion, and averse--beyond their
countrymen elsewhere--to innovation of any sort. The houses of my
neighbours, the tenants' cottages, the very fishing boats which ply on
the Bristol Channel, all conform to the patterns of a simpler age. And an
old man, forty of whose three-and-seventy years have been spent afloat,
may be pardoned a not unnatural tenderness toward the scenes of his
youth, and a satisfaction that these scenes remain so little altered by
time.

No men are more conservative than those who design and build ships save
those who sail them; and since storms are less frequent at sea than some
landsmen suppose, the life of a sailor is principally made up of the
daily performance of certain tasks, in certain manners and at certain
times. Forty years of this life have made a slave of me, and H continue,
almost against my will, to live by the clock. There is no reason why I
should rise at seven each morning, yet seven finds me dressing,
nevertheless; my copy of the _Times_ would reach me even though I
failed to order a horse saddled at ten for my ride down to Watchet to
meet the post. But habit is too much for me, and habit finds a powerful
ally in old Thacker, my housekeeper, whose duties, as I perceive with
inward amusement, are lightened by the regularity she does everything to
encourage. She will listen to no hint of retirement. In spite of her
years, which must number nearly eighty by now, her step is still brisk
and her black eyes snap with a remnant of the old malice. It would give
me pleasure to speak with her of the days when my mother was still
living, but when I try to draw her into talk she wastes no time in
putting me in my place. Servant and master, with the churchyard only a
step ahead! I am lonely now; when Thacker dies, I shall be lonely indeed.

Seven generations of Byams have lived and died in Withycombe; the name
has been known in the region of the Quantock Hills for five hundred years
and more. I am the last of them; it is strange to think that at my death
what remains of our blood will flow in the veins of an Indian woman in
the South Sea.

If it be true that a man's useful life is over on the day when his
thoughts begin to dwell in the past, then I have served little purpose in
living since my retirement from His Majesty's Navy fifteen years ago. The
present has lost substance and reality, and I have discovered, with some
regret, that contemplation of the future brings neither pleasure nor
concern. But forty years at sea, including the turbulent period of the
wars against the Danes, the Dutch, and the French, have left my memory so
well stored that I ask no greater delight than to be free to wander in
the past.

My study, high up in the north wing of Withycombe, with its tall windows
giving on the Bristol Channel and the green distant coast of Wales, is
the point of departure for these travels through the past. The journal I
have kept, since I went to sea as a midshipman in 1787, lies at hand in
the camphor-wood box beside my chair, and I have only to take up a sheaf
of its pages to smell once more the reek of battle smoke, to feel the
stinging sleet of a gale in the North Sea, or to enjoy the calm beauty of
a tropical night under the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere.

In the evening, when the unimportant duties of an old man's day are done,
and I have supped alone in silence, I feel the pleasant anticipation of a
visitor to Town, who on his first evening spends an agreeable half-hour
in deciding which theatre he will attend. Shall I fight the old battles
over again? Camperdown, Copenhagen, Trafalgar--these names thunder in
memory like the booming of great guns. Yet more and more frequently I
turn the pages of my journal still further back, to the frayed and
blotted log of a midshipman--to an episode I have spent a good part of my
life in attempting to forget. Insignificant in the annals of the Navy,
and even more so from an historian's point of view, this incident was
nevertheless the strangest, the most picturesque, and the most tragic of
my career.

It has long been my purpose to follow the example of other retired
officers and employ the too abundant leisure of an old man in setting
down, with the aid of my journal and in the fullest possible detail, a
narrative of some one of the episodes of my life at sea. The decision was
made last night; I shall write of my first ship, the _Bounty_, of
the mutiny on board, of my long residence on the island of Tahiti in the
South Sea, and of how I was conveyed home in irons, to be tried by
court-martial and condemned to death. Two natures clashed on the stage of
that drama of long ago, two men as strong and enigmatical as any I have
known--Fletcher Christian and William Bligh.


When my father died of a pleurisy, early in the spring of 1787, my mother
gave few outward signs of grief, though their life together, in an age
when the domestic virtues were unfashionable, had been a singularly happy
one. Sharing the interest in the natural sciences which had brought my
father the honour of a Fellowship in the Royal Society, my mother was a
countrywoman at heart, caring more for life at Withycombe than for the
artificial distractions of town.

I was to have gone up to Oxford that fall, to Magdalen, my father's
college, and during that first summer of my mother's widowhood I began to
know her, not as a parent, but as a most charming companion, of whose
company I never wearied. The women of her generation were schooled to
reserve their tears for the sufferings of others, and to meet adversity
with a smile. A warm heart and an inquiring mind made her conversation
entertaining or philosophical as the occasion required; and, unlike the
young ladies of the present time, she had been taught that silence can be
agreeable when one has nothing to say.

On the morning when Sir Joseph Banks's letter arrived, we were strolling
about the garden, scarcely exchanging a word. It was late in July, the
sky was blue, and the warm air bore the scent of roses; such a morning as
enables us to tolerate our English climate, which foreigners declare,
perhaps with some justice, the worst in the world. I was thinking how
uncommonly handsome my mother looked in black, with her thick fair hair,
fresh colour, and dark blue eyes. Thacker, her new maid,--a black-eyed
Devon girl,--came tripping down the path. She dropped my mother a curtsey
and held out a letter on a silver tray. My mother took the letter, gave
me a glance of apology, and began to read, seating herself on a rustic
bench.

"From Sir Joseph," she said, when she had perused the letter at length
and laid it down. "You have heard of Lieutenant Bligh, who was with
Captain Cook on his last voyage? Sir Joseph writes that he is on leave,
stopping with friends near Taunton, and would enjoy an evening with us.
Your father thought very highly of him."

I was a rawboned lad of seventeen, lazy in body and mind, with overfast
growth, but the words were like a galvanic shock to me. "With Captain
Cook!" I exclaimed. "Ask him by all means!"

My mother smiled. "I thought you would be pleased," she said.

The carriage was dispatched in good time with a note for Mr. Bligh,
bidding him to dine with us that evening if he could. I remember how I
set out, with the son of one of our tenants, to sail my boat at high tide
on Bridgwater Bay, and how little I enjoyed the sail. My thoughts were
all of our visitor, and the hours till dinner-time seemed to stretch
ahead interminably.

I was fonder, perhaps, of reading than most lads of my age, and the book
I loved best of all was one given me by my father on my tenth
birthday--Dr. Hawkesworth's account of the voyages to the South Sea. I
knew the three, heavy, leather-bound volumes almost by heart, and I had
read with equal interest the French narrative of Monsieur de
Bougainville's voyage. These early accounts of discoveries in the South
Sea, and of the manners and customs of the inhabitants of Otaheite and
Owhyhee (as those islands were then called), excited an interest almost
inconceivable to-day. The writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, which were
to have such lamentable and far-reaching results, preached a doctrine
which had made converts even among people of consequence. It became
fashionable to believe that only among men in a state of nature, freed
from all restraints, could true virtue and happiness be found. And when
Wallis, Byron, Bougainville, and Cook returned from their voyage of
discovery with alluring accounts of the New Cytheraea, whose happy
inhabitants, relieved from the curse of Adam, spent their days in song
and dance, the doctrines of Rousseau received new impetus. Even my
father, so engrossed in his astronomical studies that he had lost touch
with the world, listened eagerly to the tales of his friend Sir Joseph
Banks, and often discussed with my mother, whose interest was equal to
his, the virtues of what he termed "a natural life."

My own interest was less philosophical than adventurous; like other
youngsters, I longed to sail unknown seas, to raise uncharted islands,
and to trade with gentle Indians who regarded white men as gods. The
thought that I was soon to converse with an officer who had accompanied
Captain Cook on his last voyage--a mariner, and not a man of science like
Sir Joseph--kept me woolgathering all afternoon, and I was not
disappointed when the carriage drew up at last and Mr. Bligh stepped out.

Bligh was at that time in the prime of life. He was of middle stature,
strongly made and inclining to stoutness, though he carried himself well.
His weather-beaten face was broad, with a firm mouth and very fine dark
eyes, and his thick powdered hair grew high on his head, above a noble
brow. He wore his three-cornered black hat athwartships; his coat was of
bright blue broadcloth, trimmed with white, with gold anchor buttons and
the long tails of the day. His waistcoat, breeches, and stockings were
white. The old-fashioned uniform was one to set off a well-made man.
Bligh's voice, strong, vibrant, and a little harsh, gave an impression of
uncommon vitality; his bearing showed resolution and courage, and the
glance of his eye gave evidence of an assurance such as few men possess.
These symptoms of a strong and aggressive nature were tempered by the
lofty brow of a man of intellect, and the agreeable and unpretentious
manner he assumed ashore.

The carriage, as I said, drew up before our door, the footman sprang down
from the box, and Mr. Bligh stepped out. I had been waiting to welcome
him; as I made myself known, he gave me a handclasp and a smile.

"Your father's son," he said. "A great loss--he was known, by name at
least, to all who practise navigation."

Presently my mother came down and we went in to dinner. Bligh spoke very
handsomely of my father's work on the determination of longitude, and
after a time the conversation turned to the islands of the South Sea.

"Is it true," my mother asked, "that the Indians of Tahiti are as happy
as Captain Cook believed?"

"Ah, ma'am," said our guest, "happiness is a vast word! It is true that
they live without great labour, and that nearly all of the light tasks
they perform are self-imposed; released from the fear of want and from
all salutary discipline, they regard nothing seriously."

"Roger and I," observed my mother, "have been studying the ideas of J. J.
Rousseau. As you know, he believes that true happiness can only be
enjoyed by man in a state of nature."

Bligh nodded. "I have been told of his ideas," he said, "though
unfortunately I left school too young to learn French. But if a rough
seaman may express an opinion on a subject more suited to a philosopher,
I believe that true happiness can only be enjoyed by a disciplined and
enlightened people. As for the Indians of Tahiti, though they are freed
from the fear of want, their conduct is regulated by a thousand absurd
restrictions, which no civilized man would put up with. These
restrictions constitute a kind of unwritten law, called _taboo_, and
instead of making for a wholesome discipline they lay down fanciful and
unjust rules to control every action of a man's life. A few days among
men in a state of nature might have changed Monsieur Rousseau's ideas."
He paused and turned to me. "You know French, then?" he asked, as if to
include me in the talk.

