“THE STRANGE COMBINATION OF CIRCUMSTANCES”
Shortly after dawn on March 23, 1791, five days before the Bryants and their companions escaped from Sydney Cove, HMS Pandora sailed into the wide arc of Matavai Bay. The Admiralty’s instructions to Captain Edwards to enquire with discretion about the Bounty proved unnecessary. According to the ship’s surgeon, Northumberland-born George Hamilton, an islander immediately paddled out to the ship, joyfully embraced the new arrivals, and told them that Fletcher Christian and nine others had “long since” sailed off in the Bounty but that other crewmen were still on Tahiti. He also insisted that Cook was still alive and that Bligh had gone to live with him on Aitutaki.a When Lieutenant Hayward, who had purposely kept in the background, stepped forward, the Tahitian was astonished.
Even before the Pandora had anchored, the Bounty’s armorer, Joseph Coleman, swam out to the ship. He confirmed that others were indeed on the island, of whom some had sailed the previous day in a boat they had built to Papara in the south of Tahiti to join another group settled there. Coleman also reported that the Bounty’s master-at-arms Charles Churchill had been murdered by able seaman Matthew Thompson, and Thompson himself subsequently had been “killed by the natives and offered as a sacrifice on their altars for the murder of Churchill, whom they had made a chief.” Though Bligh had identified Coleman, like Norman and McIntosh, as having been detained on the Bounty against his will, Edwards had him put in irons.
Bligh’s “young gentlemen,” Peter Heywood and George Stewart, arrived soon afterward. Any hopes that Hayward would intercede for them were quickly dashed. According to Heywood, “Knowing from one of the natives that our former messmate, Mr. Hayward, now promoted to the rank of lieutenant was on board, we asked for him, supposing he might prove our assertions. But he (like all worldlings when raised a little in life) received us very coolly, and pretended ignorance of our affairs … Appearances being so much against us, we were ordered in irons and looked upon … as piratical villains!” Learning that another Bounty man—able seaman Richard Skinner—was at Matavai, Edwards asked a chief to apprehend him. Skinner arrived before nightfall, whether like Heywood and Stewart of his own accord or because the chief had coerced him, Edwards was unsure. It made no difference. He too was immediately put in irons.
In the eighteen months since the Bounty had left Tahiti, life among those remaining had not been harmonious and cliques had formed. Peter Heywood had lived quietly, amusing himself by compiling a Tahitian dictionary. George Stewart had settled down with his Tahitian wife, Peggy, and had been laying out a fine garden. James Morrison had soon begun to wonder whether “it would be possible to build a small vessel in hope of reaching Batavia, and from thence to England.” He had persuaded McIntosh and Millward to join his endeavors. A sign of the divisions on the island was that the trio kept their real motive secret, maintaining that the boat —a schooner—was for “pleasuring about the island.” They began assembling materials at Matavai Bay. When Norman, Hillbrant, Burkett, Sumner, Ellison, and Churchill joined them, Morrison maintained the fiction that the purpose was only “to cruise about the island.”
On November 12, 1789—two months after the Bounty’s departure—they laid the thirty-foot-long keel, assisted by Tahitians intrigued by their methods of boatbuilding. They made swift progress, only interrupted by events such as a festival to which they were invited and which opened with the veneration of Cook’s portrait: “The cloth with which it was covered being removed, every person present paid the homage of stripping off their upper garments … The master of the ceremonies then made the oodoo (or usual offering) making a long speech to the picture, acknowledging Captain Cook to be chief of Matavai … The speech ran ‘Hail, all hail Cook, Chief of Air Earth and Water. We acknowledge you chief from the beach to the mountains, over men, trees and cattle, over birds of the air and fishes of the sea.’ ”
However, February 1790 brought a rift in the workforce when Matthew Thompson—at the time living with Coleman at Point Venus—assaulted a young girl whose brother knocked him down before fleeing. Enraged, Thompson vowed revenge “on the first [Tahitian] person who offended him,” which happened to be a Tahitian family who, curious to see Englishmen, visited his house. He broke the mother’s jaw and shot the father and a child—an act, Morrison thought, of plain murder. Churchill, who Morrison suspected “had always been aspiring at command,” offered to become the Bounty men’s leader and organize their defense in case the Tahitians sought retribution, which they did not. When the others rejected his proposal, Churchill and Thompson took themselves off to another part of the island, where local chiefs appointed Churchill their sovereign. As Coleman told Captain Edwards, his “reign” was short. During a quarrel, Thompson shot Churchill, only to have his brains dashed out by islanders angrily avenging their leader.
