Title: Mutiny on the Bounty (1932)
Author: Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
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Mutiny on the Bounty

by

Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

The Bounty Trilogy
Wyeth Edition

Comprising the Three Volumes:
Mutiny on the Bounty (1932)
Men Against the Sea (1933)
Pitcairn's Island (1934)

[This file contains only MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY]

by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

Illustrations by N C Wyeth

Grosset and Dunlap, publishers: 1945

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY

To
Captain Viggo Rasmussen, Schooner Tiaré Taporo, Rarotonga
and
Captain Andy Thomson, Schooner Tagua, Rarotonga
Old friends who sail the seas the Bounty sailed

CONTENTS

PREFACE
CHAPTER I. LIEUTENANT BLIGH
CHAPTER II. SEA LAW
CHAPTER III. AT SEA
CHAPTER IV. TYRANNY
CHAPTER V. TAHITI
CHAPTER VI. AN INDIAN HOUSEHOLD
CHAPTER VII. CHRISTIAN AND BLIGH
CHAPTER VIII. HOMEWARD BOUND
CHAPTER IX. THE MUTINY
CHAPTER X. FLETCHER CHRISTIAN
CHAPTER XI. THE LAST OF THE _BOUNTY_
CHAPTER XII. TEHANI
CHAPTER XIII. THE MOON OF PIPIRI
CHAPTER XIV. THE PANDORA
CHAPTER XV. DOCTOR HAMILTON
CHAPTER XVI. THE ROUNDHOUSE
CHAPTER XVII. THE SEARCH FOR THE _BOUNTY_
CHAPTER XVIII. THE LAST OF THE PANDORA
CHAPTER XIX. TEN WEARY MONTHS
CHAPTER XX. SIR JOSEPH BANKS
CHAPTER XXI. H.M.S. DUKE
CHAPTER XXII. THE CASE FOR THE CROWN
CHAPTER XXIII. THE DEFENSE
CHAPTER XXIV. CONDEMNED
CHAPTER XXV. TINKLER
CHAPTER XXVI. WITHYCOMBE
CHAPTER XXVII. EPILOGUE

OFFICERS AND CREW OF H.M.S. BOUNTY

Lieutenant William Bligh, Captain
John Fryer, Master
Fletcher Christian, Master's Mate
Charles Churchill, Master-at-Arms
William Elphinstone, Master-at-Arms's Mate
"Old Bacchus," Surgeon
Thomas Ledward, Acting Surgeon
David Nelson, Botanist
William Peckover, Gunner
John Mills, Gunner's Mate
William Cole, Boatswain
James Morrison, Boatswain's Mate
William Purcell, Carpenter
Charles Norman, Carpenter's Mate
Thomas McIntosh, Carpenter's Crew
Joseph Coleman, Armourer

Midshipmen:
Roger Byam         Robert Tinkler
Thomas Hayward     Edward Young
John Hallet        George Stewart

Quartermasters:
John Norton
Peter Lenkletter

George Simpson, Quartermaster's Mate
Lawrence Lebogue, Sailmaker
Mr. Samuel, Clerk
Robert Lamb, Butcher
William Brown, Gardener

Cooks:
John Smith
Thomas Hall

Able Seamen:
Thomas Burkitt     John Williams
Matthew Quintal    Thomas Ellison
John Sumner        Isaac Martin
John Millward      Richard Skinner
William McCoy      Matthew Thompson
Henry Hillbrandt   William Muspratt
Alexander Smith    Michael Byrne

PREFACE

On the twenty-third of December, 1787, His Majesty's armed transport Bounty sailed from Portsmouth on as strange, eventful, and tragic a voyage as ever befell an English ship. Her errand was to proceed to the island of Tahiti (or Otaheite, as it was then called), in the Great South Sea, there to collect a cargo of young breadfruit trees for transportation to the West Indies, where, it was hoped, the trees would thrive and thus, eventually, provide an abundance of cheap food for the negro slaves of the English planters.

