A FEW DAYS after Pigot and his little squadron arrived at the Mole with the convoy of prizes, Sir Hyde had to transfer Otway from the Mermaid to the Ceres. The Admiralty had ordered the Mermaid to follow the Success back to England for a dockyard refit at Plymouth, and Otway naturally did not want to return with hen Fortunately Captain James Newman of the Ceres had no such objection, so they exchanged commands.
So far as the ships were concerned, the exchange made no difference to Otway since they were almost identical. However, when Otway went on board the Ceres, read himself in and looked over the crew, he received a shock. Reporting later in writing to Sir Hyde, he said that ‘there was a great want of regularity in her; the ship’s company were accustomed in a great measure to do as they pleased, and drunkenness seldom considered as a crime’. He found that in addition to their taste for liquor and distaste for discipline, a greater part of the frigate’s crew consisted of ‘old men, boys and foreigners’. Referring to the drunkenness, he told Sir Hyde that ‘having been from my infancy trained up in the service with different ideas’, he was ‘endeavouring to put a stop to such pernicious example’.
By the middle of May Sir Hyde Parker had agreeable orders for both the Hermione and Ceres: Pigot was to take Otway and the Ceres under his command, and the two ships were to cruise along the Spanish Main off the coast of the province of Caracas (now Venezuela). Pigot’s orders were to seek what would be called in modern jargon ‘targets of opportunity’: any enemy craft-merchantmen, warships or privateers that he could find.
The actual voyage to the patrol area, some 750 miles, gave Otway and his officers an opportunity to get the Ceres’s crew into some sort of shape. In the Hermione the new Master, Mr Edward Southcott, who had recently joined the ship, was proving valuable: competent in handling and navigating the ship, he knew the Caribbean well, and he also had the knack of handling men.
The frigates arrived off the eastern coast of Caracas, finding it bold and mountainous, fringed with steep cliffs. Turning westwards they passed close to La Guaira, the entry port for the capital of the province, without sighting a single sail, and carried on past Puerto Cabello, heading north-westward towards the Dutch island of Curaçao. The mainland runs west and then north to Point Tucacas, forming the Gulf of Triste. It is well named, because for more than thirty miles the coast is low and sandy, backed by swamps of mangroves whose roots rear out of the water like tortured, arthritic limbs.
The coastline of the Gulf makes two sides of a triangle, while the frigates’ course to clear Point Tucacas formed the third. Pigot wanted to pass twelve to fifteen miles to seaward of the Point, and he worked out a course of west-north-west, with five degrees of easterly variation to be allowed in the compass. This would keep them clear of the only navigational hazards in the area, which were three low-lying mangrove cays tucked just inside the far end of the Gulf and separated from the shore by a narrow channel. They should pass the Point next morning.
The course for the night was signalled to the Ceres keeping station a quarter of a mile away on the Hermione’s larboard quarter, and then with its usual almost dramatic suddenness, the sun set—there is little twilight in these latitudes—and some haze added its quota to what soon proved to be a very dark night. Meanwhile the usual routine on board continued without interruption. The log was hove and showed they were making five knots with the quartering wind, and in the Hermione the officer on deck for the first watch, from eight until midnight, was John Forbes, the Master’s Mate. At midnight Lt Harris relieved him. There were no special night orders, and Forbes passed on the usual information and instructions: the course was west-north-west, ‘nothing to the westward, with the same sail set’; the Captain was to be called if the weather changed; watch the Ceres in case she made any signals; and the Captain to be called at daybreak.
With Lt Harris on the quarterdeck were, apart from the man at the wheel, two quartermasters, Thomas Dugal, a Scot from Perthshire, who had come from the Success, and John Goodier, a young Irishman from Cork. In six different positions in the ship were lookouts, and on the ship’s present course the most important of them was the one on the larboard bow, sitting on the cathead and watching an arc from ahead to forty-five degrees to larboard. This was the landward side, and the man placed there, William Watkins, later claimed that his eyesight was bad.
The wind stayed at east-north-east, so there was no sail trimming to be done. The log was hove from time to time, and every thirty minutes the half-hour sand glass was turned as the quartermaster struck the bell slung in the belfry on the fo’c’sle. Every twenty minutes, in obedience to Captain Pigot’s standing orders, Lt Harris called out to all the lookouts to make sure they were awake and alert.
