“WHAT COULD YOU LEARN, SIR? WHAT CAN SAVAGES TELL, BUT WHAT THEY THEMSELVES HAVE SEEN?”
The Admiralty originally intended to appoint Charles Clerke to lead their new expedition but were delighted when Cook, at dinner with Lord Sandwich one evening, stood and volunteered to command it. Despite his disappointment, Clerke agreed to serve as Cook’s second-in-command and captain of the Discovery which was to accompany a refitted Resolution on this voyage. Soon afterward Clerke was arrested for debt, one of the forty thousand Britons to whom this happened annually, often for small sums. Imprisoned in the King’s Bench debtors’ prison in London, he caught one of the diseases rampant in the country’s prisons—a severe chest infection he would later discover was consumption (tuberculosis). It took Lord Sandwich’s intervention to secure his release just in time to join the Discovery before she sailed. Virginian John Gore was appointed first lieutenant of the Resolution, with James King as the Resolution’s second lieutenant. James Burney became the Discovery’s first lieutenant and David Nelson, an employee of Joseph Banks, was appointed the expedition’s botanist.
Twenty-one-year-old William Bligh was appointed the Resolution’s master. Like many other sailors at this time, including Samuel Wallis, he was from a Cornish family. Born on September 9, 1754, he was the only child of a customs official and his wife, both of whom had been previously married. His mother, who had a grown-up daughter from another marriage, was forty-one at his birth. Destined for the sea at an early age, he was entered at seven years old on the muster roll of HMS Monmouth as a captain’s servant. However, he probably did not serve aboard. Persuading a captain to add to his roll a young boy was common and mutually beneficial. The boy would gain theoretical sea time toward that required to become a commissioned officer. The captain would have a nonexistent mouth for which he could claim the cost of food from the Admiralty.
William Bligh’s first sea experience probably came as an able seaman and then midshipman in 1770, a few months after his mother had died and two after his father had remarried again. He did not make particularly fast progress toward a commission. His last appointment before the Resolution was to the Ranger, a small naval vessel based in the Isle of Man and tasked with preventing the smuggling for which the islanders—like the people of Bligh’s home county of Cornwall—were notorious, most inhabitants sympathizing more with the perpetrators than with the revenue officials. Around this period he took and passed the examinations to be warranted a ship’s master—a noncommissioned rank that could be the dead end for a naval career. Bligh, however, signaled his continued ambition by passing his lieutenant’s examination before sailing on the Resolution and was probably hoping that his experience with Cook would secure that rank for him. Cook wrote that in general he was looking for able men who “could be usefully employed in constructing charts, in taking views of the coasts and headlands near which we should pass, and in drawing plans of the bays and harbours in which we should anchor.” How Bligh came to be selected for the post of the Resolution’s master is not recorded. However, he must have had some reputation in that regard.
As she awaited the final orders for departure in Plymouth Sound, the Resolution was surrounded by sixty-two troop transports carrying Hessian mercenaries to fight against the rebellious American colonists. A commentator reflected on “the singular and affecting circumstance that at the very instant of our departure upon a voyage the object of which was to benefit Europe by making fresh discoveries in North America there should be the unhappy necessity of employing others of His Majesty’s ships, and of conveying numerous bodies of land forces to secure the obedience of those parts of that continent which had been discovered and settled by our countrymen in the last century.”
On July 12, 1776, eight days after the thirteen rebel American colonies signed the Declaration of Independence, the Resolution finally sailed. Standing together on the deck as the vessel headed out to sea, Cook and Bligh would have made an oddly assorted pair. The forty-seven-year-old Cook at over six feet would have towered above the twenty-one-year-old Bligh, who was scarcely more than five feet tall. Cook’s dark features would have been weathered and sea-beaten, while Bligh was always noted for his blue eyes and pale skin, “of an ivory or marble whiteness” beneath his dark hair. Bligh quickly grew to look up mentally as well as physically to Cook, who would become the role model for many of his own command practices. Bligh noted how Cook insisted on pain of flogging that his men consume sauerkraut, wort of malt, and orange and lemon juice to avoid scurvy, how Cook also insisted on them dancing on deck to provide exercise as a further guard against disease, and how Cook demanded from his crew cleanliness of both their persons and their quarters. He would also remember how Cook preferred a three-watch system for the running of his ship under which crews were split into thirds to work the ship in shifts in contrast to the two-watch system that was standard on most naval ships.
