Mutiny on the Bounty Page 13

  Which prompts the next question.

  ‘Pretanie?’6 Britain? ‘Lima?’7 Portugal?

  ‘British!’ the men call back.

  With this answer, the Natives seem to be very pleased indeed – their interactions with the men from that far kingdom of Pretanie have been much happier than with those from Lima – and in an instant, as Bligh would recount, ‘they were no sooner satisfied in this than they crowded on board in vast numbers, notwithstanding our endeavours to prevent it, as we were working the ship in; and in less than ten minutes the deck was so full that I could scarce find my own people’.8

  Yelling above the tumult of the excited throng, Bligh and Fryer at least manage to bring the ship to a safe anchorage at a depth of 13 fathoms beneath the hull, a mile off Venus Point. The anchor is dropped, ten months and 25,000 miles after leaving Spithead.

  To govern local interactions, Bligh has made sure each sailor understands the set of rules that he has ‘stuck up on the mizzenmast’9 so all can see. Any failure to follow these rules will result in a lashing.

  Rules to be observed by every Person on Board, or belonging to the Bounty, for the better establishing a Trade for Supplies of Provisions, and good Intercourse with the Natives of the South Sea wherever the Ship may be at.

  1st. At the Society, or Friendly Islands, no person whatever is to intimate that Captain Cook Was killed by Indians; or that he is dead.

  (For the Tahitians, Captain Bligh knows, regard Toote as a near-God. It will not do for them to know that it is even possible for such a God-like figure to be killed by mere men.)

  2d. No person is ever to speak, or give the least hint, that We have come on purpose to get the bread-fruit plant, until I have made my plan known to the chiefs.

  3d. Every person is to study to gain the good will and esteem of the natives; to treat them with all kindness; and not to take from them, by violent means, any thing that they may have stolen; and no one is ever to fire, but in defence of his life.

  4th. Every person employed on service, is to take care that no arms, or implements of any kind under their charge, are stolen; the value of such thing, being lost, shall be charged against their wages …

  Given under my hand, on board the Bounty,

  Tahiti, 25th October, 1788.10

  Understood?

  Understood!

  Who would not be happy to abide the rules when there are no restrictions placed on relations with the fairer sex?

  Everywhere, all over the deck, joyous and goggle-eyed sailors – many of them missing teeth, heavily pock-marked, and born and raised in cold, dark slums – are surrounded in the bright sunshine by giggling Native women reaching out to touch their strange white skin, the curious shape of their long noses. Encouraged, the sailors reach out to touch the bountiful brown breasts of the females and are awe-struck when their hands are not slapped away! Bosom friends!

  ‘Every officer and man in the ship,’ James Morrison chronicles, ‘were provided with new friends, though none understood the language. Yet, we found it very easy to converse by signs, at which these people are adept.’11

  Precisely what they are saying with those signs is not detailed exactly by Morrison, but a clue is certainly provided in his next, ironic, notation.

  ‘Some of the women who came on board became very intelligible in a short time and soon brought their former husbands into a method of discourse by which everything was transacted.’12

  Former husbands?

  Well, yes.

  For as their sign language makes clear, if the sailor in question would like to be at least the temporary husband of these dusky maidens, or at least have conjugal rights, then neither the maidens, nor their ‘former husbands’, have any problem with that! But they would like something in return.

  What, exactly? Therein lies the beauty of the coming transactions.

  For, unlike so many societies around the world, the Tahitians care nothing at all for gold. Yes, gold is shiny. But when you are living in the sunshine, on the most sparkling island in the Pacific, what do you care for a useless metal which merely shines, but has no other particular uses?

  No, far more valuable to them – as most particularly explained to the other men by the sun-drenched, leather-skinned old South Seas hand that is William Peckover, who not only understands the language, but also the way of life – is iron, as found in nails. And as the sailors quickly discover, a single nail can easily be exchanged for perfumed paradise!

