A Day of a Mutiny on the HMS Bounty, 1789
You Are There: A Graphic History Series
You Are There… Graphic History Series.
Historical Backdrop
On April 28, 1789, His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty was sailing through the South Pacific, roughly thirty miles south of the volcanic island of Tofua in the Friendly Islands, which we now call Tonga. The ship, a small converted merchant vessel of just 215 tons and about 91 feet in length, had been dispatched from England in December 1787 under the command of Lieutenant William Bligh on a mission to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and transport them to the West Indies as cheap food for enslaved plantation workers. The crew of 45 men had spent five idyllic months anchored at Tahiti, where many of them had taken Tahitian lovers and grown deeply attached to island life.
When the Bounty finally departed Tahiti on April 4, 1789, morale collapsed almost immediately. Bligh, a gifted navigator who had sailed with Captain Cook but who possessed a vicious temper, had been escalating his verbal abuse of officers and crew for weeks, and on the evening of April 27 he publicly humiliated his acting lieutenant, twenty-four-year-old Fletcher Christian, accusing him of stealing coconuts from the ship’s stores and calling him a coward and a thief in front of the men. That night, Christian — sleepless, despairing, and enraged — stood the middle watch from midnight to four in the morning and made a historic decision.
Our subject is Fletcher Christian, born on September 25, 1764 in Eaglesfield, Cumberland, England, into a once-prosperous family that had fallen on hard times. He went to sea as a teenager and served under William Bligh on two previous voyages aboard merchant vessels, during which the two men had been friendly — Bligh even dined with Christian at the same table, an unusual intimacy between a captain and a subordinate. By the night of April 27, 1789, he was twenty-four years old, emotionally shattered by months of Bligh’s escalating cruelty, heartsick for the Tahitian life and the woman he had left behind, and so desperate that his plan was not mutiny — but to desert the ship alone on a crude raft and take his chances in the open ocean.
April 28, 1789 — 3:30 AM — Quarterdeck of HMS Bounty, South Pacific, approximately 19°30’S, 175°30’W
You wake before dawn in the South Pacific, and before breakfast you will commit the most famous crime in naval history. You stand alone at the quarterdeck rail in the last hour of the middle watch, gripping the worn teak so hard your knuckles have gone white. The ship creaks and rolls gently beneath you in a light following breeze, the sails overhead barely drawing, the phosphorescent wake trailing like a ghost behind the stern. The sky is moonless and glutted with stars and the Southern Cross hangs bright off the port quarter. Below your bare feet the deck planks are damp with condensation and warm from the tropical night. The air smells of salt, tar, and the sickly-sweet rot of the breadfruit plants lashed in their pots on the deck below. You have not slept. Your eyes are swollen and red. Your jaw aches from clenching. Somewhere forward, the watch bell has just struck seven bells and in thirty minutes your watch will end and you will go below to the berth where you will lie awake and hear Bligh’s words again — thief, coward, damned hound — ringing in your skull. You have already gathered some nails, a few roasted breadfruit, and a length of spar. You are going to build a raft and go over the side. You are going to die out here rather than endure another day.
April 28, 1789 — 4:10 AM — Quarterdeck of HMS Bounty, South Pacific
You do not go below when the watch changes. The morning watch has begun and the new watchmen — Midshipman Stewart, seaman John Williams, and a few others — come on deck yawning and blinking. You remain at the rail, barefoot, your shirt damp with night sweat. George Stewart, the fair-haired midshipman who shares your loathing of Bligh, approaches and asks quietly what is wrong. You tell him. You tell him you cannot bear it anymore, that you mean to leave the ship on a raft. Stewart stares at you and says, in a low voice barely audible over the creak of the rigging, that you are not the only one. That the men would follow you. That the word below is that half the crew would rather go back to Tahiti than continue under Bligh. Something shifts in your chest — not relief but something harder and colder, a resolve that has weight. You stare at Stewart’s face in the dim pre-dawn light and for the first time in hours you are not thinking about dying.
April 28, 1789 — 4:40 AM — Below Decks, HMS Bounty, South Pacific
You go below into the sweltering darkness of the lower deck, where the crew sleeps in hammocks slung so close together that a man cannot pass without brushing against the canvas. The air is thick — body odor, bilge water, mildew, the rancid smell of unwashed wool and the sweetness of rum. You move through the hammocks and wake the men you trust. Matthew Quintal first — the big, gap-toothed able seaman from Cornwall who despises Bligh with a rage even darker than yours. Then Isaac Martin. Then John Mills, the gunner’s mate. Then you go to Charles Churchill, the ship’s corporal, the man who holds the key to the arms chest. Churchill sits up in his hammock, his narrow face sharp in the guttering light of the tallow candle you carry, and when you tell him what you intend to do, he grins. Within minutes there are six of you gathered around the base of the foremast in the near-darkness, breathing hard, whispering. You are shaking. Your hands will not be still. You tell them: we take the ship at first light.
April 28, 1789 — 5:00 AM — Midship, HMS Bounty, South Pacific