One, two, and then three bells had been struck by Goodier, and finally, just before 2 a.m., he went to the fo’c’sle ready to strike four bells dead on the hour. The ship was still making five knots through the water, wallowing slightly with the quartering wind; and aloft the great yards creaked while the down-draught of wind from the sails arching overhead made the seamen shiver occasionally. The man at the wheel, his face faintly illuminated by the light in the binnacle, moved slightly from time to time as he turned the wheel a spoke or two, counteracting the butt of a wave on the bow or the wayward pressure of an extra puff of wind.
Beyond the narrow world of the ship it was so dark the sea seemed to merge into the night sky without a hint of an horizon. Suddenly Lt Harris turned to Dugal and asked him if he could see land ahead. The quartermaster peered for a few moments, then said no: he thought it was only a cat’s paw of wind (which, ruffling the surface of the sea and making it appear darker, often gives the illusion of land).
Harris was not satisfied and called out the same question to Watkins, perched on the larboard cathead over the creaming bow wave. Watkins shouted back that he could see nothing.
Harris was deciding whether or not to alter course—perhaps unwilling to seem foolish if what he had seen was only a cat’s paw—when at that moment the other quartermaster, John Goodier, came back aft from the fo’c’sle, where he had just struck four bells. Harris went to meet him on the gangway.
‘Can you see land ahead over there?’ he demanded.
Goodier turned and looked forward over the bow. ‘I am sure it is, sir’, he replied.
With this confirmation there was no time to see if it was only the loom of the land—more of a sensation of a distant coastline than a sight of it—or the actual shore only a few hundred yards away.
Harris gave a string of orders. ‘Fetch the Master and call all the hands!’ he told Goodier, while to Dugal he said sharply: ‘Quickly, take the wheel and put the helm hard a’port’. This would turn the ship to starboard, away from the land. (At this period, incidentally, ‘port’ was being used for helm orders although the old term ‘larboard’ was retained for other purposes.)
While Dugal hurriedly spun the wheel, the seamen on watch ran to the sheets and braces, hauling the great yards round to trim the sails so that the ship could steer closer to the wind. Dugal could turn the Hermione some sixty degrees before the wind would be blowing too far ahead to fill the sails and keep the ship moving, forcing Harris to tack.
The ship was still turning when the first of the officers and off-watch seamen roused out of hammocks and cots by Goodier’s stentorian ‘All hands on deck!’ came scrambling up from below, bleary-eyed and bewildered. But the Hermione was not the only ship in peril: the Ceres, a quarter of a mile away on the larboard quarter, was that much nearer the land. ‘Tell the Gunner to prepare a gun,’ ordered Harris. A shot would warn the Ceres that something was amiss, in case she had not sighted the land.
The first of the Hermione’s officers to reach the quarterdeck after Goodier’s bellowing was Edward Southcott, the Master. Harris swiftly explained the situation and ordered Southcott to take over while he went down to the Captain.
Southcott ran to the wheel (he said afterwards he could see land about a mile off) and told Dugal not to take the sails aback—to sail as close to the wind as possible, which meant steering due north, but not to tack the ship.
The Gunner, Richard Searle, was by now forward on the main deck getting a gun ready for firing (only the lashings had to be cast off and the gun primed, since it was kept loaded for emergencies) and John Forbes, the Master’s Mate, had run to the fo’c’sle, which was his station at the order ‘All hands’.
Lt Harris in the meantime had gone down to warn the Captain.
Pigot was awake in a few moments, and Harris reported: ‘I’ve seen land ahead of us, sir—very near.’
Pigot at once sat up in his cot and was just swinging his legs out to stand up when, as he wrote later, ‘I felt the ship strike several times’. But the noise of water gurgling past and the creak of the tiller ropes as Dugal moved the wheel showed that whatever the frigate had hit she was still under way and, what was just as important, her rudder had not been torn off.
He ran up on deck, closely followed by Harris, to find the sea-men straining and grunting as they finished heaving round the yards and trimming the sails: Southcott now had the ship hard on the wind, beating out to the northward. Captain Pigot then glanced out over the larboard quarter (roughly in the direction the Hermione had originally been sailing) and, he claimed later, he could just see land. A gun then boomed out forward as Searle fired the warning shot for the Ceres, and Pigot listened to the steady chanting of the leadsman in the chains, telling him how much water the Hermione had under her keel. There was precious little, but very soon each successive call showed it was getting deeper.