Morrison and his team doggedly continued with their boatbuilding, making pitch from breadfruit to caulk the seams. On July 1 four hundred singing Tahitians helped haul her down to the beach where, christened Resolution, she was launched. She proved watertight but much was still to be done, from cutting masts and making casks to assembling rope. Sometimes Morrison and his helpers had to stop work when Tu asked the Bounty men’s help in quelling risings on the island, which they agreed to give. This was the first time Europeans, with their western weapons like the muskets with which they armed themselves and some of their Tahitian allies, intervened directly in island affairs. Morrison described how once “as we entered the enemy’s country they fled to the mountains, and our party on shore pursued them, burning the houses and destroying the country … rooting up the plantains and taro, notching the bark round the breadfruit trees to stop their growth, and laying all in ashes.”
Whenever he could, Morrison returned to finishing his schooner. Short voyages around the island and across to Moorea, Tahiti’s northwestern neighbor, confirmed her seaworthiness but Morrison realized that her sails—improvised from woven matting for lack of canvas—would not withstand the battering of a voyage to the Dutch Indies. Reluctantly he abandoned his plans to leave Tahiti but still sailed the Resolution around the island, which is what he was doing when on March 23, 1791, Captain Edwards and the Pandora arrived. Morrison had taken Norman, Ellison, Byrne, McIntosh, Millward, and Hillbrant to visit Burkett, Sumner, and Muspratt, who were living at Papara on the south coast. They had barely arrived when, to their shock, an islander told them “that a ship had anchored at Matavai since we had left it,” that Heywood, Stewart, Coleman, and Skinner had already gone on board and that armed boats had been dispatched to catch the rest of them. These were the Pandora’s launch and pinnace, commanded by Hayward and another lieutenant, Robert Corner. Edwards’s hope was to seize the Bounty men before they learned of his arrival.
Edwards had quickly acquired a useful informant—a sailor, John Brown, whose ship Mercury had put in at Tahiti while Christian and the Bounty had still been at Tubuai. On Tahiti Brown had slashed the face of another sailor with an old razor and been clapped in irons. When the Mercury sailed he had voluntarily remained behind. On the Pandora’s arrival he had hastened aboard to assure Edwards that he had only associated with “the pirates” “for his own safety.” Deciding Brown would be useful as “guide, soldier and seaman,” Edwards entered his name on the Pandora’s muster.
Morrison and his companions agreed to “avoid the boats” until they had decided what to do. Therefore they spent an entire day evading their pursuers until Corner and Hayward returned exhausted to the Pandora. When Morrison finally put in to the shore, Burkett, Sumner, Muspratt, Hillbrant, McIntosh, and Millward departed to hide in the mountains, leaving Morrison, Norman, and Ellison behind with the boat. Morrison concluded they must turn themselves in, though a Tahitian friend warned him that “Hayward will kill you, for he is very angry” and urged him to “go into the mountains” as well. When Morrison refused, Tahitians put Morrison, Norman, and Ellison under guard in a house on the shore to prevent them leaving.
The next evening to their surprise John Brown arrived bringing them a pistol, two hatchets, a knife, and a bottle of gin. His purpose in coming has never been clear and Morrison, who had long thought him “a dangerous kind of man,” evidently did not trust him though he did tell him their intention was to reach the Pandora. Later that night, Morrison, Norman, and Ellison escaped from the house, leaving Brown behind, and set out by canoe. After paddling six miles along the shoreline, they landed and approached Matavai Bay and the Pandora on foot. At about four in the morning they saw the Pandora’s launch, commanded by Lieutenant Corner, lying at anchor.
Events now turned somewhat farcical. Finding Corner and his crew soundly asleep, Morrison and his companions “waked him and delivered ourselves up to him, telling him who we were.” At daybreak, Corner set off overland to Papara with eighteen men to seek the remaining “pirates,” leaving his three captives under guard to await the arrival in another boat of their former shipmate, Lieutenant Hayward. When Hayward appeared in the early afternoon he had the prisoners’ hands bound and dispatched them to the Pandora while he continued to Papara, where Corner had been struggling over tumbled basalt rocks, through dense foliage, and across fast-flowing waterfalls. Hayward eventually located the last six Bounty men, who surrendered peacefully.
Edwards set guards with pistols and bayonets over the prisoners, ordering them, according to Morrison, “not to suffer any of the natives to speak to us, and to shoot the first man that spoke to another in the Tahiti language.” At first the Bounty men were kept in irons below deck where sympathizers among the Pandora’s crew gave them “plenty of coconuts” to quench their thirst, though “any who looked pitifully towards us were ordered out of the ship.” However, to secure his prisoners during the long voyage home and prevent “their having any communication with, or to crowd and incommode the ship’s company,” Edwards ordered the construction of what Morrison called “a kind of poop on the quarterdeck for our reception.”