One man not on board was James Boswell, whose in-person pleas to accompany Cook on the voyage to learn about people in a pure state of nature Cook had turned down, by now wary of supernumeraries who might turn out to be prima donnas. Samuel Johnson had been equally discouraging: “What could you learn, sir? What can savages tell, but what they themselves have seen? Of the past, or the invisible, they can tell nothing. The inhabitants of Tahiti and New Zealand are not in a state of pure nature, for it is plain they broke off from some other people. Had they grown out of the ground, you might have judged of a state of pure nature.”
After touching on Tasmania and revisiting New Zealand—landing where some of the Adventure’s men had been killed and eaten by Maoris on the previous voyage—the ships reached the Friendly Islands, Tonga, in 1777. There, by now stripped of illusions about how the local people would behave and increasingly exasperated by thefts and no doubt increasingly exhausted after long years at sea, Cook resorted more quickly than previously to flogging both islanders and crewmen and to hostage-taking to secure the return of stolen goods.
In August 1777, the Resolution and Discovery anchored in Matavai Bay in Tahiti, where Cook went ashore with Omai. To his surprise Cook received a lukewarm welcome but quickly discovered the reason. Two Spanish ships had visited the island, depositing for a time two Catholic missionaries. The Spaniards had told the Tahitians they ruled the world and that they had defeated the British and in fact killed Cook himself. Cook’s presence in the flesh, with the help of a fireworks display and a large quantity of sacred red feathers obtained in the Friendly Islands, soon mended relations. Cook, Omai, and the ships’ officers were now greeted formally by Tu, a young man in his late twenties who had established himself as the island’s supreme chief. Purea, the Britons discovered to their dismay, had died. Even taller than Cook, Tu welcomed the British regally but was entirely unimpressed by Omai’s boasting about Britain and his friendship with “King Tosh” as well as his displays of his finery and other gifts.
While on Tahiti, Cook visited a marae where a human sacrifice was being made to increase Tu’s martial power or manna in an anticipated battle with the people of the neighboring island of Moorea. The human sacrifice had seemingly already been made when Cook arrived but he witnessed the eye being removed and ceremoniously placed on a leaf and inserted in Tu’s mouth to give him the strength of Oro, the god of war. Among the most venerated objects was the sacred Tahitian banner onto which the Dolphin’s pennant presented to Purea by Wallis had been sewn. Shortly afterward some of the Tahitian chiefs were offended by Cook’s refusal to join them in an attack on Moorea and outraged by Omai telling them that if they sacrificed a man in England they would be hanged for murder.
Nevertheless the crews continued to enjoy the pleasures of Tahiti. One first-time visitor recalled: “The overflowing plenty, the ease in which men live and the softness and delightfulness of the clime, the women are extremely handsome.” Another enthused, “In these Elysian fields immortality alone is wanting … We had not a vacant hour … we wanted no coffee houses to kill time nor Ranelaghs or Vauxhalls.” (These were London’s pleasure gardens, illuminated by thousands of lanterns by night, and centers of entertainment of all sorts from concerts and fancy-dress balls to firework displays and fire-eating.) He witnessed a dance whose performance “bespoke an excess of joy and licentiousness. Most were young women who put themselves into several lascivious postures, sometimes they put their garments aside and exposed with seemingly very little sense of shame those parts which most nations have thought it modest to conceal.” In fact, he was mistaken about the purpose of the dance. It was again not eroticism but designed to arouse Oro.
