To Banks, as to Campbell, Bligh concluded with an update on the progress of a protégé. ‘Young Hallet is very well and is a very fine young man,’ he informed Banks, ‘and I shall always attend to every thing that can be of service to him.’
Parting company with the British Queen, the Bounty continued south and days later ‘passed the limits of the Southern Tropic.’ Incrementally, the temperature began to drop. Vast numbers of seabirds were noted – shearwaters, albatross – as well as turtles and numerous whales; one afternoon a cloud of butterflies was blown past the ship. Then, on Sunday, March 2, after divine service and the usual inspection of his men, Bligh made an announcement ‘I now thought it for the Good of the Service to give Mr. Fletcher Christian an Acting Order as Lieut. I therefore Ordered it to be read to all hands.’ This was another clear indication of Bligh’s patronage, if not favouritism, of Christian; a long stint as acting lieutenant would in the normal course of things ensure the master’s mate of promotion on his return.
A week later, out of the blur of notations about butterflies and shearwaters, porpoises and whales, Bligh’s log records an event that returned him squarely to the world of his men: ‘Untill this Afternoon I had hopes I could have performed the Voyage without punishment to any One,’ Bligh wrote, with evident regret, ‘but I found it necessary to punish Mathew Quintal with 2 dozen lashes for Insolence and Contempt.’
In a subsequent published narrative, Bligh expanded on the event. ‘Upon a complaint made to me by the master, I found it necessary to punish Matthew Quintal, one of the seamen, with two dozen lashes, for insolence and mutinous behaviour. Before this, I had not had occasion to punish any person on board.’
Now began the whole grim ritual; the crew mustered to watch Quintal, aged twenty-two, from Cornwall, stripped to the waist and strapped, spread-eagled, by the wrists and ankles to an upright deck grating. With no marines to drum or pipe, this would have been a lacklustre ceremony, itself stripped down to its most pertinent and brutal elements. By all later reports, Quintal, of middle height and ‘strong made’, was a dangerously disaffected troublemaker. It does not appear from the manner in which the incident was logged, however, that Bligh himself had been witness to Quintal’s insubordination; no matter. Once his master logged the event and brought it to Bligh’s attention, Bligh was compelled to administer punishment, and his perfect record was now spoiled.
While the small crew stood formally mustered to witness the punishment in the damp, hazy weather, Boatswain’s Mate James Morrison – the literate diarist, with his smattering of classical education – administered the flogging. For Bligh, whose humane principles had forbidden men’s being ducked when crossing the line, the familiar ritual must have been a singularly unpleasant landmark on his voyage. The natural coarseness of men’s habits – their dirty clothes and fingernails, his surgeon’s ‘beastly’ drunkenness, their cruel and brutal pranks – all offended him. He had chosen a profession infamous for poor conditions and dirty habits, in which men counted on taking brutal poundings from their fellow men and from the sea. Yet Bligh expected his ship to be ‘perfectly sweet’ and scented with vinegar, hardened seamen to wear clean clothes and scrub their hands, cheerfulness to be seen on every countenance and merry dancing in the evening. There was no dirt or disease in Bligh’s vision of the perfect voyage, and no punishment. Busily intent on his many burdensome responsibilities, Bligh was unlikely to have taken note of his men’s practised and scrutinizing gazes. Did they perceive that it was their fastidious, bustling captain who avoided the lash?
The damp, hazy weather closed in and by the following day had become dense fog. The temperature continued to drop, and when the fog cleared the air was felt to be cold. In the afternoon, one of the men shot an albatross that fell dying into the ocean, and a boat was sent out to collect it. On board its wingspan was gravely measured. The superstition that the killing of an albatross brought bad luck was not yet prevalent; Coleridge had not yet written ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – this would follow later.
The Bounty was now as far south as the fortieth latitude, the ‘roaring forties’, and was drawing parallel with the coast of Patagonia. A wet, dense fog forbade sight of land, although south of Puerto Deseado the men ‘saw what was supposed to be the looming of it.’ Whales appeared in great numbers and seemed to enjoy lying in groups of two and three windward of the ship, expelling great blasts of spray over the men.
A strong gale arose on 20 March as the Bounty approached the Jasons, the northwesternmost of the Falkland Islands. Albatross, petrels and snowbirds flocked and hovered around the rigging, as if wishing to perch. The wind and sea became violent and Bligh was anxious to get south of the islands; he had by now given up his earlier plan of stopping here for wood and water. The weather was fast deteriorating and he could afford no delays.
Before dawn on 23 March, the goats and single dog on board began to agitate, and the men declared that the animals could smell land. Soon, in the moonlight, hills could be made out to the west, and when daylight broke the mountains of Tierra del Fuego could be seen, mostly free of snow.
‘I realy look upon the bad or Winter Weather not yet to be set in,’ Bligh wrote. ‘But as I must expect it hourly I have no right to loose a Moment…’
Skirting Le Maire Strait, they passed the desolate, mountainous country of Staten Island to the east. Now, at nearly the 55° latitude south, the Bounty was fast approaching the Horn. A hint of the weather they were in for hit the ship on 27 March, with the arrival of a strong gale and an ‘exceedingly High’ sea.
‘It would not be possible for a laboursome Ship to keep her Masts,’ Bligh observed. His ship, as he had often proudly noted, was not ‘laboursome’, but well behaved. Her hatches were all battened down, and although towering seas broke over her, so far the men kept ‘tolerably dry’. The temperature was now in the upper thirties, and the weather wet and raw.
‘I Ordered the People to have Wheat [porridge] served every day with Sugar & Butter to enable them to have a comfortable hot breakfast,’ Bligh logged. Hour after hour, his men were required to reef and hand the sails; then reset them; then reef again, up and down the perilous, pitching rigging in the menacing cold. The sea, Bligh wrote wonderingly, ‘exceeds any I have seen.’
When the gale moderated, Bligh ordered the belowdecks cleaned and dried. The sea was still so huge that he had difficulty taking sightings, as the mountainous waves swamped his horizon. Over the next few days the gales moderated, then increased, moderated, then ‘blew a Storm of Wind and the Snow fell so heavy that it was scarce possible to haul the sails up and furl them from the Weight and Stiffness.’ With the great sea running confused and contrary, sleet and hail began to fall.
‘At 6 In the Morning the Storm exceeded anything I had met with and a Sea higher than I had ever seen before,’ Bligh entered in his log. The ship was carrying only her staysails, all the canvas that could be risked.
‘My next business was to see after my People who had undergone some fatigue,’ Bligh wrote, his ship safe for the time being. A fire blazed continuously in the galley and someone was set to dry clothes around the clock. Bligh ordered large quantities of the ‘Portable Soup’ of which he was very proud, added to the men’s ‘Pease’, or pea pudding, ‘which made a Valuable and good dinner for them.’
Incredibly, the gales increased, carrying blasts of snow and sleet, the sharp winds piling the sea to windward ‘like a Wall’. Still, Bligh could note that blue petrels and pintados, ‘two beautiful kinds of birds,’ followed their wake. The Bounty was losing ground, being driven back the hard-won miles. At the close of 3 April, she was farther north than she had been six days before.
‘All