Hell's Fire Read online

  Hell’s Fire

  Brian Freemantle

  writing as John Maxwell

  For Peter and Romayne,

  with much love

  ‘The law, sir! Damn the law: my will is the law and woe unto the man that dares to disobey it!’

  Captain William Bligh

  Fletcher Christian

  ‘… he was a gentleman: a brave man: and every officer and seaman on board the ship would have gone through fire and water to have served him …’

  Edward Christian,

  in an appendix to the published

  text of the Bounty Court Martial,

  October 1792

  William Bligh

  ‘… a man with integrity unimpeached, a mind capable of providing its own resources in difficulties, without leaning on others for advice, firm in discipline, civil in deportment and not subject to whimper and whine when severity of discipline is wanted to meet emergencies …’

  Sir Joseph Banks,

  Bligh’s patron, March 15, 1805

  Acknowledgments

  Pitcairn Island is one of the remotest inhabited spots in the world, a volcanic chip of land one mile across and two miles long, lying almost midway between Panama and New Zealand. The nearest commercial airstrip is 1,300 miles away in Tahiti. Shipping companies ask for bookings to be made with either Panama or New Zealand as the listed destination, so unsure are they that weather conditions will permit passengers to disembark.

  I never imagined, therefore, that there would be any possibility of my reaching the island to research this book, much less that I would have the opportunity to live among people only fifth-generation descendants of Fletcher Christian and his mutineers.

  That I did was due to the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and their vessel, the Sir Geraint. For making the trip initially possible, I thank Major ‘Tony’ Dixon and Lt-Col. Peter Hicks, at the Ministry of Defence.

  To the master of the Sir Geraint, Captain James Bailey, and his officers I will remain forever grateful for their friendship and hospitality during the two-month South Pacific voyage.

  I shall always remember with gratitude and affection the welcome given to me by Pitcairn chief magistrate Ivan Christian and his wife Dobrey, with whom I lived. And appreciate the willing help I received from the islanders to the sometimes intrusive enquiries I made.

  Pitcairn, of course, represents only a part of the study made for this book. The staff of the London Library responded to every request with an enthusiasm and cheerfulness that is a feature of any dealing with that institution. So, to them, a final ‘thank you’.

  Introduction

  This is a work of fiction, not history.

  Fully aware of the irritation it may cause some historians of the period, I have made appear simultaneous events in the lives of Captain William Bligh and the man who led the mutiny against him on the Bounty, Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, which did, in fact, occur some years apart.

  I have done this – consciously – for several reasons. For the fictional book it is intended to be, it makes for ease of narrative. I hope, too, that it enables me to highlight the conflicting characters of the two men.

  And then it makes it possible to suggest the hidden secret that caused Fletcher Christian to rebel against the man who had been his friend, casting him and seventeen other crewmen adrift to what he could only have believed would be their certain death. For nowhere in the mass of surviving documents, records, first person accounts or on the island of Pitcairn itself is there a satisfactory answer to the question: why?

  Bligh was not a tyrant, imposing the lash at the slightest infringement of regulations. He was an irascible nagger, certainly. He demanded a high standard aboard his ships and when it wasn’t achieved, the lash came from his tongue, not the cat-o’-nine-tails. Compared with other recorded punishments by contemporary captains, by eighteenth-century standards Bligh was soft-handed with his crew.

  When, on the outward voyage of the Bounty, the crew deck became soaked by the storms of Cape Horn, he turned his own quarters over to his men so they could sleep dry. They didn’t like it, but he made them eat a carefully considered diet, rightly recognising ahead of his time that scurvy came from a vitamin deficiency. He reached Tahiti after a ten-month voyage with only one suspected case of the illness, an unparalleled record for the time.

  So why?

  Would an educated man like Christian, whose brothers were barristers and whose family was steeped in law, have considered mass murder because he had fallen in love with a native girl in Tahiti? Or because Bligh had harangued him to the point of tears in front of the whole crew for stealing a coconut? These are the explanations offered by Bligh, in the existing log of his amazing, 3,600-mile survival voyage and then in a book he wrote of the incident.