After presenting to Tu a picture of himself painted by his ship’s artist, John Webber, and guided by Omai in his canoe, Cook and his ships sailed through the reefs across to Moorea, which he had not previously charted. There the friendly relations the expedition first established deteriorated quickly after two goats belonging to the vessels and put ashore to graze were stolen, leading an irate Cook to overreact by ordering the destruction of many of the islanders’ canoes. Some of his crew deplored his “cruel ravages” but Omai took a leading part in the mayhem. According to a German crewman he “executed the greater part of this destruction and behaved much worse than the Europeans.”
Sailing on to the island of Huahine, where Omai had joined the Adventure, Cook put him ashore and established him on a small farm where his men helped build paddocks for the horses, cows, and goats that King George III had given him—and that were all unknown in the islands until the arrival of the Europeans.a As the time for departure grew closer a young marine deserted, only to be captured by Cook and Bligh when sleeping garlanded with flowers between two women in a canoe, brought back to the ship, and flogged. Shortly afterward two other crewmen—a midshipman deeply in love with a Tahitian woman and one of the gunner’s mates—also deserted. After they were recaptured with some difficulty, Cook assembled his crews and told them all deserters would be sure to be captured, dead or alive.
Leaving a weeping Omai and the islands behind for what would be the last time, Cook again mused that the islanders could never go back to their previous halcyon existence: “My real opinion [is] that it would have been far better for these poor people never to have known our superiority in the accommodation and arts that make life comfortable … indeed they cannot be restored to that happy mediocrity in which they lived before we discovered them … for by the time that the iron tools of which they are possessed are worn out they will have almost lost the knowledge of their own. A stone hatchet is, at present, as rare a thing amongst them, as an iron one was eight years ago.”
Voyaging on, Cook and his men became the first Europeans to reach the Hawaiian Islands, which he named the Sandwich Islands after the First Lord of the Admiralty. There they found the women just as generous with their favors as the Tahitians and the whole population equally keen on purloining articles from the ships and their crews.
Beginning their search for the Northwest Passage, Cook’s ships sighted the northwest coast of America, in what is now Oregon, in March 1778. Working his ships farther north, Cook passed the wild shores of a large island (later to be named after his midshipman George Vancouver, who would make further surveys in the area), and landed in the island’s Nootka Sound, which he charted. Pushing onward, the crews traded furs with the Inuit and passed through the volcanic Aleutian Island chain before crossing the Arctic Circle. Not long afterward Cook “perceived a brightness in the northern horizon like that reflected from the ice, commonly called the blink.” Soon, at 70 degrees 44 minutes north, they met a barrier of ice and had to turn back, returning eventually to the Sandwich Islands. There, as they anchored in January 1779 in a bay on the island of Hawaii called Kealakekua, an area which they had not previously visited, they were warmly welcomed by Hawaiians, who believed them to be gods.
Leaving after two and a half weeks, the two ships quickly ran into a fierce storm that split the Resolution’s foremast. Cook, now fifty years old, returned to Kealakekua Bay, where the Hawaiians were surprised to see those they had considered divine returning with a damaged ship. As a consequence they were much less welcoming as sailors and marines brought ashore the damaged foremast to be repaired—a process that would take some days.
Thefts from the ships became ever more frequent and blatant. Mutual distrust spilled over into confrontations, in one of which midshipman Vancouver and the Discovery’s master were hurt and some of their equipment stolen. Already determined to stop the Hawaiians imagining “they have gained advantage over us,” Cook woke the next morning, February 14, 1779, to find that the Discovery’s cutter had been stolen during the night from where it had been moored half under water to preserve it against warping.