The events of that voyage it is the purpose of this tale to unfold. Mutiny on the Bounty, which opens the story, is concerned with the voyage from England, the long Tahiti sojourn while the cargo of young breadfruit trees was being assembled, the departure of the homeward-bound ship, the mutiny, and the fate of those of her company who later returned to Tahiti, where the greater part of them were eventually seized by H. M. S. Pandora and taken back to England, in irons, for trial.

The authors chose as the narrator of this part of the tale a fictitious character, Roger Byam, who tells it as an old man, after his retirement from the Navy. Byam had his actual counterpart in the person of Peter Heywood, whose name was, for this reason, omitted from the roster of the Bounty's company. Midshipman Byam's experience follows closely that of Midshipman Heywood. With the license of hisorical novelists, the authors based the career of Byam upon that of I Heywood, but in depicting it they did not, of course, follow the latter n every detail. In the essentials, relating to the mutiny and its aftermath, they have adhered to the facts preserved in the records of the I British Admiralty.

Men Against the Sea, the second part of the narrative, is the story of Captain Bligh and the eighteen loyal men who, on the morning of lie mutiny, were set adrift by the mutineers in the Bounty's launch, an open boat twenty-three feet long, with a beam of six feet, nine inches. In this small craft Captain Bligh carried his men a voyage of 3600 miles, from the island of Tofoa (or Tofua, as it is now called), in the Friendly, or Tongan Group, to Timor, in the Dutch East Indies. The wind and weather of Men Against the Sea are those of Captain Bligh's own log, a series of brief daily notes which formed the chief literary source of this part of the tale. The voyage is described in the words of one of those who survived it—Thomas Ledward, acting surgeon of the Bounty, whose medical knowledge and whose experience in reading men's sufferings would qualify him as a sensitive and reliable observer.

Pitcairn's Island, which concludes the tale, is perhaps the strangest and most romantic part of it. After two unsuccessful attempts to settle on the island of Tupuai (or Tubuai, as the name is now more commonly spelled), the mutineers returned to Tahiti, where they parted company. Fletcher Christian, acting lieutenant of the Bounty and instigator of the mutiny, once more embarked in the ship for an unknown destination. With him were eight of his own men and eighteen Polynesians (twelve women and six men). They sailed from Tahiti in September 1789, and for a period of eighteen years nothing more was heard of them. In February 1808, the American sealing vessel Topaz, calling at Pitcairn, discovered on this supposedly uninhabited crumb of land a thriving community of mixed blood: a number of middle-aged Polynesian women and more than a score of children, under the benevolent rule of a white-haired English seaman, Alexander Smith, the only survivor of the fifteen men who had landed there so long before.

Various and discrepant accounts have been preserved concerning the events which took place on Pitcairn during the eighteen years preceding the visit of the Topaz. The source of them all, direct or indirect, was Alexander Smith (or John Adams, as he later called himself). He told the story first to Captain Folger, of the Topaz; then, in 1814, to Captains Staines and Pipon, of the English frigates Briton and Tagus; then to Captain Beechey, of H. M. S. Blossom, in 1825; and finally, in 1829, to J. A. Moerenhout, author of Voyages aux Îles du Grand Océan. Later accounts were recorded by Walter Brodie, who set down, in 1850, a narrative obtained from Arthur, Matthew Quintal's son; and by Rosalind Young, in her Story of Pitcairn Island, which gives certain details retained in the memory of Eliza, daughter of John Mills, who reached the advanced age of ninety-three.

Each of these accounts is remarkable for its differences from the others. The authors, therefore, after careful study of every existing account, adopted a chronology and selected a sequence of events which seemed to them to render more plausible the play of cause and effect.