  The transcript exists of the court martial of ten mutineers arrested in Tahiti and arraigned at Portsmouth on September 12, 1792. The dialogue and evidence I have created for the participants is based on recorded fact, moving, I hope, towards my conclusion. That recorded fact comes very little from the court hearing, however. Not once were any of the witnesses or prisoners asked to suggest a cause for the insurrection.

  Bounty midshipman Edward Young followed Christian to Pitcairn, fomented a civil war on the island between the natives and the mutineers and then, in an act of dying contrition after all but one of the mutineers were dead, wrote a detailed account of events leading up to the mutiny and of their subsequent existence on one of the loneliest islands in the world.

  Today that account is, according to the islanders I have met and interviewed, still hidden somewhere on Pitcairn, secreted upon the orders of the last surviving mutineer, Jack Adams. Before he died, however, Adams made the record available to one of the British sea captains who had located their island sanctuary and the man copied sections from it. In his journal, Young confessed to his part as agent provocateur in the mutiny and wrote at length of their early, savage years on Pitcairn.

  Missing from the document, however, was any acceptable explanation for why Fletcher Christian went before dawn on that April morning in 1789 to rouse Captain Bligh at cutlass point with the words: ‘I am in hell.’

  One man knew. Fletcher Christian told him.

  A few minutes before sailing for the last time from Tahiti to form what is today Britain’s smallest colony, Christian took aside midshipman Peter Heywood. Before they pulled too far away, Edward Young, standing nearby, heard Christian begin to talk of ‘the reason for my foolishness’. The Portsmouth court martial exonerated Heywood from any complicity in the crime, accepting his story that he was carried away against his will. Heywood rose to the rank of captain and swore an affidavit that in 1808, walking along Fore Street, Plymouth, he saw a figure he recognised. He called out Christian’s name and the man turned, showing himself to be the mutiny leader. The man fled and although he gave chase, Heywood lost him.

  Heywood was quite willing to provide these and other details for a book written about the Bounty uprising by a relative, Lady Belcher. About only one thing did he refuse to talk – that secret conversation with Christian on the greyish-black Tahitian sand.

  Could Christian have escaped from Pitcairn?

  There are several accounts that other vessels came upon the mutineers before the officially accepted discovery in February 1808, when the Boston-registered whaler Topaz, under the command of Captain Mayhew Folger, anchored in surf-lashed Bounty Bay.

  And in the Dictionary of National Biography, Sir John Laughton writes: ‘It is in a high degree probable that, whether in Captain Folger’s ship in 1808 or in some more venturesome way, Christian escaped from the island and returned to England.’

  John Adams told several conflicting stories about Christian, finally asserting that he had pe
rished in the civil war that broke out when one of the mutineers demanded from a Tahitian native the woman who had accompanied him to Pitcairn from Tahiti.

  Adams and Edward Young’s journal both recorded how Christian was ostracised on the island.

  On September 17, 1814, a British sailor, Captain Pipon, interviewed Adams and then wrote of Fletcher Christian:

  It appears that this unfortunate, ill-fated young man was never happy after the rash and inconsiderate step he had taken but always sullen and morose, a circumstance which will not surprise anyone; this moroseness, however, led him to many acts of cruelty and inhumanity which soon was the cause of his incurring the hatred and detestation of his companions here; one cannot avoid expressing astonishment when you consider that the very crime he was then guilty of towards his companions who assisted him in the mutiny was the very same they so loudly accused their captain of.

  Bligh’s mission in the Bounty had been to transplant the breadfruit plant from Tahiti to the West Indies, to provide cheap food for the slaves on Britain’s sugar plantations there.

  He returned to England after that 48-day, 3,618-mile voyage to be lionised in eighteenth-century London. He was presented a hero to George III, became a friend of the King’s son, the Duke of Clarence, was cleared of any blame in losing his ship and promoted full captain.

