June 16, 2010 • 25 mins
The mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty has been popularized in film, but how accurate is this depiction? In this podcast, Sarah and Katie take a closer look at this legendary mutiny -- and figure out whether William Bligh deserves his terrible reputation.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And most of
us know a little bit about our topic for today,
the Mutiny on the Bounty, and we know there's this
(00:22):
outraged group of sailors and the mutiny against their captain
and two amazing stories in sue. And the first is
that the mutineers, with a group of Tahitian women, end
up establishing a colony on this remote Pacific island that
still exists today, the island and the colony obviously. And
then the other is that the cast off captain and
(00:44):
his loyalists navigate thousands of miles to safety and make
it all the way back to England eventually. But that's
about all most people know well, and our understanding of
the people involved isn't quite as good as our understanding
of the basics. And that's partly due to the misleading
but entertaining film portrayals of the stories to leading men
(01:06):
in film, Captain Bligh and our mutineer, Fletcher Christian. Yeah,
most of the films depict Bligh as this hard nosed
bully and Christian is a dashing hero, but those depictions
aren't necessarily correct in times movies lie. Yeah. It turns out, though,
that the films weren't the first to skew it that way,
(01:26):
with with one as the hero and one as this
mean old captain, and the two men's respective reputations actually
started to grow shortly after the mutiny itself when some
of the participants are brought back to England for justice
and try to skew the story and save their hides
(01:46):
by defaming your captain. And it's these interesting back stories
and others that continue centuries after the mutiny that made
our listener, Catherine in London suggests the topics. So we're
going to start our Shian alright, So the famous mutiny
happens in the Pacific Islands in seventeen eighty nine. But
(02:07):
before we get into that, we have to understand why
the ship was there in the first place. It wasn't
on your ordinary run of the mill mission. No, it
was a culinary mission. And to understand we have to
go back to seventeen sixty nine when Captain James Cook's ship,
the Endeavor, discovered the breadfruit in Tahiti and Joseph Banks,
(02:29):
a famous botanist, on board to Conne And several years
after this, England had a bit of a food crisis,
and it wasn't about feeding their own people, but about
feeding their slaves in Jamaica and the lesser Antilles. And
they were wondering, what can we feed all of these
people with that's cheap and easy to grow in the Caribbean.
(02:50):
And uh, part of the problem here was that they
didn't have the North American colonies anymore producing loads of
food and fish to to feed these big lave populations.
So botanist Banks suggested the bread fruit. But of course
that's in Tahiti, so someone would have to go there,
take saplings and cuttings and then attempt to propagate the
(03:11):
tree in the West Indies. And by seventy seven, at
very adamant, Banks finally convinced the king to sponsor this mission.
So who would they put in charge, Good old reliable
William Bly. And William Bly had been in the navy
for quite some time. He was born to a customs
officer in seventeen fifty four, probably in Plymouth, England, and
(03:34):
he joined the Royal Navy as a teen and rose
pretty fast under the service of Captain Cook, who we
mentioned earlier, and Bligh was even there when Cook was
bludgeoned to death by natives in what is now the
Hawaiian Islands, so that would be an unfortunate thing to witness,
but he also learned a lot from Cook, and after
(03:55):
returning to England and getting married and having kids, he
left the Royal Navy and became a commander of merchant ships,
which was a really good way to make a lot
of money and to have a bit of an easier
career than sailing all over the world for the Navy. Right,
but he came out of retirement to serve on this
(04:15):
bread fruit mission and his vessel would be the two
d and fifteen ton Bethia renamed the Bounty, and he
accepted the mission. But it didn't turn out to be
the prestigious, well funded scientific expedition he hoped it would be.
The ship was tiny, he didn't get the title of
master and commander, and he didn't have the security and
(04:36):
commissioned officers that should have come with that kind of trip.
But nevertheless, he's got a major trip underway, and one
of the first men he recruits is Fletcher Christian who's
served him well before and has connections to his family. However, Yeah,
so we have this really bizarre mission to get the
bread fruit. Not of particularly popular mission, but nevertheless. It
(05:00):
sets off December, after delays of weeks because of unsuitable weather,
so a bad start almost right away. But the ship
leaves from Spithead, England, and the plan is to go
to Tahiti by way of South America, sailing around the
Cape Horn, and they near the cape by late March,
(05:21):
but the weather is so bad that they make a detour.
And this detour is just insane if you get the
more around the world. Yeah, if you get mad about
having to go a few blocks out of your way,
take note here. Their detour involves going around the Cape
of Good Hope, which is in Africa, obviously, and it
takes until May for them to get there. They stop
(05:43):
at Cape Town, refit their ship, reload their supplies, and
head on their way. And Blind may have been disappointed
with the initial expedition, but things are actually going well
so far, especially considering their bad weather and the long delay.
