Beyond the hotel window I observed the high blue sky and unfamiliar vegetation: palm ferns and mango trees, bougainvillea and frangipani, hibiscus and bromeliads. I didn’t want any of my mother’s possessions. Possessions were a poor substitute for something I’d wanted but failed to find.
12
The ordeal of the nineteen men forced into an open boat by Fletcher Christian lasted seven weeks, from 28 April until 14 June 1789. When they stopped at one of the Friendly Islands, the quartermaster John Norton was beaten to death with stones by tribesmen as he ran down the beach to cast off the stern of the boat. After that, unarmed, starving, dependent, bearing no gifts and like spectres of death, the surviving men didn’t dare land on any inhabited island.
For sixteen days in continual rain they were squashed together, soaking wet and numb with cold, with swollen legs, violent gut pains, aching bones and little use of their limbs. They bailed night and day as great waves broke over the boat. Sleep ‘in the midst of water’ was no comfort. Dinner was a bit of coconut or a morsel of pork or bread. On a morning when to their great joy they hooked a fish, the creature writhed and returned to the sea. When the sun rose fiery and red, wind storms followed. If it shone at noon, they were scorched by its heat. There were nights so dark they couldn’t see each other, days when they were equally blinded by rain and seawater. When the weather raged, they could do no more than run with the tide. The least error at the helm might in a second cause their destruction.
Even on this terrible voyage Bligh took confident, galling command, convinced of ‘God’s gracious support’ and his own superiority. As ever he had a goal. He would get himself and these men to the Dutch colony of Timor. From there they could get passage to England. He calculated the voyage would take eight weeks, so he rationed such provisions as they had, to last for ten. He meted out equal starvation rations in scales made of coconut shells. Bullets – ‘pistol balls’ found by chance in the boat – were his weights. When they caught a booby bird he divided it into eighteen portions and gave its blood to the three men nearest death. With each measured portion of beak, entrails or claws he called, ‘Who shall have this?’ in a display of fairness. He called the torrential rain a blessing, for constant sun would have scorched them and killed them from thirst. He contrived a canvas weather cloth round the boat, threw inessential stuff overboard for balance and speed and supervised men to watch and bail. He made them all wring their clothes in seawater each morning because he thought this refreshing, and he stored the bread in the carpenter’s tool chest.
He described the mutineers as ‘a tribe of armed ruffians … unfeeling wretches’. He’d account to his king and country and bring them to the gallows:
A few hours before, my situation had been peculiarly flattering. I had a ship in the most perfect order and well stored with every necessary both for service and health: by early attention to particulars I had, as much as lay in my power, provided against any accident in case I could not get through Endeavour Straits, as well as what might befall me in them; add to this the plants had been successfully preserved in the most flourishing state, so that, upon the whole, the voyage was two-thirds completed, and the remaining part in a very promising way; every person on board being in perfect health, to establish which was ever among the principal objects of my attention.
In his journal he wrote that these ruffians turned against him because of the ‘allurement of dissipation’ on Tahiti, where sex was freely available and they need never work, where the chiefs protected them and gave them land, where the sun shone and the food was good. They were ‘void of connections’ in their own country whereas he, a family man, understood responsibility. They were scheming villains who’d deceived their trusting leader. ‘The possibility of such a conspiracy was ever the farthest from my thoughts,’ he wrote.
Anger and vengeance would get him the 3600 miles to Timor. His testimony would be believed. The mutineers had committed a great crime for which the ultimate punishment awaited them. He’d see Christian dead.
13
Sitting on a box by the quayside at Tauranga port on 2 July 2004 was a woman in her fifties with bright blonde hair and sunglasses on a beaded chain round her neck. She wore a padded gold jacket and white snow boots. I’d seen her before on the coach from Auckland to Tauranga. She was hard to overlook. As we drove past orange, lemon and olive groves and fields of sheep she’d sung in a clear soprano ‘Soave sia il vento’ from Così Fan Tutte and ‘Evil Deeds’ by Eminem. I supposed her to be accompanying what was on her iPod. At the comfort stop at Thames she ordered vegetable soup and a caramel milk shake then missed the coach. We waited for her two miles on, at the Rendezvous Motel.
‘Thank you, drivah,’ she said as she reboarded, without a hint of contrition for causing inconvenience. After ten minutes she called, ‘Drivah, you’re going too fast. And in England you’d be fined on the spot for using a mobile phone.’ The driver, a young energetic-looking man, muttered in Maori. I and another woman exchanged a grimace.
In Tauranga from high on Mount Maungani I’d watched the Tundra Princess towed by pilot boats into the harbour, a white, silent ship on blue water. Walking the path at the foot of the mountain, where yellow-beaked birds nested in pohutukawa trees, I heard again that penetrating voice. ‘You don’t get many shags in Knightsbridge.’ She was