  The Natives like any piece of iron they can get their hands on, as well as red feathers and tools such as hatchets and adzes, while Bligh also notes that ‘Files, Gimlets, Combs, Knives, [and] Looking Glasses are also in great esteem’.13

  (One of Bligh’s officers will later note of this sexual trade, only half tongue-in-cheek, that while English mothers protect the ‘jewel inviolate’14 of their daughter’s virginity and then sell it once for a husband and dowry, in Tahiti, sex is sold all the time to get much smaller things that husbands or mothers want.)

  Now, of course, those large swathes of the Tahitian population who simply don’t have their voluptuous forms to sell must come up with something else, and it does not take long for a veritable floating market to engulf the Bounty.

  ‘We were presently surrounded,’ Morrison notes, ‘by the natives in their canoes, who brought off hogs, bread-fruit, and coconuts in abundance, and a trade for nails, hatchets, etc., soon commenced.’15

  The long, arduous voyage from Portsmouth to Tahiti has taken ten gruelling months, but at this moment, for most of the crew, with the wonderful prospect of the Bounty soon rocking a little more energetically in the water than the waves alone can explain, it all seems worth it.

  Yes, the men of the Bounty have arrived in paradise, in the land of plenty, and are taking their fill.

  The one man notable among them for having nothing to do with the women is Bligh. He is taking his cue from his marriage vows, his genuine love of his dear wife Betsy, and what he had learnt from Captain Cook a decade earlier: the sailors and officers can sleep with all the women they like, but as the Captain is the ‘Chief’ of the ship, whoever he chooses to sleep with will have ramifications – and, beyond all that, it simply will not do for the Captain of a ship to show such looseness.

  What he is interested in, however, is finding out what has happened to old friends and acquaintances since his last visit here to Tahiti, but a problem soon emerges. For, while Tahiti is still composed of ‘seventeen districts called Venooa (or Lands)’,16 each one of which has a Chief – and the whole island is still ruled over by a King – not everything about those Chiefs, or King, is so stable.

  For just as the Tahitians have what Bligh regards as an unorthodox approach to the exclusive nature of sexual intercourse, so, too, do they take a very different slant on the virtues of keeping the same name. For the nobility of Tahiti, particularly, it turns out, love to change their names every few years!

  ‘Almost every individual of any consequence,’ Bligh will later note, ‘has several names which makes it frequently perplexing when the same person is spoken of to know who is meant. Every chief has perhaps a dozen or more names in the course of thirty years; so that the person who has been spoken of by one visitor will not perhaps be known to another unless other circumstances lead to a discovery.’17

  It takes, thus, some doing, but Bligh – who is pleased at his enduring grasp of the Tahitian language from his previous visit – eventually works out that Otoo, the ‘old’ King who ruled when Cook and Bligh were last in Tahiti, in 1777, is currently called ‘Tinah’, and has a six-year-old son who is the new King called … Otoo, while Tinah’s father, who had been the King previous to him, who Bligh knew as ‘Whappi’ is now called … Otow.

  Otoo, Otoo and Otow. It is all rather confusing, and Bligh decides he will call his old friend – the King of all Tahiti when last they met, over a decade earlier – ‘Tinah’ to avoid confusion, while the boy, the new King, will be known as King Tu.

&nbs
p; What stuns Bligh most, however, is that the King he knew – an unchallenged God to his people – is now ruled by his son, the little boy Tu, just as Bligh now realises that Tinah had taken over from his father, who had taken over from his father before that, and so on. It is an odd system, whereby youth is venerated above all, and as soon as Tu becomes a father to a son, he, too, will lose all of his power.

  For now though, Bligh cannot see any King, old or new, as Tinah and King Tu are away from the bay, and so he converses with the older Tahitians on the Bounty – ‘several inferior chiefs’18 – who have many questions about old friends, none more than their great tyo, Sir Joseph Banks, and their greatest tyo of all, Toote, Captain Cook.

  Yes, well, as soon as the subject of Cook arises, Bligh is quick to assure the Tahitians that Toote is wonderfully well, and sends his warmest best wishes … which occasions an awkward silence. For the Tahitians now inform them that a British ship, the Lady Penrhyn, had been here just four months ago – one of the First Fleet that had just dropped off its convicts at Botany Bay – and its commander, Captain William Sever, had given them the terrible news that Toote is dead.

  Oh.

  Really …?