"Yes, sir," I replied.

"I'll do him justice, Mr. Bligh," my mother put in; "he has a gift for
languages. My son might pass for a native of France or Italy, and is
making progress in German now. His Latin won him a prize last year."

"I wish I had his gift! Lord!" Bligh laughed. "I'd rather face a
hurricane than translate a page of Caesar nowadays! And the task Sir
Joseph has set me is worse still! There is no harm in telling you that I
shall soon set sail for the South Sea." Perceiving our interest, he went
on:--

"I have been in the merchant service since I was paid off four years ago,
when peace was signed. Mr. Campbell, the West India merchant, gave me
command of his ship, _Britannia_, and during my voyages, when I
frequently had planters of consequence as passengers on board, I was many
times asked to tell what I knew of the breadfruit, which flourishes in
Tahiti and Owhyhee. Considering that the breadfruit might provide a cheap
and wholesome food for their negro slaves, several of the West India
merchants and planters petitioned the Crown, asking that a vessel be
fitted out suitably to convey the breadfruit from Tahiti to the West
Indian islands. Sir Joseph Banks thought well of the idea and gave it his
support. It is due largely to his interest that the Admiralty is now
fitting out a small vessel for the voyage, and at Sir Joseph's suggestion
I was recalled to the Service and am to be given command. We should sail
before the end of the year."

"Were I a man," said my mother, whose eyes were bright with interest, "I
should beg you to take me along; you will need gardeners, no doubt, and I
could care for the young plants."

Bligh smiled. "I would ask no better, ma'am," he said gallantly, "though
I have been supplied with a botanist--David Nelson, who served in a
similar capacity on Captain Cook's last voyage. My ship, the
_Bounty_, will be a floating garden fitted with every convenience
for the care of the plants, and I have no fear but that we shall be able
to carry out the purpose of the voyage. It is the task our good friend
Sir Joseph has enjoined on me that presents the greatest difficulty. He
has solicited me most earnestly to employ my time in Tahiti in acquiring
a greater knowledge of the Indians and their customs, and a more complete
vocabulary and grammar of their language, than it has hitherto been
possible to gather. He believes that a dictionary of the language, in
particular, might prove of the greatest service to mariners in the South
Sea. But I know as little of dictionaries as of Greek, and shall have no
one on board qualified for such a task."

"How shall you lay your course, sir?" I asked. "About Cape Horn?"

"I shall make the attempt, though the season will be advanced beyond the
time of easterly winds. We shall return from Tahiti by way of the East
Indies and the Cape of Good Hope."

My mother gave me a glance and we rose as she took leave of us. While he
cracked walnuts and sipped my father's Madeira, Bligh questioned me, in
the agreeable manner he knew so well how to assume, as to my knowledge of
languages. At last he seemed satisfied, finished the wine in his glass,
and shook his head at the man who would have filled it. He was moderate
in the use of wine, in an age when nearly all the officers of His
Majesty's Navy drank to excess. Finally he spoke.

"Young man," he said seriously, "how would you like to sail with me?"

I had been thinking, ever since his first mention of the voyage, that I
should like nothing better, but his words took me aback. "Do you mean it,
sir?" I stammered. "Would it be possible?"

"It rests with you and Mrs. Byam to decide. It would be a pleasure to
make a place for you among my young gentlemen."

The warm summer evening was as beautiful as the day that had preceded it,
and when we had joined my mother in the garden, she and Bligh spoke of
the projected voyage. I knew that he was waiting for me to mention his
proposal, and presently, during a pause in the talk, I summoned up my
courage.

"Mother," I said, "Lieutenant Bligh has been good enough to suggest that
I accompany him."

If she felt surprise, she gave no sign of it, but turned calmly to our
guest. "You have paid Roger a compliment," she remarked. "Could an
inexperienced lad be of use to you on board?"

"He'll make a seaman, ma'am, never fear! I've taken a fancy to the cut of
his jib, as the old tars say. And I could put his gift for languages to
good use."

"How long shall you be gone?"

"Two years, perhaps."

"He was to have gone up to Oxford, but I suppose that could wait." She
turned to me half banteringly. "Well, sir, what do you say?"

"With your permission, there is nothing I would rather do."

She smiled at me in the twilight and gave my hand a little pat. "Then you
have it," she said. "I would be the last to stand in the way. A voyage to
the South Sea! If I were a lad and Mr. Bligh would have me, I'd run away
from home to join his ship!"

Bligh gave one of his short, harsh laughs and looked at my mother
admiringly. "You'd have made a rare sailor, ma'am," he remarked--"afraid
of nothing, I'll wager."


It was arranged that I should join the _Bounty_ at Spithead, but the
storing, and victualing, and fitting-out took so long that the autumn was
far advanced before she was ready to sail. In October I took leave of my
mother and went up to London to order my uniforms, to call on old Mr.
Erskine, our solicitor, and to pay my respects to Sir Joseph Banks.

My clearest memory of those days is of an evening at Sir Joseph's house.
He was a figure of romance to my eyes--a handsome, florid man of
forty-five, President of the Royal Society, companion of the immortal
Captain Cook, friend of Indian princesses, and explorer of Labrador,
Iceland, and the great South Sea. When we had dined, he led me to his
study, hung with strange weapons and ornaments from distant lands. He
took up from among the papers on his table a sheaf of manuscript.

"My vocabulary of the Tahitian language," he said. "I have had this copy
made. It is short and imperfect, as you will discover, but may prove of
some service to you. Please observe that the system of spelling Captain
Cook and I adopted should be changed. I have given the matter some
thought, and Bligh agrees with me that it will be better and simpler to
set down the words as an Italian would spell them--particularly in the
case of the vowels. You know Italian, eh?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good!" he went on. "You will be some months in Tahiti, while they are
gathering the young breadfruit plants. Bligh will see to it that you are
given leisure to devote yourself to the dictionary I hope to publish on
your return. Dialects of the Tahitian language are spoken over an immense
space of the South Sea, and a dictionary of the commoner words, with some
little information as to the grammar, will be in demand among mariners
before many years have passed. At present we think of the South Sea as
little less remote than the moon, but depend on it, the rich whale
fisheries and new lands for planting and settlement will soon attract
notice, now that we have lost the American Colonies.

"There are many distractions in Tahiti," he went on after a pause; "take
care that you are not misled into wasting your time. And, above all, take
care in the selection of your Indian friends. When a ship drops anchor in
Matavai Bay the Indians come out in throngs, each eager to choose a
friend, or _taio_, from amongst her company. Bide your time, learn
something of politics on shore, and choose as your _taio_ a man of
consideration and authority. Such a man can be of infinite use to you; in
return for a few axes, knives, fishhooks, and trinkets for his women, he
will keep you supplied with fresh provisions, entertain you at his
residence when you step ashore, and do everything in his power to make
himself useful. Should you make the mistake of choosing as your
_taio_ a man of the lower orders, you may find him dull, incurious,
and with an imperfect knowledge of the Indian tongue. In my opinion they
are not only a different class, but a different race, conquered long ago
by those who now rule the land. Persons of consequence in Tahiti are
taller, fairer, and vastly more intelligent than the _manahune_, or
serfs."

"Then there is no more equality in Tahiti than amongst ourselves?"

Sir Joseph smiled. "Less, I should say. The Indians have a false
appearance of equality from the simplicity of their manners and the fact
that the employments of all classes are the same. The king may be seen
heading a fishing party, or the queen paddling her own canoe, or beating
out bark cloth with her women. But of real equality there is none; no
action, however meritorious, can raise a man above the position to which
he was born. The chiefs alone, believed to be descended from the gods,
are thought to have souls." He paused, fingers drumming on the arm of his
chair. "You've everything you will need?" he asked. "Clothing, writing
materials, money? Midshipmen's fare is not the best in the world, but
when you go on board, one of the master's mates will ask each of you for
three or four pounds to lay in a few small luxuries for the berth. Have
you a sextant?"

"Yes, sir--one of my father's; I showed it to Mr. Bligh."

"I'm glad Bligh's in command; there's not a better seaman afloat. I am
told that he is a bit of a tartar at sea, but better a taut hand than a
slack one, any day! He will instruct you in your duties; perform them
smartly, and remember--discipline's the thing!"

I took my leave of Sir Joseph with his last words still ringing in my
ears--"Discipline's the thing!" I was destined to ponder over them
deeply, and sometimes bitterly, before we met again.



CHAPTER II. SEA LAW


Toward 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 near-by 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.



CHAPTER III. AT SEA


At daybreak on the twenty-eighth of November we got sail on the
_Bounty_ and worked down to St. Helen's, where we dropped anchor.
For nearly a month we were detained there and at Spithead by contrary
winds; it was not until the twenty-third of December that we set sail
down the Channel with a fair wind.

A month sounds an age to be crowded with more than forty other men on
board a small vessel at anchor most of the time, but I was making the
acquaintance of my shipmates, and so keen on learning my new duties that
the days were all too short. The _Bounty_ carried six midshipmen,
and, since we had no schoolmaster, as is customary on a man-of-war,
Lieutenant Bligh and the master divided the duty of instructing us in
trigonometry, nautical astronomy, and navigation. I shared with Stewart
and Young the advantage of learning navigation under Bligh, and in
justice to an officer whose character in other respects was by no means
perfect, I must say that there was no finer seaman and navigator afloat
at the time. Both of my fellow midshipmen were men grown: George Stewart
of a good family in the Orkneys, a young man of twenty-three or four, and
a seaman who had made several voyages before this: and Edward Young, a
stout, salty-looking fellow, with a handsome face marred by the loss of
nearly all his front teeth. Both of them were already very fair
navigators, and I was hard put to it not to earn the reputation of a
dunce.