After firing the warning shot, Searle walked aft along the starboard gangway towards the quarterdeck, glancing across the ship and out into the darkness on the larboard beam. He was surprised to see two cays: they were small, they were low like hummocks in a flat field, and they were close to the ship: there was no mistaking them, even though it was a dark night.
‘Has anyone seen those cays?’ he called.
‘Where?’ demanded Pigot, walking towards him, followed by Harris.
‘Over there—on the larboard beam—two cays’.
Neither Pigot nor Harris could see them at first; but Pigot put the night glass to his eye. ‘I see them! Two of them!’
A few moments later, still peering through the night glass, he exclaimed that there was a third.
Seeming no higher out of the water than the Hermione’s hull, they were in fact the three cays just inside the western end of the Gulf of Triste. This meant the Hermione was some fifteen to twenty miles too far south… And had Harris not altered course, she would have run up on the cays or the mainland beyond.
As soon as Pigot assured himself the Hermione was heading for deep water, his next concern was for the Ceres: had she seen land or the cays in time to turn northwards to the open sea? Had she heard the Hermione’s warning shot? Or was she even then hard aground, or sunk after ripping open her bottom on some off-lying reef? She had not fired a warning shot; on the other hand she was not lighting flares.
The leadsman, by then soaking wet as he hauled in the line and cast again and again, was still regularly calling out the depths at which the lead touched bottom: eight fathoms… ten… and finally twelve. With seventy-two feet of water under her keel the Hermione must be clear of danger, and Pigot gave the order to anchor.
‘I waited anxiously for the morning,’ he wrote later to Sir Hyde Parker, ‘with the hope that the Ceres had anchored, or been as fortunate as the Hermione in extricating herself from so perilous a situation.’
The Ceres, however, had not been so fortunate—if fortunate is the appropriate word to describe the result of Lt Harris’s alertness. Otway’s First Lieutenant had been on watch with the usual lookouts stationed round the ship; but unlike Harris he had seen nothing. The first he knew of danger was when the frigate’s easy motion was suddenly interrupted by a heavy thud as the Ceres hit the first of a series of reefs running parallel to the shore. Before the sheets could be let fly to spill the wind out of the sails or an anchor let go, more heavy blows hit the ship’s hull in quick succession as she continued to buck herself across the reefs.
By the time Otway had rushed up on deck the ship was in an uproar. Some men were letting the sheets fly, although a few more shocks would send the masts crashing over the side. Otway kept his head and as the off-watch men streamed up from below began giving orders. The sails could be left to flog for the moment: first he had to let go the anchors to stop the ship driving across any more reefs and ending up on the beach. The Carpenter had already hurried below with a lantern to see how badly the ship was leaking. But as Otway began giving instructions to get the anchors laid out he was startled to find that most of the crew completely ignored him: discipline had almost vanished. At the moment the Carpenter came up to report that water flooding into the ship was gaining on the pumps, some of the seamen were already smashing down the door of the spirit room to steal enough rum to get themselves helplessly drunk. Seven other men, running up on deck and hearing the Carpenter making his report, saw that a boat had already been lowered by some of the steadier sailors, ready to take an anchor out. Without a moment’s hesitation they scrambled down into it and, before anyone could stop them, cast off the painter and rowed off in the darkness, heading for the shore.
As Otway later reported to Sir Hyde Parker, ‘Little or no attention was paid to my orders, not the smallest exertion [sic], the spirits broached and the greatest part of them drunk’.
Amidst all this confusion, the ship herself was still being lifted by the swell waves and relentlessly thrust forward. Flung down on to a reef by one swell wave, she was lifted up bodily by the next and surged forward by a third on to yet another reef. The rocks tore at her keel and gouged her hull planking; the rudder was wrenched off and the pieces floated away in the darkness. Eventually, with a final lurch and thump, the frigate came to a stop, hard aground. Someone took a cast of the lead and reported she was in fourteen feet of water. Since she had been drawing well over fifteen aft, that alone showed now much the swell waves had lifted her.
Otway’s feelings can be imagined: he knew that even if her hull could be patched up, the chances of getting the ship back over the reefs were slight, however much she was lightened by jettisoning guns and gear to reduce her draught.
Eventually Pigot’s anxious vigil drew to an end: almost imperceptibly the black of night diluted into grey and he could see the waves more clearly, rounded pyramids which surged past, burnished by the dawnlight to the colour of steel, and seeming hostile, cold and cruel. Slowly the visible horizon widened—fifty yards, then a hundred, and soon a mile. Pigot saw the three cays lying in the water like turtles; then beyond the line of the shore, low and even, with the swell waves moving in relentlessly towards it. From the Hermione they seemed in the distance to be grey ripples possessed of their own concentric rhythm, flecked with white where they hit rocks and scoured over reefs.