The men are in good health or how been a
lot of injuries. He even loans money to Christian while
(06:03):
they're in Africa, which Bli was a little bit of
a tight wad, so that's really a big deal. And
from the Cape they headed to Tasmania, which is where
their troubles began. They have a man die after a
blood letting, and some of the other men become a
little insolent, but still they press on. They get to
Tahiti October, and when they arrive in Tahiti, the islanders
(06:28):
come pouring aboard the ship, and this is a relatively
happy time, perhaps one of the last truly happy times
on this mission. Bli has been to the islands before.
He really likes Tahiti. He gets along well with the
native people and he even calls Tahiti the paradise of
the world. And he also gets to work on his mission,
which is of course securing the bread fruit plants and
(06:51):
the trees. So he gets permission from the island chiefs
to transplant and builds a place to put the plants
and let them grow, and then hangs to type for
about five months to see if the plants take and
to wait out the rainy season. And his men don't
seem to mind Tahiti of course is gorgeous and they
like the native women, but not all of their tensions
(07:11):
smelt away. Three of the men go missing with arms
and ammo. They aren't found for three weeks. Bli gets grumpy,
of course, to find that his orders aren't carried out.
The men are lacks about important issues, um the spare sales,
rot and mildew for examp. Pretty major problems happening. Yeah,
that's a big deal. But finally, on April five, the
bounty is ready to leave with its one thousand, fifteen saplings.
(07:34):
So by the eleventh of April, the ship anchors at
the rather ironically named Friendly Islands. Because not long after
they leave their Bli and Christian begin to argue and
not friendly, No, it's not friendly. This is according to
a later account. But things get worse by the twenty
one and that's when Christian is hard to say, Sir,
(07:56):
your abuse is so bad that I cannot do my
duty with any pleasure. I've been in hell for weeks
with you, and by April the two are fighting again.
Blige is disappointed that Christian let native men scare him,
and he's furious that the watch let a Native diver
make off with a small anchor, and that brings us
to our last straw, which was Blige's manhunt over stolen coconuts,
(08:19):
which sounds absolutely ridiculous, but I think you have to
consider these people being in such close quarters with each
other for so long and an already tense situation ready
to go home, stolen coconuts become a really big deal.
But Blithe specifically implicates Christian before imposing this ration on Yams,
(08:41):
and it just devastates Christian. Apparently he's seemed crying and
BLI it's not as big of a deal for him.
He actually doesn't stay angry for long. He invites Christian
to dine with him that night. Christian uh doesn't get
over it so quickly, though, because pre dawn on April,
(09:02):
according to Bligh's account, Christian comes in with other men,
seizes him, ties him up and threatens to kill him,
and they haul him naked except for a shirt, onto
the deck where he's placed on the launch vessel and
joined by eighteen others who were loyal to the captain,
and they're given some supplies roum about five days worth
of food, water, some tools, and a compass and four
(09:25):
cutlass is tossed in at the last minute. Uh, three
people loyal to BLI are actually detained on board, and
that'll come into play later. But Bli is there trying
to reason with Christian at the last minute. Here he
knows what's about to happen to him, and he knows
that it most likely means death and death for the
men on this little skiff. He tries to remind Christian
(09:48):
that he's held his children back in England, that he's
been his mentor this whole time, and asks if this
is proper repayment for his kindness, and Christian says that
Captain Bly, that is the thing I am in hell.
I am in Hell. So Christian is pretty tortured by
this decision to mutiny against his captain. Other men at
(10:10):
the trial substantiate this account, and it's possible that Christian
had considered slipping off the ship in a raft alone,
which would have been suicidal, but was talked into mutiny instead.
And while a movie might end there, our podcast will not.
So first we're going to catch up with the captain
post mutiny. Things look really bleak. This tiny boat, lots
(10:33):
of guys, not much food, and they're sailing through mostly
uncharted water. Certain death, yes, certainty death. It seems like um.
But even though Bligh isn't the best people person, maybe
not the best captain for no managerial skills negotiating with folks,
he's a really great navigator. And from his tiny little
(10:54):
glimpses he's had of of charted waters that the waters
that actually are charted, he's able to navigate thousands of
miles back to safety. What he's done is is pretty fantastic,
and they stop on a volcanic island, but when one
of them was killed by natives, Blies determined not to
stop again, so to tea more or death. As Sarah
(11:17):
wrote in her outline, but the problem would be that
Teamore is about three thousand, six hundred miles away. And
the other thing is everyone on the boat kind of
hates each other, which is going to be a running
theme for the rest of the podcast. They bicker and
argue with each other the whole way, and of course
they're starving too, so they have a lot of good
(11:38):
reasons to be on the grumpy side. Somewhat Miraculously, they
reached Teamore June four nine, and the English Chronicle calls
the navigation of his little skiff through so dangerous a sea,
a matchless undertaking that seems beyond the verge of probability.
And from there they go into Jakarta and eventually find
(11:58):
a ride all the way back to Gland, and Bligh
is hailed as a hero and he writes a narrative
which is very popular, and he also gets a new job.
Still with the bread fruit. You think you would be
breadfruit sick of bread fruit by this point, But um,
this time around, the mission is going to be different.
He's going to have lieutenants, he's going to have marines
(12:19):
for security. I think the Royal Navy has realized that
a mission of this size should have been managed better.