Edwards himself described it as a “round house … airy and healthy.” The fourteen men confined within would soon call it “Pandora’s Box.” According to Morrison,
The poop, or roundhouse, being finished we were conveyed into it and put in irons as before … the entrance being a scuttle on the top, eighteen or twenty inches square, secured by a bolt … two scuttles of nine inches square in the bulkhead for air with iron grates; and the stern ports barred inside and out with iron. The sentries were placed on the top … The length of this box was eleven feet … and eighteen wide … and no person was suffered to speak to us but the master-at-arms …
The heat of the place … was so intense that the sweat frequently ran in streams to the scuppers and produced maggots … The hammocks, being dirty when we got them, we found stored with vermin … which we had no method of eradicating … though our friends would have supplied us with plenty of cloth, they were not permitted to do it, and our only remedy was to lay naked … the two necessary tubs … helped to render our situation truly disagreeable.
When the officer of the watch discovered that McIntosh had managed to free one of his legs from the heavy shackles, Edwards had all the prisoners’ leg irons tightened. A lieutenant also tested the fit of their handcuffs by “setting his foot against our breasts and hauling the handcuffs over our hands with all his might, some of which took the skin off with them. All that could be hauled off by this means were reduced, and fitted so close, that there was no possibility of turning the hand in them. When our wrists began to swell, he told us that ‘they were not intended to fit like gloves.’ ”
Morrison also related how at first, “the women with whom we had cohabited on the island came frequently under the stern (bringing their children, of which there were six born, four girls and two boys; several of the women were big with child). They cut their heads till the blood discoloured the water about them.” They included George Stewart’s wife, Peggy, and their young daughter. Though “always driven away by the captain’s orders,” they stubbornly continued “to come near enough to be observed and there performed their mourning rites.”
Captain Edwards questioned “different people” and sifted through “journals kept on the Bounty … found in the chests of the pirates at Tahiti” hoping for clues about the Bounty’s destination. All he learned was that Christian had frequently declared “he would search for an unknown or uninhabited island in which there was no harbour for shipping.” Since this information “was too vague to be followed in an immense ocean strewed with an almost innumerable number of known and unknown islands,” Edwards decided to sail to Aitutaki, where the Bounty men had told the islanders that Bligh was living with Cook, searching other islands on the way. He also decided to refit and take with him as a tender Morrison’s Resolution—“decked, beautifully built, and the size of a Gravesend boat,” Hamilton wrote approvingly in his later account.
While at Matavai, Tahiti’s legendary charms were at work on Edwards’s crew, if not the captain himself. To Surgeon Hamilton it was “the Cythera of the southern hemisphere … what poetic fiction has painted of Eden and Arcadia, is here realised, where the earth without tillage produces both food and clothing, the trees loaded with the richest of fruit, the carpet of nature spread with the most odoriferous flowers, and the fair ones ever willing to fill your arms with love.” He perceived a natural nobility, devoid of selfishness and self-interest, in the islanders’ way of life that, he thought, made even the “generous, charitable” British seem “stingy”: “A native of this country divides everything in common with his friend, and the extent of the word friend, by them, is only bounded by the universe, and was he reduced to his last morsel of bread, he cheerfully halves it with him … The king and beggar relieve each other in common.”
Like others, Hamilton also reflected, “Happy would it have been for those people had they never been visited by Europeans; for, to our shame be it spoken, disease and gunpowder is all the benefit they have ever received from us, in return for their hospitality and kindness. The ravages of the venereal disease is evident, from the mutilated objects so frequent amongst them, where death has not thrown a charitable veil over their misery … A disease of the consumptive kind has of late made great havoc amongst them; this they call the British disease.”
On May 8, 1791, “filled with cocoa-nuts and fruit” and “as many pigs, goats and fowls, as the decks and boats would hold,” the Pandora sailed for Aitutaki. Hamilton called it a “dismal day” on which hearts aboard were “heavy … Every canoe almost in the island was hovering round the ship; and they began to mourn.” To the prisoners, squinting through the tiny scuttles of Pandora’s Box, the cries of their women were enough to “melt the most obdurate heart.”
Six days into the voyage Henry Hillbrant—perhaps hoping for better treatment—claimed that, the night before the Bounty had finally left Tahiti, Christian had told him that he intended to seek out an uninhabited island discovered by Captain Byron where, if it proved suitable, he intended to settle after running the ship onto a reef and wrecking her. Edwards identified the island as probably the Duke of York’s Island.b He thought the suggestion “plausible” but decided to go first to Aitutaki. Finding no trace of the Bounty there, he set course for the Duke of York’s Island.