The boatswain, Mr. Cole, and his mate, James Morrison, instructed me in
seamanship. Cole was an old-style Navy salt, bronzed, taciturn, and
pigtailed, with a profound knowledge of his work and little other
knowledge of any kind. Morrison was very different--a man of good birth,
he had been a midshipman, and had shipped aboard the _Bounty_
because of his interest in the voyage. He was a first-rate seaman and
navigator; a dark, slender, intelligent man of thirty or thereabouts,
cool in the face of danger, not given to oaths, and far above his station
on board. Morrison did not thrash the men to their work, delivering blows
impartially in the manner of a boatswain's mate; he carried a colt, a
piece of knotted rope, to be sure, but it was only used on obvious
malingerers, or when Bligh shouted to him: "Start that man!"

There were much irritation and grumbling at the continued bad weather,
but at last, on the evening of the twenty-second of December, the sky
cleared and the wind shifted to the eastward. It was still dark next
morning when I heard the boatswain's pipe and Morrison's call: "All
hands! Turn out and save a clue! Out or down here! Rise and shine! Out or
down there! Lash and carry!"

The stars were bright when I came on deck, and the grey glimmer of dawn
was in the East. For three weeks we had had strong southwesterly winds,
with rain and fog; now the air was sharp with frost, and a strong east
wind blew in gusts off the coast of France. Lieutenant Bligh was on the
quarter-deck with Mr. Fryer, the master; Christian and Elphinstone, the
master's mates, were forward among the men. There was a great bustle on
deck and the ship rang with the piping of the bos'n's whistle. I heard
the shouting of the men at the windlass, and Christian's voice above the
din: "Hove short, sir!"

"Loose the topsails!" came from Fryer, and Christian passed the order on.
My station was the mizzen-top, and in a twinkling we had the gaskets off
and the small sail sheeted home. The knots in the gaskets were stiff with
frost, and the men setting the fore-topsail were slow at their work.
Bligh glanced aloft impatiently.

"What are you doing there?" he shouted angrily. "Are you all asleep,
foretop? The main-topmen are off the yard! Look alive, you crawling
caterpillars!"

The topsails filled and the yards were braced up sharp; the _Bounty_
broke out her own anchor as she gathered way on the larboard tack. She
was smartly manned in spite of Bligh's complaints, but he was on edge,
for a thousand critical eyes watched our departure from the ships at
anchor closer inshore. With a "Yo! Heave ho!" the anchor came up and was
tatted.

Then it was: "Loose the forecourse!" and presently, as she began to heel
to the gusts: "Get the mainsail on her!" There was a thunder of canvas
and a wild rattling of blocks. When the brace was hove short, Bligh
himself roared: "Board. the main tack!" Little by little, with a mighty
chorus at the windlass: "Heave ho! Heave and pawl! Yo, heave, hearty,
ho!" the weather clew of the sail came down to the waterway. Heeling well
to starboard, the bluff-bowed little ship tore through the sheltered
water, on her way to the open sea.

The sun rose in a cloudless sky--a glorious winter's morning, clear,
cold, and sparkling. I stood by the bulwarks as we flew down the Solent,
my breath trailing off like thin smoke. Presently we sped through the
Needles and the _Bounty_ headed away to sea, going like a race
horse, with topgallants set.


That night the wind increased to a strong gale, with a heavy sea, but on
the following day the weather moderated, permitting us to keep our
Christmas cheerfully. Extra grog was served out, and the mess cooks were
to be heard whistling as they seeded the raisins for duff, not, as a
landsman might suppose, from the prospect of good cheer, but in order to
prove to their messmates that the raisins were not going into t heir
mouths.

I was still making the acquaintance of my shipmates at this time. The men
of the _Bounty_ had been attracted by the prospect of a voyage to
the South Sea, or selected for their stations by the master or Bligh
himself. Our fourteen able-bodied seamen were true salts, not the scum of
the taverns and jails impressed to man so many of His Majesty's ships;
the officers were nearly all men of experience and tried character, and
even our botanist, Mr. Nelson, had been recommended by Sir Joseph Banks
because of his former voyage to Tahiti under Captain Cook. Mr. Bligh
might have had a hundred midshipmen had he obliged all those who applied
for a place in the _Bounty's_ berth; as it was, there were six of
us, though the ship's establishment provided for only two. Stewart and
Young were seamen and pleasant fellows enough; Hallet was a
sickly-looking boy of fifteen with a shifty eye and a weak, peevish
mouth; Tinkler, Mr. Fryer's brother-in-law, was a year younger, though he
had been to sea before--a monkey of a lad, whose continual scrapes kept
him at the masthead half the time. Hayward, the handsome, sulky boy I had
met when I first set foot in the berth, was only, sixteen, but big and
strong for his age. He was something of a bully and aspired to be cock of
the berth, since he had been two years at sea aboard a seventy-four.

I shared with Hayward, Stewart, and Young a berth on the lower deck. In
this small space the four of us swung our hammocks at night and had our
mess, using a chest for a table and other chests for seats. On
consideration of a liberal share of our grog, received each Saturday
night, Alexander Smith, able-bodied, acted as our hammock man, and for a
lesser sum of the same ship's currency, Thomas Ellison, the youngest of
the seamen, filled the office of mess boy. Mr. Christian was caterer to
the midshipmen's mess; like the others, I had paid him five pounds on
joining the ship, and he had laid out the money in a supply of potatoes,
onions, Dutch cheeses (for making that midshipman's dish called "crab"),
tea, coffee, and sugar, and other small luxuries. These private stores
enabled us to live well for several weeks, though a more villainous cook
than young Tom Ellison would be impossible to find. As for drink, the
ship's allowance was so liberal that Christian made no special provision
for us. For a month or more every man aboard received a gallon of beer
each day, and when that was gone, a pint of fiery white _mistela_
wine from Spain--the wine our seamen love and call affectionately "Miss
Taylor." And when the last of the wine was gone we fell back on an ample
supply of the sailor's sheet anchor--grog. We had a wondrous fifer on
board--a half-blind Irishman named Michael Byrne. He had managed to
conceal his blindness till the _Bounty_ was at sea, when it became
apparent, much to Mr. Bligh's annoyance. But when he struck up "Nancy
Dawson" on the first day he piped the men to grog, his blindness was
forgotten. He could put more trills and runs into that lively old tune
than any man of us had heard before a cheeriness in keeping with this
happiest hour of the seaman's day.

We lost a good part of our beer in a strong easterly gale that overtook
the _Bounty_ the day after Christmas. Several casks went adrift from
their lashings and were washed overboard when a great sea broke over the
ship; the same wave stove in all three of our boats and nearly carried
them away. I was off watch at the time, and below, diverting myself in
the surgeon's cabin on the orlop, aft. It was a close, stinking little
den, below the water line--reeking of the bilges and lit by a candle that
burned blue for lack of air. But that mattered nothing to Old Bacchus.
Our sawbones's name was Thomas Huggan and it was so inscribed on the
ship's articles, but he was known as Old Bacchus to all our company. His
normal state was what sailors call "in the wind" or "shaking a cloth,"
and the signal that he had passed his normal state earned him the name by
which all hands on the _Bounty_ knew him. When he had indiscreetly
added a glass of brandy or a tot of grog to the carefully measured supply
of spirits demanded at close intervals by a stomach which must have been
copper-sheathed, it was his custom to rise, balancing himself on his
starboard leg, place a hand between the third and fourth buttons of his
waistcoat, and recite with comic gravity a verse which begins:--

Bacchus must now his power resign.

With his wooden leg, his fiery face, snow-white hair, and rakish blue
eyes, Old Bacchus seemed the veritable archetype of naval surgeons. He
had been afloat so long that he could scarcely recollect the days when he
had lived ashore, and viewed with apprehension the prospect of
retirement. He preferred salt beef to the finest steak or chop to be
obtained ashore, and confided to me one day that it was almost impossible
for him to sleep in a bed. A cannon ball had carried away his larboard
leg when his ship was exchanging broadsides, yardarm to yardarm, with the
_Ranger_, and he had been made prisoner by John Paul Jones.

The cronies of Old Bacchus were Mr. Nelson, the botanist, and Peckover,
the _Bounty's_ gunner. The duties of a gunner, onerous enough on
board a man-of-war, were of the very lightest on our ship, and
Peckover--a jovial fellow who loved a song and a glass dearly--had some
leisure for conviviality. Mr. Nelson was a quiet, elderly man with
iron-grey hair. Though devoted to the study of plants, he seemed to
derive great pleasure from the surgeon's company, and could spin a. yarn
with the best when in the mood. The great event in his life had been his
voyage to the South Sea with Captain Cook, whose memory he revered.

Mr. Nelson's cabin was forward of the surgeon's, separated from it by the
cabin of Samuel, the captain's clerk, and he was to be found more often
in the surgeon's cabin than in his own. All of the cabins were provided
with standing bed places, built in by the carpenters at Deptford, but
Bacchus preferred to sling a hammock at night, and used his bed as a
settee and the capacious locker under it as a private spirit room. The
cabin was scarcely more than six feet by seven; the bed occupied nearly
half of this space, and opposite, under the hammock battens, were three
small casks of wine, as yet unbroached. On one of them a candle guttered
and burned blue.

Another cask served as a seat for me, and Bacchus and Nelson sat side by
side on the bed. Each man held a pewter pint of flip--beer strongly laced
with rum. The ship was on the larboard tack and making heavy weather of
it, so that at times my cask threatened to slide from under me, but the
two men on the settee seemed to give the weather no thought.

"A first-rate man, Purcell!" remarked the surgeon, glancing down
admiringly at his new wooden leg; "a better ship's carpenter never swung
an adze! My other leg was most damnably uncomfortable, but this one's
like my own flesh and bone! Mr. Purcell's health!" He took a long pull at
the flip and smacked his lips. "You're a lucky man, Nelson! Should
anything happen to your underpinning, you've me to saw off the old leg
and Purcell to make you a better one!"

Nelson smiled. "Very kind, I'm sure," he said; "but I hope I shall not
have to trouble you."

"I hope not, my dear fellow--I hope not! But never dread an amputation.
With a pint of rum, a well-stropped razor, and a crosscut saw, I'd have
your leg off before you knew it. Paul Jones's American surgeon did the
trick for me.