The history of those early years on Pitcairn was tragic, perhaps inevitably so. Fifteen men and twelve women, of two widely different races, were set down on a small island, one of the loneliest in the world. At the end of a decade, although there were many children, only one man and ten women remained; of the sixteen dead, fifteen had come to violent ends. These are the facts upon which all the accounts agree. If, at times, in the Pitcairn narrative, blood flows over-freely, and horror seems to pile on horror, it is not because the authors would have it so: it was so, in Pitcairn history.

But the outcome of those early turbulent years was no less extraordinary than the threads of chance which led to the settlement of the island. All who were fortunate enough to visit the Pitcairn colony during the first quarter of the nineteenth century agree that it presented a veritable picture of the Golden Age.

Those who are interested in the source material concerning the Bounty mutiny will find an exhaustive bibliography of books, articles, and unpublished manuscripts in the Appendix to Mr. George Mackaness's Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh, published by Messrs. Angus and Robertson, of Sydney, Australia. Among the principal sources consulted by the authors were the following: "Minutes of the Proceedings of a Court-Martial on Lieutenant William Bligh and certain members of his crew, to investigate the cause of the loss of H. M. S. Bounty"; A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty's Ship "Bounty," by William Bligh; A Voyage to the South Sea, by William Bligh; The Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H. M. S. "Bounty," by Sir John Barrow; Pitcairn island and the Islanders, by Walter Brodie; Mutineers of the "Bounty" and Their Descendants in Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands, by Lady Belcher; Bligh of the "Bounty," by Geoffrey Rawson; Voyage of H. M. S. "Pandora," by E. Edwards and G. Hamilton; The Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh, by George Mackaness; The Story of Pitcairn Island, by Rosalind Young; Captain Bligh's Second Voyage to the South Seas, by I. Lee; Pitcairn Island Register Book; New South Wales Historical Records; Cook's Voyages; Hawkesworth's Voyages; Beechey's Voyages; Ellis's Polynesian Researches; Ancient Tahiti, by Teura Henry; and A Memoir of Peter Heywood. Two excellent studies of the present-day descendants of the Bounty mutineers, from the point of view of an anthropologist, have been made by Dr. Harry Shapiro in his Descendants of the Bounty Mutineers and The Heritage of the Bounty.

We wish to express our cordial thanks to Mr. N. C. Wyeth, whose illustrations lend so much colour and vividness to the story of the Bounty and her men.

June, 1940.

J. N. H. C. N.

CHAPTER I.—LIEUTENANT BLIGH

The British are frequently criticized by other nations for their dislike of change, and indeed we love England for those aspects of nature and life which change the least. Here in the West Country, where I was born, men are slow of speech, tenacious of opinion, and averse—beyond their countrymen elsewhere—to innovation of any sort. The houses of my neighbours, the tenants' cottages, the very fishing boats which ply on the Bristol Channel, all conform to the patterns of a simpler age. And an old man, forty of whose three-and-seventy years have been spent afloat, may be pardoned a not unnatural tenderness toward the scenes of his youth, and a satisfaction that these scenes remain so little altered by time.

No men are more conservative than those who design and build ships save those who sail them; and since storms are less frequent at sea than some landsmen suppose, the life of a sailor is principally made up of the daily performance of certain tasks, in certain manners and at certain times. Forty years of this life have made a slave of me, and H continue, almost against my will, to live by the clock. There is no reason why I should rise at seven each morning, yet seven finds me dressing, nevertheless; my copy of the Times would reach me even though I failed to order a horse saddled at ten for my ride down to Watchet to meet the post. But habit is too much for me, and habit finds a powerful ally in old Thacker, my housekeeper, whose duties, as I perceive with inward amusement, are lightened by the regularity she does everything to encourage. She will listen to no hint of retirement. In spite of her years, which must number nearly eighty by now, her step is still brisk and her black eyes snap with a remnant of the old malice. It would give me pleasure to speak with her of the days when my mother was still living, but when I try to draw her into talk she wastes no time in putting me in my place. Servant and master, with the churchyard only a step ahead! I am lonely now; when Thacker dies, I shall be lonely indeed.