Oh and it's payback time. The Royal Navy also wants
to hunt it down our mutineers, if there are any
mutineers left to find, which brings us to our next question,
what happened to the mutineers? So in the Navy commissions
(12:44):
Captain Edward Edwards and the Pandora to find the surviving
mutineers in the Pacific, and one of the Bligh skiff
survivors comes along to presumably to help identify the men
and to talk to them and probably bring out their
guilt a little too, if this is the guy you
tossed into a boat not too long ago. Face to
(13:04):
face encounter. When the ship arrives in Tahiti, three bounty
mutineers swim out to it. They're so ready to go home,
and they're arrested and chained, while the other men are
rounded up and put into the prison hut on deck,
which they called Pandora's Box, which is pretty clever, and
one of the survivors tells Edwards how the men got there,
and he pieces together more from the journals of the
(13:26):
captured men, but the basics are that hatred and jealousy
began immediately after the mutiny, with some men thinking that
Christian favored his friends among the other mutineers. So the
ship initially anchors on a tiny island south of Thiti,
and because they're pretty short on supplies, they head back
to Tahiti and load up on livestock as well as
(13:48):
a bunch of Tahitian people, women, men, boys, and one girl,
and then head back to their tiny island and they
try to live there for about three months before the
in fighting again, with the more it gets insufferable and
Christian agrees to take some of the men back to Tahiti,
and he takes sixteen of them back, implying that he'll
(14:11):
linger nearby the island on the ship for about a
day or so before slipping off. That he doesn't doesn't happen.
He leaves in the middle of the night, essentially kidnapping
the women who were on board the ship. One even
jumps overboard and swims back from beyond the coral reef
when she realizes what's happening, and sadly, of the sixteen
(14:31):
left in Tahiti, two are murdered. So back to our
Captain Edwards. He keeps hunting for Christian and his band
of men, but he can't find them. He eventually gives
up and starts to head home, but runs his ship
aground on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Thirty one of his
men drowned and four prisoners die, so only ten prisoners
make it back to England where they will be tried together,
(14:54):
and the prosecution rests on three points. These men didn't
try to stop the mutiny, they didn't get into the
launch with BLI, and they didn't try to get to
England after the mutiny, but hid instead, And there's still
more fighting among the defendants over who did what, because
obviously this is the time to implicate your fellows. He
(15:15):
was the guy with the weapon. It wasn't me. I
was dragged into the whole thing by Christian. You can imagine.
It goes on and on, and four of the men
have letters from Bli declaring them innocent, so this court
martial for them is pretty much a formality. They'll be okay.
Three are virtually assured death because they had all been
seen with arms. Everyone can agree that these three guys
(15:38):
were bearing arms, and three are kind of up in
the air, especially one named Peter Hayward, who is the
only officer charge, and he was only fifteen at the
time of the mutiny. He's from a really well connected
family though, and says that he's young and confused at
the time of the mutiny, that he had been sleeping
below decks so hadn't been able to react until it
(16:01):
was a bit too late, and he didn't want to
join the launch because it was so overloaded. But interestingly too,
it's his testimony that kind of helps build up the
legend of Bligh as a sadistic incompetent captain. Something that
will help hey would get off the hook. And he,
of course isn't there to defend his own name. He's
(16:22):
on bread Fruit Mission Part two, so that's the only
account that people are going by really. So ultimately one
of the prisoners gets off on a legal technicality, two
are pardoned, including Hayward, and then three hang at Portsmouth
Harbor and their bodies are displayed for two hours in
the rain. Just a warning to other wood, message to you.
(16:44):
So Bli's second bread fruit mission is successful. He secures
two thousand one plants. He manages to get six hundred
and seventy eight of them to the West Indies and
there he delivers them at St. Vincent and Jamaica. And
he was delayed air by the start of the French Revolution,
but eventually returned and continues his up and down career.
(17:06):
Being gone for the trial was very unfortunate for his reputation,
since a bit of a pamphlet war started not only
with Hayward's claims against his character, but Christian's brother, a
law professor at Cambridge, who interviews the crew members to
show problems with the command. And that's where he gets
his nickname the Bounty Bastard, which haunts him for the
(17:28):
rest of his life. But catching up with Christian and
his men, what happens to them? Captain Edwards is never
able to find them, presumably they're all dead. They don't
make it, But the second act of this story continues
in eighteen ten, when the American ship Topaz and Captain
Folger find this Englishman Alexander Smith also known as John Adams,
(17:52):
on Pitcaren Island in the South Pacific. So what's he
doing here? He's claiming he's a bounty survivor. He tells
how the group of mutineers, Tahitian women and male Tahitian
servants landed there in and stripped and burned the bounty
to cover their tracks. In fighting, once again, it kills
off almost everyone, with Christian getting shot in the neck
(18:15):
with a pistol ball, although other rumors do have Christian
escaping Pitcaren and returning to England probably unlikely. It seems
like infighting is our general trend here and we should
probably go and going at the pistol ball. But just
because most of the men have killed each other off
doesn't mean that this island is devoid of a population.