"Let's see--it must have been in seventy-eight. I was on the old
_Drake_, Captain Burden, and we were on the lookout for Paul Jones's
_Ranger_ at the time. Then we learned that she was hove-to off the.
mouth of Belfast Lough. An extraordinary affair, begad! We actually had
sight-seers on board--one of them was an officer of the Inniskilling
Fusileers in full uniform. We moved out slowly and came up astern of the
American ship. Up went our colours and we hailed: "What ship is that?"
'American Continental ship _Ranger!_' roared the Yankee master, as
his own colours went up. 'Come on--we're waiting for you!' Next moment
both ships let go their broadsides...Good God!"

The _Bounty_ staggered with the shock of a great sea which broke
into her at that moment. "Up with you, Byam!" ordered the surgeon; and,
as I sprang out of his cabin toward the ladderway, I heard, above the
creaking and straining of the ship and the roar of angry water, a faint
shouting for all hands on deck. Then I found myself in an uproar and
confusion very strange after the peace of the surgeon's snuggery.

Bligh stood by the mizzenmast, beside Fryer, who was bawling orders to
his mates. They were shortening sail to get the ship hove-to. The men at
the clew lines struggled with might and main to hoist the stubborn
thundering canvas to the yards.

My own task, with two other midshipmen, was to furl the mizzen topsail--a
small sail, but far from easy to subdue at such a time. The men below
brailed up the driver and made fast the vangs of its gaff. Presently the
_Bounty_ was hove-to, all snug on the larboard tack, under reefed
fore and main topsails.

The great wave which had boarded us left destruction in its wake. All
three of our boats were stove in; the casks of beer which had been lashed
on deck were nowhere to be seen; and the stern of the ship so damaged
that the cabin was filled with water, which leaked into the bread room
below, spoiling a large part of our stock of bread.


In latitude 39°N. the gale abated, the sun shone out, and we made all
sail for Teneriffe with a fine northerly wind. On the fourth of January
we spoke a French merchant vessel, bound for Mauritius, which let go her
topgallant sheets in salute. The next morning we saw the island of
Teneriffe to the southwest of us, about twelve leagues distant, but it
fell calm near the land and we were a day and a night working up to the
road of Santa Cruz, where we anchored in twenty-five fathoms, close to a
Spanish packet and an American brig.

For five days we lay at anchor in the road, and it was here that the
seeds of discontent, destined to be the ruin of the voyage, were sown
among the _Bounty's_ people. As there was a great surf on the beach,
Lieutenant Bligh bargained with the shore boats to bring off our water
and supplies, and kept his own men busy from morning to night repairing
the mischief the storm had done our ship. This occasioned much grumbling
in the forecastle, as some of the sailors had hoped to be employed in the
ship's boats, which would have enabled them at least to set foot on the
island and to obtain some of the wine for which it is famous, said to be
little inferior to the best London Madeira.

During our sojourn the allowance of salt beef was stopped, and fresh
beef, obtained on shore, issued instead. The _Bounty's_ salt beef
was the worst I have ever met with at sea, but the beef substituted for.
it in Teneriffe was worse still. The men declared that it had been cut
from the carcasses of dead horses or mules, and complained to the master
that it was unfit for food. Fryer informed Bligh of the complaint; the
captain flew into a passion and swore that the men should eat the fresh
beef or nothing at all. The result was that most of it was thrown
overboard--a sight which did nothing to soothe Bligh's temper.

I was fortunate enough to have a run ashore, for Bligh took me with him
one day to wait upon the governor, the Marquis de Branchefortàé. With the
governor's permission Mr. Nelson ranged the hills every day in search of
plants and natural curiosities, but his friend the surgeon only appeared
on deck once during the five days we lay at anchor. Old Bacchus had
ordered a monstrous supply of brandy for himself--enough to do the very
god of wine, his namesake, for a year. Not trusting the shore boats with
such precious freight, he had obtained the captain's permission to send
the small cutter to the pier, and when a man went below to inform him
that his brandy was alongside, the surgeon came stumping to the ladderway
and clambered on deck. The cutter was down to the gunwales with her load;
as there was a high swell running, Old Bacchus stood by the bulwarks
anxiously. "Easy with it!" he ordered with tender solicitude. "Easy now!
A glass of grog all around if you break nothing!" When the last of the
small casks was aboard and had been sent below, the surgeon heaved a
sigh. I was standing near by and saw him glance at the land for the first
time. He caught my eye. "One island's as like another as two peas in a
pod," he remarked indifferently, pulling out a handkerchief to mop his
fiery face.

When we sailed from Teneriffe, Bligh divided the people into three
watches, making Christian acting lieutenant, and giving him charge of the
third watch. Bligh had known him for some years in the West India trade,
and believed himself to be Christian's friend and benefactor. His
friendship took the form of inviting Christian to sup or dine one day,
and cursing him in the coarsest manner before the men the next; but in
this case he did him a real service, since it was ten to one that, if all
went well on the voyage, the appointment would be confirmed by the
Admiralty, and Christian would find himself the holder of His Majesty's
commission. He now rated as a gentleman, with the midshipmen and Bligh;
and Fryer was provided with a grievance both against the captain,
and--such is human nature--against his former subordinate.

Nor were grievances wanting during our passage from Teneriffe to Cape
Horn. The people's food on British ships is always bad and always
scanty--a fact which in later days caused so many of our seamen to desert
to American vessels. But on the _Bounty_ the food was of poorer
quality, and issued in scantier quantities, than any man of us had seen
before. When Bligh called the ship's company aft to read the order
appointing Christian acting lieutenant, he also informed them that, as
the length of the voyage was uncertain, and the season so far advanced
that it was doubtful whether we should be able to make our way around
Cape Horn, it seemed necessary to reduce the allowance of bread to two
thirds of the usual amount. Realizing the need for economy, the men
received this cheerfully, but continued to grumble about the salt beef
and pork.

We carried no purser. Bligh filled the office himself, assisted by
Samuel, his clerk--a smug, tight-lipped little man, of a Jewish cast of
countenance, who was believed, not without reason, to be the captain's
"narker" or spy among the men. He was heartily disliked by all hands, and
it was observed that the man who showed his dislike for Mr. Samuel too
openly was apt to find himself in trouble with Lieutenant Bligh. It was
Samuel's task to issue the provisions to the cooks of the messes; each
time a cask of salt meat was broached, the choicest pieces were reserved
for the cabin, and the remainder, scarcely lit for human food, issued out
to the messes without being weighed. Samuel would call out "Four pounds,"
and mark the amount down in his book, when anyone could perceive that the
meat would not have weighed three:

Seamen regard meanness in their own kind with the utmost contempt, and
that great rarity in the Service, a mean officer, is looked upon with
loathing by his men. They can put up with a harsh captain, but nothing
will drive British seamen to mutiny faster than a captain suspected of
lining his pockets at their expense.

While the _Bounty_ was still in the northeast trades, an incident
occurred which gave us reason to suspect Bligh of meanness of this kind.
The weather was fine, and one morning the main hatch was raised and our
stock of cheeses brought up on deck to air. Bligh missed no detail of the
management of his ship; he displayed in such matters a smallness of mind
scarcely in accord with his commission. This unwillingness to trust those
under him to perform their duties is apt to be the defect of the officer
risen from the ranks,--or "come in through the hawse-hole," as seamen
say,--and is the principal reason why such officers are rarely popular
with their men.

Bligh stood by Hillbrandt, the cooper, while he started the hoops on our
casks of cheese and knocked out the heads. Two cheeses, of about fifty
pounds weight, were found to be missing from one of the casks, and Bligh
flew into one of his passions of rage.

"Stolen, by God!" he shouted.

"Perhaps you will recollect, sir," Hillbrandt made bold to say, "that
while we were in Deptford the cask was opened by your order and the
cheeses carried ashore."

"You insolent scoundrel! Hold your tongue!"

Christian and Fryer happened to be on deck at the time, and Bligh
included them in the black scowl he gave the men near by. "A damned set
of thieves," he went on. "You're all in collusion against me--officers
and men. But I'll tame you--by God, I will!" He turned to the cooper.
"Another word from you and I'll have you seized up and flogged to the
bone." He turned aft on his heel and bawled down the ladderway. "Mr.
Samuel! Come on deck this instant."

Samuel came trotting up to his master obsequiously, and Bligh went on:
"Two of the cheeses have been stolen. See that the allowance is
stopped--from the officers too, mind you--until the deficiency is made
good."

I could see that Fryer was deeply offended, though he said nothing at the
time; as for Christian,--a man of honour,--his feelings were not
difficult to imagine. The men had a pretty clear idea of which way the
wind blew by this time, and on the next banyan day, when butter alone was
served out, they refused it, saying that to accept butter without cheese
would be a tacit acknowledgment of the theft. John Williams, one of the
seamen, declared publicly in the forecastle that he had carried the two
cheeses to Mr. Bligh's house, with a cask of vinegar and some other
things which were sent up in a boat from Long Reach.

As the private stocks of provisions obtained in Spithead now began to run
out, all hands went "from grub galore to the King's own," as seamen say.
Our bread, which was only beginning to breed maggots, was fairly good,
though it needed teeth better than mine to eat the central "reefer's
nut"; but our salt meat was unspeakably bad. Meeting Alexander Smith one
morning when he was cook to his mess, I was shown a piece of it fresh
from the cask--a dark, stony, unwholesome-looking lump, glistening with
salt.

"Have a look, Mr. Byam," he said. "What'll it be, I wonder? Not beef or
pork, that's certain! I mind one day on the old _Antelope_--two
years ago, that was--the cooper found three horseshoes in the bottom of a
cask!" He shook his pigtail back over his shoulder and shifted a great
quid of tobacco to his starboard cheek. "You've seen the victualing yards
in Portsmouth, sir? Pass that way any night, and you'll hear the dogs
bark and the horses neigh! And I'll tell you something else you young
gentlemen don't know." He glanced up and down the deck cautiously and
then whispered: "It's as much as a black man's life is worth to pass that
way by night! They'd pop him into a cask like that!" He snapped his
fingers impressively.