Finally, in line with the cays and inshore of the reefs, close to the beach, Pigot saw the Ceres. She was inert, like a half-tide rock; she did not rise and fall as the swell swept past her. Either she was stuck on a reef or she had sunk and was resting on the bottom.
Within a few minutes one of the Hermione’s boats, with Pigot on board, was making her way inshore towards the Ceres, with a man in the bows heaving a leadline and calling out the depths—both captains would need to know them if the stricken frigate was to be salvaged. The boat’s direct course from the Hermione to the Ceres took them within what Pigot was to call ‘a pistol shot’ of the south end of the southern cay.
But they were still three or four miles from the Ceres when the leadsman’s droning voice warned the water was shoaling fast. Pigot wrote later that until then he ‘flattered myself, however, from appearances I should be able to bring the Hermione to an anchor near enough to heave her [the Ceres] off without difficulty (as the wind was then moderate) before she received any damage [he was then unaware of the damage she had already received], but in this I was disappointed for on sounding I found we [the Hermione] could not approach nearer to her with safety than three or four miles’.
Pigot returned to the Hermione and brought her as close to the Ceres as he dared before anchoring again. He then set off in a boat to join Otway. He climbed on board the Ceres to find his friend busy, with the men who were still sober, building a raft to carry out an anchor. Pigot gave orders to his party and then the two captains went down to Otway’s cabin to plan the best way of salvaging the ship.
Otway told Pigot that the Ceres was making six feet of water an hour, but the main trouble was that although the pumps were clearing it aft, the limber holes (through which the water forward normally ran back to the pump wells amidships) were completely blocked up. This meant the whole forward part of the ship remained flooded under many feet of water, so that the limber holes could not be cleared. But the worst leaks were forward, and until the water was pumped out the Carpenter and his crew could not repair them….
No one could think of a way out of this seeming impasse until Midshipman Casey spoke up, ‘suggesting and strongly recommending (having been in a similar situation before) one or two of the hand pumps being removed forward’. This, Casey wrote later, ‘was instantly done, with the desired effect’. The main pump could clear about a ton of water a minute. The little hand pumps, used for washing decks, were similar to the old plunger type still found on village greens, with a long hose attached to reach down the ship’s side to the water.
It took many hours of arduous pumping to achieve the ‘desired effect’, and stopping the leaks was not enough: the ship was far too deep in the water to float back across the reefs. The only way of reducing her draught was to jettison as much heavy equipment as possible. Since dumping six tons of equipment would result in her floating only about an inch higher in the water, obviously Otway would have to be drastic.
Cutting the masts over the side and getting rid of the yards and spare topmasts and booms would save more than fifteen tons, with the standing and running rigging accounting for another twenty; the sails and spares could be transferred to the Hermione, saving more than three tons. The guns and carriages, powder and shot, would help by at least seventy-five tons. Jettisoning most of the provisions and fresh water represented more than fifty tons. It meant, in effect, gutting the ship of almost everything except the hull, but it would lighten her by at least 200 tons, reducing her draught by more than two and a half feet.
Leaving his party of men on board the Ceres, Pigot returned to the Hermione. He had a great deal to think about: he and Otway were facing a crisis in their respective careers. As senior officer, Pigot had been responsible for both the ships and the course they steered, while Otway was responsible for actually running the Ceres aground. Someone in authority might well blame Pigot because the ships ended up so close to Point Tucacas; but the Admiralty would also certainly want to know why, if the Hermione had sighted land in time to avoid running aground, the Ceres had not done so.
The obvious answer was of course that Lt Harris in the Hermione had been more alert than his opposite number in the Ceres. That was indisputable and could clear Pigot of some of the blame; but at the same time it would put more responsibility on the shoulders of his friend Otway….
Having worked out the exact position of the Ceres, and also made a note of various facts and figures from her log books to compare with his own, Pigot could now see that there had been a strong current setting into the Gulf of Triste. This meant, as Pigot later wrote to Sir Hyde Parker, that although the frigates had steered west-north-west ‘through the water’, the current setting into the Gulf had diverted them on an actual course ‘over the ground’ of south-west. In addition, ‘though by log we had only run twenty-seven miles’ from the point off Puerto Cabello where they had altered course the previous afternoon, the present position of the Ceres showed they had travelled between forty-five and sixty miles ‘over the ground’ thanks to the unexpected current.