There has been a lot of repopulating going on at
(18:37):
the same time, and the island now has thirty five inhabitants,
and Smith is their leader, and the first to be
born on the island is actually Christian's own son. And
so this new expedition finds a twenty year old Thursday
October Christian, the descendant of Fletcher, and a Tahitian woman,
(18:57):
a name we had a lot of fun with earlier
to day. Some of the settlers eventually immigrate to Norfolk Island,
east of Australia, and many of them still live there today.
But others still live on pit Karen, where they speak
English and pitt Kern, a mix of Tahitian and eighteenth
century English, which sounds pretty cool. And they trade with
ships that come by or sell their stuff online. But
(19:20):
a few years ago they had a scandal when numerous
men were arrested and charged with abusing underage girls. I'd
read a big article in Vanity Fair about it, called
Trouble in Paradise, which you can find online. Sarah read
some other accounts, yeah, and NPR story about the journalist
Kathy Marks who had unearthed this whole history, which apparently
(19:42):
stretched back for generations, at least three generations of abuse.
That's just a side note for us. We're going to
go to the more popular game of what went wrong?
So why was there this mutiny in the first place?
That's the big popular question, and one myth to debunk
is that Bli and Christian had this secret, illicit relationship
(20:05):
and that's why Christian just got so angry at Bligh
and mutinied. He wasn't Hell. He wasn't Hell. Yeah, exactly. So.
The historian who first suggested this idea retracted it later
after she reassessed the size of the ship and figured
that there was no way you could have conducted a
secret affair aboard a vessels so small. And this mutiny
(20:28):
also didn't happen because Bli was too strict. In his
captain's log, he had noted that he hadn't punished anyone
until several months in, and he also noted that he'd
hoped to complete the journey without it flogging, and those
types of punishment weren't something that he relied on. That
was a sign of trouble for him. Yeah, he was
really pretty light on corporal punishment as far as other
(20:50):
captains in the Pacific went. He's a pretty progressive captain.
According to Caroline Alexander, who is a historian. He has
written several articles in books on the subject, and she
said that especially in terms of food and sleep for
the men, he's extremely progressive. So it wasn't about that.
It wasn't that he was this tyrannical, physically abusive captain,
(21:14):
but he could have been verbally and personally abusive in
a way that really needled his men. So Alexander's biggest
cause of the mutiny is Fletcher Christian himself, and she
says that it wouldn't have happened without him, and that
it happened because of his own personal breakdown. So maybe
we shouldn't look too to Blige for our problems, but
to Christian himself. So Sarah, was this mission for bread
(21:38):
fruit all for not? Yeah, we have to catch up
with the bread fruit here, since it's the whole purpose
for this story. The specimens that arrive in Jamaica are
practically too late because it takes a while for this exotic,
strange food to catch on, and by the time it
finally does catch on, slavery has been abolished. By the
(21:59):
British today, though it's actually a really popular food in Jamaica.
And according to the Smithsonian, a mature tree produces two
hundred pounds of fruit a season, which is kind of insane.
And it's filled with protein and calories and carbohydrates and nutrients.
And you can grill it and fry it and bake
(22:21):
it and roast it. I mean, I feel like I'm
talking about shrimp and forest. Ever, I was thinking the
same thing. So if you'd like to send us a
breadfruit recipe, please do. And that brings us to the
end of the mutiny and the bounty and our ideas
about who, well what is the cause of it, And
that brings us to Listener mail. Our first postcard for
(22:45):
today is a picture of James Joyce in Paris and
nine and it's from Andrew in Raleigh, North Carolina, who
was actually a high school classmate of mine, so Go
Harrison High School. And he said that he loved the
podcast although he discovered at it fairly recently, and that
it has been excellent company during his frequent drives to
South Carolina to visit his fiancee. So he asked us
(23:08):
to do a podcast about America's Stonehenge, So thank you
for the suggestion, Andrew, and for getting back in touch.
We also got a postcard from Maddie who is studying
abroad in Strasbourg, and she suggested that we do a
little bit of history on the city, especially the cathedral,
and I think it mostly made Katie and I want
to go check out one of the local Alsatian restaurants
(23:31):
here in town, Kafe Alsace Indicator, which we both really love.
And our last postcard of the day is a reproduction
of Boston Common at Twilight, and it's a postcard from
Bostonian Sophia, who says she's a longtime devotee of the
podcast and especially loved our episode on the art heist
at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which she says she
(23:54):
passes every day on her way to work, and she
requests some more art history topics and then asked ps,
is snail mail really the key to listener mail glory?
And yes, yes it is. Although we've gotten so much
awesome snail mail postcards and letters and all kinds of
things in the past few weeks, we can't read them
all anymore, and we wish we could show it all
(24:16):
to you, because we have some really gorgeous ones who
are trying to figure out if we can scan them
and somehow share them, but so far we haven't really
come up with a good strategy for that. They're really
pretty in our cubes though, Yes, thank you, we love them.
If you'd like to send us email, we take that too.