Smith was a great admirer of Old Bacchus, whom he had known on other
ships, and a few days later he handed me a little wooden box. "For the
surgeon, sir," he said. "Will you give it to him?"

It was a snuffbox, curiously wrought of some dark, reddish wood, like
mahogany, and very neatly fitted with a lid; a handsome hit of work,
carved and polished with a seaman's skill. I found leisure to visit the
surgeon the same evening.

Christian's watch was on duty at the time. Young Tinkler and I were in
Mr. Fryer's watch, and the third watch had been placed in charge of Mr.
Peckover, a short, powerful man of forty or forty-five, who could
scarcely remember a time when he had not been at sea. His good-humoured
face had been blackened by the West Indian sun, and his arms were covered
with tattooing.

I found Peckover with the doctor and Nelson--squeezed together on the
settee.

"Come in," cried the surgeon. "Wait a bit, my lad--I think I can make a
place for you."

He sprang up with surprising agility and pushed a small cask into the
doorway. Peckover held the spigot open while the wine poured frothing
into a pewter pint. I delivered the snuffbox before I sat down on my
cask, pint in hand.

"From Smith, you say?" asked the surgeon. "Very handsome of him! Very
handsome indeed! I remember Smith well on the old _Antelope_--eh,
Peckover? I have a recollection that I used to treat him to a drop of
grog now and then. And why not, I say! A thirsty man goes straight to my
heart." He glanced complacently about his cabin, packed to the hammock
battens with small casks of spirits and wine. "Thank God that neither I
nor my friends shall go thirsty on this voyage!"

Nelson stretched out his hand for the snuffbox and examined it with
interest. "I shall always marvel," he remarked, "at the ingenuity of our
seamen. This would be a credit to any craftsman ashore, with all the
tools of his trade. And a fine bit of wood, handsomely polished, too!
Mahogany, no doubt, though the grain seems different."

Bacchus looked at Peckover quizzically, and the gunner returned the look,
grinning.

"Wood?" said the surgeon. "Well, I have heard it called that, and worse.
Wood that once bellowed--aye, and neighed and harked, if the tales be
true. In plain English, my dear Nelson, your mahogany is old junk, more
politely called salt beef--His Majesty's own!"

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Nelson, examining the snuffbox in real
astonishment.

"Aye, salt beef! Handsome as any mahogany and quite as durable. Why, it
had been proposed to sheathe our West India frigates with it--a material
said to defy the attacks of the toredo worm!"

I took the little box from Nelson's hand, to inspect it with a new
interest. "Well, I'm damned!" I thought.

Old Bacchus had rolled up his sleeve and was pouring a train of snuff
along his shaven and polished forearm. With a loud sniffing sound it
disappeared up his nose. He sneezed, blew his nose violently on an
enormous blue handkerchief, and filled his tankard with _mistela_.

"A glass of wine with you gentlemen!" he remarked, and poured the entire
pint down his throat without taking breath. Mr. Peckover glanced at his
friend admiringly.

"Aye, Peckover," said the surgeon, catching his eye, "nothing like a nip
of salt beef to give a man a thirst. Let the cook keep his slush. Give me
a bit of the lean, well soaked and boiled, and you can have all the
steaks and cutlets ashore. Begad! Just suppose, now, that we were all
wrecked on a desert island, without a scrap to eat. I'd pull out my
snuffbox and have one meal, at any rate, while the rest of you went
hungry!"

"So you would, surgeon, so you would," said the gunner in his rumbling
voice, grinning from ear to ear.



CHAPTER IV. TYRANNY


One sultry afternoon, before we picked up the southeast trades, Bligh
sent his servant to bid me sup with him. Since the great cabin was taken
up with our breadfruit garden, the captain messed on the lower deck, in
an apartment on the larboard side, extending from the hatch to the
bulkhead abaft the mainmast. I dressed myself with some care, and, going
aft, found that Christian was my fellow guest. The surgeon and Fryer
messed regularly with Bligh, but Old Bacchus had excused himself this
evening.

There was a fine show of plate on the captain's table, but when the
dishes were uncovered I saw that Bligh fared little better than his men.
We had salt beef, in plenty for once, and the pick of the cask, bad
butter, and worse cheese, from which the long red worms had been
hand-picked, a supply of salted cabbage, believed to prevent scurvy, and
a dish heaped with the mashed pease seamen call "dog's body."

Mr. Bligh, though temperate in the use of wine, attacked his food with
more relish than most officers would care to display. Fryer was a rough,
honest old seaman, but his manners at table put the captain's to shame;
yet Christian, who had been a mere master's mate only a few days before,
supped fastidiously despite the coarseness of the food. Christian was on
the captain's right, Fryer on his left, and I sat opposite, facing him.
The talk had turned to the members of the _Bounty's_ company.

"Damn them!" said Bligh, his mouth full of beef and pease, which he
continued to chew rapidly as he spoke. "A lazy, incompetent lot of
scoundrels! God knows a captain has trials enough without being cursed
with such a crew! The dregs of the public houses..." He swallowed
violently and filled his mouth once more. "That fellow I had flogged
yesterday; what was his name, Mr. Fryer?"

"Burkitt," replied the master, a little red in the face.

"Yes, Burkitt, the insolent hound! And they're all as bad. I'm damned if
they know a sheet from a tack!"

"I venture to differ with you, sir," said the master. "I should call
Smith, Quintal, and McCoy first-class seamen, and even Burkitt, though he
was in the wrong..."

"The insolent hound!" repeated Bligh violently, interrupting the master.
"At the slightest report of misconduct, I shall have him seized up again.
Next time it will be four dozen, instead of two!"

Christian caught my eye as the captain spoke. "If I may express an
opinion, Mr. Bligh," he said quietly, "Burkitt's nature is one to tame
with kindness rather than with blows."

Bligh's short, harsh laugh rang out grimly. "La-di-da, Mr. Christian! On
my word, you should apply for a place as master in a young ladies'
seminary! Kindness, indeed! Well, I'm damned!" He took up a glass of the
reeking ship's water, rinsing his mouth preparatory to an attack on the
sourcrout. "A fine captain you'll make if you don't heave overboard such
ridiculous notions. Kindness! Our seamen and kindness as well as they and
Greek! Fear is what they _do_ understand! Without that, mutiny and
piracy would be rife on the high seas!"

"Aye," admitted Fryer, as if regretfully. "There is some truth in that."

Christian shook his head. "I cannot agree," he said courteously. "Our
seamen do not differ from other Englishmen. Some must be ruled by fear,
it is true, but there are others, and finer men, who will follow a kind,
just, and fearless officer to the death."

"Have we any such paragons on board?" asked the captain sneeringly. "In
my opinion, sir," said Christian, speaking in his light and courteous
manner, "we have, and not a few."

"Now, by God! Name one!"

"Mr. Purcell, the carpenter. He..."

This time Bligh laughed long and loud. "Damme!" he exclaimed, "you're a
fine judge of men! That stubborn, thick-headed old rogue! Kindness...Ah,
that's too good!"

Christian flushed, controlling his hot temper with an effort. "You won't
have the carpenter, I see," he said lightly: "then may I suggest
Morrison, sir?"

"Suggest to your heart's content," answered Bligh scornfully. "Morrison?
The gentlemanly boatswain's mate? The sheep masquerading as a wolf?
Kindness? Morrison's too damned kind now!"

"But a fine seaman, sir," put in Fryer gruffly; "he has been a
midshipman, and is a gentleman born."

"I know, I know!" said Bligh in his most offensive way; "and no higher in
my estimation for all that." He turned to me, with what he meant to be a
courteous smile. "Saving your presence, Mr. Byam, damn all midshipmen, I
say! There could be no worse schools than the berth for the making of sea
officers!" He turned to Christian once more, and his manner changed to an
unpleasant truculence.

"As for Morrison, let him take care! I've my eye on him, for I can see
that he spares the cat. A boatswain's mate who was not a gentleman would
have had half the hide off Burkitt's back. Let him take care, I say! Let
him lay on when I give the word or, by God, I'll have him seized up for a
lesson from the boatswain himself!"

I perceived, as the meal went on, that the captain's mess was anything
but a congenial one. Fryer disliked the captain, and had not forgotten
the incident of the cheeses. Bligh made no secret of his dislike for the
master, whom he often upbraided before the men on deck; and he felt for
Christian a contempt he was at no pains to conceal.


I was not surprised, a few days later, to learn from Old Bacchus that
Christian and the master had quitted the captain's mess, leaving Bligh to
dine and sup alone. We were south of the line by this time.

At Teneriffe, we had taken on board a large supply of pumpkins, which now
began to show symptoms of spoiling under the equatorial sun. As most of
them were too large for the use of Bligh's table, Samuel was ordered to
issue them to the men in lieu of bread. The rate of exchange--one pound
of pumpkin to replace two pounds of bread--was considered unfair by the
men, and when Bligh was informed of this he came on deck in a passion and
called all hands. Samuel was then ordered to summon the first man of
every mess.

"Now," exclaimed Bligh violently, "let me see who will dare to refuse the
pumpkins, or anything else I order to be served. You insolent rascals! By
God! I'll make you eat grass before I've done with you!"

Everyone now took the pumpkins, not excepting the officers, though the
amount was so scanty that it was usually thrown together by the men, the
cooks of the different messes drawing lots for the whole. There was some
murmuring, particularly among the officers, but the grievance might have
ended there had not all hands begun to believe that the casks of beef and
pork were short of their weight. This had been suspected for some time,
as Samuel could never be prevailed on to weigh the meat when opened, and
at last the shortage became so obvious that the people applied to the
master, begging that he would examine into the affair and procure them
redress. Bligh ordered all hands aft at once.

"So you've complained to Mr. Fryer, eh?" he said, shortly and harshly.
"You're not content! Let me tell you, by God, that you'd better make up
your minds to be content! Everything that Mr. Samuel does is done by my
orders, do you understand? My orders! Waste no more time in complaints,
for you will get no redress! I am the only judge of what is right and
wrong. Damn your eyes! I'm tired of you and your complaints! The first
man to complain from now on will be seized up and flogged."

