Dan Snow's History Hit - Mutiny on The Bounty

Episode Date: August 14, 2022

Numerous novels, TV shows and as many as 5 movies- including the Hollywood classic starring Clarke Gable and Marlon Brando - have immortalised the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty in the popular imagination forever. The mutiny on the HMS Bounty occurred in the South Pacific Ocean on 28 April 1789. Disaffected crewmen, led by acting-Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, seized control of the ship from their captain, Lieutenant Bligh, and set him and eighteen loyalists adrift in a rowing boat. The mutineers settled on Tahiti and Pitcairn Island, while Bligh navigated more than 4,000 miles in the rowing boat to safety. and began the process of bringing the mutineers to justice.Direct descendent of lead mutineer Fletcher Christian, Harrison Christian joins Dan on the podcast to seperate the myth from the truth in this epic tale of a rebellious crew, a mammoth journey and a lost colony in the far-flung tropics of the Pacific Ocean. The legends started when William Bligh returned to Britain and immediately rewrote the facts of what happened to fit his narrative; novelists and film-writers have been doing the same ever since.The producer was Mariana Des Forges and the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hey everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On the 28th of April 1789, the most famous mutiny in British history took place. The mutiny on HMS Bounty, a Royal Navy vessel, if you can believe it, the crew of a Royal Navy vessel mutiny against their captain, Lieutenant William Bly. Led by his former protege, his great friend, Fletcher Christian, the crew seized control of the ship and they set him and 18 loyalists on a ship's open launch. The mutineers then headed, well, some went to Tahiti, others went for Pitcairn Island. Bly, amazingly, made one of the great open boat journeys of all time.

You heard me talk about Shackleton a lot on this podcast. Well, this is one of the other great open boat journeys of all time. You heard me talk about Shackleton a lot on this podcast. Well, this is one of the other great open boat journeys in history. 3,500 miles, Bly went from the point of mutiny in the South Pacific to Indonesia, the Dutch colony in Indonesia, where he was able to arrange passage home to the UK. In this episode, I'm talking to a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian. He's going to help me separate the myth from the reality. I'm going to talk about the mutiny. We'll talk about Bly, Christian, and what happened on Pitcairn Island. That is Harrison Christian. He's a journalist. He's an author. He's written a great book called Men Without Country, all about this. And it's great to have him on the podcast. Here's Harrison Christian. Enjoy.

Harrison, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thrilled to be here, Dan. Thanks for having me. I mean, the second name is a bit of a tell, the descendant. Was this exciting, going back and writing the story of your forebear? Absolutely. I mean, I grew up just steeped in this stuff. My father brought me into the fold in early age, as it were. And yeah, I grew up with the movies. And when I went to bed, my father would bring me these books about the mutiny. And I was always fascinated by it. It always excited me. Did you grow up on Pitcairn Island or did your family move off the island subsequently?

My father and I were both born and raised in New Zealand. So Fletcher Christian, when he reached his final refuge in the Pacific, Pitcairn Island, he had three children with his Tahitian partner, Moatua. And those were Thursday October Christian, Charles Christian, and Mary Christian. And so my line goes back to Charles Christian, Fletcher's second son. And Charles had a son, Isaac Christian, who was part of the general relocation of the bounty descendants from Pitcairn Island to Norfolk Island, which is another very small remote island in the Pacific between Australia and New Zealand. The British government relocated the bounty descendants to Norfolk Island in the mid-19th century, after the colony had been

discovered, obviously. And so my grandfather, John Christian, was born on Norfolk Island and migrated to New Zealand when he was a young boy. Well, let's go back and talk about your ancestor and his relationship with William Bly, the captain of the Bounty. They knew each other before serving on that voyage, didn't they? They did, Dan. In fact, they were friends. They'd sailed together on two trading runs to the West Indies when Bly was a rum and sugar captain. He was sailing these merchant ships to the West Indies. And it seems from the evidence that Bly and Christian had a kind of mentor-pupil relationship, because on their second voyage to the West Indies, Bly promoted Christian to second mate.