At History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We
also have a Twitter feed which you should follow at
(24:38):
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works dot com home page. Bling bl
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And most of
us know a little bit about our topic for today,
the Mutiny on the Bounty, and we know there's this
(00:22):
outraged group of sailors and the mutiny against their captain
and two amazing stories in sue. And the first is
that the mutineers, with a group of Tahitian women, end
up establishing a colony on this remote Pacific island that
still exists today, the island and the colony obviously. And
then the other is that the cast off captain and
(00:44):
his loyalists navigate thousands of miles to safety and make
it all the way back to England eventually. But that's
about all most people know well, and our understanding of
the people involved isn't quite as good as our understanding
of the basics. And that's partly due to the misleading
but entertaining film portrayals of the stories to leading men
(01:06):
in film, Captain Bligh and our mutineer, Fletcher Christian. Yeah,
most of the films depict Bligh as this hard nosed
bully and Christian is a dashing hero, but those depictions
aren't necessarily correct in times movies lie. Yeah. It turns out, though,
that the films weren't the first to skew it that way,
(01:26):
with with one as the hero and one as this
mean old captain, and the two men's respective reputations actually
started to grow shortly after the mutiny itself when some
of the participants are brought back to England for justice
and try to skew the story and save their hides
(01:46):
by defaming your captain. And it's these interesting back stories
and others that continue centuries after the mutiny that made
our listener, Catherine in London suggests the topics. So we're
going to start our Shian alright, So the famous mutiny
happens in the Pacific Islands in seventeen eighty nine. But
(02:07):
before we get into that, we have to understand why
the ship was there in the first place. It wasn't
on your ordinary run of the mill mission. No, it
was a culinary mission. And to understand we have to
go back to seventeen sixty nine when Captain James Cook's ship,
the Endeavor, discovered the breadfruit in Tahiti and Joseph Banks,
(02:29):
a famous botanist, on board to Conne And several years
after this, England had a bit of a food crisis,
and it wasn't about feeding their own people, but about
feeding their slaves in Jamaica and the lesser Antilles. And
they were wondering, what can we feed all of these
people with that's cheap and easy to grow in the Caribbean.
(02:50):
And uh, part of the problem here was that they
didn't have the North American colonies anymore producing loads of
food and fish to to feed these big lave populations.
So botanist Banks suggested the bread fruit. But of course
that's in Tahiti, so someone would have to go there,
take saplings and cuttings and then attempt to propagate the
(03:11):
tree in the West Indies. And by seventy seven, at
very adamant, Banks finally convinced the king to sponsor this mission.
So who would they put in charge, Good old reliable
William Bly. And William Bly had been in the navy
for quite some time. He was born to a customs
officer in seventeen fifty four, probably in Plymouth, England, and
(03:34):
he joined the Royal Navy as a teen and rose
pretty fast under the service of Captain Cook, who we
mentioned earlier, and Bligh was even there when Cook was
bludgeoned to death by natives in what is now the
Hawaiian Islands, so that would be an unfortunate thing to witness,
but he also learned a lot from Cook, and after
(03:55):
returning to England and getting married and having kids, he
left the Royal Navy and became a commander of merchant ships,
which was a really good way to make a lot
of money and to have a bit of an easier
career than sailing all over the world for the Navy. Right,
but he came out of retirement to serve on this
(04:15):
bread fruit mission and his vessel would be the two
d and fifteen ton Bethia renamed the Bounty, and he
accepted the mission. But it didn't turn out to be
the prestigious, well funded scientific expedition he hoped it would be.
The ship was tiny, he didn't get the title of
master and commander, and he didn't have the security and
(04:36):
commissioned officers that should have come with that kind of trip.
But nevertheless, he's got a major trip underway, and one
of the first men he recruits is Fletcher Christian who's
served him well before and has connections to his family. However, Yeah,
so we have this really bizarre mission to get the
bread fruit. Not of particularly popular mission, but nevertheless. It
(05:00):
sets off December, after delays of weeks because of unsuitable weather,
so a bad start almost right away. But the ship
leaves from Spithead, England, and the plan is to go
to Tahiti by way of South America, sailing around the
Cape Horn, and they near the cape by late March,
(05:21):
but the weather is so bad that they make a detour.
And this detour is just insane if you get the
more around the world. Yeah, if you get mad about
having to go a few blocks out of your way,
take note here. Their detour involves going around the Cape
of Good Hope, which is in Africa, obviously, and it
takes until May for them to get there. They stop
(05:43):
at Cape Town, refit their ship, reload their supplies, and
head on their way. And Blind may have been disappointed
with the initial expedition, but things are actually going well
so far, especially considering their bad weather and the long delay.
The men are in good health or how been a
lot of injuries. He even loans money to Christian while
(06:03):
they're in Africa, which Bli was a little bit of
a tight wad, so that's really a big deal. And
from the Cape they headed to Tasmania, which is where
their troubles began. They have a man die after a
blood letting, and some of the other men become a
little insolent, but still they press on. They get to
Tahiti October, and when they arrive in Tahiti, the islanders
(06:28):
come pouring aboard the ship, and this is a relatively
happy time, perhaps one of the last truly happy times
on this mission. Bli has been to the islands before.
