Chapter 22

APRIL 1789, FIFTY KILOMETRES OFF THE ISLAND OF TOFUA, NEAR TONGA

I am now to relate one of the most atrocious and consumate [sic] acts of piracy ever committed.

WILLIAM BLIGH EXPLAINING TO BANKS HOW HIS BREADFRUIT EXPEDITION WENT BELLY UP¹

WITH A RAZOR-SHARP bayonet pressed against his breast and rage rising in his heart, William Bligh knew his mission was over. He would later tell Banks that he and David Nelson had watched aghast from the Bounty’s small seven-metre open launch as mutineers threw more than a thousand of the precious breadfruit plants overboard and used some of them to pelt their despised skipper, damning him to a watery grave.

Bligh had shown himself to be a prickly character on Cook’s final voyage, but Cook had been able to control him. As the skipper of the Bounty, though, he had no one to keep his acid tongue and blunderbuss temper in check. However, he had kept up the best of appearances while relaying to Banks the progress of the mission in its early stages, writing from Tenerife two weeks into the voyage that the ‘ship behaves very well & is an excellent seaboat. My People are all healthy and well, and I have taken in some good wines which I think will be better for them in hot Climates than the Spirits. I have taken two [Hogsheads] of the best quality for you which will be very fine on my return and equal to Madeira. [David] Nelson is very well and is employed gathering what this place can give him.’² On 17 February 1788, as Arthur Phillip’s convicts at Sydney Cove continued to clear land for huts, the Bounty was just south of the Equator off Brazil, and Bligh reported to Banks, ‘I am happy and satisfyed in my little ship and we are now fit to go round half a score of worlds – both men and officers tractable and well disposed & chearfulness & content in the countenance of every one . . . I have no cause to inflict punishments for I have no offenders . . . Nelson & the Gardener are very well indeed I have not had a sick person since I left England.’³

Ferocious storms forced Bligh to abandon a rounding of Cape Horn, and he travelled on to the Cape of Good Hope instead, telling Banks when he arrived that despite the horrific storms he had attended to all those on board ‘with the utmost care . . . I kept constant fires below & saw regularly their cloaths dryed, so that no one ever came on deck with wet apparel of any kind . . . I gave them constantly hot breakfasts of ground wheat, and sugar to sweeten it, & every day at eleven o’clock a pint of the infusion of malt . . . One day in the week I gave them Portable Soup made rich with Krout.’⁴ Bligh claimed that his crew ‘lived as well or better than any set of Men that ever went to sea’.⁵

By the time the Bounty arrived in Cape Town on 28 May 1788, the skipper had appointed his friend, the dark and muscular Fletcher Christian,⁶ as acting lieutenant. That same month, work commenced on the first Government House at Sydney Cove, which was also the first two-storey building on the Australian mainland.

WHILE IN CAPE TOWN, Bligh dined on board the Dublin, an East Indiaman transport taking 350 British soldiers to Bombay. The Dublin’s skipper, Captain William Smith, hosted Colonel Robert Gordon,⁷ commandant of the Dutch troops at the Cape. Joining Bligh at the table was Banks’s plant hunter, Francis Masson, and a young Scottish officer, Lachlan Macquarie, who had been a poor farm boy on Mull when Banks had visited there sixteen years before on his way to Iceland.

Gordon regaled the guests with his stories of journeying ‘a thousand miles’⁸ into Africa’s interior. Masson told of his adventures hunting plants for Banks in the Cape, Madeira, the Canary Islands, the Azores, the Antilles and Portugal, and how he had been captured and imprisoned by the French in Grenada. He had first come to the Cape with Cook on the Resolution in 1772 and was now on his second tour. He had once gone into the Hottentots Holland Mountains and found rare species of Erica and Protea in seed; he had immediately sent them back to Banks,⁹ whose Kew Gardens now contained more than fifty thousand trees and plants including the Venus flytrap,¹⁰ which Benjamin Franklin had sent from the swampy marshes of South Carolina.¹¹

Macquarie recalled that the guests ‘staid on board till very late at night’ and that a fine dinner was augmented by ‘a great deal of dancing with the ladies’ to ‘fine moonlight on the quarterdeck’.¹² Years later Macquarie described the skipper of the Bounty as a ‘most disagreeable person to have any dealings with . . . uncommonly brash and tyrannical in the extreme’.¹³ Many of Bligh’s crew at the time felt the same way.

