The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty Read Online Free PDF

island, filling the harbor around the ship. Men and women stripped their clothes and cut their heads in grief, and as the blood fell, cut again and cried aloud. Tynah came on board and, with tears streaming down his cheeks, begged to be remembered to his friend, the King of England.
     
    “This I believe was the first time that an Englishman got up his anchor, at the remotest part of the globe, with a heavy heart, to go home to his own country,” wrote Dr. Hamilton—an astonishing admission from a naval official who had come in search of deserting mutineers.
     
    On May 8, 1791, under pleasant breezes, the Pandora, recaulked and overhauled, left Tahiti with the mutineers’ schooner, Resolution, in tow. Edwards’s commission was far from fulfilled. Still missing was His Majesty’s stolen ship as well as the ringleader of the mutiny and his most hard-core followers.
     
    “Christian had been frequently heard to declare that he would search for an unknown or an uninhabited Island in which there was no harbour for Shipping, would run the Ship ashore, and get from her such things as would be useful to him and settle there,” Edwards recorded in his official report to the Admiralty, continuing with admirable understatement, “but this information was too vague to be follow’d in an immense Ocean strew’d with an almost innumerable number of known and unknown Islands.” Specifically, the Pacific contains more than twenty thousand islands scattered over some 64 million square miles. Christian and the Bounty had departed Tahiti in September 1789—a twenty-month head start, long enough to have taken the Bounty not only as far as North or South America, but, in theory, around the globe.
     
    Edwards’s instructions from the Admiralty offered some guidance: If no knowledge of the mutineers had been gained at Tahiti, he was to venture west to Whytootackee (Aitutaki), “calling, in your way, at Huaheine and Uliatea.” If nothing was found here, he was to make a circuit of the neighboring islands. If nothing here, he was to continue west to the Friendly Islands (Tonga), “and, having succeeded, or failed,” to return to England, through the Endeavour Strait (Torres Strait) separating New Guinea from New Holland (Australia). Be mindful of prevailing winds, the Admiralty admonished, “there being no dependence (of which we have any certain knowledge) of passing the Strait after the month of September. . . .”
     
    For roughly the next three months Edwards doggedly followed the Admiralty’s prescribed itinerary in a desultory chase from island to island. At each landfall, a uniformed officer was disembarked and in the cloying heat tramped along the beach, offering presents and seeking information. Anchored offshore, the Pandora received the now customary canoe loads of eager visitors. Spears, clubs and other curios were collected, differences among the islanders, who appeared “ruder” and less civilized as the Pandora progressed, were duly noted, but no hint of the Bounty ’s whereabouts emerged.
     
    A week out from Tahiti, Hilbrant, one of the mutineers, volunteered that Christian had spoken to him on the day before his departure of his intention to make for an uninhabited island that he knew from earlier accounts to be “situated to the Westward of the Islands of Danger.” This description seemed to refer to Duke of York Island (Atafu) but was to prove to be another dead end. En route, however, Edwards stopped off at Palmerston Island (Avarau) and sent his boats ashore to search that isle’s bays and inlets. Two of these returned in the late afternoon full of coconuts, and nothing more. But that night the tender arrived with hopeful news: it had discovered some spars and a yard marked “Bounty’s Driver Yard” embossed with the Admiralty’s broad arrow mark.
     
    Over the next two days, the ship’s craft—a cutter, two yawls and the mutineers’ schooner—were dispatched to examine the island as well as