Seven generations of Byams have lived and died in Withycombe; the name has been known in the region of the Quantock Hills for five hundred years and more. I am the last of them; it is strange to think that at my death what remains of our blood will flow in the veins of an Indian woman in the South Sea.

If it be true that a man's useful life is over on the day when his thoughts begin to dwell in the past, then I have served little purpose in living since my retirement from His Majesty's Navy fifteen years ago. The present has lost substance and reality, and I have discovered, with some regret, that contemplation of the future brings neither pleasure nor concern. But forty years at sea, including the turbulent period of the wars against the Danes, the Dutch, and the French, have left my memory so well stored that I ask no greater delight than to be free to wander in the past.

My study, high up in the north wing of Withycombe, with its tall windows giving on the Bristol Channel and the green distant coast of Wales, is the point of departure for these travels through the past. The journal I have kept, since I went to sea as a midshipman in 1787, lies at hand in the camphor-wood box beside my chair, and I have only to take up a sheaf of its pages to smell once more the reek of battle smoke, to feel the stinging sleet of a gale in the North Sea, or to enjoy the calm beauty of a tropical night under the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere.

In the evening, when the unimportant duties of an old man's day are done, and I have supped alone in silence, I feel the pleasant anticipation of a visitor to Town, who on his first evening spends an agreeable half-hour in deciding which theatre he will attend. Shall I fight the old battles over again? Camperdown, Copenhagen, Trafalgar—these names thunder in memory like the booming of great guns. Yet more and more frequently I turn the pages of my journal still further back, to the frayed and blotted log of a midshipman—to an episode I have spent a good part of my life in attempting to forget. Insignificant in the annals of the Navy, and even more so from an historian's point of view, this incident was nevertheless the strangest, the most picturesque, and the most tragic of my career.

It has long been my purpose to follow the example of other retired officers and employ the too abundant leisure of an old man in setting down, with the aid of my journal and in the fullest possible detail, a narrative of some one of the episodes of my life at sea. The decision was made last night; I shall write of my first ship, the Bounty, of the mutiny on board, of my long residence on the island of Tahiti in the South Sea, and of how I was conveyed home in irons, to be tried by court-martial and condemned to death. Two natures clashed on the stage of that drama of long ago, two men as strong and enigmatical as any I have known—Fletcher Christian and William Bligh.

When my father died of a pleurisy, early in the spring of 1787, my mother gave few outward signs of grief, though their life together, in an age when the domestic virtues were unfashionable, had been a singularly happy one. Sharing the interest in the natural sciences which had brought my father the honour of a Fellowship in the Royal Society, my mother was a countrywoman at heart, caring more for life at Withycombe than for the artificial distractions of town.

I was to have gone up to Oxford that fall, to Magdalen, my father's college, and during that first summer of my mother's widowhood I began to know her, not as a parent, but as a most charming companion, of whose company I never wearied. The women of her generation were schooled to reserve their tears for the sufferings of others, and to meet adversity with a smile. A warm heart and an inquiring mind made her conversation entertaining or philosophical as the occasion required; and, unlike the young ladies of the present time, she had been taught that silence can be agreeable when one has nothing to say.

On the morning when Sir Joseph Banks's letter arrived, we were strolling about the garden, scarcely exchanging a word. It was late in July, the sky was blue, and the warm air bore the scent of roses; such a morning as enables us to tolerate our English climate, which foreigners declare, perhaps with some justice, the worst in the world. I was thinking how uncommonly handsome my mother looked in black, with her thick fair hair, fresh colour, and dark blue eyes. Thacker, her new maid,—a black-eyed Devon girl,—came tripping down the path. She dropped my mother a curtsey and held out a letter on a silver tray. My mother took the letter, gave me a glance of apology, and began to read, seating herself on a rustic bench.