And before the bounty voyage, Bly had actually hoped for Christian to serve as master of the bounty, the officer in charge of the ship's navigation. The admiralty turned him down on account of Christian's inexperience. So Christian ended up signing on as master's mate. But then halfway through the outward voyage, Bly actually ended up promoting Christian to acting lieutenant so all of that suggests to me that Bly was a kind of mentor of Christian probably in a similar way that Captain James Cook had once been a mentor to Bly when Bly was just 21 years old and he came on to Cook's third and final expedition to the Pacific as master and so so you're right, Dan, not only do they know each other, but they were friends, they were family friends,

and it appears the Christian was Bly's pupil. So they set off to gather breadfruit from the Pacific Islands to be taken to the Caribbean as food for enslaved people. What was it about conditions on board the ship that pushed people eventually towards mutiny? Well, the contention in my book is that it was all about food, which is not what Bly claimed the issue was when he made it back to England. So after he was cast adrift and he made this incredible journey from Tonga to Timor across 4,000 nautical miles, navigating only by dead reckoning with 18 of his loyal supporters in this uncovered longboat.

It was an incredible feat that he accomplished. But when he gets to England, he claims that the mutiny was carefully planned behind his back and that the chief cause of it was that his officers were desperate to return to Tahiti because of the female connections that they'd formed there. What I try to show in the book is that this is a complete fabrication and really the spark for the mutiny was food. While the mutiny was unfolding, food was all anyone was talking about. They were speaking of being starved, of having short rations, and let Bly see if he can live on three-fourths of a pound of yams per day. And essentially, Bly, as the purser of the ship,

which is the role which determines how the ship's rations and allowances are allocated, he was extremely parsimonious with food, almost to the point of obsession, it seems. And that, to me, seems to be the spark that caused the mutiny. Crazy decision for him to take on the job of purser as well as captain, because the purser's the guy everyone loves to hate. Exactly, Dan. Everyone hates the purser, or the pusser, as they called them.

And in the past, captains like James Cook were always wise enough to delegate that role to a secretary or someone else to be captain and purser is asking for conflict really because as purser it's in Bly's interest to sell back any surplus provisions once he gets back to England and so so the person traditionally was always looked on with deep suspicion by sailors in the Royal Navy, and justifiably so. And Bly has got a reputation as a strict disciplinarian. Is that fair? Was he any worse than his contemporaries in the Georgian Royal Navy?

It's a good question. And that is one area where Bly was wronged by history. I don't know if you've seen any of the Mutiny on the Bounty films through the 19th century. There was one in the 30s which showed Bly as a sadistic tyrant essentially, someone who relished physical punishment in the lash and that isn't true. In fact, we know that Bly flogged his sailors less often than other captains, including James Cook. And in fact, when the bounty set sail, Bly openly said that it was his intention to undertake a voyage without any physical punishment at all. He wanted to undertake the perfect voyage. He didn't want a single case of scurvy and he didn't want a single case of flogging. So he was very reluctant to flog his

men. He did do it when it was justified. I mean, flogging was obviously in the 18th century, a staple of naval discipline, but he was reluctant to do it. And it was more, the way he rubbed his men the wrong way was, I think, more psychological and definitely more around rations and the lack of them. And indeed, it seems to be rations that leads to the final break between him and Fletcher Christian. Tell me about what the final straw was. Well, the day before the mutiny, now this is something that Bly never mentioned in his account of the mutiny. So when he got back to England, he very quickly published his narrative of the bounty voyage and the mutiny. It was a bestseller in England. He never mentioned

this incident the day before the mutiny that we know it happened because all the crew members corroborated it. It came up in the court martial of the captured mutineers years later. The day before the mutiny, Bly, it's a bit bizarre, he got it in his head that the seaman had been stealing from his private stash of coconuts on the bounty as she made her way from Tahiti to the West Indies. And so he called the entire ship's company together and he publicly accused Fletcher Christian of being the instigator of this theft

and essentially called Christian a thief and a coward and a scoundrel in front of all the other sailors, shook his fists in Christian's face. And when no one would come forward to admit that they were the coconut thief, if indeed there had been a coconut thief, he cut the seaman's rations down to three quarters of a pound of yams per day, which is why everyone was going on about yams during the mutiny. And so that incident happened the day before that night Christian made up his mind to actually desert the bounty. So the mutiny was not closely planned as, as I said, it was in fact completely spontaneous

not closely planned as as I said it was in fact completely spontaneous because Christian's plan was to desert the bounty and sail a raft to an island in Tonga to Fua and be done with it but it was because in the ensuing hours Christian was unable to find an opportunity to get away from the ship that he suddenly changed his mind and decided to take the ship instead. Tell me about the drama of that moment. Well, it was chaos because it was unplanned. It was completely spontaneous. So Christian falls asleep that night. He's got his raft together. Some of the men have been kind enough to give him some provisions so that he can take his chances and the islands and he falls asleep while he's waiting for this opportunity to launch his raft when he wakes up it's time for the morning watch so the sailors are emerging from the hatches and going about their duties and