En route there he called at Palmerston Island (in the Cook group) where Lieutenant Corner made a promising discovery—“a yard and some spars marked ‘Bounty.’ ” Edwards landed a shore party “to advance with great circumspection, and to guard against surprise” and sent the Pandora’s cutter to circumnavigate the island. However, neither found any trace of the mutineers. The only “surprise” to the shore party, exhausted by having to swim ashore through the surf in cork jackets, was when a coconut they had thrown on their fire and forgotten “burst with a great explosion.” Believing themselves under attack they all jumped up and grabbed their muskets. In fact, the mutineers had never landed here. The spars found on the beach were those lost while the Bounty was in Tubuai and had drifted with the prevailing winds. As “the weather became thick and hazy, and began to blow fresh,” the Pandora’s jolly boat and her crew of five vanished among the island’s reefs. Though Edwards searched, neither boat nor men were ever seen again and Edwards could only sail on.
On June 6, the Pandora reached the Duke of York’s Island where, despite Hillbrant’s claim, there was no sign of the Bounty either. A frustrated Edwards continued onward, stopping to search other islands, including one where islanders naked except for “a girdle of leaves round their middle” and garlands of sweet-smelling flowers came aboard to trade spiced puddings and bright-feathered birds. Hamilton admired a naked woman “six feet high, of exquisite beauty, and exact symmetry … Many mouths were watering for her but Captain Edwards … had given previous orders that no woman should be permitted to go below,” as some of the crew had not recovered from the venereal disease encountered on Tahiti.
A few days later, in strong winds the Pandora lost contact with the Resolution. Edwards had guns fired and fires lit on the Pandora’s deck to help the schooner’s nine-strong crew find their way back, but to no avail. Eventually Edwards set sail for Nomuka in the Friendly Islands (Tonga) which, after the loss of the jolly boat, he had designated as the rendezvous if any vessel became separated. Bligh and his men had been attacked on Nomuka during their open-boat journey and while the Pandora waited there for news of the Resolution her crew also received a hostile reception: “The second lieutenant was knocked down on shore … and some of the men were stripped stark naked,” Morrison wrote. Islanders climbed into Edwards’s cabin and stole some of his books.
However, they were as eager as the Tahitians to trade for metal. Surgeon Hamilton described how “the quarter-deck became the scene of the most indelicate familiarities” as mothers bartered their daughters’ virginity for as little as “an old razor, a pair of scissors, or a very large nail.” Among the male traders were some who had attacked Bligh’s party and looked much abashed when they recognized Lieutenant Hayward. Edwards could not punish them since, if the Resolution did eventually arrive, the islanders might avenge themselves on her crew.
In early July, Edwards embarked on a sweep of neighboring islands, searching for clues to the Bounty’s whereabouts but, discovering nothing, returned to Nomuka where there was still no news of the Resolution. On August 2, leaving a letter for the Resolution’s crew with the islands’ chiefs, he sailed away.
In the humid heat and heavy tropical rain, conditions for the prisoners cooped up in Pandora’s Box worsened. Morrison described how “when any rain fell we were always wet … Our miserable situation soon brought sickness on amongst us.” Though “the surgeon [Hamilton], a very humane gentleman … informed us that Captain Edwards had given such orders that it was out of his power to be of any service to us … between him and the second lieutenant, a copper kettle was provided to boil our cocoa … This and Divine Providence kept us alive.”
By August 8, having still discovered nothing of the Bounty, Edwards set course westward for the Torres Strait and home. On August 13, through the heat haze, lookouts sighted an island on which, Edwards wrote, “we saw smoke very plain, from which it may be presumed that the island is inhabited.” The island was Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands and the smoke may have been from fires lit by survivors of La Pérouse’s expedition, which Phillip and the First Fleet had encountered in Botany Bay. La Pérouse’s ships the Boussole and Astrolabe had subsequently foundered on Vanikoro’s reefs three years before. Had Edwards sent a landing party it might have rescued any survivors.
Four days later, the Pandora almost grounded on shoals—a warning that she was approaching Cook’s “insane labyrinth”—the Great Barrier Reef. On August 28, Edwards sent Lieutenant Corner in one of the ship’s yawls to seek an opening through the reef. At five o’clock that afternoon Corner signaled that he had found a safe passage but, with night falling, Edwards ordered him back to the ship. The yawl only regained the Pandora with difficulty, guided through the “exceeding dark, stormy night” by flashes from muskets fired on the mother ship’s deck. Shortly afterward, the Pandora suddenly hit the reef so violently that Morrison “expected at every surge that the masts would go by the board.”