"From Sir Joseph," she said, when she had perused the letter at length and laid it down. "You have heard of Lieutenant Bligh, who was with Captain Cook on his last voyage? Sir Joseph writes that he is on leave, stopping with friends near Taunton, and would enjoy an evening with us. Your father thought very highly of him."

I was a rawboned lad of seventeen, lazy in body and mind, with overfast growth, but the words were like a galvanic shock to me. "With Captain Cook!" I exclaimed. "Ask him by all means!"

My mother smiled. "I thought you would be pleased," she said.

The carriage was dispatched in good time with a note for Mr. Bligh, bidding him to dine with us that evening if he could. I remember how I set out, with the son of one of our tenants, to sail my boat at high tide on Bridgwater Bay, and how little I enjoyed the sail. My thoughts were all of our visitor, and the hours till dinner-time seemed to stretch ahead interminably.

I was fonder, perhaps, of reading than most lads of my age, and the book I loved best of all was one given me by my father on my tenth birthday—Dr. Hawkesworth's account of the voyages to the South Sea. I knew the three, heavy, leather-bound volumes almost by heart, and I had read with equal interest the French narrative of Monsieur de Bougainville's voyage. These early accounts of discoveries in the South Sea, and of the manners and customs of the inhabitants of Otaheite and Owhyhee (as those islands were then called), excited an interest almost inconceivable to-day. The writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, which were to have such lamentable and far-reaching results, preached a doctrine which had made converts even among people of consequence. It became fashionable to believe that only among men in a state of nature, freed from all restraints, could true virtue and happiness be found. And when Wallis, Byron, Bougainville, and Cook returned from their voyage of discovery with alluring accounts of the New Cytheraea, whose happy inhabitants, relieved from the curse of Adam, spent their days in song and dance, the doctrines of Rousseau received new impetus. Even my father, so engrossed in his astronomical studies that he had lost touch with the world, listened eagerly to the tales of his friend Sir Joseph Banks, and often discussed with my mother, whose interest was equal to his, the virtues of what he termed "a natural life."

My own interest was less philosophical than adventurous; like other youngsters, I longed to sail unknown seas, to raise uncharted islands, and to trade with gentle Indians who regarded white men as gods. The thought that I was soon to converse with an officer who had accompanied Captain Cook on his last voyage—a mariner, and not a man of science like Sir Joseph—kept me woolgathering all afternoon, and I was not disappointed when the carriage drew up at last and Mr. Bligh stepped out.

Bligh was at that time in the prime of life. He was of middle stature, strongly made and inclining to stoutness, though he carried himself well. His weather-beaten face was broad, with a firm mouth and very fine dark eyes, and his thick powdered hair grew high on his head, above a noble brow. He wore his three-cornered black hat athwartships; his coat was of bright blue broadcloth, trimmed with white, with gold anchor buttons and the long tails of the day. His waistcoat, breeches, and stockings were white. The old-fashioned uniform was one to set off a well-made man. Bligh's voice, strong, vibrant, and a little harsh, gave an impression of uncommon vitality; his bearing showed resolution and courage, and the glance of his eye gave evidence of an assurance such as few men possess. These symptoms of a strong and aggressive nature were tempered by the lofty brow of a man of intellect, and the agreeable and unpretentious manner he assumed ashore.

The carriage, as I said, drew up before our door, the footman sprang down from the box, and Mr. Bligh stepped out. I had been waiting to welcome him; as I made myself known, he gave me a handclasp and a smile.

"Your father's son," he said. "A great loss—he was known, by name at least, to all who practise navigation."

Presently my mother came down and we went in to dinner. Bligh spoke very handsomely of my father's work on the determination of longitude, and after a time the conversation turned to the islands of the South Sea.

"Is it true," my mother asked, "that the Indians of Tahiti are as happy as Captain Cook believed?"

"Ah, ma'am," said our guest, "happiness is a vast word! It is true that they live without great labour, and that nearly all of the light tasks they perform are self-imposed; released from the fear of want and from all salutary discipline, they regard nothing seriously."

