Sextant: A Voyage Guided by the Stars and the Men Who Mapped the World’s Oceans

Colin was right about Bligh’s skills as a navigator. Bligh had sailed with Cook as master of the Resolution, a post to which he was appointed at the unusually early age of twenty-one. He seems to have enjoyed Cook’s approval; he certainly demonstrated great skill as a surveyor and draughtsman. But he was a difficult man. J. C. Beaglehole, in his magisterial life of Cook, says that he ‘saw fools about him too easily’, and that even at this early stage in his career he displayed ‘the thin-skinned vanity’ that was always to be his curse: ‘Bligh learnt a good deal from Cook: he never learnt that you do not make friends of men by insulting them.’

Bligh was actually involved in not one but three mutinies. These tempestuous events did not stop him reaching the rank of vice admiral,

but they have overshadowed his substantial achievements. Of these the most remarkable was his voyage in an overloaded 23-foot open boat after being set adrift by the Bounty mutineers in the Tonga Islands. The mutineers, led by the master’s mate, Fletcher Christian, comprised more than half the Bounty’s crew, and they were – in Bligh’s words – ‘the most able men of the ship’s company’.

Bligh later speculated that the temptations of Tahiti were the main cause of the mutiny. The crew had just spent twenty-three lazy weeks there while the gardener prepared the breadfruit seedlings for transplantation to the West Indies, and discipline had inevitably suffered.

Bligh was not surprised that ‘a set of sailors, most of them void of connections’, should wish to ‘fix themselves in the midst of plenty on one of the finest islands of the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond anything that can be conceived’. However, he claimed to be aware of no discontent and bitterly complained that he had thought himself to be on the friendliest terms with Christian. So he felt not only shock but also a personal sense of betrayal when, just before sunrise on 28 April 1789, Christian, accompanied by three other men, came into Bligh’s cabin, tied his hands behind his back and threatened him ‘with instant death’ if he made the least noise. While Christian held a bayonet to his throat, the members of the crew who had refused to join the mutiny were put over the ship’s side into the launch. The captain’s clerk tried to save Bligh’s surveys and drawings, but was forbidden to do so. Nor was Bligh allowed to take the chronometer or any charts. At last he himself was forced to board the open boat, which was promptly cast adrift. Equipped only with a sextant and compass,

and very limited supplies of bread, pork, water, rum and wine, Bligh now faced the almost overwhelming challenge of bringing to safety the eighteen men who accompanied him.

Bligh decided first to lay in a supply of breadfruit and water at the nearby island of Tofoa (now Tofua), but this plan went badly wrong. They were able to obtain very little in the way of provisions, and the natives – some of whom recalled Bligh from his visit to the Tongan archipelago with Cook fifteen years earlier – turned hostile when they realized the sailors were poorly armed and quite alone. Eventually they gathered on the beach, menacingly knocking stones together, and Bligh – who had witnessed Cook’s death – saw that an attack was imminent. He ordered all his men to get aboard the boat as quickly as possible, but stones began to fly and a member of the crew who had run back up the beach to cast off was clubbed to death. Bligh cut the painter and they escaped, under a barrage of well-aimed missiles, leaving their unfortunate comrade behind.

Despite the desperate shortage of supplies, Bligh and his companions decided not to risk landing on any of the neighbouring islands. Instead they headed west for Timor, in the Dutch East Indies, some 3,600 nautical miles away, as it was the nearest place where they could be sure to find help – and report the mutiny. To give some sense of the scale of this voyage, that is roughly the distance from Land’s End to the north-east coast of Brazil.

Shortly after leaving Tofua they were caught in a heavy gale:

the sea ran very high, so that between the seas the sail was becalmed, and when on the top of the sea it was too much to have set: but we could not venture to take in the sail for we were in very imminent danger and distress, the sea curling over the stern of the boat, which obliged us to bail with all our might. A situation more distressing has perhaps seldom been experienced.