it's in that moment while he's talking to those sailors some of these sailors are just as aggrieved as he is because they're hungry. They're on short rations. And after he confers with them, the idea of mutiny comes up. It starts to snowball. Before you know it, people are running below decks to try to recruit other men to the cause. And then someone's getting into the arms chests and handing out the muskets. And it's getting bigger and bigger. And while this is happening Christian is trying

to deliberate what he will actually do with Bly. Bly's brought up in his shirt sleeves onto the decks of the ship and some of the sailors can't even really decide what they want to do whether they will go with Bly or whether they'll stay with the ship. Going with Bly almost seems like suicide into this long boat but so does staying with the bounty because mutiny, obviously, it's a hangable offense. And so it's an incredible moment. And when I was writing about it, I could be very specific because moment by moment, there is a record of what was happening, of what was said, of who was standing where, because it's all in the court martial testimony and in the court-martial testimony

and in the testimony of the sailors who were involved. This isn't Dan Snow's history. We're talking about mutiny on the bounty, more coming up. Millions dead, a higher proportion of civilian casualties than in the Second World War. America, Britain, Russia and China all involved in a conflict that technically remains active to this day. So why is the Korean War of 1950-53 called the Forgotten War? This July,

we're dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out what this unique conflict was all about. Join me, James Rogers, throughout July on the Warfare podcast from History Hit, as we remember the war the world forgot. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research

from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions,

and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And so Christian decides to put Bly into the open boat, like a rowing boat with a small mast, expecting him to do what?

Like get to the nearest island and try and pick up a passing ship? Or was it a polite way of killing him? Was it basically a death sentence? Good question. It wasn't necessarily a death sentence because the boat was a few miles off Tofua in Tonga, this volcanic island. It was inhabited at the time. And the idea was that Blai would sail to Tafua and there he would be able to wait for a passing western ship. It didn't quite work out that way though, because when Bly turned up at Tafua, the Tongans could see that he had no ship and that he and his men were poorly armed and quite devoid of provisions. And they actually attacked Bly and his men. And that was where he lost one of his loyalists, was actually beaten to death. While they were trying to make this dramatic escape from the island,

they put off on the longboat. And it was at that point that Bly decided he wasn't going to try and depend on the hospitality of Polynesians any longer and in fact he would sail the 4,000 nautical miles to the Dutch East Indies and that involved going through the Fijian islands and Bligh was so shaken by what had happened in Tonga that he refused to call it any of those islands even though they looked lovely the beautiful green advising Fijian islands he refused to interact with Polynesians from that point onwards and he makes one of the great open boat journeys of all time and does indeed make it to the Dutch colony in Indonesia and manages to make it home an extraordinary story yep and he only lost one so the sailor who was beaten to death,

and Tonga was the only one who died during the voyage. But it isn't often mentioned that six other men died in the East Indies while Bly was arranging his passage home. But you're right, it was an incredible feat, and it shows how highly competent Bly was. It's my view that he was this highly, highly competent man who was also impossible to work with and that was his problem. What about Fletcher Christian on the bounty? Where does he take the bounty?

So once Bly has disappeared over the horizon, Fletcher and his supporters take stock and they decide to sail to Tubuai, which is an island south of Tahiti. And Fletcher's plan is to start his surreptitious colony there on Tubuai because English ships don't often call there. They tend to just sail to Tahiti. In fact, no Europeans have set foot on Tubuai. Cook has charted the island. He's sailed through the reef before, but never landed. And so they reach this island. They make the first proper contact with the indigenous people there. And they set about trying to build this fort in order to defend themselves from Polynesian

tribes and also any naval ships that might come and try and take them away. But the project is a bit of a disaster. The island isn't as hospitable as Tahiti was. They run into conflict with the local tribes. And Fletcher's support begins to wane as some of his supporters decide that they'd actually rather be on Tahiti than on Tubuai. So they end up holding a vote and 14 of Fletcher's supporters request to be taken to Tahiti. And nine of Fletcher's men say that they want to remain with him while he sets sail again in search of this time an uninhabited island where he can start the project again

and again try to set up this secret colony beyond the reach of the Royal Navy. And they choose Pitcairn Island, which was uninhabited until that point. How does that colonising mission go? Well, in the beginning it goes very well, and it was incredible luck that they were able to find Pitcairn because, as you say, it was uninhabited, which is what Fletcher wanted at that point. The Tuvawai mission had gone so badly that he decided wherever they settled, it had to be uninhabited. They could not be in competition with Polynesians anymore.