From Cape Town, Bligh sailed the Bounty across the southern Indian Ocean before stopping at Adventure Bay in Van Diemen’s Land to take on fresh water. On the final leg to Tahiti, he had to read the Articles of War, outlining the punishment for disobeying a skipper, in a dispute with his sailing master, John Fryer,¹⁴ and had to confiscate his surgeon’s supply of grog after one of the men died from careless medical treatment. Still, after a journey of fifty thousand kilometres the converted collier arrived at Matavai Bay on 26 October 1788.

The crew would stay there for five and a half months. Bligh learnt that Banks’s friend Mai had died about eight years earlier, but the Bounty’s crew intended to live it up. David Nelson and William Brown supervised the collection of 1005 breadfruit trees, with Nelson placing them in deep clay pots.

The workload for the crew was not excessive, and they spent most of their time falling in love with the tropical paradise – and with the local women. Eighteen of the Bounty men, including Fletcher Christian, received treatment for venereal infections. While Bligh remained faithful to his adored wife, Betsy, he totally understood the excitement of the men because ‘the allurements of dissipation are beyond any thing that can be conceived’.¹⁵

There was still work to do, though, and Bligh became increasingly exasperated and angry at what he saw as dereliction of duty. When the Bounty left Tahiti on 5 April 1789, it was a powerful wrench for men who resented more and more Bligh’s harsh tongue and aggressive manner. By 27 April when they sailed from Tonga, two thousand kilometres to the east, Christian thought about deserting, but some of the men persuaded him to try a different tack the next morning off the island of Tofua. Bligh told Banks, ‘At dawn of day Fletcher Christian, officer of the watch, Charles Churchill, ship’s corporal, Thomas Burkitt, seaman, and several others came into my cabbin, and while I was asleep seized and tyed my hands behind my back with a strong cord, and with cutlasses and a bayonet fixed at my breast threatened instant death if I spoke or made the least noise.’¹⁶

Bligh was hauled upon deck as a boat was lowered. Sails, twine, rope and a small cask of water were loaded into it. Bligh called out, trying to ‘rally any with a sense of duty in them’ but was instead saluted with, ‘Damn his eyes! blow his brains out.’ He later wrote that the ‘officers and men being now drove into the boat one by one, I was told by Christian, “Sir, your officers are now in the boat, and you must go with them.” I was then taken hold of under a guard, and forced over the gangway into the boat, which waited only for me, and untying my hands, I was veer’d astern by a rope.’

There were now nineteen men, including Bligh and David Nelson, in a boat just seven metres long. The mutineers did not want to become murderers, so a few pounds of pork and 150 pounds (about seventy kilograms) of bread were thrown into the craft along with a few of the valuables that its passengers begged for. When Bligh pleaded for firearms, he was tossed four cutlasses instead.

William Bligh is set adrift by the mutineers aboard the HMS Bounty with some of his officers and crew. Illustration by Robert Dodd, 1790. State Library of New South Wales

The boat was so overloaded that some of the mutineers joked it would not reach land.¹⁷ But Bligh commenced one of the most astonishing and heroic seafaring feats of all time, leading his loyal band in their tiny craft on an astonishing 6500-kilometre, 47-day journey across the Pacific to the Great Barrier Reef and then to Kupang, Timor, arriving under a makeshift Union Jack on 14 June. There had been only one loss of life: the quartermaster, John Norton, who had been set upon by local warriors on the island of Tofua.