Within five minutes the hold was flooded to a depth of eighteen inches. Fifteen minutes later the water was nine feet deep. Surgeon Hamilton recalled, a “dreadful crisis … it blew very violently; and she beat so hard upon the rocks, that we expected her, every minute, to go to pieces … the gloomy horrors of death presented us all round, being everywhere encompassed with rocks, shoals and broken water.” Edwards set hands—including Coleman, Norman, and McIntosh, whom he released from Pandora’s Box—to pumping and baling. Even so the Pandora was listing. To lighten her, Edwards ordered the guns to be thrown overboard but in the process one careered over the deck, crushing a sailor. A spare topmast crashed down, killing another.
By dawn, Edwards and his officers knew the Pandora could not be saved. He ordered the ship’s boats, moored astern, to be loaded with provisions, rafts to be built, and, Hamilton wrote, “spars, booms, hen-coops and everything buoyant” cut loose. The ship “now took a very heavy heel, so much that she lay quite down on one side.” An officer told Edwards that “the anchor on our bow was under water; that she was then going; and, bidding him farewell, jumped over the quarter into the water. The captain then followed his example, and jumped after him. At that last instant, she took her last heel; and, while everyone were scrambling to windward, she sunk in an instant. The crew had just time to leap overboard, accompanying it with a most dreadful yell.” Those who could swam to the ship’s boats to be hauled aboard by their comrades but the cries of others “drowning in the water was at first awful in the extreme; but as they sunk, and became faint, it died away.”
Hamilton also wrote that before the Pandora took her final great list, “the prisoners were ordered to be let out of irons.” Inmates of Pandora’s Box recalled a more complex and frightening picture. Morrison recounted how, when the ship hit the reef, realizing the ship “would not hold long together” and “as we were in danger at every stroke of killing each other with our irons we broke them so we might be ready to assist ourselves.” They “informed the officers what we had done,” assuring Lieutenant Corner that “we should attempt nothing further, as we only wanted a chance for our lives.” Corner promised they had nothing to fear. However, as soon as Edwards learned his prisoners had broken free of their irons “he ordered us to be handcuffed and legs ironed again … We begged for mercy and desired leave to go to the pumps but to no purpose.” Ignoring their pleas, Edwards placed additional guards over them armed with a brace of pistols apiece and “with orders to fire among us if we made any motion.” The prisoners decided “there was no remedy but prayer, as we expected never to see daylight. Having recommended ourselves to the Almighty’s protection, we lay down.”
At daybreak on August 29, realizing from what they could either hear or glimpse through the scuttles that the crew were preparing to abandon ship, according to Morrison, the prisoners “begged that we might not be forgotten, when by Captain Edwards’s order Joseph Hodges, the armourer’s mate … was sent down to take the irons off Muspratt and Skinner, and send them and Byrne (who was then out of irons) up. But Skinner, being too eager to get out, got hauled up with his handcuffs on, and the other two followed him closely. The scuttle was shut and barred before Hodges could get to it.” Morrison and Stewart, whose irons Hodges had meanwhile struck off, begged the master-at-arms guarding them “to leave the scuttle open” to which he replied, “ ‘Never fear, my boys, we’ll all go to hell together.’ The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the ship took a sally, and a general cry of ‘there she goes’ was heard. The master-at-arms and the other guards … rolled overboard.” Peering through the small air scuttle at the stern, Morrison saw Edwards swimming toward the ship’s pinnace. There seemed little hope for the men locked in Pandora’s Box: “Burkett and Hillbrant were yet handcuffed, and the ship under water as far as the main mast.”
Then “Divine Providence” sent bosun’s mate William Moulter to their aid. Hearing their desperate cries, he paused to release the scuttle’s bolt before himself leaping into the sea. All except Hillbrant managed to scramble out, including Hodges the armorer’s mate. But with the ship sinking beneath them and loose debris surging about in the water, they were still in danger. Morrison described how
observing one of the gangways come up, I swam to it and had scarcely reached it before I perceived Muspratt on the other end. It had brought him up, but it fell on the heads of several others, sending them to the bottom … The top of our prison had floated and I observed on it Mr. Peter Heywood, Burkett and Coleman … Seeing Mr. Heywood take a short plank and set off to one of the boats, I resolved to follow him. I threw away my trousers, bound my loins up in a sash … after the Tahitian manner, got a short plank and followed.