And that was a dilemma because almost all of the islands in the Pacific that were worth living on at that point were already inhabited. Polynesians had colonized the entire Pacific, except for one island, Pitcairn Island, which is a small island, but it's a high island. It has fresh water. And Christian came across a description of Pitcairn in Blaise's library on the bounty. And he read that it was uninhabited. It appeared to be uninhabited and that it had a freshwater source. And so he pinned his hopes on it. But the problem was that no Europeans knew exactly where Pitcairn was

because Philip Carter, the British navigator who had charted the island in the 1760s, had put it in the wrong place because he had used dead reckoning when he was plotting the island's coordinates and he actually placed it 200 miles west of its actual position because he'd got the longitude wrong. Anyway, Christian doesn't know this. He sails to the coordinates, the place where Pitcairn should be. He finds nothing but open sea. And he infers that Carter had got the longitude wrong, but that the latitude was probably correct. And so he sailed east along the line of latitude until he raised Pitcairn Island. And since Carter, no Europeans had seen Pitcairn, James Cook had once gone out of his way to clear up Dalitseville where it was and hadn't been able to find it again.

And so they found it. And it was for the mutineers and Christian, it was a triumph because they'd now found an island that was suitable for habitation that was also unknown to Western navigators of the time. Nobody knew where it was. So it was an incredible triumph. Was that colony a success? Did they thrive? From what we know about the early days, it seems that things very quickly went poorly for the colony. And it's such a shame because they had an incredible opportunity. Christian and his nine mutineers

and the 19 Tahitians who they brought with them, they had got what they wanted, essentially. They had an island to themselves. Nobody knew where they were. And they had this chance to start this colony from scratch and live out the rest of their days peacefully but that's not what happened and the reason for that seems to be that their little society was set up unequally from the outset

because the island was divided into nine equal portions, one for each mutineer, while the Tahitians were essentially treated as slaves. And the Tahitian men very quickly came to resent this and a lot of the tension that broke out over the ensuing years that resulted in the deaths of all of the mutineers bar one seems to have been racial tension and stemming from the resentment that the Tahitians had from being treated unequally.

And then we should say the mutineers that did remain in Tahiti, they were recaptured by the Royal Navy and many of them were hanged, weren't they? Yes, they were. All 14 men who decided to remain in Tahiti were captured by Captain Edward Edwards on the Pandora in the early 1790s. And so they were brought onto his ship. And on the way back to England, actually, they met with disaster. The Pandora sank on the Great Barrier Reef off the east coast of Australia. And four mutineers actually drowned in chains during the shipwreck. So it was just 10 who were brought back to England.

Now, some of these men were Bly loyalists who had been unable to go with Bly in the open boat for various reasons. And others were kind of a bit more ambivalent. So a couple of them, they'd been active mutineers. Some of them, it wasn't quite clear. So the 10 men made it back to England for court-martial, and in the end it was three men who were found to be guilty of mutiny and were hanged for it. And what about your ancestor? What about Fletcher Christian? Where do you end his days? It's an abiding mystery because there's no physical evidence

for Fletcher Christian's death on Pitcairn Island and there's also no physical evidence that he survived and returned to England as some people later claimed. But there is circumstantial evidence for his death on Pitcairn Island which I get into and I decide in the book that it's most likely that Christian was killed in a general uprising on the island around about 1793 when the Tahitians rose up against the white men. It seems that that's how he met his end. He would have been about 28. As I said earlier, he had three children with his Tahitian partner. But like I say, it is a bit of an abiding mystery. And I think that's part of why the story has endured for so long,

because there are all kinds of other theories about what happened to him as well. It is an extraordinary story. 1790s, revolutionary decade all around the world. Thank you very much for coming on and telling us this tale. What is your book called? It's called Men Without Country. Go and check it out, everyone. Men Without Country.

Thank you very much, Harrison, for coming on and talking to us about it. Pleasure, Dan. Thank you. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs,

this part of the history of our country, all were out.