Bligh met almost every day with Tynah and his family and retinue, and each day he logged some new discovery about his hosts’ culture. Along with the ship’s officers, he was entertained by lascivious heivas, in which the women, ‘according to the horrid custom,’ distorted their faces into obscene expressions. He discussed the tradition of infanticide among the flamboyant arioi, and he recorded the recipe for a delicious pudding made from a turnip-like root. One day, Bligh engaged in long theological enquiry, in which he was questioned closely about his own beliefs: who was the son and who was the wife of his God? Who was his father and mother? Who was before your God and where is he? Is he in the winds or in the sun?
When asked about childbirth in his country, Bligh answered as well as he was able, and enquired in turn how this was done in Tahiti. Queen Iddeeah replied by mimicking a woman in labour, squatting comfortably on her heels between the protective arms of a male attendant who stroked her belly. Iddeeah was vastly amused on learning of the difficulties of Pretanee’s women.
‘Let them do this & not fear,’ she told Bligh, who appears to have been persuaded by this tender pantomime.
In the evenings, Bligh entertained his hosts on board the Bounty, which none seemed to tire of visiting. As Tynah’s royal status forbade him to put food or drink into his own mouth, Bligh himself sometimes served as cupbearer if attendants were unavailable; Iddeeah, according to custom, ate apart from the men. After the meals, the company lounged lazily around the small deck area, enjoying the offshore breezes, and the muffled pounding of the surf on shore and reef, and the lap of the waves below. Not infrequently, Bligh’s guests stayed the night on board the Bounty, loth to depart.
How Bligh passed his time at Tahiti can be followed, day by day, event by event, as recorded in his fulsome log. What is not known with any clarity is how time was passed onshore. All midshipmen were required to keep up their own logs, to be produced at such time as they applied to pass for lieutenant, and one would give much to have Fletcher Christian’s. As it is, life at Point Venus can be sketched only in broad outline. Every evening, when the work of the shore party was winding down, the Tahitians gathered at ‘the Post’ before sunset. Almost all of the Bounty men had found taios, or protective friends, who took them into their homes and families. At least two of the men, George Stewart from the Orkneys and, perhaps less predictably, the critical James Morrison, had women friends to whom they were particularly attached, while all the men seemed to have enjoyed regular sexual partners; whether or not Fletcher Christian had formed an attachment to any one woman was to become a hotly contested question – at the very least, he, like young Peter Heywood, had to be treated for ‘venereals’. The women of Tahiti, as Bligh would later famously write, were ‘handsome, mild and cheerful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved.’ They were also by European standards not only very beautiful, but sexually uninhibited and experienced in ways that amazed and delighted their English visitors.
‘Even the mouths of Women are not exempt from the polution, and many other as uncommon ways have they of gratifying their beastly inclinations,’ as Bligh had observed, aghast. Famously, favours of the Tahitian women could be purchased for mere nails. Both on ship and at the camp, Bligh allowed female guests to stay the night, at the same time trying, through Ledward, his assistant surgeon, to keep track of the venereal diseases. When dusk came, the shore party were left more or less to their own devices. The sundown gatherings brought entertainments – wrestling matches, dances and games, feasts, martial competitions – but also a sexual privacy, even a domesticity, not allowed to the men still on board ship. From the curving arm of Point Venus, Christian and his companions could look back towards Matavai Bay, past the Bounty riding gently at anchor, to the darkening abundance of trees that seemed to cascade from the grave, unassailable heights of the island.
As the weeks passed, the potted plants began to fill the nursery tent, and by the end of November, some six hundred were ‘in a very fine way’. Meanwhile, other ship duties were intermittently carried out. Bligh ordered the sails brought onshore, where they were aired and dried under Christian’s supervision. The large cutter was found to have a wormy bottom and had to be cleaned and repainted, under the shade of a large awning that Bligh had made to protect the workmen from the sun.
These duties were accompanied by the usual problems. Mathew Thompson was flogged with a dozen lashes ‘for insolence and disobedience of Orders’. Also, Bligh logged, ‘by the remissness of my Officers & People at the Tent,’ a rudder was stolen, the only theft, as Bligh observed, so far, of any consequence; the officer in charge of the tent was of course Fletcher Christian. There is no record of punishment.
Most seriously, Purcell once again had begun to balk at his orders. When asked to make a whetstone for one of the Tahitian men, he refused point-blank, claiming that to do so would spoil his tools. On this occasion, at last, Bligh punished the carpenter with confinement to his cabin – although, as he recorded, he did ‘not intend to lose the use of him but to remitt him to his duty to Morrow.’
Towards the end of November, strong winds began to accompany what had become daily showers of rain, and by early December the dark weather brought an unfamiliar, heavy swell. The Bounty rolled uncomfortably at her anchorage, while the surf breaking on Dolphin Bank, the outlying reef, had become violent. On 6 December, Bligh described a scene ‘of Wind and Weather which I never supposed could have been met with in this place.’ From midnight until well into the morning, amid torrents of rain, a foaming sea agitated the ship ‘in a most tremendous manner’. Onshore, Christian’s party was cut off by the swelling of the nearby river and an alarming influx of the sea. In the morning, Tynah and Iddeeah fought their way to the Bounty in canoes through a sea so high that, as Bligh wrote, ‘I could not have supposed any Boat could have existed a moment.’ On board, the couple offered their tearful greetings, saying they had believed the ship lost in the night. The rainy season, which Europeans had never experienced before, had commenced, and it was at once clear that Matavai Bay was no longer a feasible anchorage. The plants had been threatened by salt spray as the winds and high sea raged, and Bligh was determined to move them to safer ground as soon as he was able. On Nelson’s advice, he delayed an immediate departure until plants in an apparently dormant state showed signs of being alive and healthy.
Some days after the storm, Huggan, the quondam surgeon, at last succumbed to his ‘drunkenness and indolence’.
‘Exercise was a thing he could not bear an Idea of,’ Bligh wrote by way of an epitaph. Since his death had been projected even before the Bounty departed Deptford Dockyard, Huggan had a good run for his money. He was buried the following day to the east of Point Venus, across the river that cut the point and not far from the sea.
‘There the Sun rises,’ Tynah said as the grave was being dug, ‘and there it sets, and here you may bury Terronnoo, for so he was called.’ Joining Huggan’s shipmates for the funeral were all the chiefs of the region and a great many other people, respectful and solemn for the surgeon’s perhaps undeservedly dignified rites. Huggan was only the second European to be buried on the island.
It was Christmas by the time the dormant plants had put forth the desired shoots, and the men began the cumbersome task of moving camp. A reef harbour at Oparre, to the west of Matavai, had been chosen as the Bounty’s new anchorage. With a watchful eye on the weather, which had continued to be troubled, Bligh ordered the Bounty readied for her short journey, and had his 774 potted breadfruit plants carefully carried on board. At half past ten in the morning, the ship weighed anchor and cautiously set out to follow the launch, which was carrying the tents