Historical Summary
HARSH was the traditional discipline of the quarter-deck. In the British navy as many as a thousand lashes were administered for insubordination, and sentences of from one hundred to two hundred lashes were in the more normal course of events. The tradition died hard. In Two Years before the Mast, a diary of his experiences at sea (1834–36), Richard Henry Dana reported the brutality of a sadistic captain who flogged and spread-eagled members of the crew who differed with him or even ventured to question him.
" ’If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you,’ shouted the captain. ’It’s because I like to do it!’ "
In addition to physical correction, docking the provisions of disobedient seamen, and threatening them with discharge, sea captains frequently drove their crews to the limit of endurance by bullying, profane threats, and the unsavory practice of hazing or "working up," which consisted of assigning dirty, disagreeable, and dangerous tasks to a particular seaman, too often as a means of settling a personal grudge.
For the seaman submission was the only course. As Dana pointed out, "if they resist, it is mutiny; and if they succeed and take the vessel, it is piracy." Living under the tyranny of sea law, Dana vowed that "if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that poor class of beings, of whom I then was one."
Of all the bullying captains who sailed the seven seas none is so notorious as William Bligh. Of all the risings at sea against authority, from the time of Henry Hudson (whose tragic end on his fourth expedition has been attributed to mutineers, subsequently acquitted), none has been romanticized to anywhere near the same degree as the mutiny on the Bounty.
Plymouth-born, Bligh was a protegé of the great Captain Cook, discoverer of Australia. From Cook he learned the arts of surveyor and hydrographer as well as how to control his seamen and the secrets of scientific feeding at sea. Entering the West Indies trade, Bligh came across a boy named Fletcher Christian who served under him as a seaman before the mast. Bligh tutored him in navigation, and, when, in 1787, he was given command of the Bounty on the expedition to Otaheite [Hawaii] to secure bread-fruit for Jamaica, he promoted Christian to master’s mate. Two years later Christian showed his gratitude by setting his erstwhile benefactor adrift in an overloaded ship’s launch and leaving him to make his way across 3,600 miles of uncharted ocean—a death sentence! Bligh’s escape was miraculous, one of the greatest epics of the sea, and a tribute to his all-round seamanship. He later fought with distinction in the Royal Navy, and after other stormy episodes, was finally gazetted a Rear-Admiral of the Blue.
The evidence on the rising is conflicting. The first selection below comes from a journal now in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia. Its author was James Morrison, convicted in the trial of the mutineers, but pardoned, and permitted to re-enter the naval service. As his account at certain points dovetails with Bligh’s own narrative, it is considered trustworthy despite its rancor against the captain. Although Bligh was charged with curtailing ship’s rations and starving his men, there was not a single case of scurvy aboard his ship. This was a remarkable record, and a tribute to Bligh’s empirical knowledge of antidotes for that disease long before mariners were versed in the properties of vitamin C.
"I am in hell! I am in hell!" Those words of Fletcher Christian, recorded by Bligh in his own Narrative, published in 1790 (the second excerpt below), reveals how that gay, handsome, and sensitive lad was torn between honor and passion. At Tahiti, Christian had found the great love of his life. Learning that his mate was soon to have a child, whom possibly he would never see, he was reluctant to leave the island when the time came for the Bounty to sail. This time Ulysses did not escape Circe. Dissuaded by friends from abandoning ship on a raft, he enlisted the help of malcontents and seized the vessel. After the death of his native wife, who had followed him to Pitcairn Island, he was shot in the back by the husband of another Tahitian woman whom he had chosen to take her place.
When the mutineers were brought to trial, Bligh, who had been sent on another bread-fruit expedition, probably to get him out of the way, was absent. Six were found guilty, of whom two were pardoned. Four were acquitted. The mutineers left behind them on Pitcairn Island an extraordinary brood of half-castes.
Key Quote
"I am in hell! I am in hell!"