"Roger and I," observed my mother, "have been studying the ideas of J. J. Rousseau. As you know, he believes that true happiness can only be enjoyed by man in a state of nature."

Bligh nodded. "I have been told of his ideas," he said, "though unfortunately I left school too young to learn French. But if a rough seaman may express an opinion on a subject more suited to a philosopher, I believe that true happiness can only be enjoyed by a disciplined and enlightened people. As for the Indians of Tahiti, though they are freed from the fear of want, their conduct is regulated by a thousand absurd restrictions, which no civilized man would put up with. These restrictions constitute a kind of unwritten law, called taboo, and instead of making for a wholesome discipline they lay down fanciful and unjust rules to control every action of a man's life. A few days among men in a state of nature might have changed Monsieur Rousseau's ideas." He paused and turned to me. "You know French, then?" he asked, as if to include me in the talk.

"Yes, sir," I replied.

"I'll do him justice, Mr. Bligh," my mother put in; "he has a gift for languages. My son might pass for a native of France or Italy, and is making progress in German now. His Latin won him a prize last year."

"I wish I had his gift! Lord!" Bligh laughed. "I'd rather face a hurricane than translate a page of Caesar nowadays! And the task Sir Joseph has set me is worse still! There is no harm in telling you that I shall soon set sail for the South Sea." Perceiving our interest, he went on:—

"I have been in the merchant service since I was paid off four years ago, when peace was signed. Mr. Campbell, the West India merchant, gave me command of his ship, Britannia, and during my voyages, when I frequently had planters of consequence as passengers on board, I was many times asked to tell what I knew of the breadfruit, which flourishes in Tahiti and Owhyhee. Considering that the breadfruit might provide a cheap and wholesome food for their negro slaves, several of the West India merchants and planters petitioned the Crown, asking that a vessel be fitted out suitably to convey the breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indian islands. Sir Joseph Banks thought well of the idea and gave it his support. It is due largely to his interest that the Admiralty is now fitting out a small vessel for the voyage, and at Sir Joseph's suggestion I was recalled to the Service and am to be given command. We should sail before the end of the year."

"Were I a man," said my mother, whose eyes were bright with interest, "I should beg you to take me along; you will need gardeners, no doubt, and I could care for the young plants."

Bligh smiled. "I would ask no better, ma'am," he said gallantly, "though I have been supplied with a botanist—David Nelson, who served in a similar capacity on Captain Cook's last voyage. My ship, the Bounty, will be a floating garden fitted with every convenience for the care of the plants, and I have no fear but that we shall be able to carry out the purpose of the voyage. It is the task our good friend Sir Joseph has enjoined on me that presents the greatest difficulty. He has solicited me most earnestly to employ my time in Tahiti in acquiring a greater knowledge of the Indians and their customs, and a more complete vocabulary and grammar of their language, than it has hitherto been possible to gather. He believes that a dictionary of the language, in particular, might prove of the greatest service to mariners in the South Sea. But I know as little of dictionaries as of Greek, and shall have no one on board qualified for such a task."

"How shall you lay your course, sir?" I asked. "About Cape Horn?"

"I shall make the attempt, though the season will be advanced beyond the time of easterly winds. We shall return from Tahiti by way of the East Indies and the Cape of Good Hope."

My mother gave me a glance and we rose as she took leave of us. While he cracked walnuts and sipped my father's Madeira, Bligh questioned me, in the agreeable manner he knew so well how to assume, as to my knowledge of languages. At last he seemed satisfied, finished the wine in his glass, and shook his head at the man who would have filled it. He was moderate in the use of wine, in an age when nearly all the officers of His Majesty's Navy drank to excess. Finally he spoke.

"Young man," he said seriously, "how would you like to sail with me?"

I had been thinking, ever since his first mention of the voyage, that I should like nothing better, but his words took me aback. "Do you mean it, sir?" I stammered. "Would it be possible?"