Pigot did not consider himself in any way responsible—this is clear from his report to Sir Hyde Parker—but the fault was entirely his, since in laying off the course he failed to allow for a possible inset into the Gulf, although such an inset is common and to be expected anywhere in the world, and the currents in the Caribbean are notoriously unpredictable. With about sixty-six miles to sail from off Puerto Cabello to Point Tucacas, he deliberately laid off a course to pass twelve to fifteen miles to seaward of it. The ships were making five knots so he would reach the Point, if the wind remained steady, in thirteen hours. But since there was bound to be an inset, the current had only to sweep across his course at the rate of just over a mile an hour for that period and he was bound to hit the shore at the northern end of the Gulf. And to make matters worse his night orders had not mentioned the slightest possibility of sighting land. (Had he considered this likely, his orders should have referred to it.)
His letters and subsequent actions show that since Pigot did not consider himself, Otway, or the Ceres’s First Lieutenant responsible for the night’s events, he felt he had to point an accusing finger at someone else: a man who could be loaded with enough blame to prevent awkward questions being asked about the navigation or about the lookout being kept in the Ceres. He did not look far for such a scapegoat.
It is not known for certain what parts Captain Otway and Sir Hyde Parker played in Pigot’s final solution: all three could have been concerned in what can only be called a wretched plot; on the other hand Otway and Sir Hyde might have been unwitting partners. However, Pigot’s own letters show that he was the prime mover in what followed, and they give a strong hint that Sir Hyde aided and abetted him.
Within a week of the grounding the Ceres had been sufficiently patched up for the Hermione to be able to leave her and return to the Mole. In the meantime Otway had heard news—possibly through the American Consul—of the seven seamen who had deserted the stricken ship in the barge: they had arrived at the Spanish port of Puerto Cabello. He sent a letter to the Governor under a flag of truce, politely requesting that they should be returned. He received a very prompt and equally polite reply: the seven men, the Governor claimed, were in fact American citizens; they had made the requisite declarations to the American Consul, who was satisfied and had put them under his protection. This reply, not unnaturally, infuriated Otway because apart from being cowards who had deserted an apparently sinking ship, the Ceres’s muster book gave a completely different and probably much more accurate account of the men’s nationalities.
Just before the Hermione left, Otway wrote a report for Sir Hyde Parker. Enclosing a copy of the relevant entries in the Ceres’s logs (‘which will inform you of the disaster that has befel the Ceres’), he wrote: ‘Should you, sir exhibit the smallest doubt that any blame is to be imputed to me… it will afford me the greatest satisfaction in your ordering my conduct to be publicly investigated.’ He described the condition of the Ceres’s crew when he took over command and concluded: ‘In short, sir, the ship never could have been saved if it had not been for the uncommon exertions of the Hermione’s men, Captain Pigot himself constantly assisting in person.’
The Hermione arrived back at the Mole early on June 9 and Pigot reported personally to Sir Hyde, giving him three signed letters. The first was his description of the Ceres grounding; the second requested a court martial on the Hermione’s Boatswain, Thomas Harrington; and the third asked that Thomas Leech, the deserter should also be court-martialled.
The letter concerning the Ceres told how the two ships were ‘imperceptibly drawn by a very strong current into the Gulf of Triste’. He described how he went on board the Ceres to consult with Otway. ‘I cannot help expressing to you, sir, my admiration of the steady, cool, exemplary conduct of Captain Otway throughout the whole of the arduous task that fell on him, and though beset by a variety of difficulties.
‘If, sir, there is any blame in this unfortunate business, from inattention to the situation of the ship, or imprudence in the course steered, as the senior officer (and consequently the senior ship), it must be laid to my charge; it therefore behoves me to lay before you as clear a statement of the situation on this subject as I possibly can.’
After describing in detail the events he wrote: ‘I beg leave to add, sir, though my own conscience entirely acquits me of having occasioned any misfortune by any neglect or inattention on my part, from the course steered, I feel great satisfaction in meeting any public investigation you might think proper to direct.’