Everything now depended on Bligh’s exceptional navigational skills and remarkable memory. Taking observations with the sextant to determine their latitude – a difficult feat in an overcrowded boat often tossed about in heavy seas – while keeping track of their westerly progress with the help of a makeshift log-line,

Bligh sailed towards the Great Barrier Reef, setting their course in accordance with his apparently detailed recollection of the charts he had been forced to leave behind. The food and water now had to be very strictly rationed. Such was Bligh’s devotion to duty that, even in these desperate circumstances, he continued to keep careful notes of the islands they passed – including the Fiji group which they were the first Europeans to discover – recording their latitudes and estimating their longitudes as best he could. In addition to their growing hunger and thirst, the lack of space made life on board the boat ‘very miserable’. Bligh kept half the crew sitting up on watch while the other half lay down in the bottom, or on the chest in which they kept their small supply of bread:

Our limbs were dreadfully cramped, for we could not stretch them out; and the nights so cold, and we so constantly wet, that, after a few hours sleep, we could scarce move.

After three weeks things were starting to look hopeless. An occasional teaspoon or two of rum or wine helped to keep their spirits up, and the redoubtable Bligh survived almost without sleep. Another gale brought them to the brink of disaster, but even then Bligh was still taking sights:

At noon it blew very hard, and the foam of the sea kept running over our stern and quarters; I however got propped up, and made an observation of the latitude, in 14° 17' S; course N 85° W, distance 130 miles; longitude made 29° 38' W.

The misery we suffered this night exceeded the preceding. The sea flew at us with great force, and kept us bailing with horror and anxiety … At dawn of day I found everyone in a most distressed condition, and I began to fear that another such night would put an end to the lives of several, who seemed no longer to support their sufferings.

When the weather eventually improved the heat of the sun became a serious problem, but the appearance of large numbers of birds, and the sight of stationary clouds on the western horizon, at last suggested that they were approaching land. In the middle of the night the helmsman heard the sound of breakers, and Bligh woke to see them ‘close under our lee, not more than a quarter of a mile distant from us’: they had made their landfall on the Great Barrier Reef, just as Bligh had intended. The following day they began to search for a gap through which they could pass:

The sea broke furiously over every part … I now found that we were embayed, for we could not lie clear with the sails, the wind having backed against us; and the sea set in so heavy towards the reef, that our situation was become unsafe. We could effect but little with the oars, having scarce the strength to pull them; and I began to apprehend that we should be obliged to attempt pushing over the reef. Even this I did not despair of effecting with success, when happily we discovered a break in the reef …

Having passed within the reef Bligh took a mer alt in order to determine the latitude of the channel through which he had just passed – 12 degrees 51 minutes South – and recorded his DR longitude: 40 degrees 10 minutes West of Tofua. In fact the distance is more like 32 degrees, which goes to show just how hard it is to estimate the rate of progress at sea, even for an expert like Bligh. They then headed north, looking for a convenient place to land where they would not be at risk of attack from the natives. They found a suitable island and feasted on oysters and berries, their morale much improved. It now began to look as if they might have a chance of surviving. To be able to sleep ashore was, in Bligh’s view, almost as valuable to them as food.

Bligh followed the coast of Cape York Peninsula to the north, and passed through the Torres Strait into the open sea to the west, just as Cook had done in 1770. Given the extraordinary intricacy of the navigation among the many reefs and islands, he dutifully felt he should record directions, and regretted his failure to do so:

I … think that a ship coming from the southward, will find a fair strait in the latitude of 10° S. I much wished to have ascertained this point; but in our distressful situation, any increase of fatigue, or loss of time, might have been attended with the most fatal consequences. I therefore determined to pass on without delay.

The remainder of the voyage was, if anything, even more testing than the earlier passage from Tonga. They survived on dried clams, and Bligh managed to catch a booby with his bare hands: he divided the blood among those who were in the worst condition and kept the rest of the bird for the next day. A small dolphinfish later gave them some relief, but the crew were growing steadily weaker, and Bligh began to fear that some of them would not last much longer. The boatswain ‘very innocently told me that he thought I looked worse than anyone in the boat. The simplicity with which he uttered such an opinion amused me and I returned him a better compliment.’

