April 3, 2021 • 24 mins
In this 2010 episode, previous hosts Sarah and Katie take a closer look at the legendary mutiny on the HMS Bounty -- and figure out whether William Bligh deserves his terrible reputation.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Coming up this week, we have an episode
involving William blythe who became infamous after being the victim
of a mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty. We are replaying
our June sipisode from past hosts Katie and Sarah, so
that story will be a little fresher on people's minds.
Sarah and Deablina also put out an update to this
(00:23):
episode on December three. After the replica of the Bounty,
which was built in nine six, sank during Hurricane Sandy.
We're using the original version since having multiple introductions seems weird. Also,
just a heads up that this episode contains a very
brief mention of just generations of widespread sexual abuses that
(00:45):
were committed at Pitcairn Island. That's the island where some
of the Bounty mutineers settled with Tahitian people they had
captured after the mutiny. Honestly, the whole thing is even
more horrifying that then, it seems upon hearing just that
scription and the episodes up, you go looking for the
resources they reference. It is pretty graphic. Otherwise, enjoy Welcome
(01:12):
to Stuff You missed in History Class. A production of
I Heart Radio. 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 outraged
(01:34):
group of sailers 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 his
(01:55):
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. Two leading men in
(02:17):
film Captain Bligh and our mutineer, Fletcher Christian. Yeah, most
of the films depict Bligh as this hard knows bully
and Christian is a dashing hero. But those depictions aren't
necessarily correct, and times movies lie. Yeah. It turns out,
though that the films weren't the first to skew it
that way, with with one as the hero and one
(02:40):
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 by defaming your captain. And it's the is
interesting back stories and others that continue centuries after the
(03:04):
mutiny that made our listener, Catherine in London suggests the topic.
So we're going to start our mission, all right, So
the famous mutiny happens in the Pacific Islands in seventeen
eighty nine. But 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,
(03:27):
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 bread fruit in Tahiti
and Joseph Banks, a famous botanist on board, took note.
And several years after this, England had a bit of
a food crisis, and it wasn't about feeding their own people,
(03:49):
but about feeding their slaves in Jamaica and the lesser Antilles.
And they were wondering, what can we feed all these
people with that's cheap and easy to grow the Caribbean
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 slave populations.
(04:11):
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
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
(04:34):
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
he joined the Royal Navy as a teen and rose
pretty fast under the service of Captain Cook, who we
mentioned earlier, and BLI was even there when Cook was
(04:54):
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
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
(05:16):
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
breadfruit mission, and his vessel would be the two hundred
and fifteen ton Bethia renamed the Bounty, and he accepted
the mission. But it didn't turn out to be the prestigious,
(05:37):
well funded scientific expedition he'd 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 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
(05:57):
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
sets off December, after delays of weeks because of unsuitable weather,
(06:17):
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,
but the weather is so bad that they make a detour.
And this detour is just insane. If you get tore
(06:38):
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 at
Cape Town, refit their ship, reload their supplies, and head
(06:58):
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, there haven't been a lot
of injuries. He even loans money to Christian while they're
in Africa, which Bligh was a little bit of a
tight wad, so that's really saying something. And from the
(07:19):
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
(07:39):
still they press on. They get to Tahiti October, and
when they arrive in Tahiti, the islanders 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.
(07:59):
He it's 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 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 tight for about five months to see
(08:21):
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 melt away. Three of the men
go missing with arms and ammo. They aren't found for
three weeks. Li 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.
(08:45):
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. So by the eleventh of April,
the ship anchors at the rather ironically named Friendly Islands.
Because not long after they leave their Bligh and Christian
begin to argue and not friendly, No, it's not friendly.
(09:08):
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, 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. Blie is disappointed that Christian let
native men scare him, and he's furious that the watch
(09:31):
let a Native diver make off with a small anchor.