Four months later, wracked with fever in Batavia, Bligh told Banks:

You will now, sir, with all your generous endeavors for the publick good, see an unfortunate end to the undertaking . . .

Everything was in the most perfect order, and we were well stored with every necessary both for service and health . . . I had most successfully got my plants in a most flourishing and fine order, so that upon the whole the voyage was 3/4 over, and the remaining part no way doubtfull . . .

I even rejected carrying stock for my own use, and throwing away the hencoops and every convenience, I roofed a place over the quarter-deck and filled it with plants, which I looked at with delight every day of my life.

I can only conjecture that the pirates (among whom is poor Nelson’s assistant) have ideally assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheiteans than they could possibly have in England, which, joined to some female connections, has most likely been the leading cause of the whole busyness.¹⁸

David Nelson had made it back to Kupang safely but died there on 20 July from what Bligh called ‘an inflammatory fever . . . a violent heat in his bowels, a loss of sight, much drought, and an inability to walk’. Bligh wrote, ‘The loss of this honest man I very much lamented: he had with great care and diligence attended to the object for which he was sent, and had always been ready to forward every plan that was proposed, for the good of the service in which we were engaged.’¹⁹

Some of the mutineers stayed on Tahiti but Fletcher Christian eventually sailed the Bounty to Pitcairn Island where his men burnt the ship. Four years later he, William Brown and three other mutineers were murdered by Tahitians there. Being a plant collector for Joseph Banks could be dangerous work.

WHILE BANKS HAD followed the progress of the Bounty through Bligh’s letters, he had also been following the adventurers of John Ledyard²⁰ and Archibald Menzies,²¹ who sent plants to him from their travels. Ledyard was born in Groton, Connecticut, and had been travelling from the time he was one day old, taken aboard his father’s ship for a voyage to the West Indies in 1751. He lived among the Six Nations tribes for a while and fashioned his own dugout canoe, paddling it for a week down the Connecticut River. After rambling around the world, he became a marine on Cook’s final voyage and wrote a first-hand account of the skipper’s death.

That voyage showed Ledyard that sea otter furs from the American north-west commanded huge prices in Macao, but he could not get enough merchants to support his trading venture. In Paris, aged thirty-five, he devised a plan of exploration to take him through Russia, crossing at the Bering Strait, and heading south through Alaska and then through the largely unexplored American West to Virginia. Banks and Thomas Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, offered their support, and Ledyard set off from London in December 1786. He had hoped to walk across the frozen Baltic Sea, but it wasn’t frozen enough, so he had to tramp two thousand kilometres through Sweden, Lapland and Finland before arriving in St Petersburg with threadbare shoes and no money. Another friend of Banks, the Prussian zoologist Peter Pallas,²² lent him twenty guineas. Eleven weeks later Ledyard made it to Yakutsk, 450 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, and joined an expedition led by Joseph Billings, who had also been on Cook’s final voyage. But under orders from Empress Catherine the Great, Ledyard was arrested as a suspected spy and deported to Poland. He drew money on Banks’s account and a few weeks later reached the safety of Soho Square. But he wasn’t safe for long.

Banks was now the secretary of the new African Association, and he thought Ledyard the perfect man to explore the interior of that continent and perhaps find the source of the Niger. Ledyard set off for Cairo ready to join a caravan travelling the length of the Blue Nile. He never made it that far, though, dying in Cairo in January 1789, either from dysentery or from the vitriol he had taken to induce vomiting.

At the same time, another of Banks’s explorers, Simon Lucas – who had spent sixteen years as the British consul in Morocco – was journeying through the Sahara around Fezzan, in modern Libya, though tribal wars stopped him going further to Gambia.

Soon after, an Irish soldier named Daniel Houghton²³ approached Banks, proposing a mission up the Gambia River to explore the hinterland of Africa’s west coast and to reach Timbuktu. Deep into the Sahara, though, Houghton feared that his guides intended to kill him and turned back without food or water. His body was left to the mercy of vultures.