  Within three years – after completely succeeding with the breadfruit transplantation during a second expedition – his reputation was publicly smeared by the powerful families of Fletcher Christian and Peter Heywood.

  Throughout a lifetime of spectacular dispute, Bligh was involved in the North Sea Fleet mutiny in the Nore in 1797; in 1805 he was reprimanded at a court martial for tyranny, unofficer-like conduct and ungentlemanly behaviour on the complaint of one of his lieutenants; and in 1808 he was overthrown as Governor-General of New South Wales, Australia, in an illegal rebellion.

  In 1817 he died, aged sixty-five. His tomb is in St Mary’s churchyard, Lambeth, London.

  Christian died, according to legend, in Cumberland, where he was born.

  On the wall of Cockermouth Grammar School was recorded the fact that he was once a pupil, together with the poet William Wordsworth.

  Other than that, there is no monument to him.

  Neither is there on Pitcairn.

  Southampton, 1977

  J.M.

  ‘… I would rather die ten thousand deaths than bear this treatment any longer … I always do my duty as an officer and as a man ought, yet I receive this scandalous usage … I am in hell …’

  Fletcher Christian, April 28, 1789,

  at the moment of mutiny

  Like an occasional fly on the chest of a sleeping man, the Bounty rose and fell softly in the Pacific swell. It should have been cool, so early in the morning, but there was no wind for the sails that sagged empty from the masthead and the heat draped over the tiny, almost stationary vessel like a thick blanket.

  And few people slept comfortably.

  Only Captain William Bligh appeared undisturbed. He even wore a nightcap and nightshirt, but the door of his cabin was ajar, to catch any breeze. He stirred from time to time, mumbling in some private dream, but did not awaken. The difficult part of the voyage was over now: he was returning home, in triumph. He was a contented man.

  It was too hot in his bunk for the ship’s master, James Fryer. Seeking some relief, he had arranged bed-covering into a mattress and was lodged precariously on top of his sea chest, dozing fitfully and half aware of the ship’s sounds around him. The two loaded pistols he always kept at hand were on the far side of the cabin, locked in a small cupboard. They were at sea now, miles from the nearest island and safe from any surprise attack, so the precautions weren’t necessary any more.

  Charles Norman, the carpenter’s mate, had abandoned sleep altogether. He stood at the rear of the vessel, gazing down at the bubbled whiteness the huge, scavenging shark created, arcing and scything around the Bounty, Charles Norman liked fish, much better than human beings. He’d told people that, several times. But they hadn’t taken much notice, because Charles Norman was thought to be mad.

  He would have warned Fletcher Christian, had he known what the second-in-command was planning. But the carpenter’s mate was the last person to whom any confidence could be entrusted.

  It was only a few minutes before the end of midshipman George Stewart’s watch. It would stink down below, among the sweating, unwashed men, he knew. He stayed aloft, breathing deeply, like a swimmer about to make the plunge. The volcano on Tofoa, twenty miles away, was a spectacular sight, belching towards a full-scale eruption but already with great gouts of fire and lava shooting from it, like a roman candle.

  The island was too far away for Fletcher, thought George Stewart, worriedly. And too dangerous, now, with the prospect of its being destroyed by the volcano.

  Christian was insane, Stewart decided. With good reason, perhaps. But definitely insane. The man would have to be dissuaded, for his own safety. Stewart began making his way towards the hatchway, pausing to look towards the stern. What was Norman staring at so intently? he wondered. He shrugged, uninterested. Norman was soft in the head. Nothing he was doing could be important.

  Like Norman, William Muspratt had decided to get up on deck. For’ard, near the galley, he inhaled the fresher air. A hatchet lay near the breakfast logs and on impulse he decided to split some for the cook. It would be a guaranteed way to get extra rations. Almost immediately came the protest from Michael Byrn, the ship’s sightless fiddler.