And that brings us to our last straw, which was
Blige's man hunt over stolen coconuts, 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
(09:52):
coconuts become a really big deal. But Blige specifically implicates
Christian before imposing this ration on Yams, and it just
devastates Christian. Apparently he's seen crying and bly it's not
as big of a deal for him. He actually doesn't
stay angry for long. He invites Christian to dine with
(10:13):
him that night. Christian uh doesn't get over it so
quickly though, because pre dawn on April, 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
(10:35):
who were loyal to the captain, and they're given some
supplies rum about five days worth of food, water, some tools,
and a compass, and four cutlass is tossed in at
the last minute. 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
(10:58):
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 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 Christians
says that Captain Bly, that is the thing I am
(11:21):
in hell, I am in Hell. So Christian is pretty
tortured by this decision to mutiny against his captain. Other
men at 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
(11:41):
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 of guys, not much food, and
they're sailing through mostly uncharted water. Certain death, yes, certain death.
It seems like um. But even though Bligh isn't the
(12:04):
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 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
(12:26):
he's done 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 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
(12:48):
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 reasons to be on the B side.
Somewhat Miraculously, they reached Team Or June four nine, and
the English Chronicle calls the navigation of his little skiff
(13:09):
through so dangerous a see a matchless undertaking that seems
beyond the verge of probability, and from there they go
on to Jakarta and eventually find a ride all the
way back to England 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 girl, sick
(13:31):
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 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
(13:52):
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 Captain Edward Edwards
(14:16):
and the Pandora to find the surviving mutineers in the Pacific,
and one of the blind 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 face encounter. When the
(14:36):
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 captured men,
(14:57):
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 Titi, and because
they're pretty short unsupplies, they head back to Tahiti and
load up on livestock as well as a bunch of
(15:19):
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 infighting 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 linger nearby
(15:42):
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 left
in Tahiti, two are murdered. So back to our captain Edwards.
(16:06):
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, and
the prosecution rests on three points. These men didn't try
(16:28):
to stop the mutiny, they didn't get into the launch
with Bligh, 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 was
the guy with the weapon. It wasn't me. I was
(16:48):
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
were bearing arms, and three are kind of up in
(17:11):
the air, especially one named Peter Hayward, who's the only
officer charged, 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 was a
bit too late, and he didn't want to join the
(17:33):
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 Heywood get off the hook. And he of course
isn't there to defend his own name. He's on bread
Fruit Mission part two, so that's the only account that
(17:55):
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. So
Bligh's second bread fruit mission is successful. He secures two
(18:19):
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 there by the start of the French Revolution,
but eventually returned and continues his up and down career.
Being gone for the trial was very unfortunate for his reputation,
(18:40):
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
rest of his life. But kept up with Christian and
(19:01):
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,
(19:22):
on Pit Karen 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, Tohitian women and male
Tahitian servants landed there in seventeen ninety and stripped and
burned the bounty to cover their tracks. In fighting once
again kills off almost everyone, with Christian getting shot in
(19:44):
the neck with a pistol ball. Although other rumors do
have Christian escaping Pit Karen and returning to England, probably unlikely.
It seems like in fighting is our general trend here
and we should probably go with going at the pistol ball.
But just because most the men have killed each other
off doesn't mean that this island is devoid of a population.
(20:05):
There has been a lot of repopulating going on at
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 the Tahitian woman,
(20:27):
a name we had a lot of fun with earlier. Today.
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 Pitcairn, 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 a few
(20:50):
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,
an NPR story about the journalist Cathy Marks, who had
unearthed this whole history which apparently stretched back for generations,
(21:13):
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 and that's why Christian just
(21:37):
got so angry at Bli and mutinied. He was in hell.
He was in 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 also didn't happen
(21:59):
because 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 captains in the Pacific went,
(22:21):
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, but he could have been
(22:45):
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 to to
Blithe for our problems, but to Christian himself. So Sarah,
(23:06):
was this mission for bread 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
(23:27):
has been abolished by the 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
(23:49):
it and fry it and bake it and roast it.
I mean, I feel like I'm talking about shrimp and forest. Ever,
I was thinking the same thing. Bay, So much for
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
Facebook U r L or something similar over the course
(24:11):
of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current
email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com.