He really likes Tahiti. He gets along well with the
native people and he even calls Tahiti the paradise of
the world. And he also gets to work on his mission,
which is of course securing the bread fruit plants and
(06:51):
the trees. So he gets permission from the island chiefs
to transplant and builds a place to put the plants
and let them grow, and then hangs to type for
about five months to see if the plants take and
to wait out the rainy season. And his men don't
seem to mind Tahiti of course is gorgeous and they
like the native women, but not all of their tensions
(07:11):
smelt away. Three of the men go missing with arms
and ammo. They aren't found for three weeks. Bli gets grumpy,
of course, to find that his orders aren't carried out.
The men are lacks about important issues, um the spare sales,
rot and mildew for examp. Pretty major problems happening. Yeah,
that's a big deal. But finally, on April five, the
bounty is ready to leave with its one thousand, fifteen saplings.
(07:34):
So by the eleventh of April, the ship anchors at
the rather ironically named Friendly Islands. Because not long after
they leave their Bli and Christian begin to argue and
not friendly, No, it's not friendly. This is according to
a later account. But things get worse by the twenty
one and that's when Christian is hard to say, Sir,
(07:56):
your abuse is so bad that I cannot do my
duty with any pleasure. I've been in hell for weeks
with you, and by April the two are fighting again.
Blige is disappointed that Christian let native men scare him,
and he's furious that the watch let a Native diver
make off with a small anchor, and that brings us
to our last straw, which was Blige's manhunt over stolen coconuts,
(08:19):
which sounds absolutely ridiculous, but I think you have to
consider these people being in such close quarters with each
other for so long and an already tense situation ready
to go home, stolen coconuts become a really big deal.
But Blithe specifically implicates Christian before imposing this ration on Yams,
(08:41):
and it just devastates Christian. Apparently he's seemed crying and
BLI it's not as big of a deal for him.
He actually doesn't stay angry for long. He invites Christian
to dine with him that night. Christian uh doesn't get
over it so quickly, though, because pre dawn on April,
(09:02):
according to Bligh's account, Christian comes in with other men,
seizes him, ties him up and threatens to kill him,
and they haul him naked except for a shirt, onto
the deck where he's placed on the launch vessel and
joined by eighteen others who were loyal to the captain,
and they're given some supplies roum about five days worth
of food, water, some tools, and a compass and four
(09:25):
cutlass is tossed in at the last minute. Uh, three
people loyal to BLI are actually detained on board, and
that'll come into play later. But Bli is there trying
to reason with Christian at the last minute. Here he
knows what's about to happen to him, and he knows
that it most likely means death and death for the
men on this little skiff. He tries to remind Christian
(09:48):
that he's held his children back in England, that he's
been his mentor this whole time, and asks if this
is proper repayment for his kindness, and Christian says that
Captain Bly, that is the thing I am in hell.
I am in Hell. So Christian is pretty tortured by
this decision to mutiny against his captain. Other men at
(10:10):
the trial substantiate this account, and it's possible that Christian
had considered slipping off the ship in a raft alone,
which would have been suicidal, but was talked into mutiny instead.
And while a movie might end there, our podcast will not.
So first we're going to catch up with the captain
post mutiny. Things look really bleak. This tiny boat, lots
(10:33):
of guys, not much food, and they're sailing through mostly
uncharted water. Certain death, yes, certainty death. It seems like um.
But even though Bligh isn't the best people person, maybe
not the best captain for no managerial skills negotiating with folks,
he's a really great navigator. And from his tiny little
(10:54):
glimpses he's had of of charted waters that the waters
that actually are charted, he's able to navigate thousands of
miles back to safety. What he's done is is pretty fantastic,
and they stop on a volcanic island, but when one
of them was killed by natives, Blies determined not to
stop again, so to tea more or death. As Sarah
(11:17):
wrote in her outline, but the problem would be that
Teamore is about three thousand, six hundred miles away. And
the other thing is everyone on the boat kind of
hates each other, which is going to be a running
theme for the rest of the podcast. They bicker and
argue with each other the whole way, and of course
they're starving too, so they have a lot of good
(11:38):
reasons to be on the grumpy side. Somewhat Miraculously, they
reached Teamore June four nine, and the English Chronicle calls
the navigation of his little skiff through so dangerous a sea,
a matchless undertaking that seems beyond the verge of probability.
And from there they go into Jakarta and eventually find
(11:58):
a ride all the way back to Gland, and Bligh
is hailed as a hero and he writes a narrative
which is very popular, and he also gets a new job.
Still with the bread fruit. You think you would be
breadfruit sick of bread fruit by this point, But um,
this time around, the mission is going to be different.
He's going to have lieutenants, he's going to have marines
(12:19):
for security. I think the Royal Navy has realized that
a mission of this size should have been managed better.