At three in the morning of 12 June 1789 they at last sighted land:

It is not possible for me to describe the pleasure which the blessing of the sight of this land diffused among us. It appeared scarcely credible to ourselves that, in an open boat, and so poorly provided, we should have been able to reach the coast of Timor in forty-one days after leaving Tofoa, having by that time run, by our log, a distance of 3618 miles; and that, notwithstanding our distress, no one should have perished in the voyage.

Bligh recalled that the Dutch settlement was at the south-west end of the island, so he headed that way, and finally found his way to Cupang (now Kupang), where he landed on 14 June. Although only one of the castaways had died (in the native attack on Tofua at the outset of the voyage), Bligh and his crew were a shocking sight, some scarcely able to walk as they struggled ashore:

An indifferent spectator would have been at a loss which most to admire: the eyes of famine sparkling at immediate relief, or the horror of their preservers at the sight of so many spectres, whose ghastly countenances, if the cause had been unknown, would rather have excited terror than pity. Our bodies were nothing but skin and bones, our limbs were full of sores, and we were clothed in rags: in this condition, with the tears of joy and gratitude flowing down our cheeks, the people of Timor beheld us with a mixture of horror, surprise and pity.

Unfortunately, their problems were by no means over. The Dutch East Indies were extremely unhealthy and the various endemic tropical illnesses, including malaria and dysentery, were to take a heavy toll on Bligh’s crew – as they did on so many European visitors. The Dutch Governor, himself fatally sick, nevertheless made sure that the castaways were well looked after, and on 20 August Bligh was at last able to take passage to Batavia (modern Jakarta) in a small schooner. On 14 March 1790 he reached Portsmouth with eleven out of the open boat’s original crew of nineteen. The remainder had died of illness either in Indonesia or on the homeward voyage. Fourteen of the mutineers who had decided to settle in Tahiti were hunted down there, and four of them drowned when the ship in which they were being brought home for trial was wrecked off the Great Barrier Reef. The ship’s name was Pandora and, predictably, the cage in which the unfortunate prisoners were being held came to be known as ‘Pandora’s box’. Three of the surviving mutineers were hanged, but another, the young midshipman Peter (‘Pip’) Heywood, was pardoned and later enjoyed an illustrious career as a marine surveyor.

The ringleader, Fletcher Christian, and eight others, together with some men and women from Tahiti, escaped to Pitcairn Island, where they remained unmolested even after they were discovered there in 1808. Their descendants live there today.

To have brought an overladen open boat across nearly 4,000 miles of tropical sea, without charts and with grossly inadequate provisions, stands as one of the most remarkable feats in the history of seafaring. Of course luck must have played a part in Bligh’s survival and that of his crew, as did their powers of endurance: they were certainly a tough group of men. Bligh’s own bloody-minded determination to see the mutineers brought to justice probably helped to keep him going. Were it not for his skill with the sextant and geographical memory, however, they would have had no hope of reaching Cupang. The mutineers no doubt had reason to complain about their commander’s behaviour, but they fatally underestimated his extraordinary navigational abilities.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_8122da8d-16be-5cf4-a6ee-3f87418aff19)

Anson’s Ordeals (#ulink_8122da8d-16be-5cf4-a6ee-3f87418aff19)

Day 6: Up again at 0400. Colin says we’re very close to where the Titanic went down. More fabulous weather with wind S force 2–3. Sighted a Sanko Line ship and tried to raise her on the radio-telephone – no luck. More sextant practice.

After supper Colin talked about his time as Gunnery Officer on board the battleship Prince of Wales when she and the battle cruiser Hood were in pursuit of the German battleship Bismarck. When the battle started Bismarck had the ‘windward station’ – this gave her an advantage, just as in the days of sail. Bismarck’s rangefinders were pointing downwind whereas Prince of Wales and Hood were ploughing into heavy seas that showered theirs with spray. If Colin’s guns had found Bismarck’s range sooner she would have had to alter course and maybe Hood would have survived. But Prince of Wales did manage to score a crucial hit on Bismarck.

There were tears in his eyes.