  Dead, you say? Why … not at all … not at all.

  Bligh assures them that Captain Cook is very much alive, and going very well. Alas, Bligh’s denial that Cook is dead is confusing to the Tahitians. For aboard the Lady Penrhyn was Lieutenant Watts, ‘who, having been here in Resolution with Captain Cook’,19 was a witness from afar to the killing, and had even given them some of the terrible detail.

  Salvation comes from the most unlikely quarter. For the first man to speak is the botanist, David Nelson, who now points a theatrically dramatic finger at Bligh and says, ‘This is the son of Captain Cook!’20

  All eyes turn to the rather squat figure before them, with the visage a little blurred around the edges, and compare Bligh to the rather tall, distinguished figure of Toote, with his chiselled features.

  Can it be …?

  Yes, that’s right! Bligh as the son of Captain Cook – in Tahitian culture, the son of the King is the new King! – is the authority on Cook, and if he says that Cook lives then … Cook lives!

  It makes sense … we think. Strange, that neither Cook nor Bligh had mentioned this on their earlier trip to Tahiti. And it is also undeniable that the son in no way resembles the father. A good-looking man, of Hahy (great or large) bearing, Cook looks like an impressive Tata (man), distinguished, while Bligh looks a little … Etey Etey (small, little) stunted.

  But, still. Who would lie about a thing like that?

  And so, he really is Cook’s son.

  All up though, this lie ‘seemed to please them very much’,21 Bligh records, and the awkwardness passes.

  Meantime, the Bounty continues to overflow with Natives. So many, in fact, that as a measure against thieving, Bligh insists that all male Natives must leave the ship that first night, while the women are actively encouraged to stay, and many a hammock bears the weight of two writhing bodies. Several of the hammocks have three (Sir Joseph would be proud).

  Welcome to Tahiti.

  •

  Just one day and the Bounty and her men are transformed. The ship is secure, and, after months of deprivation, the ship’s company are gorging themselves on the luscious delights of Tahiti delivered to them on ship (and also eating some of the fruit these delights carry with them). The next morning, judging the time right to make their first shore visit, Bligh and his favourite officer, Fletcher Christian, are quickly rowed to land, where they are greeted by Poeeno, the Chief of Matavai Bay, and a swarm of curious chattering Natives.

  The son of Toote is among them!

  The path to Poeeno’s residence is a delightful one, beautifully shaded with the bread-fruit trees that Captain Bligh must secure. As they proceed, Bligh with portly paces, Fletcher with his bow-legged bounds, they pass typical Tahitian huts – ‘neat thatches made of the palm leaves and supported on posts … with coconut leaves woven into a kind of matting [for doors and windows]’,22 filled with happy and welcoming Natives.

  Arriving at the house – a quite grand affair, with a thatched roof and elevated floor resting on decorously carved pillars, the whole structure measuring not less than 100 feet from end to end – Bligh and Christian see two women outside, gently bathing a piece of cloth in a tub filled with a red liquid they get from the roots of a native she-oak tree to stain it. These women, Bligh recognises, from his previous trip, as Poeeno’s wife and sister.

  With hand gestures, the women invite Bligh and Christian to repose themselves on a mat which they have spread out on the floor for them.

  Yes, Bligh is welcomed as the King of a visiting tribe, a tribe that the Tahitians respect. And, of course, it does not take long for the word of his presence to spread, as first a couple of Natives, and then some more, and soon dozens at a time, come to see for themselves.

  An English Captain, and none less than the son of Toote, is here, have you heard?

  Soon, even while Bligh and Christian are accepting refreshments, the crowd of Tahitians that has come to see the uniformed Englishmen is so numerous, so pressing, clustering around in such extraordinary numbers, that they ‘created a most intense heat’.23 It is a pressing heat which is all suddenly too much, the portly Bligh can bear it no more. Standing up, he asks the crowd to disperse, accompanying his words with a slightly violent motion with his hands: Go! Get away! Give me space!

  Reluctantly, they do so, and Bligh and Christian are able to return to their refreshments, offered and served so gracefully by the women of the home. Still, after another hour or so of pleasant talk, Bligh makes his excuses.