There were many more willing to take up Banks’s mantle of exploration, though, including Archibald Menzies, who – at around the same time that Bligh was writing his apology to the naturalist for the Bounty disaster – dashed off a thank-you letter after Banks recommended him for a voyage to the Pacific coast of North America with George Vancouver.²⁴ Menzies told Banks he had heard a ship had been bought for the expedition and fitted out in the same way as the Endeavour, and he was ready to bring home as many living plants as possible for the naturalist.²⁵

Menzies had first come to Banks’s attention as a naval surgeon five years earlier, when at the request of a botany professor, John Hope of Edinburgh, Menzies had sent him a parcel of seeds from Sandy Hook, near New York, and then another from the Caribbean.²⁶ In 1789 Menzies had just returned from a fur-trading voyage to the northern Pacific, visiting the west coast of America, China and Hawaii, and collecting a variety of new plants for Banks.²⁷ He would soon be elected to the Linnean Society, of which Banks was an honorary member.

That Society, named for Carl Linnaeus, had been founded by Banks’s friend the botanist James Edward Smith;²⁸ Linnaeus had died in 1778, followed five years later by his son, Carl the Younger. Banks organised 24-year-old Smith to use nine hundred guineas from his father, a Norfolk wool merchant, to purchase the Linnaeus family’s natural history collection and put it on display in Paradise Row: it occupied twenty-six cases, including as many as three thousand books, nineteen thousand dried plant specimens, 3198 insect species, 1564 shells, 2424 geological specimens and thirty-five stuffed birds.

Around this time, Banks was also heavily involved with Lord Hawkesbury in trying to develop a British tea industry, as each year the increasingly popular drink cost the Empire £700,000 in silver bullion, the only commodity that the Chinese would trade for their leaves. Tea had been growing in British gardens since about 1770, and in 1785 Banks had spent £50 of his own money to send one hundred tea plants to Broussonet for cultivation in Corsica, along with the book of Cook’s final voyage.²⁹

While Banks revelled in the exotic flowers at Kew, such as the bird of paradise – Strelitzia reginae, named after Queen Charlotte’s German home – economic botany was his passion. He was keen for Britain to cultivate New Zealand flax and New Zealand spinach in its dominions, and he sent camphor trees and mangos to the botanic gardens of Jamaica.

By December 1788, Banks had prepared a 2000-word paper for the East India Company that claimed tea could be cultivated well in Assam and Darjeeling, and he suggested that financial inducements be made for Chinese tea growers to migrate to Calcutta where eight hectares of the botanic gardens could be set aside for them to impart their knowledge.³⁰ As a shipping group, though, the East India Company was not keen to support a British tea industry as the company’s profits were derived from trade, and Banks would not see a tea industry develop in India during his lifetime. At least there was still a chance Bligh would get breadfruit to the West Indies.

SEVERAL OF THE MEN WHO survived Bligh’s epic voyage in the Bounty’s launch arrived in Kupang so fatigued that, like David Nelson, they perished soon after. But Bligh was made of tough stuff, and he arrived back in England on 14 March 1790 looking to get back into action. Seven months later, he was honourably acquitted at a court-martial enquiring into the loss of his ship. The Jamaica House of Assembly even granted him 500 guineas for his brave effort.