  ‘Hell’s teeth, shut up and let’s get some sleep. It’s not four yet.’

  ‘Shut up yourself, you blind bugger,’ shouted back Muspratt. He stopped though: it was too hot to chop wood. And who needed extra rations anyway, in weather like this?

  In his bunk below, the sleepless Christian heard the footsteps approaching and drew back, instinctively, as the canvas screen was pulled aside from his starboard berth. From childhood, Christian had been bothered by excessive perspiration, so bad he stained things the moment he touched them. He was soaked now, his shoulder-length hair coiled in wet ringlets, his face smeared and greasy. And it wasn’t the heat, decided George Stewart, staring at the man who was to take the watch at 4 a.m. The acting midshipman was shocked by the appearance of Christian, with whom he had become friends during the sixteen months they had been at sea. Christian was as mad as Norman, on deck above, thought Stewart again. Maybe even madder.

  ‘For God’s sake, Mr Christian. What is it?’

  ‘You know, well enough.’

  Stewart sighed. Bligh was a bastard, an unmitigated, bullying bastard, to have reduced a man to this state. Perhaps another officer wouldn’t have been so badly affected, but Christian was a sensitive, highly strung man and Bligh should have recognised the effect of his behaviour. They’d known each other long enough, after all.

  ‘You’ll not escape,’ insisted Stewart.

  ‘I’ve got to. Somehow.’

  There would be a lot of men who knew of Christian’s plan to desert the ship, reflected Stewart. The ship’s carpenter, William Purcell, was certainly aware, because he’d provided the planks with which the second-in-command had lashed together a make-shift raft, utilising the masts of the ship’s launch. He’d given Christian some nails, too, to trade with the natives if he reached an island. The cook, Tom Hall, had supplied a roasted hog. So he knew. And any intelligent man, having seen the petulance with which Bligh had treated. Christian during the two weeks since they had sailed from Tahiti and witnessed how, the previous night, after that blazing, childish row, Christian had gone from friend to friend, bestowing his personal belongings as gifts and finally throwing letters and papers overboard, must have guessed the man was in a desperate, almost demented, state of mind.

  ‘There’ll be sharks near the boat,’ warned Stewart, unaware of Norman’s interest in the stern of the vessel.

  Christian gestured, uncaring.

  ‘It could be a year before we fina
lly get back to England,’ reminded Christian. ‘Do you think I can stand the man for that long?’

  ‘If you reach an island, you’ll be slaughtered,’ predicted Stewart. ‘This isn’t Tahiti any more. The natives are hostile, cannibals maybe. If you get ashore, you’ll be killed.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll find a friendly island.’

  Stewart sighed, exasperated. Enough of Christian’s friends knew, thought Stewart again. Should he round them up, to overpower the man for his own good? But that wouldn’t work. Bligh would have to be informed. Yet Bligh couldn’t be told the truth because the reason for their action would put Christian in irons for the rest of the voyage, then get him hanged at Spithead for desertion. So the captain would construe it as an attack upon the second-in-command and accuse them of mutiny. And they would be hanged at Portsmouth.

  But the word lodged like a burr in Stewart’s mind. They were thousands of miles from England, in an area where few Europeans had explored before. And God knows they had reason enough to take command of the ship. You only hanged for mutiny if you were caught.

  ‘You’re not alone in your feelings for the captain, Mr Christian,’ said Stewart, suddenly.

  Christian shifted in his cramped bunk. He smelled, he realised. Damn the sweat. Yes, he thought, he hated Bligh now. He felt suffocated by the man. He was always conscious of him. Of those staring, pale eyes that followed every movement, eager for mistakes, either real or imagined, any cause for yet another irrational outburst.

  ‘But I’m the victim of his madness,’ complained Christian.

  ‘You’re badly treated, right enough,’ sympathised Stewart, detecting the self-pity. He paused.

  ‘Yet there’s hardly a man better liked than you aboard this ship.’