Coconut Chaos by Diana Souhami (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📗

Timor was still 1300 miles away and in a further ghastly week at sea, hatred of Bligh grew. There were two flare-ups when they stopped at another tiny rocky outcrop which he named Sunday Island. The men all gathered clams from the rocks, but William Purcell refused to hand his haul over. He said they were his. Bligh insisted they were common property and called him a scoundrel. Purcell said, ‘If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be in this mess.’ Bligh grabbed a cutlass, threatened murder, and claimed the crew would all have perished without his command. Fryer intervened, wrestled with him and got the cutlass from him.

In another fracas, several men at midnight tried to snare roosting birds barehanded, but caught only a dozen noddies. They blamed Robert Lamb, who’d separated from them and spoiled their chances by catching birds for himself. He confessed to being so desperate with hunger he’d eaten nine raw birds before rejoining the group. Bligh wrote in his journal that he gave him ‘a good beating’. On previous days he’d written of how the men were more dead than alive, their clothes in rags, their extreme hunger evident, their appearance horrible, how they were skin and bone and covered in sores. Yet still he’d beat them.

After two more hellish weeks of starvation, sleeplessness and extremes of hunger, thirst, heat and cold, on Monday 15 June they reached the Dutch East Indian settlement of Coupang on the south-west shore of Timor. Bligh hoisted a makeshift flag of distress. The governor, William Adrian Van Este, received them with all kindness, a surgeon tended them and they were given a house, bedding, food and clothes.

David Nelson the gardener died on 20 July – of ‘Inflammatory Fever’, Bligh said. At the start of the voyage Joseph Banks had told Nelson, ‘The whole success of the undertaking depends ultimately upon your diligence and care.’ Nelson, a quiet man, had with diligence and care cultivated, nurtured, tended and potted the breadfruit plants that Christian flung into the sea. He was buried behind the chapel at Coupang without a tombstone.

Bligh didn’t help his crew sort their final passage home. At Coupang he was the only one who could access money through an agent. He bought a thirty-four-foot schooner for a thousand Rix dollars, named it HMS Resource, and in it took them to Batavia* escorted by two armed Indonesian schooners. They arrived on 1 October 1789. He then left for home on the first available ship, a Dutch vessel, the Vlydte, which sailed to South Africa on the sixteenth. He took only his clerk John Samuel, and his servant John Smith. John Fryer called him fraudulent, violent, self-interested and unconcerned in any caring way for the men he commanded.

Most of these men were very ill. Three died in Batavia: Thomas Hall seaman, Peter Linkletter the quartermaster and William Elphinstone master’s mate. Robert Lamb died trying to get home and the acting surgeon Thomas Ledward wasn’t heard of again. A surviving letter from him to his family spoke of Bligh’s harshness.

The captain denied me, as well as the rest of the gentlemen who had not agents, any money unless I would give him my power of attorney and also my will, in which I was to bequeath to him all my property. This he called security. In case of my death I hope this matter will be clearly pointed out to my relations.

Thirteen of the nineteen men set adrift by Christian reached home. Bligh was the first to arrive. He landed at Portsmouth on 2 January 1790.

* In 1949 this was renamed Jakarta.

17

The Bounty had left Tahiti on 4 April 1789. Christian arrived back there on 6 June without his captain and most of the crew or any of the breadfruit plants. He’d rehearsed a lie for the Tahitians about what had happened. He said that when they stopped at the nearby island of Aitutaki for water, they met up with Captain Cook. Bligh and Cook were thrilled to be reunited and were going to form a settlement there. Bligh had dropped the idea of taking all those breadfruit to King George. Supplies were needed for this new enterprise, which Christian had been delegated to go back to Tahiti to acquire.

The Tahitians regarded Cook as their friend and teacher. Bligh hadn’t told them about his murder at Kealakekua in February 1779. He’d been Cook’s midshipman on the Discovery. As at Nomuka, the Kealakekua tribesmen had stolen the ship’s cutter. In revenge, Cook tried to take their king hostage and carnage followed. For the Hawaiians their king was their soul. ‘An immense Mob compos’d of at least 2 or 3 thousand People’ retaliated. Cook’s men fired at them. Cook was attacked, hit with a club, held under water, beaten with stones, then hacked to pieces. Bligh rushed to the English camp and shouted at them to ‘strike the Observatorys as quick as possible’. Before he spoke, the men could see in his eyes ‘the Shocking news that Captn Cook was kill’d’.

Christian and the others who returned to Tahiti had cut spare sails into nautical jackets in an effort to look like a uniformed crew. If the Tahitians had doubts about his story they didn’t convey them. In exchange for the red feathers they thought sacred, and for nails, they gave Christian 460 pigs, most of them sows, fifty goats, numerous hens, cockerels, dogs and cats, and the bull and the cow that Cook had given to Chief Otoo on his third visit to the island in August 1777.

Christian enticed on board six Tahitian men and eighteen girls and women. To join a colonising enterprise with Captains Cook and Bligh on a nearby island sounded attractive. If it didn’t work out they could be home in a week in a double hulled canoe. None of these abducted passengers knew they’d be exposed to danger, hardship