Day 5: Took the 0400 watch again. Another brilliant day with southerly force 2–3 wind, occasionally 4. Scarcely any cloud except on the southern horizon where there always seems to be a patch of cumulus.
After breakfast we checked our DR which puts us somewhere near the Tail of the Bank. I did another mer alt and Colin plotted our exact position using an earlier timed sun sightfn1 – latitude 42° 42' N, longitude 52° 13' W. Still on a course of 120° at about 5 knots.
Over supper I mentioned how I had first heard of the sextant when I saw Mutiny on the Bounty. This triggered a string of reminiscences from Colin, who recalled the mutiny that broke out in 1931 at Invergordon in Scotland aboard some of the Royal Navy’s greatest ships – including the famous battle cruiser HMS Hood. Pay cuts were blamed at the time, but low morale on the big ships was the main factor, he thought. The smaller, more tightly knit crews of destroyers and frigates had caused fewer problems. I asked what he thought of Bligh. Colin did not think the film had painted a fair portrait of him: Bligh had been a great seaman and navigator and, like Cook, had risen from the ranks. Maybe his explosive temper reflected some kind of social insecurity. Colin also objected that, since Bligh was in his mid-thirties when he commanded the Bounty, Trevor Howard had been far too old to play him.
Colin was right about Bligh’s skills as a navigator. Bligh had sailed with Cook as master of the Resolution, a post to which he was appointed at the unusually early age of twenty-one. He seems to have enjoyed Cook’s approval; he certainly demonstrated great skill as a surveyor and draughtsman. But he was a difficult man. J. C. Beaglehole, in his magisterial life of Cook, says that he ‘saw fools about him too easily’, and that even at this early stage in his career he displayed ‘the thin-skinned vanity’ that was always to be his curse: ‘Bligh learnt a good deal from Cook: he never learnt that you do not make friends of men by insulting them.’1
Bligh was actually involved in not one but three mutinies. These tempestuous events did not stop him reaching the rank of vice admiral,fn2 but they have overshadowed his substantial achievements. Of these the most remarkable was his voyage in an overloaded 23-foot open boat after being set adrift by the Bounty mutineers in the Tonga Islands. The mutineers, led by the master’s mate, Fletcher Christian, comprised more than half the Bounty’s crew, and they were – in Bligh’s words – ‘the most able men of the ship’s company’.2 Bligh later speculated that the temptations of Tahiti were the main cause of the mutiny. The crew had just spent twenty-three lazy weeks there while the gardener prepared the breadfruit seedlings for transplantation to the West Indies, and discipline had inevitably suffered.
Bligh was not surprised that ‘a set of sailors, most of them void of connections’, should wish to ‘fix themselves in the midst of plenty on one of the finest islands of the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond anything that can be conceived’. However, he claimed to be aware of no discontent and bitterly complained that he had thought himself to be on the friendliest terms with Christian. So he felt not only shock but also a personal sense of betrayal when, just before sunrise on 28 April 1789, Christian, accompanied by three other men, came into Bligh’s cabin, tied his hands behind his back and threatened him ‘with instant death’ if he made the least noise. While Christian held a bayonet to his throat, the members of the crew who had refused to join the mutiny were put over the ship’s side into the launch. The captain’s clerk tried to save Bligh’s surveys and drawings, but was forbidden to do so. Nor was Bligh allowed to take the chronometer or any charts. At last he himself was forced to board the open boat, which was promptly cast adrift. Equipped only with a sextant and compass,3 and very limited supplies of bread, pork, water, rum and wine, Bligh now faced the almost overwhelming challenge of bringing to safety the eighteen men who accompanied him.4
Bligh decided first to lay in a supply of breadfruit and water at the nearby island of Tofoa (now Tofua), but this plan went badly wrong. They were able to obtain very little in the way of provisions, and the natives – some of whom recalled Bligh from his visit to the Tongan archipelago with Cook fifteen years earlier – turned hostile when they realized the sailors were poorly armed and quite alone. Eventually they gathered on the beach, menacingly knocking stones together, and Bligh – who had witnessed Cook’s death – saw that an attack was imminent. He ordered all his men to get aboard the boat as quickly as possible, but stones began to fly and a member of the crew who had run back up the beach to cast off was clubbed to death. Bligh cut the painter and they escaped, under a barrage of well-aimed missiles, leaving their unfortunate comrade behind.
Despite the desperate shortage of supplies, Bligh and his companions decided not to risk landing on any of the neighbouring islands. Instead they headed west for Timor, in the Dutch East Indies, some 3,600 nautical miles away, as it was the nearest place where they could be sure to find help – and report the mutiny. To give some sense of the scale of this voyage, that is roughly the distance from Land’s End to the north-east coast of Brazil.
Shortly after leaving Tofua they were caught in a heavy gale:
the sea ran very high, so that between the seas the sail was becalmed, and when on the top of the sea it was too much to have set: but we could not venture to take in the sail for we were in very imminent danger and distress, the sea curling over the stern of the boat, which obliged us to bail with all our might. A situation more distressing has perhaps seldom been experienced.5
Everything now depended on Bligh’s exceptional navigational skills and remarkable memory. Taking observations with the sextant to determine their latitude – a difficult feat in an overcrowded boat often tossed about in heavy seas – while keeping track of their westerly progress with the help of a makeshift log-line,6 fn3 Bligh sailed towards the Great Barrier Reef, setting their course in accordance with his apparently detailed recollection of the charts he had been forced to leave behind. The food and water now had to be very strictly rationed. Such was Bligh’s devotion to duty that, even in these desperate circumstances, he continued to keep careful notes of the islands they passed – including the Fiji group which they were the first Europeans to discover – recording their latitudes and estimating their longitudes as best he could. In addition to their growing hunger and thirst, the lack of space made life on board the boat ‘very miserable’. Bligh kept half the crew sitting up on watch while the other half lay down in the bottom, or on the chest in which they kept their small supply of bread:
Our limbs were dreadfully cramped, for we could not stretch them out; and the nights so cold, and we so constantly wet, that, after a few hours sleep, we could scarce move.7
After three weeks things were starting to look hopeless. An occasional teaspoon or two of rum or wine helped to keep their spirits up, and the redoubtable Bligh survived almost without sleep. Another gale brought them to the brink of disaster, but even then Bligh was still taking sights:
At noon it blew very hard, and the foam of the sea kept running over our stern and quarters; I however got propped up, and made an observation of the latitude, in 14° 17' S; course N 85° W, distance 130 miles; longitude made 29° 38' W.
The misery we suffered this night exceeded the preceding. The sea flew at us with great force, and kept us bailing with horror and anxiety … At dawn of day I found everyone in a most distressed condition, and I began to fear that another such night would put an end to the lives of several, who seemed no longer to support their sufferings.8
When the weather eventually improved the heat of the sun became a serious problem, but the appearance of large numbers of birds, and the sight of stationary clouds on the western horizon, at last suggested that they were approaching land. In the middle of the night the helmsman heard the sound of breakers, and Bligh woke to see them ‘close under our lee, not more than a quarter of a mile distant from us’: they had made their landfall on the Great Barrier Reef, just as Bligh had intended. The following day they began to search for a gap through which they could pass:
The sea broke furiously over every part … I now found that we were embayed, for we could not lie clear with the sails, the wind having backed against