"It rests with you and Mrs. Byam to decide. It would be a pleasure to make a place for you among my young gentlemen."

The warm summer evening was as beautiful as the day that had preceded it, and when we had joined my mother in the garden, she and Bligh spoke of the projected voyage. I knew that he was waiting for me to mention his proposal, and presently, during a pause in the talk, I summoned up my courage.

"Mother," I said, "Lieutenant Bligh has been good enough to suggest that I accompany him."

If she felt surprise, she gave no sign of it, but turned calmly to our guest. "You have paid Roger a compliment," she remarked. "Could an inexperienced lad be of use to you on board?"

"He'll make a seaman, ma'am, never fear! I've taken a fancy to the cut of his jib, as the old tars say. And I could put his gift for languages to good use."

"How long shall you be gone?"

"Two years, perhaps."

"He was to have gone up to Oxford, but I suppose that could wait." She turned to me half banteringly. "Well, sir, what do you say?"

"With your permission, there is nothing I would rather do."

She smiled at me in the twilight and gave my hand a little pat. "Then you have it," she said. "I would be the last to stand in the way. A voyage to the South Sea! If I were a lad and Mr. Bligh would have me, I'd run away from home to join his ship!"

Bligh gave one of his short, harsh laughs and looked at my mother admiringly. "You'd have made a rare sailor, ma'am," he remarked—"afraid of nothing, I'll wager."

It was arranged that I should join the Bounty at Spithead, but the storing, and victualing, and fitting-out took so long that the autumn was far advanced before she was ready to sail. In October I took leave of my mother and went up to London to order my uniforms, to call on old Mr. Erskine, our solicitor, and to pay my respects to Sir Joseph Banks.

My clearest memory of those days is of an evening at Sir Joseph's house. He was a figure of romance to my eyes—a handsome, florid man of forty-five, President of the Royal Society, companion of the immortal Captain Cook, friend of Indian princesses, and explorer of Labrador, Iceland, and the great South Sea. When we had dined, he led me to his study, hung with strange weapons and ornaments from distant lands. He took up from among the papers on his table a sheaf of manuscript.

"My vocabulary of the Tahitian language," he said. "I have had this copy made. It is short and imperfect, as you will discover, but may prove of some service to you. Please observe that the system of spelling Captain Cook and I adopted should be changed. I have given the matter some thought, and Bligh agrees with me that it will be better and simpler to set down the words as an Italian would spell them—particularly in the case of the vowels. You know Italian, eh?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good!" he went on. "You will be some months in Tahiti, while they are gathering the young breadfruit plants. Bligh will see to it that you are given leisure to devote yourself to the dictionary I hope to publish on your return. Dialects of the Tahitian language are spoken over an immense space of the South Sea, and a dictionary of the commoner words, with some little information as to the grammar, will be in demand among mariners before many years have passed. At present we think of the South Sea as little less remote than the moon, but depend on it, the rich whale fisheries and new lands for planting and settlement will soon attract notice, now that we have lost the American Colonies.

"There are many distractions in Tahiti," he went on after a pause; "take care that you are not misled into wasting your time. And, above all, take care in the selection of your Indian friends. When a ship drops anchor in Matavai Bay the Indians come out in throngs, each eager to choose a friend, or taio, from amongst her company. Bide your time, learn something of politics on shore, and choose as your taio a man of consideration and authority. Such a man can be of infinite use to you; in return for a few axes, knives, fishhooks, and trinkets for his women, he will keep you supplied with fresh provisions, entertain you at his residence when you step ashore, and do everything in his power to make himself useful. Should you make the mistake of choosing as your taio a man of the lower orders, you may find him dull, incurious, and with an imperfect knowledge of the Indian tongue. In my opinion they are not only a different class, but a different race, conquered long ago by those who now rule the land. Persons of consequence in Tahiti are taller, fairer, and vastly more intelligent than the manahune, or serfs."