An hour and a half later Morrison was hauled into a boat where he also found Heywood. The crew made for a sandy key about four miles from the ship, where other survivors were already gathering. When the muster was taken it showed that “89 of the ship’s company and 10 of the pirates … were saved and that 31 of the ship’s company and 4 pirates were lost.” The dead Bounty men were Hillbrant, trapped in Pandora’s Box, Skinner, who had still been in handcuffs, and Stewart and Sumner, who had been struck by debris.
Edwards ordered the Pandora’s sailors to ready the ship’s four boats for a voyage that he hoped would take them, like Bligh, to Kupang and safety. They had some stocks of ship’s biscuit but only a small barrel of water and a larger amount of wine that had been thrown into one of the boats in the Pandora’s dying moments. For the moment they drank wine in preference to the water they knew they had to preserve. Hamilton described how “by a calculation which we made, by filling the compass boxes, and every utensil we had, we could admit an allowance of two small wine glasses of water a-day to each man for sixteen days.” One sailor was already behaving so erratically his comrades thought him drunk until they realized “the excruciating torture he suffered from thirst” had led him to drink saltwater.
If the Bounty prisoners hoped for less harsh treatment now they were disappointed. Though tents were erected for the Pandora’s officers and crew, the mutineers were warned not to approach either. When they begged for a sail to shelter their nearly naked bodies, pallid from confinement in semidarkness for five months, from the blistering sun, Edwards refused. He also restricted them to a small area of the key—soon nicknamed “Wreck Island”—with orders to speak to no one but each other. Morrison recalled how “we had our skin flayed off from head to foot, though we kept ourselves covered in the sand during the heat of the day.”
The day after the disaster, Edwards sent the Pandora’s master to see what he could salvage from the wreck, which was protruding from the water. He returned with some timbers and the ship’s cat, which he had found clinging to a mast. The next day, August 31, the convoy of four boats—a pinnace, a launch, and two yawls—set out, the Bounty prisoners divided among them. Each boat carried an improvised set of wooden scales, similar to Bligh’s coconut apparatus, so that “a musket-ball weight” of biscuit could be weighed out for each man at mealtimes. Morrison, McIntosh, and Ellison had the misfortune of being in Edwards’s boat where, as Morrison recalled, “As I was laying on the oars talking to McIntosh, Captain Edwards ordered me aft, and without assigning any cause ordered me to be pinioned with a cord and lashed down in the boat’s bottom. Ellison, who was then asleep in the boat’s bottom, was ordered to the same punishment.” When Morrison asked why they were being treated “thus cruelly,” Edwards replied, “Silence, you murdering villain, are you not a prisoner? You piratical dog, what better treatment do you expect?” When Morrison continued to remonstrate, Edwards “in a violent rage” grabbed a pistol and threatened to shoot him.
All the time they searched for watering places. Sometimes they were lucky but on one occasion they were chased away by canoes paddled by Aboriginal men of such “very savage aspect … we judged it prudent to avoid them.” Reaching an island, they tried to trade knives and buttons from their coats with the locals for water, only to be suddenly attacked by men loosing “a shower of arrows amongst the thick of us.”
On the evening of September 2, Edwards recorded that “we saw the northernmost extremity of New South Wales.” His “little squadron” continued west across the top of the Gulf of Carpentaria, then skirted the northern coast of New Holland searching for watering places. When on Edwards’s boat a booby was caught, “the blood was eagerly sucked.” Landing on an island, they heard what they thought was the “hideous growling” of wolves—probably dingoes—but digging deep in a hollow “had the ecstatic pleasure to see a spring rush out,” enabling them to gorge “our parched bodies … till we were perfectly water-logged.” As Bligh’s party had done, they searched for oysters to quell the hunger that wracked them once their thirst was satisfied.
Striking out due west toward Kupang, a heavy swell threatening to capsize them, sometimes the boats became separated. Their occupants became so thirsty that few ate their daily allowance of biscuit, meager though it was, and some drank their own urine. “As their sufferings continued,” Hamilton wrote, “they became very cross and savage in their temper.” One seaman went insane.
On September 13, they sighted land. A prodigious surf at first frustrated their attempts to land but eventually they sailed safely into a creek where they could drink their fill and sleep on the grass. Local people soon arrived bringing chickens, pigs, milk, and bread to sell. One man “offered to traffic with us for the charms of his daughter, a very pretty young girl. But,” Hamilton acknowledged with his customary frankness, “none of us seemed inclined that way, as there were many good things we stood much more in need of.” He also wrote that they were nervous of the local people since, “From Bligh’s narrative and others we had been warned of the danger of landing in any other part of the island of Timor but Kupang, the Dutch settlement, as [the inhabitants] were represented hostile and savage.” A sudden noise made them “all panic-struck … Most … scrambling upon all fours down to the river, and crying for Christ’s sake to have mercy.”
