The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty. Caroline Alexander

‘I wish I may get him to change.’

      Although this proved impossible, Banks did succeed in getting the Admiralty to agree to an assistant surgeon. Eventually this position was taken by Thomas Denman Ledward, a man in his late twenties from a distinguished family of apothecaries and physicians and the first cousin of Thomas Denman, destined to become Lord Chief Justice.

      ‘I am to enter as A.B.!’ Ledward wrote to his uncle shortly before sailing – the ever handy ‘able seaman’ designation being invoked to comply with the ship’s official numerical establishment. ‘But the Captain is almost certain that I shall get a first Mate’s pay, & shall stand a great chance of immediate promotion,’ and – a further agreeable incentive – ‘if the Surgeon dies (& he has the character of a drunkard) I shall have a Surgeon’s acting order.’ An additional inducement to take on what surely promised to be a thankless job was that Sir Joseph Banks had offered his ‘interest to any surgeon’s mate who would go out as able seaman.’

      On the same day that Fryer and Huggan were appointed, Thomas Hayward also joined the Bounty, nominally as another AB but shortly to be promoted to one of the two coveted midshipman allotments. This nineteen-year-old officer had been recommended by one of Banks’s old and admired colleagues, William Wales, who had been the astronomer on Cook’s second voyage, and who was now mathematical master at Christ’s Hospital, that extraordinary charity school that educated, among other luminaries, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; indeed, some of the haunting ice imagery of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ comes from William Wales’s description of crossing into Antarctic waters on Cook’s voyage. Wales taught mathematics, astronomy, navigational skills and surveying at Christ’s Hospital, the object of his particular attention being that circle of boys destined for sea careers. Lamb, describing his old teacher, claimed that ‘all his systems were adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to encounter. Frequent and severe punishments, which were expected to be borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to be his only aim.’

      Wales was also secretary to the Board of Longitude and had been responsible for publishing the scientific observations of Cook’s voyage – he was, then, a man for whom Banks had high regard.

      ‘I beg leave to trouble you with the Name of the Young Gentleman who is desirous of going with Capt. Bligh and whom I mentioned to you sometime since,’ Wales wrote to Banks on 8 August. ‘It is Mr. Thomas Hayward, Son of Mr. Hayward, a surgeon at Hackney.’ The young man who was the object of Wales’s interest was the eldest son of nine surviving children. Thomas Hayward had entered the navy’s books as a captain’s servant aboard the Halifax at the tender age of seven, where he served, on the books at least, for the next four years. From age eleven to fourteen, however, Hayward was not at sea, but was presumably being schooled. In 1782, he was back on the navy’s books and for the next five years served as able seaman or midshipman aboard a number of ships. He came to the Bounty from the 24-gun frigate Porcupine, which had been patrolling off the Irish coast. Possibly no other promising young gentleman in His Majesty’s Royal Navy was to endure such a spectacular run of bad professional fortune as Thomas Hayward.

      Over the next weeks, the rest of the crew continued to trickle in, acquired from other ships, from former service with Bligh or from those with interest to get them their positions. A number of these deserted: the names John Cooper, George Armstrong, William Hudson, Samuel Sutton, marked ‘R’ for ‘Run’, are among those that appear on the Bounty muster only briefly before vanishing from this story. These desertions included the company’s only two pressed men, seamen forced against their will into the King’s service. Bligh claimed that it was only after leaving Tenerife that he ‘now made the ship’s company acquainted with the intent of the voyage’, but it is unlikely that the men had remained in ignorance until this time; the preparations themselves would have given much away. Thomas Ledward, the young assistant surgeon, reported excitedly to his uncle before the Bounty sailed that he had agreed to go ‘to Otaheite to transplant Bread fruit trees to Jamaica’, which would indicate there were no secrets here. It is a striking fact that, with the desertion of the pressed men, the Bounty carried an all-volunteer crew; surely her destination – Tahiti, the Pacific islands – was one reason.

      Little is known of William Cole, the boatswain and another of the warrant officers, apart from the fact that this was the third naval ship on which he had served. A great deal is known, however, about the boatswain’s mate, James Morrison – fortunately, for he was to play an important role in the story of the Bounty. Morrison was a native of Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis off the western coast of Scotland. His family was descended from several generations of educated Lewismen and even local hereditary judges, while his father was a merchant and land entrepreneur of education and some means. As events would show, the twenty-seven-year-old Morrison was exceptionally – dangerously – well educated, and although almost certainly Gaelic speaking, fluent and literate in English, and with at least a passing knowledge of Latin. One of the ways in which Morrison was to exercise his superior intellect was by writing a narrative of the Bounty voyage, which included a lengthy and well-observed description of life on Tahiti, as well as the voyage and aftermath of the Pandora. It was written several years after the events described, while he was a prisoner on the Hector awaiting trial for his life, circumstances that very directly coloured some of his ‘recollections’.

      At five foot eight, Morrison was of above-average height and of slender build, with sallow skin and long black hair; a musket wound on his arm was a memento of action seen in service. He had joined the navy at the age of eighteen, and had since served on several ships in an intriguing variety of capacities: as a clerk on the Suffolk, a midshipman on the Termagant, acting gunner on the Hind. In 1783, at twenty-three, Morrison passed his master gunner’s examination, having shown proficiency, according to the examiners, in ‘Vulgar and Decimal Arithmetic, the extraction of the Square and Cube Roots, and in practical Problems of Geometry and Plain Trigonometry.’ This success, however, did not provide any material advantage. Like many during those ‘weak, piping times of peace’, Morrison seems to have been without a ship. At any rate, he does not surface in any known naval records until he appears as a boatswain’s mate on the muster of the Bounty.

      In this capacity, his duties were to assist William Cole in his continual inspection of sails, rigging and boats. It was also Morrison who would administer all floggings; on a ship of the line, the boatswain’s mate was said to be ‘the most vocal, and the most feared, of the petty officers.’ Still, boatswain’s mate was a step down from master gunner and one must suspect either an urgent need for employment or a passion to see something of the world in his willingness to sign on to the Bounty in this lower position.

      William Peckover, the Bounty’s actual gunner, had sailed with Cook on every one of his voyages. He therefore knew Tahiti and was also known to Bligh from the third expedition. William Purcell, the carpenter, made up the complement of warrant officers; the Bounty was his first ship of naval service. All of these men were at least minimally educated, as the Admiralty regulations stated that no person could be placed in charge of stores ‘unless he can read and write, and is sufficiently skilled in arithmetic to keep an account of them correctly’; all warrant officers had responsibilities for stores of some kind. Importantly, too, no warrant officer could be flogged.

      Joseph Coleman, the thirty-six-year-old armourer, had also sailed with Cook and Bligh, having been mustered as an AB on the Discovery in 1776. Another man from Cook’s third voyage was David Nelson, the gardener, who had originally been recommended to Banks by a Hammersmith nurseryman. Banks had personally selected him for the breadfruit voyage on respectable terms of £50 a year. According to a shipmate from the Discovery, Nelson was ‘one of the quietest fellows in nature’. His assistant, William Brown, aged twenty-three and from Leicester, had also been selected by Banks. Although now a gardener, Brown had formerly served as a midshipman, when he had seen fierce action against the French – how or why he had gone from the one profession to the other is not known. Both Nelson and Brown were practical, hands-on gardeners, not botanists; Banks