After the
mutiny, 27 men remained on the Bounty.
A small number of them had been loyal to Bligh, but were either kept on the
larger ship because their skills were needed or there was no room to put them
into the smaller craft with the captain. Still others still on the Bounty hadn’t been aligned with the
mutineers, but took no action to help Bligh. So the crew manning the troubled
ship wasn’t a tremendously harmonious group.
Fletcher
Christian, leader of the mutineers, first took the Bounty to the island of Tubuai, about 350 miles south of Tahiti.
But within a week, the Bounty sailed
to Tahiti, remembered fondly by the crew as a paradise, for food. They returned
to Tubuai with some Tahitian women and men, and spent three months trying to
establish a settlement there. But arguments, especially over women, and other
differences doomed that endeavor. The Bounty
and its crew and the Tahitians returned to Tahiti once again. There, the crew
split, with some taking up life on the island while Christian and the eight
sailors most closely aligned with him left for the high seas on the Bounty. With them were nine Tahitian women, six
Tahitian men, and one Tahitian child.
Upon finding
lonely and small Pitcairn Island at a different place than indicated on sea
charts, the mutineers decided to settle there – and ensured it by running the Bounty aground, salvaging supplies and
equipment from her, and burning the ship.
No one in
the rest of the world knew what became of the Bounty and the mutineers who sailed with her on that final voyage until
1808, when an American ship named the Topaz
stumbled across Pitcairn’s Island and noticed signs of habitation. Further
exploration by the Americans revealed a settlement led by one Alexander Smith
(whose real name was John Adams), the sole surviving mutineer, who told the
visitors of the others’ fate.
“The colony … prospered, although two of the
mutineers died in the first two years, one of ‘sickness,’ one by jumping off
the towering rocks in a fit of insanity,” wrote Caroline Alexander, author
of the 2003 book The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, in summarizing Smith’s account. “Four or five years later, six of the seven
remaining mutineers, including Fletcher Christian, were killed in the night by
their ‘Otaheite [Tahitian] servants,’ who had risen against them. Only
[mutineer] Alexander Smith had been left alive, although badly wounded. The [Tahitian]
widows of the mutineers then in turn killed their Tahitian kinsmen in revenge,
and so Smith had been left with all the women, and their various offspring.”
Of course, there’s no good way to verify Smith’s account, but no good reason to
doubt the gist of it either – although he reportedly offered conflicting details
in later retellings of his story.
The captain
of the Topaz reported his find to
British authorities, but Britain didn’t pursue it. And a when couple of British
ships happened up the Pitcairn Island colony in 1814, they had no clue that it
had been discovered years earlier. This
re-discovery brought much attention, however, and John Adams [aka Alexander
Smith] was granted amnesty in 1825. Pitcairn and surrounding islands were made
part of the British Empire in 1838.
But many of the
mutineers who remained on Tahiti when the Bounty
took its last voyage to Pitcairn weren’t as fortunate as Adams/Smith. After
Bligh returned to England and reported the mutiny, British authorities sent
another ship – the Pandora – to hunt
down them down. Fourteen former Bounty crewmen were found on Tahiti, arrested,
and placed in a cage on the Pandora’s
deck. A search for the other mutineers on neighboring islands proved fruitless,
so the Pandora set sail back to
England. Tragedy struck when the ship ran aground and sank with the loss of 31
crewmen and four of the prisoners.
When the ten
surviving prisoners finally arrived back in England, they were court martialed.
Three were found guilty and hanged, three were found guilty but pardoned, and
four were acquitted.
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