Hell's Fire - By Brian Freemantle Page 0,1
dead, wrote a detailed account of events leading up to the mutiny and of their subsequent existence on one of the loneliest islands in the world.
Today that account is, according to the islanders I have met and interviewed, still hidden somewhere on Pitcairn, secreted upon the orders of the last surviving mutineer, Jack Adams. Before he died, however, Adams made the record available to one of the British sea captains who had located their island sanctuary and the man copied sections from it. In his journal, Young confessed to his part as agent provocateur in the mutiny and wrote at length of their early, savage years on Pitcairn.
Missing from the document, however, was any acceptable explanation for why Fletcher Christian went before dawn on that April morning in 1789 to rouse Captain Bligh at cutlass point with the words: ‘I am in hell.’
One man knew. Fletcher Christian told him.
A few minutes before sailing for the last time from Tahiti to form what is today Britain’s smallest colony, Christian took aside midshipman Peter Heywood. Before they pulled too far away, Edward Young, standing nearby, heard Christian begin to talk of ‘the reason for my foolishness’. The Portsmouth court martial exonerated Heywood from any complicity in the crime, accepting his story that he was carried away against his will. Heywood rose to the rank of captain and swore an affidavit that in 1808, walking along Fore Street, Plymouth, he saw a figure he recognised. He called out Christian’s name and the man turned, showing himself to be the mutiny leader. The man fled and although he gave chase, Heywood lost him.
Heywood was quite willing to provide these and other details for a book written about the Bounty uprising by a relative, Lady Belcher. About only one thing did he refuse to talk – that secret conversation with Christian on the greyish-black Tahitian sand.
Could Christian have escaped from Pitcairn?
There are several accounts that other vessels came upon the mutineers before the officially accepted discovery in February 1808, when the Boston-registered whaler Topaz, under the command of Captain Mayhew Folger, anchored in surf-lashed Bounty Bay.
And in the Dictionary of National Biography, Sir John Laughton writes: ‘It is in a high degree probable that, whether in Captain Folger’s ship in 1808 or in some more venturesome way, Christian escaped from the island and returned to England.’
John Adams told several conflicting stories about Christian, finally asserting that he had perished in the civil war that broke out when one of the mutineers demanded from a Tahitian native the woman who had accompanied him to Pitcairn from Tahiti.
Adams and Edward Young’s journal both recorded how Christian was ostracised on the island.
On September 17, 1814, a British sailor, Captain Pipon, interviewed Adams and then wrote of Fletcher Christian:
It appears that this unfortunate, ill-fated young man was never happy after the rash and inconsiderate step he had taken but always sullen and morose, a circumstance which will not surprise anyone; this moroseness, however, led him to many acts of cruelty and inhumanity which soon was the cause of his incurring the hatred and detestation of his companions here; one cannot avoid expressing astonishment when you consider that the very crime he was then guilty of towards his companions who assisted him in the mutiny was the very same they so loudly accused their captain of.
Bligh’s mission in the Bounty had been to transplant the breadfruit plant from Tahiti to the West Indies, to provide cheap food for the slaves on Britain’s sugar plantations there.
He returned to England after that 48-day, 3,618-mile voyage to be lionised in eighteenth-century London. He was presented a hero to George III, became a friend of the King’s son, the Duke of Clarence, was cleared of any blame in losing his ship and promoted full captain.
Within three years – after completely succeeding with the breadfruit transplantation during a second expedition – his reputation was publicly smeared by the powerful families of Fletcher Christian and Peter Heywood.
Throughout a lifetime of spectacular dispute, Bligh was involved in the North Sea Fleet mutiny in the Nore in 1797; in 1805 he was reprimanded at a court martial for tyranny, unofficer-like conduct and ungentlemanly behaviour on the complaint of one of his lieutenants; and in 1808 he was overthrown as Governor-General of New South Wales, Australia, in an illegal rebellion.
In 1817 he died, aged sixty-five. His tomb is in St Mary’s churchyard, Lambeth, London.
Christian died, according to legend, in Cumberland, where he was born.
On the wall of Cockermouth Grammar