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

islets and even reefs in the vicinity. The belief that the mutineers might be at large nearby caused everyone to move with great circumspection. One party camping overnight on the island were woken abruptly when a coconut they had placed on their campfire exploded. “[E]xpecting muskets to be fired at them from every bush,” Dr. Hamilton explained, “they all jumped up, seized their arms, and were some time before they could undeceive themselves, that they were really not attacked.”
     
    As the various small craft tacked to and fro around the island, Edwards remained with Pandora, cruising offshore and making the occasional coconut run. On the afternoon of May 24, one of the midshipmen, John Sival, returned in the cutter with several striking painted canoes; but after these were examined and admired, he was sent back to complete his orders. Shortly after he left, thick weather closed in, obscuring the little craft as she bobbed dutifully back to shore, and was followed by an ugly squall that did not lift for four days. When the weather cleared on the twenty-eighth, the yawl had disappeared. Neither she nor her company of five men was ever seen again.
     
    “It may be difficult to surmise what has been the fate of these unfortunate men,” Dr. Hamilton wrote, adding hopefully that they “had a piece of salt-beef thrown into the boat to them on leaving the ship; and it rained a good deal that night and the following day, which might satiate their thirst.”
     
    By now, too, it was realized that the tantalizing clues of the Bounty ’s presence were only flotsam.
     
    “[T]he yard and these things lay upon the beach at high water Mark & were all eaten by the Sea Worm which is a strong presumption they were drifted there by the Waves,” Edwards reported. It was concluded that they had drifted from Tubuai, where the mutineers had reported that the Bounty had lost most of her spars. These few odds and ends of worm-eaten wood were all that were ever found by Pandora of His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty.
     
    The fruitless search apart, morale on board had been further lowered by the discovery, as Dr. Hamilton put it, “that the ladies of Otaheite had left us many warm tokens of their affection.” The men confined within Pandora’s Box were also far from well. Their irons chafed them badly, so much so that while they were still at Matavai Bay, Joseph Coleman’s legs had swollen alarmingly and the arms of McIntosh and Ellison had become badly “galled.” To the complaint that the irons were causing their wrists to swell, Lieutenant John Larkan had replied that “they were not intended to fit like Gloves!” Edwards had an obsessive fear that the mutineers might “taint” his crew and, under threat of severe punishment, had forbidden any communication between the parties whatsoever; but from rough memos he made, it seems he was unsuccessful. “Great difficulty created in keeping the Mutineers from conversing with the crew,” Edwards had jotted down, elsewhere noting that one of his lieutenants suspected that the prisoners had “carried on a correspondence with some of our people by Letter.”
     
    From Duke of York Island down to the rest of the Union Islands (Tokelau), thence to the Samoas, the Pandora continued her futile search. To aid them in making rough landfalls, Lieutenants Corner and Hayward donned cork jackets and plunged boldly into the surf ahead of the landing boats. Parakeets were purchased on one island, splendid birds resembling peacocks on another, and on others still the use of the islands’ women. Striking sights were enjoyed—the large skeleton of a whale, for example, and a deserted shrine with an altar piled with white shells. They had even discovered whole islands, whose newly bestowed names would form a satisfying addition to the report Edwards would eventually turn over to the Admiralty. In short, the Pandora had discovered a great deal—but nothing at all that pertained to the missing