Our old health stuff works email address no longer works,
and you can find us all over social media at
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(24:32):
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For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. Coming up this week, we have an episode
involving William blythe who became infamous after being the victim
of a mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty. We are replaying
our June sipisode from past hosts Katie and Sarah, so
that story will be a little fresher on people's minds.
Sarah and Deablina also put out an update to this
(00:23):
episode on December three. After the replica of the Bounty,
which was built in nine six, sank during Hurricane Sandy.
We're using the original version since having multiple introductions seems weird. Also,
just a heads up that this episode contains a very
brief mention of just generations of widespread sexual abuses that
(00:45):
were committed at Pitcairn Island. That's the island where some
of the Bounty mutineers settled with Tahitian people they had
captured after the mutiny. Honestly, the whole thing is even
more horrifying that then, it seems upon hearing just that
scription and the episodes up, you go looking for the
resources they reference. It is pretty graphic. Otherwise, enjoy Welcome
(01:12):
to Stuff You missed in History Class. A production of
I Heart Radio. 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 outraged
(01:34):
group of sailers 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 his
(01:55):
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. Two leading men in
(02:17):
film Captain Bligh and our mutineer, Fletcher Christian. Yeah, most
of the films depict Bligh as this hard knows bully
and Christian is a dashing hero. But those depictions aren't
necessarily correct, and times movies lie. Yeah. It turns out,
though that the films weren't the first to skew it
that way, with with one as the hero and one
(02:40):
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 by defaming your captain. And it's the is
interesting back stories and others that continue centuries after the
(03:04):
mutiny that made our listener, Catherine in London suggests the topic.
So we're going to start our mission, all right, So
the famous mutiny happens in the Pacific Islands in seventeen
eighty nine. But 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,
(03:27):
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 bread fruit in Tahiti
and Joseph Banks, a famous botanist on board, took note.
And several years after this, England had a bit of
a food crisis, and it wasn't about feeding their own people,
(03:49):
but about feeding their slaves in Jamaica and the lesser Antilles.
And they were wondering, what can we feed all these
people with that's cheap and easy to grow the Caribbean
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 slave populations.
(04:11):
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
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
(04:34):
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
he joined the Royal Navy as a teen and rose
pretty fast under the service of Captain Cook, who we
mentioned earlier, and BLI was even there when Cook was
(04:54):
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
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
(05:16):
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
breadfruit mission, and his vessel would be the two hundred
and fifteen ton Bethia renamed the Bounty, and he accepted
the mission. But it didn't turn out to be the prestigious,
(05:37):
well funded scientific expedition he'd 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 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
(05:57):
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
sets off December, after delays of weeks because of unsuitable weather,
(06:17):
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,
but the weather is so bad that they make a detour.
And this detour is just insane. If you get tore
(06:38):
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 at
Cape Town, refit their ship, reload their supplies, and head
(06:58):
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, there haven't been a lot
of injuries. He even loans money to Christian while they're
in Africa, which Bligh was a little bit of a
tight wad, so that's really saying something. And from the
(07:19):
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
(07:39):
still they press on. They get to Tahiti October, and
when they arrive in Tahiti, the islanders 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.
(07:59):
He it's 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 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 tight for about five months to see
(08:21):
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 melt away. Three of the men
go missing with arms and ammo. They aren't found for
three weeks. Li 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.
(08:45):
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. So by the eleventh of April,
the ship anchors at the rather ironically named Friendly Islands.
Because not long after they leave their Bligh and Christian
begin to argue and not friendly, No, it's not friendly.
(09:08):
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, 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. Blie is disappointed that Christian let
native men scare him, and he's furious that the watch
(09:31):
let a Native diver make off with a small anchor.
