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

as far back as the Atholls. This inability to assume any responsibility, let alone culpability, for his actions so incensed his employer that the Duke felt compelled to offer a personal rebuke. For years, he observed to Mr Heywood, ‘you have been living in a Stile of profusion far beyond your fortune, and to the detriment of your own Children spending money belonging to another.’

      Mr Heywood’s sudden loss of employment had brought disaster to his family, who were forced to move out of their house, which was the Duke’s property. On the other hand, the disgrace of Mr Heywood’s offence was studiously concealed and there is no whisper of any misdeed in all the Heywood papers down through the decades after this. Apparently unashamed, the children seemed to have passed through life with all their illusions of superior gentility intact.

      Peter had been sent away to school at the age of eleven, first to Nantwich school in Cheshire and then, briefly, also to St Bees, at which establishments he would have received a gentleman’s usual diet of religious instruction and Latin. His teacher at Nantwich had published books on Livy and Tacitus, and so one may hazard that young Peter had his fill of these. Unlike Fletcher, however, a seagoing career of some kind had probably been on the cards for Peter, regardless of changed family circumstances; the number of naval and military careers in the Heywood pedigree suggests this was an honoured tradition. Peter’s first naval service had been aboard the Powerful, in 1786. The Powerful, however, had never left Plymouth Harbour. As this represented his only naval experience prior to joining the Bounty, he had not yet served at sea.

      Peter’s position as a young gentleman and an AB on the Bounty came through the sympathetic and pitying offices of William Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, a friend of the Heywoods. ‘He is an ingenious young Lad & has always been a favorite of mine & indeed every body here,’ Betham wrote to Bligh from Douglas, thanking him for taking Peter under his wing. ‘And indeed the Reason of my insisting so strenuously upon his going the Voyage with you is that after I had mentioned the matter to Mrs Bligh, his Family have fallen into a great deal of Distress on account of their Father’s losing the Duke of Atholl’s Business, and I thought it would not appear well in me to drop this matter if it cou’d possibly be done without any prejudice to you, as this wou’d seem deserting them in their adversity, and I found they wou’d regard it as a great Disappointment.’ Betham did not apparently envisage young Peter’s duties as being particularly nautical. ‘I hope he will be of some Service to you, so far as he is able, in writing or looking after any necessary matters under your charge,’ Betham had added, vaguely.

      In the summer of 1787, Mr Heywood accompanied his son from the Isle of Man to Liverpool. Here he bade Peter goodbye, entrusting him to the care of friends who were travelling to London by chaise along the long, rough road, each carrying a pair of loaded pistols as a guard against highwaymen. Once at Deptford, as another token of Bligh’s efforts for the young man, Peter stayed with Bligh and his wife at their lodgings while the Bounty was being equipped. Christian had relatives in London of his own to visit, including an uncle and his brother John, who had moved here after his bankruptcy. Given Christian’s already close association with Bligh, it would be incredible that he too did not visit the Bligh household at this time. ‘You have danced my children upon your knee,’ Bligh would remind the master’s mate at a later date.

      Also joining the Bounty, rated as a nominal AB, was another fallen aristocrat of sorts, twenty-one-year-old Edward Young. Edward was the nephew of Sir George Young, a distinguished naval captain and future admiral who had served in both the Royal Navy and the East India Company. ‘As I do not know all his exploits,’ one memorialist offered breezily, ‘I can only state that he was employed…in several services requiring nautical skill and British courage.’ Since 1784, George Young had been an advocate, with Sir Joseph Banks, of establishing the New South Wales colony, which he envisaged would serve as a port of call for ships on the China trade and more unexpectedly a centre for the cultivation of flax. A paper outlining his proposal became a cornerstone of the government’s eventual establishment of a penal colony near Botany Bay. It is probable that it was through his connection with Banks that Young had approached Bligh about a position for Edward.

      However, there is no family record of a nephew called Edward. On the Bounty muster, Edward is entered as coming from ‘St Kitt’s’, and a near contemporary reference mentions him as ‘half-caste’. He was described by Bligh as roughly five foot eight in height, with a dark complexion ‘and rather a bad look’. Young had dark brown hair, was ‘Strong Made’ and had ‘lost several of his Fore teeth, and those that remain are all Rotten; a Small Mole on the left Side of the throat.’ If Edward was indeed a nephew of Sir George, it is most likely that his father had been Robert Young, a younger brother who had died in 1781 on St Helena while captain of the East India Company’s Vansittart. Whereas other distinguished families associated with the Bounty would be loud in their opinions, news of the mutiny was met with a thundering silence by the Youngs. If Edward had been born on the wrong side of the blanket, there may have been relief when he vanished from the picture altogether.

      Yet another young gentleman, George Stewart from the Orkney Islands, joined the Bounty as a midshipman, but was rerated AB before the ship sailed (the ship’s fixed allotment of two midshipman positions required judicious management on Bligh’s part). Bligh had met Stewart seven years earlier, when the Resolution had called at Stromness at the end of her long and harrowing voyage. In their home, the Whitehouse, overlooking the harbour and the bustling town with its inns and taverns, Alexander and Margaret Stewart, George’s parents, had entertained Bligh.

      Like so many of the Bounty’s young gentlemen, George Stewart could trace an old and distinguished lineage. His father’s family could be traced back to King Robert II, in the thirteenth century; his mother could trace her descent back to Danes who had settled the Orkneys in the ninth century. Alexander Stewart had been born and lived on Ronaldsay in the Orkneys, but had moved to Stromness for his children’s schooling; he and his wife had eight children, of whom George was the eldest. Apparently, when word of the Bounty’s voyage reached them, the Stewarts had reminded Bligh of their former acquaintance; surely the stories the young master had told the Stewart family seven years earlier, upon his return from the Pacific had made George’s interest in this particular voyage especially keen.

      When he came down to Deptford to join the Bounty, George Stewart was twenty-one years old and ‘five feet seven inches high’, according to Bligh, who continued with an unprepossessing description: ‘High, good Complexion, Dark Hair, Slender Made, Narrow chested, and long Neck, Small Face and Black Eyes.’

      The last of the Bounty’s young gentlemen was fifteen-year-old John Hallett from London, the son of John Hallett, an architect, and his wife, Hannah. He had four younger brothers, all of whom would later be employed by the East India Company, and one half-sister, the ‘natural child’ of Mr Hallett. Midshipman Hallett’s father was a wealthy man, with a residence in Manchester Buildings, a gentlemen’s row of private houses situated just off the Thames, almost opposite Westminster Bridge and in strolling distance of St James’s Park. The Halletts, like the Haywards, belonged to the energetic, gentlemanly professional class possessed of actual skills – doctors and architects as opposed to seneschals or bankrupt country lawyers.

      Hallett Senior moved in a distinguished circle of artists, including members of the Royal Academy. His niece had married into a prosperous family of merchants and shipbuilders, with a home in fashionable Tunbridge, where Mr Hallett was often found. From diarist Joseph Farington, who recorded a number of dinners and other social occasions at which Mr Hallett was present, we are given a glimpse of the Bounty midshipman’s circle: ‘Mr. Hallett spoke of several persons who from a low beginning had made great fortunes,’ Farington noted after a London dinner, going on to describe a leather breeches maker now established on Bond Street and said to be worth £150,000. War with Russia would only ruin Russia’s trade, as England could do without her goods. A neighbour recently died having ‘expended £50,000 it was not well known how’ – all good solid, middle-class, mercantile discussion.

      Young John Hallett was already well on the road to a naval career when he joined the Bounty. He had been entered on the books as a lieutenant’s servant in 1777, at the age of five,