Meanwhile, HMS Pandora was sent to round up the surviving Bounty men on Tahiti. Fourteen were transported on deck locked in a cage the crew called Pandora’s Box, and four drowned along with thirty-one of the crew when the ship hit the Great Barrier Reef.³¹ Ten survivors from the Bounty were eventually brought back to face trial. Those with money and lawyers were spared; three without were hanged from the yardarm of HMS Brunswick in Portsmouth.³²

Bligh was not around to watch the grisly spectacle. Banks remained his friend and advocate despite Bligh’s faults of temper, and two months after Bligh was exonerated Banks wrote to his old school friend Lord Auckland,³³ Britain’s ambassador at the Hague, to tell him the King had approved Bligh to lead a second breadfruit expedition, and also to ask Auckland if he felt the time was right to try to snare more merinos from Spain.³⁴ On 2 August 1791, Bligh set off as the leader of a two-ship mission to Tahiti, and Banks sent two gardeners from Kew – Christopher Smith and James Wiles³⁵ – with him. During the voyage, Bligh named Mount Nelson in Van Diemen’s Land in honour of David Nelson, and the Banks Islands in modern Vanuatu, before landing three hundred breadfruit trees at both Saint Vincent and Jamaica.

Banks received the Jamaican Assembly’s ‘resolution of thanks’,³⁶ while Bligh pocketed a £1000 reward. However, the breadfruit did not go down well with the slaves, who found it unpalatable. The plantation owners had more joy with the thicker, tougher variety of sugar cane that Bligh had also taken from Tahiti to the Caribbean, as it proved much more wind resistant than other sugar cane in storms.

James Wiles stayed in Jamaica to run the Liguanea Botanic Garden, but Christopher Smith returned to London with 1283 plants for Banks, collected from Timor, Tahiti and the Caribbean.

THINGS WERE NOT QUITE so fruitful at Sydney Cove, even while Arthur Phillip sent shrubs, seeds, Norfolk pines, eucalyptus oil and gum, turpentine, sand, clay and a steady stream of dead wildlife to Banks on every returning ship. He was hoping to send a live kangaroo to London for Lady Banks, but with his two greyhounds on the prowl this was proving impossible around the wilds of Port Jackson. Phillip said young kangaroos were ‘very pleasing’ and ‘a few days makes them as tame as a Cat & they will follow the person that feeds them like a Dog & would I dare say live like a dog about the House, if we could rear them, but none have lived more than three weeks . . . They are very cleanly & use the two fore feet like a Monkey . . . They are very good eating, full of flesh, but not an ounce of fat in the whole Carcase.’³⁷

Most of the colony’s seed wheat had been destroyed by weevils, but Phillip had gone ahead and planted eight hectares of other crops. Although he had high hopes for the oranges, figs, apples, pears, sugar cane and strawberries, at the end of his first year in his new frontier home he told Banks that while no climate could be healthier, ‘[without] a few good farmers, this Settlement must depend on the mother country for some years. at present if left to ourselves we should want the necessities of life. we cannot maintain live Stock in any quantity . . . I wish to see the necessarys of life produced in this Country in abundance . . .’³⁸

Phillip kept Banks abreast of the situation with the Indigenous people and said he believed that they burnt grass all over the landscape. Despite some early promise of friendship, there was not much of this between the locals and the invaders. British diplomacy usually involved firearms and force, and Phillip complained that the Eora people attacked ‘any Stragler’ they met: ‘They have been robbed of their Lances etc and now taken their revenge. I shall endeavor to secure a couple of them, in Order to get their Language, which I am anxious to obtain, for I am now satisfied that they will not be persuaded to live with us voluntarily’.³⁹

While Phillip was under instructions from home to punish convicts for harming the Eora or stealing from them, in September 1789 Henry Hacking⁴⁰ – the violent, heavy-drinking quartermaster from the Sirius – may have been the first colonist to kill a local when he fired into a group of Eora people while hunting on the north shore of the harbour. He either killed or wounded two men,⁴¹ who were carried away by their companions. By then, the Aboriginal people around Port Jackson were also being devastated by smallpox.⁴²

In October 1788, Phillip had sent John Hunter on the Sirius back to Cape Town in order to fetch flour and other supplies. Hunter had returned in May 1789 just as the colony seemed on the verge of starvation. The following March, the ship was wrecked on a reef at Norfolk Island while landing stores, and the crew were stranded for almost a year.