When sufficiently recovered, they set out for Kupang and on September 15, 1791—three months after the Bryants’ arrival and after a journey of sixteen days and 1,200 nautical miles—sailed into its harbor under the gaze of a population growing used to such arrivals. After presenting his credentials to Governor Wanjon, Edwards handed over the Bounty prisoners, who were taken to the fort and put into stocks in a cell. On being given proper food after so long, their clogged bowels began to move but they were “forced to ease nature where we lay.” A Dutch surgeon sent to examine them refused to enter their cell until slaves had scrubbed it. They received greater kindness from the fort’s commander, who six days later, “being informed of our distress,” visited them and “ordered irons to be procured and linked us two and two, giving us liberty to walk about the cell.” Being nearly naked, they wove hats from palm leaves that they were allowed to sell to raise money to buy clothes.
The Bounty prisoners discovered they were not the only British prisoners in the fort: The escapees from Botany Bay were also confined there. For a while the Bryants and their companions had succeeded in living quietly in Kupang under their assumed identities as shipwrecked whalers. According to James Martin they had even found employment—“We remained very happy at our work for two months”—until “William Bryant had words with his wife, [and] went and informed against himself, wife and children and all of us … We was immediately taken prisoners and was put in the castle.” Martin should have known what had precipitated the convicts’ arrest, though other accounts tell slightly different stories. Morrison was told that “not being able to keep within bounds, they were discovered to be cheats and confined in the castle till they should pay the debt they had contracted.” On a later visit to Kupang, Bligh was shown the journal kept by William Bryant and wrote that “one of the party informed through pique at not being taken so much notice of as the rest.” Another report suggested that William Bryant betrayed their secret while drunk.
Hamilton believed the arrival of the Pandora survivors was the convicts’ undoing: “The captain of a Dutch East Indiaman, who spoke English, hearing of the arrival of Capt. Edwards … run to them with the glad tidings of their captain having arrived; but one of them, starting up in surprise, said, ‘What Captain! Dam’me, we have no Captain;’ for they had reported that the captain and remainder of the crew had separated from them at sea in another boat. This immediately led to a suspicion of their being impostors; and they were ordered to be apprehended … One of the men, and the woman, fled into the woods but were soon taken.” However, remarks by James Martin that until Edwards’s arrival Governor Wanjon allowed them out of the fort “two at a time for one day, and the next day two more” suggest that they had been arrested before the Pandora party arrived.
Whatever the precise circumstances of their arrest, Edwards questioned them closely, “to know who we were.” “We told him we was convicts and had made our escape from Botany Bay. He told us we was his prisoners,” Martin later wrote. William Bryant and James Cox tried to convince Edwards that their sentences had expired but, he wrote to the Admiralty, even if that were true, the fact of their stealing a boat “to enable themselves and others to escape” made them “liable to punishment.”
On October 6, Edwards embarked his entire party—Bounty prisoners, Botany Bay escapees, and Pandora survivors—on the Dutch Indiaman Rembang, bound for Batavia. Morrison described how the Bounty men—arms pinioned behind their backs “as almost to haul them out of their sockets”—were “tied two and two by the elbows” and taken by longboat out to the Rembang, though “before we reached her some of us had fainted, owing to the circulation of the blood being stopped by the lashings.” He also recorded how “the Botany Bay men were now brought on board by a party of Dutch soldiers and put in irons with us, in the same manner.” How Mary Bryant and her children were treated he did not say.
A week later off the island of Flores a severe storm “attended with the most dreadful thunder and lightning we had ever experienced” broke over them. Hamilton described with chauvinistic scorn how “the Dutch seamen were struck with horror, and went below; and the ship was preserved from destruction by the manly exertion of our English tars, whose souls seemed to catch redoubled ardour from the tempest’s rage.” On October 30, the battered Rembang and her no less battered occupants limped into Samarang on the north coast of Java where, Edwards and his men discovered, the lost schooner Resolution had arrived six weeks before. After losing contact with the Pandora, her crew had mistaken an island in Fiji for the agreed rendezvous of Nomuka. After waiting in vain for the Pandora they had made their own perilous way through the Torres Strait in stark contrast to the Pandora’s fate—and in a tribute to Morrison’s shipbuilding skills. Edwards’s arrival was timely since the Dutch authorities, suspecting the Resolution’s crew might be “the Bounty pirates” of whom they had received reports, had placed them under guard.