Had he ended the letter at that point it would have been a reasonable report. However, although he had already claimed the grounding was due to being ‘imperceptibly drawn by a very strong current into the Gulf of Triste’, adding that if there was any blame over the course steered ‘it must be laid to my charge’, he then produced the person he now considered to be to blame for the whole episode. ‘… Having made inquiry respecting the lookout kept by the [Hermione’s] officers and people… I cannot bring to light at present any stronger proof of neglect in that respect, on their part, than from comparing the situation of the Ceres when aground with the course steered [when] it very clearly appears to me that we must have passed within pistol shot of the southernmost of the three cays…’
He did not consider the possibility that the Ceres might have been more than a quarter of a mile from the Hermione’s larboard quarter (which was probably the case). Instead, he declared: ‘From these circumstances I must confess I do not think a proper lookout was kept by the officer who had charge of the watch in the Hermione; that the misfortune which befell His Majesty’s Ship Ceres, and the consequent damage she suffered, is in great measure to be imputed to neglect, and as it was so near proving fatal to both ships, I beg to submit to your opinion the propriety of a further inquiry on that subject.’
So Lt Harris, the man whose keen eyesight had saved the Hermione, was being offered as the scapegoat for the Ceres grounding. Neither Otway nor Pigot mentioned that the First Lieutenant of the Ceres had seen nothing: that the first he knew of land being near was when the Ceres hit it, sailing at five knots under all plain sail. Indeed, no one on board the Ceres was to be blamed in any way, then or later.
Captain Pigot’s second letter to Sir Hyde was commendably direct and brief:
‘Thomas Harrington, Boatswain of His Majesty’s ship under my command having on the 2nd day of April last, in Port Royal Harbour, disobeyed the orders of Lt Harris and treated him in an insolent and contemptuous manner… and having been repeatedly guilty of the same offence, as well as totally neglecting his duties, and since his confinement been repeatedly drunk… I am to request you will be pleased to order a court martial to try him for the above offences.’
The third letter requested a court martial to be held on Thomas Leech ‘otherwise known as Daniel White’, and briefly outlined his various desertions and recaptures.
In the letter to Sir Hyde concerning the Ceres Pigot had begged ‘to submit to your opinion the propriety of a further inquiry’, which indicates that a fourth letter Pigot sent to the Commander-in-Chief that day, June 9, was written after the two men met. This letter began by saying he had made an inquiry into the lookout kept by Lt Harris, continued it with a long verbatim extract from his first letter, and concluded by quoting the last part of it, substituting Lt Harris’s name for ‘the officer’ and then altering the final phrase that the damage suffered by the Ceres ‘is in a great measure to be imputed to neglect’ to read ‘imputed to his neglect’. He then asked for an inquiry into Harris’s conduct—which was tantamount to asking for a court martial.
Clearly Pigot would not have requested an inquiry into Harris’s behaviour at the same moment that he asked for Sir Hyde’s opinion whether or not there should be a ‘further inquiry’, so it must have been the result of Sir Hyde’s opinion. The point is important in determining Sir Hyde’s role in what followed, because the whole episode was now, by accident or design, about to enter the realm of naval ‘polities’.
The reasons for this are almost disgustingly simple. An act of Parliament laid down that no person commanding a fleet or squadron of more than five ships could preside at a court martial abroad, ‘but that the officer next in command to such officer commanding in chief shall hold such court martial’. Sir Hyde’s next in command was Rear-Admiral Rodney Bligh, whom he detested (and who should not be confused with Captain William Bligh, formerly of the Bounty). Indeed, within a year Parker wrote to the Admiralty to ‘request Their Lordships will remove Rear-Admiral Bligh from under my command, or, that Their Lordships will allow me to resign from a situation which must be extremely unpleasant, finding myself so ill-supported by the person next to me in command in keeping up the discipline and subordination of this particular squadron’. The Admiralty’s view was expressed much later by the First Lord, writing to tell Parker he was being recalled: ‘… though in the course of your command a few circumstances have occurred in which I could have wished you to have acted differently from what you did, especially with regard to the business of Vice-Admiral Bligh, I can, however, assure you that it is not on that account that this arrangement [Parker’s replacement] is made’
Against this unhappy background was set the affair of Pigot, Otway and John Harris: the first two were Sir Hyde’s protégés, while Harris was Rear-Admiral Bligh’s.
On receiving Pigot’s letter concerning Harris, Sir Hyde wrote within twenty-four hours to Rear-Admiral Bligh, ordering him to assemble a court martial on June 16 to try Harris ‘for his conduct in having… negligently performed his duty, as set forth more particularly in a letter from Captain Pigot…’ Bligh was also ordered to try Boatswain Harrington and Thomas Leech.