Something happened to warp his respect and good feelings. Charles, when he heard of the mutiny, thought only extreme provocation could have made Fletcher act so out of character. He said he was ‘slow to be moved’. He wondered if it was the stress of proximity:
When men are cooped up for a long Time in the Interior of a Ship there oft prevails such jarring Discordancy of Tempers and Conduct that it is enough on many Occasions by repeated Acts of Irritation and Offence to change the Disposition of a Lamb into That of an Animal Fierce and Resentful.
But on that aborted journey from Tahiti to the West Indies, Christian was cooped up in the Bounty interior for only three weeks before he mutinied. He’d lived for five indulgent months on Tahiti. No one spoke of him as an angry man, he was disposed to be obedient and kind. The ‘jarring Discordancy’ was provoked by Bligh’s erosion of trust and accumulation of insult. It turned Christian’s love of him to hate.
5
It wasn’t easy for me to get to Pitcairn in 2004. Press reports of the depraved behaviour of Fletcher Christian’s descendants, and criminal charges for their crimes against girls – gang rape, serial rape, gross indecency – made the islanders wary of visits from strangers. And this tiny isolated island, this remote, unwanted British dependency, had no transport links with anywhere. Most islands in the South Pacific, administered by the French, had airstrips and ferry links. But not Pitcairn.
There was satellite email, though – set up for the judges and lawyers who’d go from Auckland, in a boat chartered by the British government, to conduct the trials. Islanders too could log on for free, though there was no privacy to their mail. Rosie advised my best chance was to travel with Graham Wragg Expeditions from the island of Mangareva, 300 miles east of Pitcairn, which had an air link with Tahiti. Wragg, a New Zealand botanist, was chartered by the French Polynesian authorities to sail his catamaran Bounty Bay through their waters to Pitcairn. I emailed him. He said he’d take me. A cost of thirteen hundred US dollars would include two days on the uninhabited island of Henderson, 107 miles east-north-east of Pitcairn, where I might see the Ridley turtle, the dark-rumped petrel and the flightless rail. I was to meet him on the quay at Rikitea, Mangareva’s only settlement.
I paid the money into his Oxford account and rebooked my flights with Harold Wing. ‘Welcome aboard Bounty Bay,’ Wragg wrote. He recommended the Tahiti Airport Lodge, ‘Clean and friendly, five minutes up the hill from the airport.’ He said he’d sort a pension on Mangareva, advised me to bring sunburn cream and seasickness pills and wrote of a fantastic tour into the centre of Tahiti to the crater of the volcano from which the island was born.
Rosie said bring something nice to wear for church, but apart from that just shorts, jeans and maybe a fleece because it was cool in the evenings. There were mosquitoes, I’d need repellent, and did I eat special food? She added a caution. Things to do with Pitcairn seldom worked out as planned. Shipping was unreliable and dependent on the weather. It was a fact of life. They were used to it.
Within a week came an email from Wragg. I deserved a medal for perseverance but he had ‘frustrating’ news. There’d been a change of government in Tahiti, his permission to sail in French waters was under review, voyages to Pitcairn were on hold, it was all a mess, he was trying to sort it, it would take him months. ‘Hope your air tickets are date changeable. Sorry about this.’ Startled questions from me were blocked by auto-reply. Wragg and the Bounty Bay were at sea.
Two weeks later he emailed that he couldn’t risk having his boat impounded by the Tahitian authorities. It had happened before and cost him twenty thousand US dollars in fines. The new Tahitian president, Oscar Temaru, was pro-Polynesian independence and had a one-seat majority over the outgoing pro-France man Gaston Flosse, whose staff had all been sacked and taken their paperwork with them. The British authorities didn’t want outsiders on Pitcairn while the sex trials were going on, and the Pitcairn governor had asked him not to rock the boat – his boat – with the French Polynesian authorities at this delicate time. Maybe he’d be able to take me next year, but trials and international manoeuvrings between governments were way above anything he could influence. I wondered about the reimbursement of my thirteen hundred dollars.
6
The whole Bounty endeavour was a ‘jarring Discordancy’ to Bligh. Even before setting off from Spithead he was frustrated and bad-tempered.
His commission was to take the breadfruit saplings acquired in Tahiti to the West Indies to form plantations to feed the colony’s starving slaves. He was to sail via the Endeavour Strait so as to chart that stretch of ocean which was little known and dangerous.
The architect of the enterprise, Sir Joseph Banks, botanical adviser to King George the Third, traveller and rich entrepreneur, had recommended Bligh to the Admiralty. He thought him a brilliant navigator. They’d sailed together to Tahiti with Captain Cook, so Banks knew Bligh was on good terms with the island’s chiefs. But the Admiralty, preoccupied with war in Europe, gave scant attention to this commercial voyage of a small ship and Bligh was demeaned by a commission which didn’t even merit the official rank of captain and which gave him only a lieutenant’s pay.
He supervised the transformation of the Bethia, a merchant ship eighty-five feet long and rated only as a cutter, into the Bounty. He turned the great cabin into a conservatory for the saplings, with skylights, air vents and a lead floor cut with hundreds of holes, each fitted with a pot and drainage pipe. His private cabin was a windowless annexe. He was meticulous over detail and