We also talked about the Battle of Jutland. Colin said that the British Commander-in-Chief had struggled to determine his exact position as he was closing with the German fleet because poor visibility had prevented any sights being taken. Strange to think that these great warships relied on sextant and chronometer to find their way – just like us.

Saecwen was not much better equipped in navigational terms than the Bounty. Like Bligh we steered by magnetic compass and fixed our position by the sun and stars. It is true we had a ‘Walker’ log to measure the distance we travelled through the water – a mechanical device that sat on the stern counting the turns of a brass impellor that we trailed behind us. This was more sophisticated than the kind of log that Bligh would have used, but it was still a piece of nineteenth-century technology. In addition to an old-fashioned lead-line, we had an electronic echo sounder and a radio direction-finder (RDF), both of which would have amazed Bligh. But the echo sounder could measure depths down to a few hundred feet at best, so it was helpful only in coastal waters, and since the marine radio beacons had a range of no more than a couple of hundred miles the latter too was of little use to us in mid-ocean. Fairly accurate radio-based navigation systems, like LORAN, had been developed during the Second World War, but the receivers were bulky and expensive and we did not have one. Early forms of satellite navigation were already available but only for military purposes, and GPS was still on the drawing board. We carried a radio-telephone, which turned out to be very temperamental, but apart from flares we had no other means of calling for help in an emergency.

Saecwen herself was ten years old, and handsome without being flashy. She would now be regarded as a ‘classic’ yacht. With a long, deep keel, she was slow and heavy by modern standards, and a bit the worse for wear after her tough outward passage across the Atlantic. We had already had to repair some of her sails, and rust stains were starting to trickle down her white topsides. Most new yachts were already being built of glass fibre-reinforced plastic (GRP), with aluminium masts and stainless-steel rigging and deck fittings, but Saecwen was old fashioned. She was built almost entirely of traditional materials – a teak deck, with a wooden mast and hull of copper-fastened mahogany planks on oak frames. Beneath the sliding main hatch – at the forward end of the cockpit – a few steps descended into the cabin. The galley, with a small two-burner gas-fired stove and a tiny sink, was immediately on the left, while the chart table with the temperamental radio-telephone and RDF set lay on the right.

Beyond the galley and the chart table was the saloon, a space perhaps 10 feet by 8 with a table in the middle and a settee berth on either side. It was lined with lockers – one marked with a red cross for the medical kit – and there were small bookshelves with bars to hold in their contents in heavy weather. Three oblong windows let in light at deck level on either side. Beyond the main bulkhead lay the ‘heads’ – a miniature pump-action lavatory – and the fo’c’s’l where there were two more berths and stowage for oilskins and sails. Small electric lights were dotted around the cabin but most of the time we relied on brass oil lamps.

Below deck Saecwen had a very particular smell I can still vividly recall – a musty mixture of damp timbers, diesel oil, paraffin, oilskins and dirty clothes, coupled with the scent of the ripening fruit and vegetables in the cargo nets overhead. Not very appealing perhaps, but it was far better than the sharp scent of epoxy resin that never quite vanishes from GRP boats. Being built throughout of wood Saecwen even sounded different from a plastic yacht: footsteps on deck and the thump of waves against the hull were muted and distant, and partly for that reason her white-painted saloon felt especially cosy. The eighteenth-century navigators would have felt quite at home aboard her.

The fast-spinning impellor that trailed at the end of the log-line skipped through our boiling wake as we continued reaching fast to the east under full sail. We passed through patches of yellow Gulf weed, and a sharp dorsal fin slowly zigzagging through the water, like a hound picking up a trail, revealed the presence of a large shark. A half-inflated purplish plastic bag floated by, a depressing reminder of man’s polluting habits, until on closer inspection it turned out to be a Portuguese man-of-war – a medusa, trailing its long blue fringe of stinging tendrils.

The fine weather continued and we fell into an easy routine, eating together, taking sights and otherwise either sleeping or standing watch – four hours on, four hours off at night for Colin and me, with more flexibility during the day when Alexa helped us out. Every twenty-four hours we recorded good runs of 150 miles or more, the fore hatch stood open and the steady draught of warm air gradually dried out everything down below. On deck everything was now covered with a sparkling rime of salt crystals. We hardly had to touch the sheets, and the self-steering gear

kept us on a steady course relative to the wind. Apart from navigation and preparing food, there was little to do apart from keeping a lookout, reading and occasionally writing up the log.