Sailing on with the Resolution, on November 7 the Rembang arrived in Batavia, where Edwards transferred his prisoners to a Dutch prison hulk on which they were held in irons. Cook had called Batavia the cause of “the death of more Europeans than any other place upon the globe.” Several survivors of Bligh’s open-boat journey had died there. Hamilton, disturbed by the sight of corpses floating in the water and bumping against the ship, thought it a “Golgotha.” He blamed not the climate but the Dutch passion for canal building: “All the mortality of that place originates from marsh effluvia arising from their stagnant canals and pleasure-grounds.”
To ward off the miasma of “pestilential vapours” and “thick stinking fog,” the new arrivals smoked tobacco continuously; but many were already ill or soon became so. There was little option but to dispatch them to the hospital—in Hamilton’s view “a cadaverous stinking prison”—where their chances of survival “surrounded by poor wretches whose pallid faces and emaciated bodies plainly indicated their approaching dissolution” were slim. Among those sent to this charnel house were the Bryants’ twenty-month-old son, Emmanuel, who, James Martin wrote, “we lost” on December 1 and William Bryant himself, who, “taken bad,” died three weeks later.
Edwards found passage for all his prisoners and crew on Dutch ships bound for Holland via the Cape of Good Hope. He embarked with the ten surviving Bounty men on the Vredenburg. Of the convicts, Mary Bryant and the last remaining member of her family, her four-year-old daughter Charlotte, were put aboard the Horssen together with William Allen and James Cox, while James Martin, John Butcher, William Morton, Samuel Bird, and Nathaniel Lilley sailed on the Hoornwey. During the three-month voyage of frequent “heavy gales” and “mountainous sea” Morton and Bird died, while James Cox leapt overboard. Edwards recorded simply that he drowned. Surgeon Hamilton thought he managed to swim ashore which, given that he was in irons, seems unlikely.
At Cape Town, Edwards found HMS Gorgon, returning home after carrying convicts to Port Jackson with the Second Fleet, and he embarked all his prisoners on her. By a quirk of fate, among those already aboard were Watkin Tench, now a captain, and a number of other marines, including Lieutenant Ralph Clark, returning to Britain after completing their service in the colony. Tench was impressed when he heard the story of the Bryants’ party, which had escaped the colony a year before:
It was my fate to fall in again with part of this little band of adventurers. In March 1792, when I arrived in the Gorgon, at the Cape … six of these people, including the woman and one child, were put on board of us to be carried to England … The woman and one of the men had gone out to Port Jackson in the ship which had transported me thither. They had both of them been always distinguished for good behaviour … I confess that I never looked at these people without pity and astonishment. They had miscarried in a heroic struggle for liberty after having combated every hardship, and conquered every difficulty … I could not but reflect with admiration at the strange combination of circumstances which had again brought us together to baffle human foresight and confound human speculation.
As well as the marines who had once guarded them, aboard the Gorgon were other reminders to the Botany Bay prisoners of the land they had fled. According to Mrs. Parker, the captain’s wife, the ship was “crowded with kangaroos, opossums, and every curiosity that country produced. The quarter deck was occupied with shrubs and plants, while the cabin was hung around with skins of animals,” many destined for Joseph Banks.
On April 6, 1792, the Gorgon sailed in weather soon so stiflingly hot that Ralph Clark noted how belowdecks, where the prisoners were confined, “there is hardly any living for the heat.” Four days later, he noted that “this hot weather is playing the devil with the children.” By May 2, the children were “going very fast”: Five young children of the marines had already died and another followed on May 4. Then on Sunday, May 6, Clark recorded, “Squally weather with a great deal of rain all this day. Last night the child belonging to Mary Broad, the convict woman who went away in the fishing boat from Port Jackson last year, died about four o’clock. Committed the body to the deep.”c
On June 18, 1792, the Gorgon anchored at Portsmouth and all the prisoners on board, including the trebly bereft Mary Bryant, prepared to face whatever justice lay in store.
aAitutaki is in the archipelago discovered by Cook southwest of Tahiti named by him the Hervey Islands, later renamed the Cook Islands.
bAtafu in the western Pacific.
cLieutenant Ralph Clark did not long survive his service in Port Jackson, dying aboard ship in 1794—possibly killed in action. Soon after, his eight-year-old son, Ralph, a midshipman aboard the same ship, died of yellow fever. Clark’s wife, Alicia, had died earlier that year after giving birth to a stillborn child. The island in Sydney Harbour where Clark cultivated a vegetable garden is named after him. What became of convict Mary Branham and Alicia, the daughter she bore Clark, appears unknown.