Perceiving that no redress was to be hoped for before the end of the
voyage, the men resolved to bear their sufferings with patience, and
neither murmured nor complained from that time. But the officers, though
they dared make no open complaints, were less easily satisfied and
murmured frequently among themselves of their continual state of hunger,
which they thought was due to the fact that the captain and his clerk had
profited by the victualing of the ship. Our allowance of food was so
scanty that the men quarreled fiercely over the division of it in the
galley, and when several men had been hurt it became necessary for the
master's mate of the watch to superintend the division of the food.

About a hundred leagues off the coast of Brazil, the wind chopped around
to north and northwest, and I realized that we had reached the southern
limit of the southeast trades. It was here, in the region of variable
westerlies, that the _Bounty_ was becalmed for a day or two, and the
people employed themselves in fishing, each mess risking a part of its
small allowance of salt pork in hopes of catching one of the sharks that
swam about the ship.

The landsman turns up his nose at the shark, but, to a sailor craving
fresh meat, the flesh of a shark under ten feet in length is a veritable
luxury. The larger sharks have a strong rank smell, but the flesh of the
small ones, cut into slices like so many beefsteaks, parboiled first and
then broiled with plenty of pepper and salt, eats very well indeed,
resembling codfish in flavour.

I tasted shark for the first time one evening off the Brazilian coast. It
was dead calm; the sails hung slack from the yards, only moving a little
when the ship rolled to a gently northerly swell. John Mills, the
gunner's mate, stood forward abreast of the windlass, with a heavy line
coiled in his hand. He was an old seaman, one of Christian's watch--a man
of forty or thereabouts who had served in the West Indies on the
_Mediator_, Captain Cuthbert Collingwood. I disliked the man,--a
tall, rawboned, dour old salt,--but I watched with interest as he
prepared his bait. Two of his messmates stood by, ready to bear a
hand--Brown, the assistant botanist, and Norman, the carpenter's mate.
The mess had contributed the large piece of salt pork now going over the
side; they shared the risk of losing the bait without results, as they
would share whatever Mills was fortunate enough to catch. A shark about
ten feet long had just passed under the bows. I craned my neck to watch.

Next moment a small striped fish like a mackerel flashed this way and
that about the bait. "Pilot fish!" cried Norman. "Take care--here comes
the shark!"

"Damn you!" growled Mills. "Don't dance about like a monkey--you'll
frighten him off!"

The shark, an ugly yellowish blotch in the blue water, was rising beneath
the bait, and all eyes were on him as he turned on his side, opened his
jaws, and gulped down the piece of pork. "Hooked, by God!" roared Mills
as he hove the line short. "Now, my hearties, on deck with him!" The line
was strong and the messmates hove with a will; in an instant the shark
came struggling over the bulwarks and thumped down on deck. Mills seized
a hatchet and struck the fish a heavy blow on the snout; next moment six
or seven men were astride of the quivering carcass, knives out and
cutting away for dear life. The spectacle was laughable. Mills, to whom
the head belonged by right of capture, was seated at the forward end;
each of the others, pushing himself as far aft as possible, to enlarge
his cut of shark, was slicing away within an inch of the next man's rump.
There were cries of "Mind what you are about, there!"

"Take care, else I'll have a slice off your backside!" And in about three
minutes' time the poor fish had been severed into as many great slices as
there had been men bestriding him.

The deck was washed, and Mills was picking up the several slices into
which he had cut his share of the fish, when Mr. Samuel, the captain's
clerk, came strolling forward.

"A fine catch, my good man," he remarked in his patronizing way. "I must
have a slice, eh?"

In common with all of the _Bounty's_ people, Mills disliked Samuel
heartily. The clerk drank neither rum nor wine, and it was suspected that
he hoarded his ration of spirits for sale ashore.

"So you must have a slice," growled the gunner's mate. "Well, I must have
a glass of grog, and a stiff one, too, if you are to eat shark to-day."

"Come! Come! My good man," said Samuel pettishly. "You've enough fish
there for a dozen."

"And you've enough grog stowed away for a thousand, by God!"

"It's for the captain's table I want it," said Samuel.

"Then catch him a shark yourself. This is mine. He gets the best of the
bread and the pick of the junk cask as it is."

"You forget yourself, Mills! Come, give me a slice--that large one
there--and I'll say nothing."

"Say nothing be damned! Here--take your slice!" As he spoke, Mills flung
the ten or twelve pounds of raw fish straight at Samuel's face, with the
full strength of a brawny, tattooed arm. He turned on his heel to go
below, growling under his breath.

Mr. Samuel picked himself up from the deck, not forgetting his slice of
shark, and walked slowly aft. The look in his eye boded no good fortune
to the gunner's mate.

The news spread over the ship rapidly, and for the first time aboard the
_Bounty_ Mills found himself a popular man, though there was little
hope that he would escape punishment. As Old Bacchus put it that night,
"The least he can hope for is a red-checked shirt at the gangway.
Samuel's a worm and a dirty worm, but discipline's discipline, begad!"

I believe that a day will come when flogging will be abolished on His
Majesty's ships. It is an over-brutal punishment, which destroys a good
man's self-respect and makes a bad man worse. Landsmen have little idea
of the savagery of a flogging at the gangway. The lashes are laid on with
the full strength of a powerful man's arm, with such force that each blow
knocks the breath clean out of the delinquent's body. One blow takes off
the skin and draws blood where each knot falls. Six blows make the whole
back raw. Twelve cut deeply into the flesh and leave it a red mass,
horrible to see. Yet six dozen are a common punishment.

As had been predicted, Mills spent the night in irons. The kind hearts of
our British seamen were evident next morning when I was told that his
messmates had saved their entire allowance of grog for Mills, to fortify
him against the flogging they considered inevitable. At six bells Mr.
Bligh came on deck, and bade Christian turn the hands aft to witness
punishment. The weather had grown cooler, and the _Bounty_ was
slipping southward with all sail set, before a light northwest breeze.
The order was piped and shouted forward; I joined the assembly of
officers aft, while the people fell in on the booms and along the ship's
side. All were silent.

"Rig the gratings," ordered Mr. Bligh, in his harsh voice.

The carpenter and his mates dragged aft two of the wooden gratings used
to cover the hatches. They placed one flat on the deck, and the other
upright, secured to the bulwarks by the lee gangway. "The gratings are
rigged, sir," reported Purcell, the carpenter. "John Mills!" said Bligh.
"Step forward!"

Flushed with the rum he had taken, and dressed in his best, Mills stepped
out from among his messmates. His unusual smartness was designed to
mollify the punishment, yet there was in his bearing a trace of defiance.
He was a hard man, and he felt that he had been hardly used.

"Have you anything to say?" asked Bligh of the bare-headed seaman before
him.

"No, sir," growled Mills sullenly.

"Strip!" ordered the captain.

Mills tore off his shirt, flung it to one of his messmates, and advanced
bare-shouldered to the gratings.

"Seize him up," said Bligh.

Norton and Lenkletter, our quartermasters--old pigtailed seamen who had
performed this office scores of times in the past--now advanced with
lengths of spun yarn, and lashed Mills's outstretched wrists to the
upright grating.

"Seized up, sir!" reported Norton.

Bligh took off his hat, as did every man on the ship, opened a copy of
the Articles of War, and read in a solemn voice the article which
prescribes the punishments for mutinous conduct. Morrison, the
boatswain's mate, was undoing the red baize bag in which he kept the cat.

"Three dozen, Mr. Morrison," said Bligh as he finished reading. "Do your
duty!"

Morrison was a kindly, reflective man. I felt for him A that moment, for
I knew that he hated flogging on principle, and must feel the injustice
of this punishment. Yet he would not dare, under the keen eye of the
captain, to lighten the force of his blows. However unwilling, he was
Bligh's instrument.

He advanced to the grating, drew the tails of the cat through his
fingers, flung his arm back, and struck. Mills winced involuntarily as
the cat came whistling down on his bare back, and the breath flew out of
his body with a loud "Ugh!" A great red welt sprang out against the white
skin, with drops of blood trickling down on one side. Mills was a burly
ruffian and he endured the first dozen without crying out, though by that
time his back was a red slough from neck to waist.

Bligh watched the punishment with folded arms. "I'll show the man who's
captain of this ship," I heard him remark placidly to Christian. "By God,
I will!" The eighteenth blow broke the iron of Mills's self-control. He
was writhing on the grating, his teeth tightly clenched and the blood
pouring down his back. "Oh!" he shouted thickly. "Oh, my God! Oh!"

"Mr. Morrison," called Bligh, sternly and suddenly. "See that you lay on
with a will."

Morrison passed the tails of the cat through his fingers to free them of
blood and bits of flesh. Under the eye of the captain he delivered the
remaining lashes, taking a time that seemed interminable to me. When they
cut Mills down he was black in the face and collapsed at once on the
deck. Old Bacchus stumped forward and ordered him taken below to the sick
bay, to be washed with brine. Bligh sauntered to the ladder-way and the
men resumed their duties sullenly.


Early in March we were ordered to lay aside our light tropical clothing
for warm garments which had been provided for our passage around Cape
Horn. The topgallant masts were sent down, new sails bent, and the ship
made ready for the heavy winds and seas which lay ahead. The weather grew
cooler each day, until I was glad to go below for my occasional evenings
with Bacchus and his cronies, or to my mess in the berth. The surgeon
messed with us now, as well as Stewart and Hayward, my fellow midshipmen,
Morrison, and Mr. Nelson, the botanist. We were all the best of friends,
though young Hayward never forgot that I was his junior in service, and
plumed himself on a knowledge of seamanship certainly more extensive than
my own.

Those were days and nights of misery for every man on board. Sometimes
the wind hauled to the southwest, with squalls of snow, forcing us to
come about on the larboard tack; sometimes the gale increased to the
force of a hurricane and we lay hove-to under a rag of staysail, pitching
into the breaking seas. Though our ship was new and sound, her seams
opened under the strain and it became necessary to man the pumps every
hour. The hatches were constantly battened down, and when the forward
deck began to leak, Bligh gave orders that the people should sling their
hammocks in the great cabin aft. At last our captain's iron determination
gave way, and to the great joy and relief of every man on board he
ordered the helm put up to bear away for the Cape of Good Hope.