We kept a close eye on the western sky for any change in the weather – sometimes clouds would pile up as the sun went down, but then the night would be clear and dawn would bring in another perfect day. The barometer remained high and steady; even Colin had rarely known such beautiful sailing.

‘Food’, I wrote in my journal, ‘becomes a major interest and it matters far more than usual that it should be good. In fact good fresh food on a plate and plenty to drink are the main things one misses. Also keeping reasonably clean.’ We still had some apples, potatoes, eggs and onions, but otherwise most of our fresh food had run out. We carried 35 gallons of fresh water and used this only for drinking; our rice or potatoes were boiled in seawater. We all now looked disgusting, with filthy, lank hair and – in Colin’s case and mine – increasingly stubbly cheeks.

People sometimes complain of the monotony of the sea, but it is, with the sky, the most changeful of all natural spectacles. Its surface, brushed by the wind, whether gently or with violence, presents patterns of infinite variety, and its colour too undergoes astonishing transformations, depending on factors like the time of day, the depth of water and the weather. But despite the ever-changing vistas of sea and sky, time passed very slowly and I often found the close physical confinement trying. We spent almost all our time either on watch in the narrow cockpit, a space perhaps 7 foot by 5 with the tiller in the middle, or down below in the saloon. This was a bit bigger, but there was very little room to move around, and at more than 6 foot I could not stand upright. In fine weather I would often sneak off to the foredeck to read. There was nowhere else to go but overboard. We were getting very little physical exercise and this probably contributed to my sense of frustration and impatience: sometimes I felt like screaming.

Colin deliberately did not plot our position on the small-scale North Atlantic chart until we were well on our way, and even then it looked as if we had hardly made any progress. This was not surprising given that we were crossing 3,000 miles of ocean at a rate seldom faster than a brisk jog. The possibility that the weather might change for the worse was always on our minds, as we knew we would be lucky not to encounter a gale at some point. The condition of the boat was also a concern – we ran the engine for an hour or so every few days to charge the batteries, pumped out the bilges (counting how many strokes it took to assess how leaky the boat was) and watched the sails and rigging for signs of wear and tear. Sometimes we had to carry out minor repairs. The sliders that attached the mainsail to the track running up the mast often came loose and had to be reattached, and we sewed up a seam on one of the foresails where the stitching had worn out. The steering compass too caused problems: the fluid in which the compass card floated began to leak out and a bubble appeared in the clear plastic bowl that covered it. As the bubble steadily grew it became harder to read the course, so we dismantled the binnacle, found the leak and patched it up with chewing gum. We then topped up the fluid with gin, but the operation was not a complete success – a small parcel of air obstinately wobbled at the top of the bowl, and the cost in precious liquor was high.

One day a bird landed on Saecwen’s deck – some kind of flycatcher, I think – so exhausted that it made no attempt to move when I offered it some water. Eventually it fluttered away. How it had reached us and where it was going was a mystery. As our distance from the land steadily increased, some part of me was always anxiously aware of the immensity of the ocean, the miles of water fading into chilly darkness beneath us, and the almost ludicrous smallness and fragility of our 35-foot boat.

*

Despite our compass problems, our sextant and chronometer told us where we were to within a few miles. The exotically named Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell was less fortunate when, on the night of 22 October 1707, he entered the English Channel with twenty-one British warships under his command. The fleet drove on to the reef-strewn Isles of Scilly, which were then guarded only by a single lighthouse on the island of St Agnes, and four ships went down with the loss of some 2,000 lives. Shovell himself was washed ashore and reportedly murdered by a local woman who fancied a ring on his finger. This notorious disaster, which has often been cited as evidence of the dangers of navigating without an accurate means of determining longitude, may in fact have been caused by errors in the assessment of the fleet’s latitude, or by mistakes in the recorded position of the Scilly Isles

– quite possibly both.