Now captured and pinned inside Pandora’s Box, the Bounty prisoners listened in anguish as their wives and friends wailed and grieved under the Pandora’s stern. Standing in canoes around the ship, the women enacted their terrible rites of mourning, hammering at their heads with sharp shells until the blood ran. As the day of departure approached, more canoes came from across the island, filling the harbour around the ship. Men and women stripped their clothes and cut their heads in grief, and as the blood fell, cut again and cried aloud. Tynah came on board and, with tears streaming down his cheeks, begged to be remembered to his friend, the King of England.
‘This I believe was the first time that an Englishman got up his anchor, at the remotest part of the globe, with a heavy heart, to go home to his own country,’ wrote Dr Hamilton – an astonishing admission from a naval official who had come in search of deserting mutineers.
On 8 May 1791, under pleasant breezes, the Pandora, recaulked and overhauled, left Tahiti with the mutineers’ schooner, Resolution, in tow. Edwards’s commission was far from fulfilled. Still missing was His Majesty’s stolen ship as well as the ringleader of the mutiny and his most hard-core followers.
‘Christian had been frequently heard to declare that he would search for an unknown or an uninhabited Island in which there was no harbour for Shipping, would run the Ship ashore, and get from her such things as would be useful to him and settle there,’ Edwards recorded in his official report to the Admiralty, continuing with admirable understatement, ‘but this information was too vague to be follow’d in an immense Ocean strew’d with an almost innumerable number of known and unknown Islands.’ Specifically, the Pacific contains more than twenty thousand islands scattered over some 64 million square miles. Christian and the Bounty had departed Tahiti in September 1789 – a twenty-month head start, long enough to have taken the Bounty not only as far as North or South America, but, in theory, around the globe.
Edwards’s instructions from the Admiralty offered some guidance: If no knowledge of the mutineers had been gained at Tahiti, he was to venture west to Whytootackee (Aitutaki), ‘calling, in your way, at Huaheine and Uliatea.’ If nothing was found here, he was to make a circuit of the neighbouring islands. If nothing here, he was to continue west to the Friendly Islands (Tonga), ‘and, having succeeded, or failed,’ to return to England, through the Endeavour Strait (Torres Strait) separating New Guinea from New Holland (Australia). Be mindful of prevailing winds, the Admiralty admonished, ‘there being no dependence (of which we have any certain knowledge) of passing the Strait after the month of September…’
For roughly the next three months Edwards doggedly followed the Admiralty’s prescribed itinerary in a desultory chase from island to island. At each landfall, a uniformed officer was disembarked and in the cloying heat tramped along the beach, offering presents and seeking information. Anchored offshore, the Pandora received the now customary canoe-loads of eager visitors. Spears, clubs and other curios were collected, differences among the islanders, who appeared ‘ruder’ and less civilized as the Pandora progressed, were duly noted, but no hint of the Bounty’s whereabouts emerged.
A week out from Tahiti, Hilbrant, one of the mutineers, volunteered that Christian had spoken to him on the day before his departure of his intention to make for an uninhabited island that he knew from earlier accounts to be ‘situated to the Westward of the Islands of Danger.’ This description seemed to refer to Duke of York Island (Atafu) but was to prove to be another dead end. En route, however, Edwards stopped off at Palmerston Island (Avarau) and sent his boats ashore to search that isle’s bays and inlets. Two of these returned in the late afternoon full of coconuts, and nothing more. But that night the tender arrived with hopeful news: it had discovered some spars and a yard marked ‘Bounty’s Driver Yard’ embossed with the Admiralty’s broad arrow mark.
Over the next two days, all the ship’s craft – a cutter, two yawls and the mutineers’ schooner – were dispatched to examine the island as well as islets and even reefs in the vicinity. The belief that the mutineers might be at large nearby caused everyone to move with great circumspection. One party camping overnight on the island were woken abruptly when a coconut they had placed on their campfire exploded. ‘Expecting muskets to be fired at them from every bush,’ Dr Hamilton explained, ‘they all jumped up, seized their arms, and were some time before they could undeceive themselves, that they were really not attacked.’
As the various small craft tacked to and fro around the island, Edwards remained with Pandora, cruising offshore and making the occasional coconut run. On the afternoon of 24 May, one of the midshipmen, John Sival, returned in the cutter with several striking painted canoes; but after these were examined and admired, he was sent back to complete his orders. Shortly after he left, thick weather dosed in, obscuring the little craft as she bobbed dutifully back to shore, and was followed by an ugly squall that did not lift for four days. When the weather cleared on the twenty-eighth, the cutter had disappeared. Neither she nor her company of five men was ever seen again.
‘It may be difficult to surmise what has been the fate of these unfortunate men,’ Dr. Hamilton wrote, adding hopefully that they ‘had a piece of salt-beef thrown into the boat to them on leaving the ship; and it rained a good deal that night and the following day, which might satiate their thirst.’
By now, too, it was realized that the tantalizing clues of the Bounty’s presence were only flotsam.
‘The yard and these things lay upon the beach at high water Mark & were all eaten by the Sea Worm which is a strong presumption they were drifted there by the Waves,’ Edwards reported. It was concluded that they had drifted from Tubuai, where the mutineers had reported that the Bounty had lost most of her spars. These few odds and ends of worm-eaten wood were all that were ever found by Pandora of His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty.
The fruitless search apart, morale on board had been further lowered by the discovery, as Dr Hamilton put it, ‘that the ladies of Otaheite had left us many warm tokens of their affection.’ The men confined within Pandora’s Box were also far from well. Their irons chafed them badly, so much so that while they were still at Matavai Bay, Joseph Coleman’s legs had swollen alarmingly and the arms of McIntosh and Ellison had become badly ‘galled’. To the complaint that the irons were causing their wrists to swell, Lieutenant John Larkan had replied that ‘they were not intended to fit like Gloves!’ Edwards had an obsessive fear that the mutineers might ‘taint’ his crew and, under threat of severe punishment, had forbidden any communication between the parties whatsoever; but from rough memos he made, it seems he was unsuccessful. ‘Great difficulty created in keeping the Mutineers from conversing with the crew,’ Edwards had jotted down, elsewhere noting that one of his lieutenants suspected that the prisoners had ‘carried on a correspondence with some of our people by Letter.’
From Duke of York Island down to the rest of the Union Islands (Tokelau), thence to the Samoas, the Pandora continued her futile search. To aid them in making rough landfalls, Lieutenants Corner and Hayward donned cork jackets and plunged boldly into the surf ahead of the landing boats. Parakeets were purchased on one island, splendid birds resembling peacocks on another, and on others still the use of the islands’ women. Striking sights were enjoyed – the large skeleton of a whale, for example, and a deserted shrine with an altar piled with white shells. They had even discovered whole islands, whose newly bestowed names would form a satisfying addition to the report Edwards would eventually turn over to the Admiralty. In short, the Pandora had discovered a great deal – but nothing at all that pertained to the missing mutineers and the Bounty.
Thousands of miles from England, adrift in one of the most unknown regions of the earth, Hamilton, who seems to have enjoyed this meandering sojourn, mused tellingly on the strange peoples he had seen and their distance from civilized life: ‘And although that unfortunate man Christian has, in a rash unguarded moment, been tempted to swerve from his duty to his king and country, as he is in other respects of an amiable character, and respectable abilities, should he elude the hand of justice,