Banks was organising help for the colony as the unofficial expert on all NSW matters. He worked his contacts on both sides of the government with an eye to long-term aid, though he had no desire to enter Parliament like his father. ‘I could not take office and do my duty to the colony,’ he wrote. ‘My successor would naturally oppose my wishes. I prefer, therefore to be friendly with both sides.’⁴³ He spoke often with Nepean, holding conversations with him ‘& other Gentlemen in various departments of Government’.⁴⁴

With a second fleet of convicts being planned that would add to Phillip’s burden, Banks helped to organise relief for the colony. The 44-gun HMS Guardian would be converted into a store ship under the command of 26-year-old Lieutenant Edward Riou,⁴⁵ who had been a teenage midshipman on Cook’s final voyage. Banks was compiling ‘A List of Fruit Trees &c for Botany Bay’,⁴⁶ and the Guardian left Spithead on 8 September 1789 carrying 123 people,⁴⁷ including twenty-five convicts, and supplies worth £70,000. There was farm machinery, livestock, seeds and plants, some from Kew Gardens and some provided by Hugh Ronalds, a nurseryman of Brentford in outer London.

On board there were also two Kew-trained gardeners, George Austin and James Smith. Taking a model from the Bounty, Banks paid for a three-tonne plant cabin measuring five metres by four that was built on the Guardian’s top deck with room for ninety-three fruit trees. It had a canvas cover for shade from the boiling equatorial sun and sliding shutters for ventilation, and it came with a stove along with glass coverings for the icy latitudes. Banks gave his gardeners strict and detailed instructions for the care of the plants, telling them to remain sober because they had been entrusted with precious cargo.⁴⁸ They were instructed to help Phillip with his cultivation program at Sydney Cove, and to collect seeds and live plants then train a sailor to care for them on the return journey. In defiance of Banks’s orders to collect only for him and Kew, Austin secretly promised to collect seeds from native plants in New South Wales and send them to nurserymen in England. He tried to persuade Smith to join him in the scheme, but Smith wrote to Banks to alert him about Austin’s deceit.

Banks was also in the market for human heads and skulls for his friend Johann Blumenbach, wherever the Guardian could get them. Alexander Anderson, his Kew-trained botanist from the Botanic Garden in St Vincent, sent him the skull of a ‘Yellow Carib’ (a person indigenous to the island rather than one with African heritage);⁴⁹ it was of a chief who had died three years before, but Anderson told him the skulls were hard to come by. In July 1789, Banks forwarded it to Blumenbach in Germany with a note that Anderson had told him, ‘burial places are not easily Found & an attempt to disturb them is look’d upon as the greatest of Crimes’.⁵⁰

Riou was apparently none too keen on chasing human heads. He wrote to Banks from the Cape of Good Hope ‘worrying that he’d done the wrong thing in even mentioning the subject to Robert Gordon’.⁵¹ Riou reprovisioned at Cape Town, but twelve days later, on Christmas Eve, the Guardian hit an iceberg and the plant cabin, guns and stores were thrown overboard. The livestock had to fend for itself. Riou elected to stay with his sinking ship along with sixty-one others, including twenty-one convicts, the daughter of one of the convict superintendents, and Thomas Pitt,⁵² the violent, wastrel teenage cousin of the prime minister. The others, including the two gardeners, tried to crowd into five small boats, but only one of the vessels – containing ten desperate people – was ever recovered. Austin and Smith were never seen again.

Somehow, Riou kept the wreck of the Guardian afloat and managed to limp her along for nine weeks towards the safety of the Cape, 1900 kilometres away. The twenty-one convicts were eventually sent on to New South Wales, but Riou managed to have Governor Phillip pardon fourteen of them.

Banks quickly organised more help for New South Wales. Even after the ordeal, Riou could not forget the man who had overseen his mission: on 15 May 1791, Banks wrote to thank the skipper for taking care of seeds and bulbs in Cape Town and sending them on to Soho Square.⁵³