By now thoroughly angry, he ordered four boats—two from each ship—to blockade the bay, allowing no canoes to escape while he landed to retrieve the cutter either by direct action or by taking the leading chief of the island hostage to secure its return. Bligh was put in charge of the Resolution’s cutter. Soon spotting canoes attempting to leave the bay, he set off in hot pursuit and, closing in on them, gave the order to his marines to fire—which they did, together with those in one of the other boats, wounding some of the canoeists, including a priest, and forcing the canoes back to shore.
Cook meanwhile had landed some distance away, accompanied by Lieutenant Molesworth Phillips of the marines and nine of his men, to secure the island’s chief. Lieutenant John Williamson, the Resolution’s Third Lieutenant—a close friend of Bligh’s, and a fellow freemason, but according to his men a bully and “a very bad man and great tyrant”—hovered just offshore in the Resolution’s launch together with its pinnace. Cook was bringing the chief back toward the beach when a hubbub broke out among the nearly two thousand Hawaiians now thronging the shore. Some officers later thought its cause was the news of the attack on the canoes by Bligh and the others and the wounding of the priest.
Whatever the cause, the Hawaiian warriors began to crowd around Cook and shortly attacked him with clubs and stones. Cook and the marines fired once but then the marines, abandoning any attempt to reload, dropped their muskets and ran back toward the sea, pursued by the Hawaiians. Lieutenant Phillips, wounded in the shoulder in his attempts to defend Cook, swam across to the pinnace, which had remained close in, before jumping back into the sea to drag aboard by his hair one of his marines who was floundering in the water. Lieutenant Williamson in the launch, to the manifest disgust of some of his crew, rather than going to the defense of Cook—who could not swim—immediately headed the launch back toward the Resolution despite Cook’s gesturing him to come closer to the shore. Cook tried to protect himself but was soon felled, and clubbed and stabbed to death among the rocks on the shoreline, together with four marines.
In the aftermath of Cook’s death, Bligh was among the advocates of taking a bloody revenge on the Hawaiians, but Charles Clerke, now in command in Cook’s place, refused to take any such drastic actions. Subsequently he ordered Bligh to take a party ashore again to bring back to the ship Lieutenant King; William Bayly, one of the expedition’s astronomers; and some marines and sailors, who had been working on the Resolution’s damaged foremast and making celestial observations in another part of the bay, which had remained peaceful. Skeptical about the need to leave, King told Bligh to stand on the defensive while he returned to the Resolution to confirm the orders to abandon the camp. After he departed, Bligh, in what King would claim was direct defiance of his explicit orders and despite protests from Bayly, opened fire on nearby villagers, killing some. Eventually King returned to the encampment and the Britons quickly withdrew to the safety of the ships, taking with them the half-repaired foremast.
Cook’s death led to a series of promotions and changes of responsibility, though not for Bligh. Lieutenant Gore became commander of the Resolution. One of Bligh’s subordinates—a master’s mate—was promoted over his head to be a lieutenant as another had been earlier in the voyage. The Resolution and Discovery continued their expedition, making a full survey of the Sandwich Islands and exploring some of the coast of Siberia including the Kamchatka Peninsula, where Clerke died from the tuberculosis he had contracted in the debtors’ prison. His death sparked another round of promotions. Bligh again failed to benefit despite his claim that after Cook’s death “C. Clerke being very ill in a decline he could not attend the deck—publicly gave me the power solely of conducting the ships and moving as I thought proper.” Another of Bligh’s master’s mates was, however, made a junior lieutenant.
John Gore now took command of the expedition and brought the two ships back to Britain in October 1780. Upon their return there were further promotions, among them for King, Phillips, and Williamson. Yet again William Bligh was not included. Perhaps the events surrounding Cook’s death had something to do with it. Bligh’s own journal for the voyage no longer exists, believed lost on the Bounty, but he later annotated King’s version of what happened at the encampment and elsewhere, calling it “a pretty old woman’s story” and claiming that “whenever any dangerous situation should be taking place King was always being ill.”