Oh and it's payback time. The Royal Navy also wants
to hunt it down our mutineers, if there are any
mutineers left to find, which brings us to our next question,
what happened to the mutineers? So in the Navy commissions
(12:44):
Captain Edward Edwards and the Pandora to find the surviving
mutineers in the Pacific, and one of the Bligh skiff
survivors comes along to presumably to help identify the men
and to talk to them and probably bring out their
guilt a little too, if this is the guy you
tossed into a boat not too long ago. Face to
(13:04):
face encounter. When the ship arrives in Tahiti, three bounty
mutineers swim out to it. They're so ready to go home,
and they're arrested and chained, while the other men are
rounded up and put into the prison hut on deck,
which they called Pandora's Box, which is pretty clever, and
one of the survivors tells Edwards how the men got there,
and he pieces together more from the journals of the
(13:26):
captured men, but the basics are that hatred and jealousy
began immediately after the mutiny, with some men thinking that
Christian favored his friends among the other mutineers. So the
ship initially anchors on a tiny island south of Thiti,
and because they're pretty short on supplies, they head back
to Tahiti and load up on livestock as well as
(13:48):
a bunch of Tahitian people, women, men, boys, and one girl,
and then head back to their tiny island and they
try to live there for about three months before the
in fighting again, with the more it gets insufferable and
Christian agrees to take some of the men back to Tahiti,
and he takes sixteen of them back, implying that he'll
(14:11):
linger nearby the island on the ship for about a
day or so before slipping off. That he doesn't doesn't happen.
He leaves in the middle of the night, essentially kidnapping
the women who were on board the ship. One even
jumps overboard and swims back from beyond the coral reef
when she realizes what's happening, and sadly, of the sixteen
(14:31):
left in Tahiti, two are murdered. So back to our
Captain Edwards. He keeps hunting for Christian and his band
of men, but he can't find them. He eventually gives
up and starts to head home, but runs his ship
aground on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Thirty one of his
men drowned and four prisoners die, so only ten prisoners
make it back to England where they will be tried together,
(14:54):
and the prosecution rests on three points. These men didn't
try to stop the mutiny, they didn't get into the
launch with BLI, and they didn't try to get to
England after the mutiny, but hid instead, And there's still
more fighting among the defendants over who did what, because
obviously this is the time to implicate your fellows. He
(15:15):
was the guy with the weapon. It wasn't me. I
was dragged into the whole thing by Christian. You can imagine.
It goes on and on, and four of the men
have letters from Bli declaring them innocent, so this court
martial for them is pretty much a formality. They'll be okay.
Three are virtually assured death because they had all been
seen with arms. Everyone can agree that these three guys
(15:38):
were bearing arms, and three are kind of up in
the air, especially one named Peter Hayward, who is the
only officer charge, and he was only fifteen at the
time of the mutiny. He's from a really well connected
family though, and says that he's young and confused at
the time of the mutiny, that he had been sleeping
below decks so hadn't been able to react until it
(16:01):
was a bit too late, and he didn't want to
join the launch because it was so overloaded. But interestingly too,
it's his testimony that kind of helps build up the
legend of Bligh as a sadistic incompetent captain. Something that
will help hey would get off the hook. And he,
of course isn't there to defend his own name. He's
(16:22):
on bread Fruit Mission Part two, so that's the only
account that people are going by really. So ultimately one
of the prisoners gets off on a legal technicality, two
are pardoned, including Hayward, and then three hang at Portsmouth
Harbor and their bodies are displayed for two hours in
the rain. Just a warning to other wood, message to you.
(16:44):
So Bli's second bread fruit mission is successful. He secures
two thousand one plants. He manages to get six hundred
and seventy eight of them to the West Indies and
there he delivers them at St. Vincent and Jamaica. And
he was delayed air by the start of the French Revolution,
but eventually returned and continues his up and down career.
(17:06):
Being gone for the trial was very unfortunate for his reputation,
since a bit of a pamphlet war started not only
with Hayward's claims against his character, but Christian's brother, a
law professor at Cambridge, who interviews the crew members to
show problems with the command. And that's where he gets
his nickname the Bounty Bastard, which haunts him for the
(17:28):
rest of his life. But catching up with Christian and
his men, what happens to them? Captain Edwards is never
able to find them, presumably they're all dead. They don't
make it, But the second act of this story continues
in eighteen ten, when the American ship Topaz and Captain
Folger find this Englishman Alexander Smith also known as John Adams,
(17:52):
on Pitcaren Island in the South Pacific. So what's he
doing here? He's claiming he's a bounty survivor. He tells
how the group of mutineers, Tahitian women and male Tahitian
servants landed there in and stripped and burned the bounty
to cover their tracks. In fighting, once again, it kills
off almost everyone, with Christian getting shot in the neck
(18:15):
with a pistol ball, although other rumors do have Christian
escaping Pitcaren and returning to England probably unlikely. It seems
like infighting is our general trend here and we should
probably go and going at the pistol ball. But just
because most of the men have killed each other off
doesn't mean that this island is devoid of a population.