  ‘I am to return on board for dinner,’24 he tells Poeeno. And yet his hosts, with their natural and entirely unaffected manners which so impress Bligh, will not allow him to leave without a present from them. With great elegance, the ladies begin by gathering together some of their finest tapa cloth, made from dried pandanus leaves, coconut fibre and bread-fruit bark, with enormous labour, and a sophisticated process passed down through the centuries – with the pulp ‘spread in the sun to Dry for one Day, after which it is bleach’d in the Morning Dew till it is perfectly white’25 – and clothe the Englishman in Tahitian style, with pareo, a one-piece wrap-around cloth.

  Delighted at his new appearance, they say graciously, ‘We will go with you to your boat.’26

  Thank you, Captain Bligh would be delighted.

  It is a pity he has not yet seen Tinah, who is away visiting another village, but Tinah will no doubt come to visit him on the ship, once he returns.

  Now clothed in more comfortable – and it must be said, more regal – garments of Tahiti, Bligh happily walks back, hand in hand with the two ladies, ‘a great crowd’27 following them along the shore, where his Cutter awaits. Christian, half admiring and half amused – so let us go with bemused – can barely credit how the stiff British officer who had left the Bounty just hours before has returned as a quasi Tahitian Chief.

  Arriving back on deck, Bligh finds Captain Cook waiting for him.

  Well, not quite.

  For, of course, it is not the great man in the flesh, but he is there, in rather large portrait form. Bligh recognises the portrait immediately as the one of his ‘father’, done by the sailor-artist John Webber back in 1777, which had been left with the Tahitians to become what is by now no less than a holy relic of Captain Cook’s divinity. (Cook, with an eye to helping whoever the next British Captain in these parts would be, had given the painting as a gift for King Tinah – saying that ‘When my son comes out, you must show it to him.’28)

  As there has been a little damage done to the frame of the portrait, the Natives had it brought to the Bounty in the hope that it might be repaired. The Tahitians know the portrait as ‘Toote Earee no Otaheite, Cook Chief of Tahiti’.

  But, can you repair it, Captain Bligh?

  Of course he can.

  And so, from now on,
at every feast, every ceremony, there are the penetrating eyes of Bligh’s former Captain gazing at him, assessing him, measuring him against what Cook himself would have done.

  And now?

  Cook’s eyes are coolly appraising his former brilliant young officer to assess how he deals with the drama that has taken place on the Bounty while he has been on the shore. For, as Bligh is now apprised, while he has been away, one of the Natives had been caught trying to steal a tin pot, and King Tinah’s brother, Prince Oreepyah, is so offended by this offence to their new tyos that, he ‘flew round the Deck, and with billets of wood he violently beat without mercy and drove over board everyone’.29

  Yes, the Prince gives a beating to every Native he can reach with his vicious swinging pieces of wood, irrespective of whether or not they had anything to do with the theft. ‘This,’ the surprised Bligh notes, reeling from such wanton violence, ‘was a mode of conduct I never saw in any Tahitian Chief before.’30

  It was with some difficulty that the thief escaped with his life.

  An hour later, Bligh is bemused when now meeting Tinah’s youngest brother, Whydooah, who ‘appeared stupefied with drinking kava’31 and seemed ‘Stupid and Sulky’. As Bligh soon learns, despite Whydooah’s reputation of being a fearsome warrior, he is also regarded as ‘being the greatest drunkard in the country’.32

  (If it were a competition, Dr Huggan would surely be the dark horse, but still.)

  In the meantime, although he has still forbidden the crew to leave the Bounty to set foot on land, the Captain has come up with a sure-fire method to keep the men happy, and there are no complaints. For, as the Log records: ‘Every Night I order all the Natives on shore except the Women, as soon as the Sun is down.’33

  •

  At last, the next morning, the meeting that Bligh has so earnestly been seeking, the one on which the success or failure of his whole mission rests, is clearly approaching. For not long after dawn on this 28th day of October 1788, a glistening Native man in a canoe brings word that Tinah is ready to see Bligh and he would like a boat from the Bounty, a boat befitting his royal rank, to be sent to take him to the ship.