Beyond the Bounty

‘Because we can’t go home, sir,’ I blubbered. Now the rest of them had started me off and I was sobbing like a milkmaid who has had her best bucket hidden by a stable lad. ‘Because we can’t go home where nothing is waiting but the rope.’

‘No, Ned – it is still our old and beloved England,’ he gasped. ‘Justice, Ned. The truth.’ He fought for breath here, for he was overcome by the pain. ‘What is right and what is wrong,’ he continued. ‘Standing for liberty against tyranny. Standing for Christian values in the face of all that is cruel and wicked. That was our choice – the way of Captain Bligh or my way, Ned.’

As though all goodness and right belonged to him alone. He coughed a bit at this point. Mostly blood, although also some yellow substance which did not look too promising.

‘They would have listened,’ says he.

‘They would have listened, all right,’ says I. ‘They would have had a good old listen and then they would have made us dangle.’

But even a cold, hard-hearted scoundrel such as myself could not fail to be moved by the death of Mister Fletcher Christian.

My eyes ran with tears and I knew that, despite everything, I loved him.

Not that I ever liked him much.

But I can’t deny that I loved him.

I could feel the fire in my blood. The Bounty crackled and shrieked like a living thing. It died hissing and spitting as it dropped its masts into the boiling water. And then, just as the sky was turning pale pink in the east, the Bounty collapsed beneath the sea.

For a few minutes there were wispy trails of grey smoke curling from the surface, and then they were gone too.

It was as if our ship had never existed.

‘Ned,’ Fletcher Christian whispered. And it was no more than a faint whisper now, this close to the end. ‘Don’t leave me. Don’t let me go alone, Ned.’

‘I’m here,’ I sobbed, holding him as tight as I could without causing him even more pain. ‘I’m here, and here I will stay. I shall not go until you are gone. I promise you that. You have my word, Mister Fletcher Christian, sir.’

‘Oh, Ned,’ he said. ‘The pain.’

I placed my hand over his nose and mouth. ‘There, there,’ I said. ‘There, there – rest your eyes, Mister Christian, sir. Rest those blue eyes of yours for just a moment, sir.’

His eyes widened as I leaned into him, pushing down harder over his nose and mouth, making quite sure that he would not be breathing much more of that sweet tropical air.

The eyes of Mister Fletcher Christian slowly began to close.

I have big hands, you see.

Big hands made hard by twenty-five years before the mast.

Stopping a dying man from breathing is about as hard for me as it is for your grandmother to fill her pipe.

‘You’re right, sir,’ I said. ‘The angels are waiting for you. They have been waiting all along. You have been right all along, Mister Fletcher Christian, sir. Right about everything.’

Heaven was calling him.

Loud and clear.

Even above the weeping and wailing of the men and the women, and even above the terrible sound of the Bounty dying in the bay, you could hear Heaven calling Mister Fletcher Christian to his reward.

And I confess on these pages that these large and hardened hands of mine helped that good young gentleman on his way.

It felt like the least I could do.

2

The Angry Widow

I climbed to the top of the cliffs and I looked back on our island.

It was like looking at Paradise. Our island, Pitcairn, was Paradise.

Pitcairn is a tiny garden in the middle of an endless ocean. A densely wooded rock in the middle of nowhere. Just two miles square. And the loneliest island in the South Seas.

We had looked for it long and hard before we found it.

The Bounty had visited more than thirty islands before we landed on Pitcairn. Yes, more than thirty islands bobbing in the South Seas, and they all had something wrong with them.

There were islands where the natives thought they might decorate their grass huts by putting our heads on the ends of muddy sticks.

There were islands with so little water we would have died of thirst before the year was out.

There were islands with nothing to eat. Islands with nothing to drink. Islands where the natives came screaming out of the bushes and chased us back to our long boat. We saw them all.

And then we saw Pitcairn, our beautiful island in the sun. The last home that any of us would ever know.

It was a place of rough beauty. The steep cliffs. The jagged rocks in the bay and the wild sea beyond. The craggy green hills. The deep blue of the sea and the lighter blue of the sky.

There was fresh water and food galore. It was uninhabited. And the sea winds made it far cooler than Tahiti.

Pitcairn was perfect.

We almost missed it. We almost sailed right by. Not because it is such a tiny speck in that endless expanse of blue water that men call the Pacific Ocean.

No, we almost sailed straight past our future home because, according to every single map in the King’s navy, Pitcairn was not there.

The maps were wrong.

Pitcairn was charted wrong on the Bounty’s map, which means that it was charted wrong on all of them. Mister Christian spotted it. According to the map, Pitcairn was meant to be 150 miles from where God had seen fit to drop it.

It was too good to be true. The men could scarcely believe their luck. Pitcairn was a paradise that showed itself on no man’s map.

Even old Fletcher had a smile on his dark and handsome chops for once.

We would hide ourselves forever on the only island in the Pacific that, as far as the King’s navy was concerned, did not exist.

It felt as if we had stumbled into the Garden of Eden. The soil was rich and fertile, and there was food galore. Game. Yam. Papaya. Pineapples. Watermelons. Mandarins. Grapefruit. Lemon. Limes. And breadfruit – bloody breadfruit!

We all had a good laugh at the sight of breadfruit.