The fine weather which followed and our rapid passage east did much to
raise the spirits of the men on board. We had caught great numbers of sea
birds off Cape Horn and penned them in cages provided by the carpenter.
The pintado and the albatross were the best; when penned like a Strasburg
goose and well stuffed with ground corn for a few days, they seemed to us
as good as ducks or geese, and this fresh food did wonders for our
invalids.

With the returning cheerfulness on board, the _Bounty's_ midshipmen
began to play the pranks of their kind the world over, and none of us
escaped penance at the masthead--penance that was in general richly
deserved. No one was oftener in hot water than young Tinkler, a monkey of
a lad, beloved by every man on the ship. Bligh's severity to Tinkler, one
cold moonlight night, when we were in the longitude of Tristan da Cunha,
was a warning to all of us, and the cause of much murmuring among the
men.

Hallet, Hayward, Tinkler, and I were in the larboard berth. The gunner's
watch was on duty, and Stewart and Young on deck. We had supped and were
passing the time at Ablewhackets--a game I have never seen played ashore.
It is commenced by playing cards, which must be named the Good Books. The
table is termed the Board of Green Cloth, the hand the Flipper; the light
the Glim, and so on. To all a table a table, or a card a card, brings an
instant cry of "Watch," whereupon the delinquent must extend his Flipper
to be severely firked with a stocking full of sand by each of the players
in turn, who repeat his offense while firking him. Should the pain bring
an oath to his lips, as is more than likely, there is another cry of
"Watch," and he undergoes a second round of firking by all hands. As will
be perceived, the game is a noisy one.

Young Tinkler had inadvertently pronounced the word "table," and Hayward,
something of a bully, roared, "Watch!" When he took his turn at the
firking, he laid on so hard that the youngster, beside himself with pain,
squeaked, "Ouch! Damn your blood!"

"Watch!" roared Hayward again, and at the same moment we heard another
roar from aft--Mr. Bligh calling angrily for the ship's corporal. Tinkler
and Hallet rushed for their berth on the starboard side; Hayward doused
the glim in an instant, kicked off his pumps, threw off his jacket, and
sprang into his hammock, where he pulled his blanket up to his chin and
began to snore, gently and regularly. I wasted no time in doing the same,
but young Tinkler, in his anxiety, must have turned in all standing as he
was.

Next moment, Churchill, the master-at-arms, came fumbling into the
darkened berth. "Come, come, young gentlemen; no shamming, now!" he
called. He listened warily to our breathing, and felt us to make sure
that our jackets and pumps were off, before he went out, grumbling, to
the starboard berth. Hallet had taken the same precautions as ourselves,
but poor little Tinkler was caught red-handed--pumps, jacket, and all.
"Up with you, Mr. Tinkler," rumbled Churchill. "This'll mean the
masthead, and it's a bloody cold night. I'd let you off if I could. You
young gentlemen keep half the ship awake with your cursed pranks!" He led
him aft, and presently I heard Bligh's harsh voice, raised angrily.

"Damme, Mr. Tinkler! Do. you think this ship's a bear garden? By God!
I've half a mind to seize you up and give you a taste of the colt! To the
masthead with you!"

Next morning at daylight Tinkler was still at the main topgallant
crosstrees. The sky was clear, but the strong west-southwest wind was icy
cold. Presently Mr. Bligh came on deck, and, hailing the masthead,
desired Tinkler to come down. There was no reply, even when he hailed a
second time. At a word from Mr. Christian, one of the top-men sprang into
the rigging, reached the crosstrees, and hailed the deck to say that
Tinkler seemed to be dying, and that he dared not leave him for fear he
would fall. Christian himself then went aloft, sent the topman down into
the top for a tailblock, made a whip with the studding-sail halliards,
and lowered Tinkler to the deck. The poor lad was blue with cold, unable
to stand up or to speak.

We got him into his hammock in the berth, wrapped in warm blankets, and
Old Bacchus came stumping forward with a can of his universal remedy. He
felt the lad's pulse, propped his head up, and began to feed him neat rum
with a spoon. Tinkler coughed and opened his eyes, while a faint colour
appeared in his cheeks.

"Aha!" exclaimed the surgeon. "Nothing like rum, my lad! Just a sip, now.
That's it! Now a swallow. Begad! Nothing like rum. I'll soon have you
right as a trivet! And that reminds me--I'll have just a drop myself. A
corpse reviver, eh?"

Coughing as the fiery liquor ran down his throat, Tinkler smiled in spite
of himself. Two hours later he was on deck, none the worse for his night
aloft.


On the twenty-third of May we dropped anchor in False Bay, near Cape
Town. Table Bay is reckoned unsafe riding at this time of year, on
account of the strong northwest winds. The ship required to be caulked in
every part, for she had become so leaky that we had been obliged to pump
every hour during our passage from Cape Horn. Our sails and rigging were
in sad need of repair, and the timekeeper was taken ashore to ascertain
its rate. On the twenty-ninth of June we sailed out of the bay, saluting
the Dutch fort with thirteen guns as we passed.

I have few recollections of the long, cold, and dismal passage from the
Cape of Good Hope to Van Diemen's Land. Day after day we scudded before
strong westerly to southwesterly winds, carrying only the foresail and
close-reefed maintopsail. The seas, which run for thousands of miles in
these latitudes, unobstructed by land, were like mountain ridges; twice,
when the wind increased to a gale, Bligh almost drove his ship under
before we could get the sails dewed up and the _Bounty_ hove-to. I
observed that as long as the wind held southwest or west-southwest great
numbers of birds accompanied us,--pintados, albatross, and blue
petrels,--but that when the wind chopped around to the north, even for an
hour or two, the birds left us at once. And when they reappeared their
presence was always the forerunner of a southerly wind.

On the twentieth of August we sighted the rock called the Mewstone, which
lies near the southwest cape of Van Diemen's Land, bearing northeast
about six leagues, and two days later we anchored in Adventure Bay. We
passed a fortnight here--wooding, watering, and sawing out plank, of
which the carpenter was in need. It was a gloomy place, hemmed in by
forests of tall straight trees of the eucalyptus kind, many of them a
hundred and fifty feet high and rising sixty or eighty feet without a
branch. Long strips of bark hung in tatters from their trunks, or decayed
on the ground underfoot; few birds sang in the bush; and I saw only one
animal--a small creature of the opossum sort, which scuttled into a
hollow log. There were men here, but they were timid as wild
animals--black, naked, and uncouth, with hair growing in tufts like
peppercorns, and voices like the cackling of geese. I saw small parties
of them at different times, but they made off at sight of us.

Mr. Bligh put me in charge of a watering party, giving us the large
cutter and instructing me to have the casks filled in a gully at the west
end of the beach. Purcell, the carpenter, had rigged his saw pit close to
this place, and was busy sawing out plank, with his mates, Norman and
McIntosh, and two of the seamen detailed to the task. They had felled two
or three of the large eucalyptus trees, but the carpenter, after
inspecting the wood, had declared it worthless, and instructed his men to
set to work on certain smaller trees of a different kind, with a rough
bark and firm reddish wood.

I was superintending the filling of my casks one morning when Bligh
appeared, a fowling piece over his arm and accompanied by Mr. Nelson. He
glanced toward the saw pit and came to a halt.

"Mr. Purcell!" he called harshly.

"Yes, sir."

The _Bounty's_ carpenter was not unlike her captain in certain
respects. Saving the surgeon, he was the oldest man on board, and nearly
all of his life had been spent at sea. He knew his trade as well as Bligh
understood navigation, and his temper was as arbitrary and his anger as
fierce and sudden as Bligh's.

"Damme, Mr. Purcell!" exclaimed the captain. "Those logs are too small
for plank. I thought I instructed you to make use of the large trees."

"You did, sir," replied Purcell, whose own temper was rising.

"Obey your orders, then, instead of wasting time."

"I am not wasting time, sir," said the carpenter, very red in the face.

"The wood of the large trees is useless, as I discovered when I had cut
some of them down."

"Useless? Nonsense...Mr. Nelson, am I not right?"

"I am a botanist, sir," said Nelson, unwilling to take part in the
dispute. "I make no pretense to a carpenter's knowledge of woods."

"Aye--that's what a carpenter _does_ know," put in old Purcell. "The
wood of these large trees will be worthless if sawn into plank."

Bligh's temper now got the better of him. "Do as I tell you, Mr.
Purcell," he ordered violently. "I've no mind to argue with you or any
other man under my command."

"Very well, sir," said Purcell obstinately. "The large trees it is. But I
tell you the plank will be useless. A carpenter knows his business as
well as a captain knows _his_."

Bligh had turned away; now he spun about on his heel.

"You mutinous old bastard--you have gone too far! Mr. Norman, take
command of the work here. Mr. Purcell, report yourself instantly to
Lieutenant Christian for fifteen days in irons."

It was my task to ferry Purcell out to the ship. The old man was flushed
with anger; his jaw was set and his fists clenched till the veins stood
out on his forearms. "Calls me a bastard," he muttered to no one in
particular, "and puts me in irons for doing my duty. He hasn't heard the
last of this, by God! Wait till we get to England! I know my rights, I
do!"


We were still on the shortest of short rations, and Adventure Bay offered
little in the way of refreshment for our invalids, or food for those of
us who were well. Though we drew the seine repeatedly, we caught few fish
and those of inferior kinds, and the mussels among the rocks, which at
first promised a welcome change in our diet, proved poisonous to those
who partook of them. While Mr. Bligh feasted on the wild duck his fowling
piece brought down, the ship's people were half starved and there was
much muttering among the officers.

The whole of our fortnight in Adventure Bay was marred by wrangling and
discontent. The carpenter was in irons; Fryer and Bligh were scarcely on
speaking terms, owing to the master's suspicions that the captain had
lined his pockets in victualing the ship; and just before our departure,
Ned Young, one of the midshipmen, was lashed to a gun on the quarter-deck
and given a dozen with a colt.

