Resentment among the crew festered then burst out. On 5 January 1789 Charles Churchill master-at-arms, and able seamen William Muspratt and John Millward, loaded the ship’s cutter with guns and ammunition then sailed it to the bay. They intended to escape by canoe to the island of Tethuroa. Bligh let the Tahitians know that unless they were captured he’d ‘make the whole country suffer for it’. Thomas Hayward, the officer on watch, was put in irons, and Bligh, armed with pocket pistols, went with a party of Tahitians to round up the deserters. He found them in a house five miles from the ship and the arms were retrieved, apart from a musket and two bayonets. Two lots of flogging followed: twelve lashes on each occasion for Churchill, twenty-four for Muspratt and Millward. They were kept in irons until their skin healed enough for the second round.
That same week Bligh gave the seaman Isaac Martin nineteen lashes for striking a Tahitian. A few days later the ship was almost wrecked when it ran aground. Then someone almost severed the anchor cable. Had they succeeded, the ship would have foundered on the reef. The vehemence of Bligh’s anger alarmed the Tahitians. Otoo was mystified by it, his wife Iddeah wept and his parents left for the mountains even though it was raining heavily.
Bligh had a platform built in the fo’c’sle for a sentinel to guard the cable night and day. He suspected sabotage, as a ploy for his men to stay on Tahiti. Vanity barred him from thinking they might be tired of his rages and punishments. Hayward’s tyo was implicated. He was thought to be vengeful of the punishment meted to his friend, or at least to have agreed to do the deed for him. He was given a hundred lashes, his back swelled and the skin broke. He was put in irons but escaped and dived overboard.
On Friday 27 January the gardener began to load the breadfruit plants into the Bounty conservatory. Roots were pushing through the containers. There were 774 pots, thirty-nine tubs, and twenty-four boxes of saplings. There were also exotic Tahitian specimens for Joseph Banks’s botanical collection at Kew: the chestnut-like rata, peeah which the Tahitians ate as a pudding, ettow and matte which gave them a red dye, and the oraiah, a sort of plantain. Bligh and the crew were given leaving presents: wooden carvings, musical instruments, black pearls and cloth. Otoo wanted to be saluted with the great guns as the Bounty pulled out to sea, but Bligh was afraid this would disturb the plants. Instead, he ordered all the men to gather on deck and give three cheers for Tahiti as the ship sailed from the bay.
10
Verity stayed with friends. The rooms we’d shared looked empty. We were polite when we met, but politeness seemed like proof of distance. One evening she mooted her plan to move to a provincial town, and asked if I’d keep this place on or go to Mill Cottage until I decided what I wanted. I thought of Bligh’s contention that his crew had no attachments in their home country, so they mutinied to stay on Tahiti.
I talked of my problems in getting to Pitcairn Island. ‘This is the twenty-first century,’ Verity said. ‘If you want to go anywhere on the planet you buy a ticket then get on a plane, train, ship or bus.’ I said Pitcairn was not like that. ‘But why go there anyway?’ she asked and not for the first time. ‘There’s enough about Pitcairn on the net and in the news. Why choose somewhere so weird and far away?’ I said it was a question of living connections, of being dissatisfied with virtual reality, of letting the real world impinge. I again expounded on random correlations that challenge ideas of linear narrative, predetermination or contiguousness. I told her how, in a deterministic system, later states evolve from earlier ones according to a fixed law, whereas in a random system the move from earlier to later states is not determined by any law. She gave me an appraising stare and said that in her view love was a fixed connection and that narrative without it was bleak. As for life as a series of random happenings, that was OK if I didn’t mind loneliness and loss.
I reflected on this alone in my room. I feared I’d sounded pretentious. It was my choice to go to Pitcairn. It was not essential. Verity’s view of life was directional whereas I shook all the bits, like in a kaleidoscope, to see how they’d arrange themselves next. I wondered if I was as mutinous and impulsive as Fletcher Christian, scuppering the ordinary unmomentous journey that might have been my life because of some reckless dissatisfaction or need to subvert.
Self-doubt wasn’t helped by a call from mother. She’d sacked Wendy the latest Country Cousin, and the phantom persecutor had painted her red azalea pink and left a single footprint in the bath. She’d been to the police. She intended to barricade herself in the house with a poker to hand to bludgeon the assailant when next she appeared. I felt the chaos of her irrational universe and in a troubled dream I tried to get through the checkout without a ticket to fly.
I visited mother, who gave me a tour of her vandalised house. My resolve to fly away hardened. The phantom had put cheese parings down the back of the Chesterfield, stolen the feathers out of a favourite cushion and painted the paws in a print of Renoir’s Girl with Cat a darker shade of white.
I had a blouse for Rosie but no ship to carry it to her. She emailed her disappointment in Wragg and didn’t know what he’d done to get into trouble with the French authorities. The only alternative boat from Mangareva was the Braveheart, chartered by the British