Bligh also blamed Lieutenant Phillips and his marines for Cook’s death rather than his friend Lieutenant Williamson, despite many other accounts praising Phillips, in particular for his rescue of the marine from drowning, and damning Williamson for cowardice. Captain Clerke had apparently been collecting reports on Williamson’s behavior as material for a possible court-martial but, according to Phillips, when Clerke died Williamson broke open the captain’s desk and stole the relevant papers. According to a midshipman, Williamson formed “a mason’s lodge” on the Resolution by “bribing [the sailors] with brandy and got them to promise as brothers they would say nothing of his cowardice when they came back to England.”b
Although exactly what happened in Kealakekua Bay that day will never be entirely clear, one certainty is that sailing master William Bligh was one of the very few of the expedition’s officers who did not profit from Cook’s last voyage, failing in his expectation to be rewarded for his endeavors by promotion to lieutenant. To add insult to injury, Bligh found that many of the charts of the voyage—for which he rightly claimed to have been responsible—were being presented to the Admiralty as the work of another of his master’s mates, Henry Roberts, newly promoted to lieutenant.
His indignation reached a new high when the third volume of the official account of the voyage, prepared by King and dealing with the period after Cook’s death, appeared in 1784. In it, Roberts was credited in print for what Bligh considered his charts. Bligh later wrote on a copy of the volume: “None of the maps and charts in this publication are from the original drawings of Lieutenant Henry Roberts. He did no more than copy the original ones from Captain Cook who besides myself was the only person that surveyed and laid the coast down in the Resolution. Every plan and chart from Captain Cook’s death are exact copies of my works.”
In the nearly four years between the Resolution’s return and the publication of that volume much had happened in William Bligh’s life and career. His father, who had been widowed and remarried yet again for a fourth time, had died three months after the return of Bligh, his only son. Bligh was employed as master on a succession of naval ships in the wars against European powers who were supporting the American rebels, eventually achieving his long-delayed and ardently desired promotion to a junior lieutenancy.
Soon after his return on the Resolution and immediately after his father’s death, he had revisited the Isle of Man during a period of leave. There he met—or much more likely renewed the acquaintance from his previous visits on the Ranger of—Elizabeth Betham, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of the head of the Isle of Man’s customs service. Within a few weeks, and only four months after the Resolution had docked, the couple were married. A little over nine months later, Betsy, as she was known to the family, gave birth to a daughter, with a second daughter to follow not long after.
The signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 ended the wars and confirmed the independence of the thirteen colonies. The peace led to a speedy run-down of the British navy. Many officers, including Bligh, were placed on half-pay, in his case around thirty-five pounds a year. This was far from a sufficient sum to keep a wife and family in a genteel way and Bligh was now a family man.
Fortunately, Elizabeth Bligh’s relations were well placed to help, having influential connections both familial and friendly. A distant relation in the navy had had a hand in Bligh’s belatedly receiving a commission. Now Elizabeth’s maternal uncle Duncan Campbell was best placed to help. He was a wealthy merchant owning vessels trading with the West Indies as well as the prison hulks anchored in the Thames and holding the prisoners who, until the rebellion of the American colonies, would have been transported by him to those very lands for a considerable profit. Campbell arranged for Bligh to secure the Admiralty’s permission to command one of his merchant vessels plying the West Indian trade and gave him a magnificent salary of five hundred pounds per annum.
When the account of Cook’s last voyage was published in 1784, Campbell intervened with the Admiralty, urging Bligh’s claim that many of the charts credited to Roberts were his, and successfully gained Bligh a share of the royalties. The bulk went to Captain Cook’s widow, whereas Roberts got nothing.
aThe islanders coined the name “man-carrying pig” for the horse.
bNearly two decades later Williamson was court-martialed for disobedience to orders and cowardice at the battle of Camperdown, at which Bligh himself served honorably. Called as a witness, Bligh did not condemn his old colleague; but on the overwhelming evidence of others Williamson was convicted of disobedience and dismissed from further service.