Young had been sent, with three men and the small cutter, to gather
shellfish, crabs, and whatever he might find for our sick, who lived in a
tent pitched on the beach. They pulled away in the direction of Cape
Frederick Henry and did not return till after dark, when Young reported
that Dick Skinner, one of the A.B.'s and the ship's hairdresser, had
wandered off into the woods and disappeared.

"Skinner saw a hollow tree," Young told Mr. Bligh, "which, from the bees
about it, he believed to contain a store of honey. He asked my permission
to smoke the bees out and obtain their honey for our sick, saying that he
had kept bees in his youth and understood their ways. I assented readily,
knowing that you, sir, would be pleased if we could obtain the honey, and
an hour or two later, when we had loaded the cutter with shellfish, we
returned to the tree. A fire still smouldered at its foot, but Skinner
was nowhere to be seen. We wandered through the woods and hailed till
nightfall, but I regret to report, sir, that we could find no trace of
the man."

I chanced to know that Bligh had called for the hairdresser, requiring
his services that very afternoon, and had been incensed at Young when it
was learned that Skinner had accompanied him. Now that the man was
reported missing, Mr. Bligh was thoroughly enraged.

"Now damn you and all other midshipmen!" roared the captain. "You're all
alike! If you had gotten the honey, you would have eaten it on the spot!
Where the devil is Skinner, I say? Take your boat's crew this instant and
pull back to where you saw the man last. Aye, and bring him back this
time!"

Young was a man grown. He flushed at the captain's words, but touched his
hat respectfully and summoned his men at once. The party did not return
till the following forenoon, having been nearly twenty-four hours without
food. Skinner was with them this time; he had wandered off in search of
another honey tree and become lost in the thick bush.

Bligh paced the quarter-deck angrily as the boat approached. By nature a
man who brooded over grudges till they were magnified out of all
proportion to reality, the captain was ready to explode the moment Young
set foot on deck.

"Come aft, Mr. Young!" he called harshly. "I'm going to teach you to
attend to your duty, instead of skylarking about the woods. Mr.
Morrison!"

"Yes, sir!"

"Come aft here and seize up Mr. Young on that gun yonder! You're to give
him a dozen with a rope's end."

Young was an officer of the ship and rated as a gentleman, a proud,
fearless man of gentle birth. Though Bligh was within his powers as
captain, the public flogging of such a man was almost without precedent
in the Service. Morrison's jaw dropped at the order, which he obeyed with
such evidence of reluctance that Bligh shouted at him threateningly,
"Look alive, Mr. Morrison! I've my eye on you!"

I shall not speak of the flogging of Young, nor tell how Skinner's back
was cut to ribbons with two dozen at the gangway. It is enough to say
that Young was a different man from that day on, performing his duties
sullenly and in silence, and avoiding the other midshipmen in the berth.
He informed me long afterwards that, had events turned out differently,
it was his intention to resign from the Service on the ship's arrival in
England, and call Bligh to account as man to man.


On the fourth of September, with a fine spanking breeze at northwest, we
weighed anchor and sailed out of Adventure Bay. Seven weeks later, after
an uneventful passage made miserable by an outbreak of scurvy and the
constant state of starvation to which we were reduced, I saw my first
South Sea island.

We had gotten our easting in the high southern latitudes, and once in the
trade winds we made a long board to the north on the starboard tack. We
were well into the tropics now and in the vicinity of land. Man-of-war
hawks hovered overhead, their long forked tails opening and shutting like
scissor-blades; shoals of flying fish rose under the ship's cutwater to
skim away and plunge into the sea like whiffs of grapeshot. The sea was
of the pale turquoise blue only to be seen within the tropics, shading
to purple here and there where clouds obscured the sun. The roll of the
Pacific from east to west was broken by the labyrinth of low coral
islands to the east of us,--the vast cluster of half-drowned lands called
by the natives _Paumotu_,--and the _Bounty_ sailed a tranquil
sea.

I was off watch that afternoon and engaged in sorting over the articles I
had laid in, at the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks, for barter with the
Indians of Tahiti. Nails, files, and fishhooks were in great demand, as
well as bits of cheap jewelry for the women and girls. My mother had
given me fifty pounds for the purchase of these things, and Sir Joseph
had added another fifty to it, advising me that liberality to the Indians
would be amply repaid. "Never forget," he had remarked, "that in the
South Sea the Seven Deadly Sins are compounded into one, and that one is
meanness." I had taken this advice to heart, and now, as I looked over my
store of gifts, I felt satisfied that I had laid out my hundred pounds to
good effect. I had been a lover of fishing since childhood, and my hooks
were of all sizes and the best that money could buy. My sea chest was
half filled with other things--coils of brass wire, cheap rings,
bracelets, and necklaces; files, scissors, razors, a variety of
looking-glasses, and a dozen engraved portraits of King George, which Sir
Joseph had procured for me. And down in one corner of the chest, safe
from the prying eyes of my messmates, was a velvet-lined box from Maiden
Lane. It contained a bracelet and necklace, curiously wrought in a design
like the sinnet seamen plait. I was a romantic lad, not without my dreams
of some fair barbarian girl who might bestow her favours on me. As I look
back over the long procession of years, I cannot but smile at a boy's
simplicity, but I would give all my hard-earned worldly wisdom to
recapture if only for an hour the mood of those days of my youth. I had
returned them to my chest when I heard Mr. Bligh's harsh, vibrant voice.
His cabin was scarcely fifteen feet aft of where I sat.

"Mr. Fryer!" he called peremptorily. "Be good enough to step into my
cabin."

"Yes, sir," replied the master's voice.

I had no desire to eavesdrop on the conversation that followed, but there
was no way to avoid it without leaving my open chest in the berth.

"To-morrow or the day after," said Bligh, "we shall drop anchor in
Matavai Bay. I have had Mr. Samuel make an inventory of the stores on
hand, which has enabled him to cast up an account of the provisions
expended on the voyage so far. I desire you to glance over this book,
which requires your signature."

A long silence followed, broken at last by Fryer's voice. "I cannot sign
this, sir," he said.

"Cannot sign it? What do you mean, sir?"

"The clerk is mistaken, Mr. Bligh. No such amounts of beef and pork have
been issued!"

"You are wrong!" answered the captain angrily. "I know what was taken
aboard and what remains. Mr. Samuel is right!"

"I cannot sign, sir," said Fryer obstinately.

"And why the devil not? All that the clerk has done was done by my
orders. Sign it instantly! Damme! I am not the most patient man in the
world."

"I cannot sign," insisted Fryer, a note of anger in his voice; "not in
conscience, sir!"

"But you _can_ sign," shouted Bligh in a rage; "and what is more,
you _shall!_" He went stamping up the ladderway and on to the deck.
"Mr. Christian!" I heard him shout to the officer of the watch. "Call all
hands on deck this instant!"

The order was piped and shouted forward and, when we assembled, the
captain, flushed with anger, uncovered and read the Articles of War. Mr.
Samuel then came forward with his book and a pen and ink.

"Now, sir!" Bligh ordered the master, "sign this book!"

There was a dead silence while Fryer took up the pen reluctantly.

"Mr. Bligh," he said, controlling his temper with difficulty, "the ship's
people will bear witness that I sign in obedience to your orders, but
please to recollect, sir, that this matter may be reopened later on."

At that moment a long-drawn shout came from the man in the foretop. "Land
ho!"



CHAPTER V. TAHITI


The lookout had sighted Mehetia, a small, high island forty miles to the
southeast of Tahiti. I stared ahead, half incredulously, at the tiny
motionless projection on the horizon line. The wind died away toward
sunset and we were all night working up to the land.

I went off watch at eight bells, but could not sleep; an hour later,
perched on the fore-topgallant crosstrees, I watched the new day dawn.
The beauty of that sunrise seemed ample compensation for all of the
hardships suffered during the voyage: a sunrise such as only the seaman
knows, and then only in the regions between the tropics, remote from
home. Saving the light, fluffy "fair-weather clouds" just above the vast
ring of horizon which encircled us, the sky was clear. The stars paled
gradually; as the rosy light grew stronger, the velvet of the heavens
faded and turned blue. Then the sun, still below the horizon, began to
tint the little clouds in the east with every shade of mother-of-pearl.

An hour later we were skirting the reef, before a light air from the
south. For the first time in my life I saw the slender, graceful trunk
and green fronds of the far-famed coconut tree, the thatched cottages of
the South Sea Islanders, set in their shady groves, and the people
themselves, numbers of whom walked along the reef not more than a cable's
length away. They waved large pieces of white cloth and shouted what I
supposed were invitations to come ashore, though their voices were
drowned in the noise of a surf which would have made landing impossible
even had Mr. Bligh hove-to and lowered a boat.

Mehetia is high and round in shape, and not more than three miles in its
greatest extent. The village is at the southern end, where there is a
tolerably flat shelf of land at the base of the mountain, but elsewhere
the green cliffs are steep-to, with the sea breaking at their feet. The
white line of the breakers, the vivid emerald of the tropical vegetation
covering the mountains everywhere, the rich foliage of the breadfruit
trees in the little valleys, and the plumed tops of the coconut palms
growing in clusters here and there, made up a picture which enchanted me.
The island had the air of a little paradise, newly created, all fresh and
dewy in the dawn, stocked with everything needful for the comfort and
happiness of man.

The men walking along the shelf of reef at the base of the cliffs were
too far away for inspection, but they seemed fine stout fellows, taller
than Englishmen. They were dressed in girdles of bark cloth which shone
with a dazzling whiteness in the morning sunlight. They were naked except
for these girdles, and they laughed and shouted to one another as they
followed us along, clambering with great agility over the rocks.

As we rounded the northern end of the island, Smith hailed me from the
top. "Look, Mr. Byam!" he shouted, pointing ahead eagerly. There, many
leagues away, I saw the outlines of a mighty mountain rising from the
sea,--sweeping ridges falling away symmetrically from a tall central
peak,--all pale