And that brings us to our last straw, which was
Blige's man hunt over stolen coconuts, 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
(09:52):
coconuts become a really big deal. But Blige specifically implicates
Christian before imposing this ration on Yams, and it just
devastates Christian. Apparently he's seen crying and bly it's not
as big of a deal for him. He actually doesn't
stay angry for long. He invites Christian to dine with
(10:13):
him that night. Christian uh doesn't get over it so
quickly though, because pre dawn on April, 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
(10:35):
who were loyal to the captain, and they're given some
supplies rum about five days worth of food, water, some tools,
and a compass, and four cutlass is tossed in at
the last minute. 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
(10:58):
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 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 Christians
says that Captain Bly, that is the thing I am
(11:21):
in hell, I am in Hell. So Christian is pretty
tortured by this decision to mutiny against his captain. Other
men at 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
(11:41):
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 of guys, not much food, and
they're sailing through mostly uncharted water. Certain death, yes, certain death.
It seems like um. But even though Bligh isn't the
(12:04):
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 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
(12:26):
he's done 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 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
(12:48):
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 reasons to be on the B side.
Somewhat Miraculously, they reached Team Or June four nine, and
the English Chronicle calls the navigation of his little skiff
(13:09):
through so dangerous a see a matchless undertaking that seems
beyond the verge of probability, and from there they go
on to Jakarta and eventually find a ride all the
way back to England 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 girl, sick
(13:31):
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 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
(13:52):
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 Captain Edward Edwards
(14:16):
and the Pandora to find the surviving mutineers in the Pacific,
and one of the blind 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 face encounter. When the
(14:36):
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 captured men,
(14:57):
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 Titi, and because
they're pretty short unsupplies, they head back to Tahiti and
load up on livestock as well as a bunch of
(15:19):
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 infighting 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 linger nearby
(15:42):
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 left
in Tahiti, two are murdered. So back to our captain Edwards.
(16:06):
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, and
the prosecution rests on three points. These men didn't try
(16:28):
to stop the mutiny, they didn't get into the launch
with Bligh, 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 was
the guy with the weapon. It wasn't me. I was
(16:48):
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
were bearing arms, and three are kind of up in
(17:11):
the air, especially one named Peter Hayward, who's the only
officer charged, 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 was a
bit too late, and he didn't want to join the
(17:33):
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 Heywood get off the hook. And he of course
isn't there to defend his own name. He's on bread
Fruit Mission part two, so that's the only account that
(17:55):
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. So
Bligh's second bread fruit mission is successful. He secures two
(18:19):
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 there by the start of the French Revolution,
but eventually returned and continues his up and down career.
Being gone for the trial was very unfortunate for his reputation,
(18:40):
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
rest of his life. But kept up with Christian and
(19:01):
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,
(19:22):
on Pit Karen 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, Tohitian women and male
Tahitian servants landed there in seventeen ninety and stripped and
burned the bounty to cover their tracks. In fighting once
again kills off almost everyone, with Christian getting shot in
(19:44):
the neck with a pistol ball. Although other rumors do
have Christian escaping Pit Karen and returning to England, probably unlikely.
It seems like in fighting is our general trend here
and we should probably go with going at the pistol ball.
But just because most the men have killed each other
off doesn't mean that this island is devoid of a population.
(20:05):
There has been a lot of repopulating going on at
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 the Tahitian woman,
(20:27):
a name we had a lot of fun with earlier. Today.
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 Pitcairn, 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 a few
(20:50):
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,
an NPR story about the journalist Cathy Marks, who had
unearthed this whole history which apparently stretched back for generations,
(21:13):
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 and that's why Christian just
(21:37):
got so angry at Bli and mutinied. He was in hell.
He was in 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 also didn't happen
(21:59):
because 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 captains in the Pacific went,
(22:21):
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, but he could have been
(22:45):
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 to to
Blithe for our problems, but to Christian himself. So Sarah,
(23:06):
was this mission for bread 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
(23:27):
has been abolished by the 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
(23:49):
it and fry it and bake it and roast it.
I mean, I feel like I'm talking about shrimp and forest. Ever,
I was thinking the same thing. Bay, So much for
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
Facebook U r L or something similar over the course
(24:11):
of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current
email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com.
Our old health stuff works email address no longer works,
and you can find us all over social media at
missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show
on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app,
(24:32):
and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed
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