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

Christian asked, ‘Why do you treat me thus, Captain Bligh?’

‘No reply,’ said Bligh, then ordered the quartermasters to bring every coconut on the ship to the quarterdeck. He assembled the crew, told them, ‘There never were such a set of damned thieving rascals under any man’s command in the world before,’ halved their daily supply of yams and vowed when the ship reached the Endeavour Strait he’d kill half of them, force the others to eat grass like cows, and make the officers jump overboard.

It was not a happy day aboard the Bounty. That afternoon Bligh again cursed Christian and called him a damned rascal and an infamous wretch. Christian cracked. He ran off crying. None of the crew had seen him cry before. ‘Tears were running from his eyes in big drops,’ William Purcell the carpenter said. ‘Flesh and blood can’t bear this,’ Christian told him. ‘I’d rather die ten thousand deaths. I always do my duty as an officer and a man, yet I receive this scandalous treatment.’ Purcell tried to console him that the voyage home to England would not take long. Christian said, ‘In going through the Endeavour Strait I am sure the ship will be in hell.’

Bligh’s outbursts were part of his command. After them he behaved as if nothing had happened. Purcell asked Christian why he took this incident so badly. Christian replied, ‘Can you ask me and hear the treatment I receive?’ Purcell said, ‘Don’t I receive as bad as you do?’ Christian replied, ‘You have your warrant to protect you so you can answer him. But if I should speak to him as you do, he would break me, turn me before the mast and flog me, and if he did, it would be the death of us both, for I’m sure I’d take him in my arms and jump overboard with him.’

Christian resolved to jump ship that night. He lashed together two masts to form a makeshift raft, packed bread, fruit and pork in a clothes bag, took nails to use as barter and gave away his Tahitian souvenirs: his carved wooden figures, black pearls and drum made of sharkskin. He intended to slip from the side of the ship in the dark and float on this makeshift raft until local Polynesians in their canoes saw him. He’d bribe them with nails to take him to a shore, then make his way back to Tahiti.

His plan was thwarted. A volcano on the island of Tofua erupted as the Bounty passed in the dark. The crew gathered on deck to wonder as magma and flames spurted to the sky. They thought they were viewing the wrath of God. For Christian it was an obstacle to his escape from his tormentor.

He didn’t sleep. He plotted with Matthew Quintal a Cornish seaman, and the gunner’s mate John Mills. Quintal got the key to the arms store on the pretext that he needed a gun to shoot a shark that was following the ship. At dawn the three men burst into Bligh’s cabin, said they’d kill him if he made a noise, pushed him to his stomach, tied back his hands, hauled him out of bed, dragged him in his nightshirt to the mizzen mast, swore at him as he had sworn at them and warned they’d blow his brains out if he tried to resist.

Of the crew of forty-five men, twenty joined in or were implicated in the fracas of Christian’s mutiny. Quintal and other armed men guarded the hatches and the officers’ cabins. Christian held a musket to Bligh’s head and shouted orders. He made the boatswain William Cole lower the ship’s launch, then ordered him and eighteen other Bligh ‘loyalists’ into this open boat: John Smith Bligh’s personal servant, John Fryer the master, William Elphinstone the master’s mate, the gunner, the carpenter, the acting surgeon, three midshipmen, two quartermasters, the quartermaster’s mate, the sailmaker, the master-at-arms, the cook, the butcher and David Nelson the gardener, who grieved to be separated from the 1114 breadfruit plants he’d potted and nurtured in Tahiti.

In a scene of violence, panic and surprise these men struggled to get supplies for survival into the boat: twine, canvas, sails, a twenty-eight-gallon cask of water. William Purcell took his tool chest, John Smith got a hundred and fifty pounds of bread, six bottles of wine, six quarts of rum, a quadrant compass, Bligh’s journals and commission and some of the ship’s papers. Christian said he’d kill him if he touched any of Bligh’s collection over fifteen years of maps, astronomical observations, surveys and drawings, or his sextant or timekeeper.

Christian then told Bligh, ‘Your officers and men are in the boat and you must go with them. Attempt the least resistance and you’ll instantly be put to death.’ Then he shoved him down the Jacob’s ladder at gunpoint.

The launch measured twenty-three feet long, six feet nine inches wide and two feet nine inches deep. The men’s weight sank it to the surface of the sea. The mutineers veered it astern with a rope, chucked in sixteen bits of pork and four cutlasses, jeered at Bligh and his crew, then cast them adrift on the open ocean.

3

Aviva wrapped Rosie’s top in layers of tissue paper. It would take up little space in my Eagle Creek bag. She was interested in my intention to visit Pitcairn Island, for she’d seen three film versions of Mutiny on the Bounty and once glimpsed Marlon Brando in a Florida store.

I told her of the island’s remoteness, how difficult it was to get there because ships seldom stopped and it had no airstrip, how its small population was descended from Fletcher Christian and other Bounty mutineers and the Tahitian women they’d abducted, how some of the men who now lived there had committed serious sexual crimes, how there was no bank, shops, cars, television, hotel or anything much except coconut palms and the pounding surf.

She