the respect of every islander he encountered. The arrival upon an unknown island of a ship in which the men all dressed the same would increase tenfold the natives’ acceptance, he had argued. And so they had obeyed him, he remembered. Only just. But they’d accepted the order, not so much because he had given it but because that residue of discipline from Bligh’s command was still there and because they had been too frightened then to oppose him, realising completely in those initial hours what they had done.
They’d complained. But without any real strength. Quintal had led the dissent, of course, with his bumptious arrogance.
‘Worse than Bligh,’ Christian had overheard him say, three days after the uprising, as the men had sat cross-legged on deck, stitching at the seams.
‘Good teacher,’ Mickoy had replied. And they’d both laughed, enjoying their joke. But even that had been gained from the reassurance of the past. They were as scared as everybody else, Christian had known, despite the bravado and the cursing. The rum-drinking had made that obvious. Christian had made no effort to stop it, knowing he could not succeed by open challenge. The men would have rejected him immediately, taking from him the thin platform of authority upon which he still stood. So every night they had washed away their apprehension until they were unconscious, the Bounty nosing almost unmanned through the Pacific swell.
Had he realised their feelings, like a true leader would have done, then perhaps they would have accepted him in the role he had then sought. But he had been too engrossed in his own remorse to consider theirs.
So all he had done was inflate to ridiculous proportions the need for uniforms, carping as Bligh had done in the past, knowing the Quintal comparison was inevitable, but careless of it.
Whether or not the uniforms were made had become an issue of major importance in his mind. If the outfits were completed, he had convinced himself, then everything was going to be all right: they would acknowledge his leadership, not put every order to the committee of dissidents that appeared to be forming. Without consultation, conscious of his role as their nominal leader, he had chosen Tubai as a refuge. Tahiti was obviously the first place any searchers would look if Bligh survived – he had left the Bounty sneering at their eagerness to get back to it. Tubai was only three hundred miles away, so conditions should have been almost identical, he had decided.
But they weren’t.
No women had come giggling to meet them, offering themselves. No men had paddled out in canoes, anxious to trade.
Instead, there had been almost constant hostility, with the mutineers having to fight for every yard of land they wanted. Christian had decided upon a fort-like compound, with the ship’s guns mounted at the four corners to repel any searchers. His efforts to create it had become ridiculous. As quickly as the sailors dug trenches and created earth and wattle walls, the Tubains tore them down. Every food and water expedition had become the target for guerilla attacks. The night after Christian had ordered the ship’s guns fired, as a show of force, the natives had crept undetected into their compound, stolen muskets and lashed them together in the shape of a funeral pyre to mock them when they awoke.
Christian had tried to minimise the defeat.
‘Tahiti, lads,’ he had urged, as they had manhandled the guns back aboard. ‘Think on it – the women we know! The friends we have there, who’ll feed and shelter us without expecting anything in return!’
Predictably it had been Quintal who had focused their disgust. Christian had never been able positively to prove it, of course, because they would have laughed at him had he enquired. But he was sure it had been Quintal’s idea to bundle together the uniforms upon which he had been so insistent and commit them overboard, in imitation burial.
Had that been the end of his control? he wondered. Perhaps not entirely. They still took sea orders from him, but even that gesture was without meaning. They obeyed because he was the only man left who could read all the charts and use every instrument. It was more a case of his working for them than they for him. He’d been let down by his friends, Christian decided. George Stewart, the damned man who’d first brought out the idea of an uprising, had lost stomach for it by the time they had reached Tahiti. Accepting