There has been a lot of repopulating going on at
(18:37):
the same time, and the island now has thirty five inhabitants,
and Smith is their leader, and the first to be
born on the island is actually Christian's own son. And
so this new expedition finds a twenty year old Thursday
October Christian, the descendant of Fletcher, and a Tahitian woman,
(18:57):
a name we had a lot of fun with earlier
to day. Some of the settlers eventually immigrate to Norfolk Island,
east of Australia, and many of them still live there today.
But others still live on pit Karen, where they speak
English and pitt Kern, a mix of Tahitian and eighteenth
century English, which sounds pretty cool. And they trade with
ships that come by or sell their stuff online. But
(19:20):
a few years ago they had a scandal when numerous
men were arrested and charged with abusing underage girls. I'd
read a big article in Vanity Fair about it, called
Trouble in Paradise, which you can find online. Sarah read
some other accounts, yeah, and NPR story about the journalist
Kathy Marks who had unearthed this whole history, which apparently
(19:42):
stretched back for generations, at least three generations of abuse.
That's just a side note for us. We're going to
go to the more popular game of what went wrong?
So why was there this mutiny in the first place?
That's the big popular question, and one myth to debunk
is that Bli and Christian had this secret, illicit relationship
(20:05):
and that's why Christian just got so angry at Bligh
and mutinied. He wasn't Hell. He wasn't Hell. Yeah, exactly. So.
The historian who first suggested this idea retracted it later
after she reassessed the size of the ship and figured
that there was no way you could have conducted a
secret affair aboard a vessels so small. And this mutiny
(20:28):
also didn't happen because Bli was too strict. In his
captain's log, he had noted that he hadn't punished anyone
until several months in, and he also noted that he'd
hoped to complete the journey without it flogging, and those
types of punishment weren't something that he relied on. That
was a sign of trouble for him. Yeah, he was
really pretty light on corporal punishment as far as other
(20:50):
captains in the Pacific went. He's a pretty progressive captain.
According to Caroline Alexander, who is a historian. He has
written several articles in books on the subject, and she
said that especially in terms of food and sleep for
the men, he's extremely progressive. So it wasn't about that.
It wasn't that he was this tyrannical, physically abusive captain,
(21:14):
but he could have been verbally and personally abusive in
a way that really needled his men. So Alexander's biggest
cause of the mutiny is Fletcher Christian himself, and she
says that it wouldn't have happened without him, and that
it happened because of his own personal breakdown. So maybe
we shouldn't look too to Blige for our problems, but
to Christian himself. So Sarah, was this mission for bread
(21:38):
fruit all for not? Yeah, we have to catch up
with the bread fruit here, since it's the whole purpose
for this story. The specimens that arrive in Jamaica are
practically too late because it takes a while for this exotic,
strange food to catch on, and by the time it
finally does catch on, slavery has been abolished. By the
(21:59):
British today, though it's actually a really popular food in Jamaica.
And according to the Smithsonian, a mature tree produces two
hundred pounds of fruit a season, which is kind of insane.
And it's filled with protein and calories and carbohydrates and nutrients.
And you can grill it and fry it and bake
(22:21):
it and roast it. I mean, I feel like I'm
talking about shrimp and forest. Ever, I was thinking the
same thing. So if you'd like to send us a
breadfruit recipe, please do. And that brings us to the
end of the mutiny and the bounty and our ideas
about who, well what is the cause of it, And
that brings us to Listener mail. Our first postcard for
(22:45):
today is a picture of James Joyce in Paris and
nine and it's from Andrew in Raleigh, North Carolina, who
was actually a high school classmate of mine, so Go
Harrison High School. And he said that he loved the
podcast although he discovered at it fairly recently, and that
it has been excellent company during his frequent drives to
South Carolina to visit his fiancee. So he asked us
(23:08):
to do a podcast about America's Stonehenge, So thank you
for the suggestion, Andrew, and for getting back in touch.
We also got a postcard from Maddie who is studying
abroad in Strasbourg, and she suggested that we do a
little bit of history on the city, especially the cathedral,
and I think it mostly made Katie and I want
to go check out one of the local Alsatian restaurants
(23:31):
here in town, Kafe Alsace Indicator, which we both really love.
And our last postcard of the day is a reproduction
of Boston Common at Twilight, and it's a postcard from
Bostonian Sophia, who says she's a longtime devotee of the
podcast and especially loved our episode on the art heist
at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which she says she
(23:54):
passes every day on her way to work, and she
requests some more art history topics and then asked ps,
is snail mail really the key to listener mail glory?
And yes, yes it is. Although we've gotten so much
awesome snail mail postcards and letters and all kinds of
things in the past few weeks, we can't read them
all anymore, and we wish we could show it all
(24:16):
to you, because we have some really gorgeous ones who
are trying to figure out if we can scan them
and somehow share them, but so far we haven't really
come up with a good strategy for that. They're really
pretty in our cubes though, Yes, thank you, we love them.
If you'd like to send us email, we take that too.
At History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We
also have a Twitter feed which you should follow at
(24:38):
Misston History and a Facebook fan page at History Class Stuff.
So look for us and stop by our homepage at
www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com and be sure to check out this stuff
you missed in History Class, blogged on the how stuff
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