"Then there is no more equality in Tahiti than amongst ourselves?"

Sir Joseph smiled. "Less, I should say. The Indians have a false appearance of equality from the simplicity of their manners and the fact that the employments of all classes are the same. The king may be seen heading a fishing party, or the queen paddling her own canoe, or beating out bark cloth with her women. But of real equality there is none; no action, however meritorious, can raise a man above the position to which he was born. The chiefs alone, believed to be descended from the gods, are thought to have souls." He paused, fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. "You've everything you will need?" he asked. "Clothing, writing materials, money? Midshipmen's fare is not the best in the world, but when you go on board, one of the master's mates will ask each of you for three or four pounds to lay in a few small luxuries for the berth. Have you a sextant?"

"Yes, sir—one of my father's; I showed it to Mr. Bligh."

"I'm glad Bligh's in command; there's not a better seaman afloat. I am told that he is a bit of a tartar at sea, but better a taut hand than a slack one, any day! He will instruct you in your duties; perform them smartly, and remember—discipline's the thing!"

I took my leave of Sir Joseph with his last words still ringing in my ears—"Discipline's the thing!" I was destined to ponder over them deeply, and sometimes bitterly, before we met again.

CHAPTER II.—SEA LAW

Toward the end of November I joined the Bounty at Spithead. It makes me smile to-day to think of the box I brought down on the coach from London, packed with clothing and uniforms on which I had laid out more than a hundred pounds: blue tail-coats lined with white silk, with the white patch on the collar known in those days as a "weekly account"; breeches and waistcoats of white nankeen, and a brace of "scrapers"—smart three-cornered reefer's hats, with gold loops and cockades. For a few days I made a brave show in my finery, but when the Bounty sailed it was stowed away for good, and worn no more.

Our ship looked no bigger than a longboat among the tall first-rates and seventy-fours at anchor near by. She had been built for the merchant service, at Hull, three years before, and purchased for two thousand pounds; ninety feet long on deck and with a beam of twenty-four feet, her burthen was little more than two hundred tons. Her name—Bethia—had been painted out, and at the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks she was rechristened Bounty. The ship had been many months at Deptford, where the Admiralty had spent more than four thousand pounds in altering and refitting her. The great cabin aft was now rigged as a garden, with innumerable pots standing in racks, and gutters running below to allow the water to be used over and over again. The result was that Lieutenant Bligh and the master, Mr. Fryer, were squeezed into two small cabins on either side of the ladderway, and forced to mess with the surgeon, in a screened-off space of the lower deck, aft of the main hatch. The ship was small to begin with; she carried a heavy cargo of stores and articles for barter with the Indians, and all hands on board were so cramped that I heard mutterings even before we set sail. I believe, in fact, that the discomfort of our life, and the bad humour it brought about, played no small part in the unhappy ending of a voyage which seemed ill-fated from the start.

The Bounty was copper-sheathed, a new thing in those days, and with her bluff, heavy hull, short masts, and stout rigging, she looked more like a whaling vessel than an armed transport of His Majesty's Navy. She carried a pair of swivel guns mounted on stocks forward, and six swivels and four tour-pounders aft, on the upper deck.

All was new and strange to me on the morning when I presented myself to Lieutenant Bligh, the ship was crowded with women,—the sailors' "wives,"—rum seemed to flow like water everywhere, and sharp-faced Jews, in their wherries, hovered alongside, eager to lend money at interest against pay day, or to sell on credit the worthless trinkets on their trays. The cries of the bumboat men, the shrill scolding of the women, and the shouts and curses of the sailors made a pandemonium stunning to a landsman's ears.

Making my way aft, I found Mr. Bligh on the quarter-deck. A tall, swarthy man was just ahead of me.

"I have been to the Portsmouth observatory, sir," he said to the captain; "the timekeeper is one minute fifty-two seconds too fast for mean time, and losing at the rate of one second a day. Mr. Bailey made a note of it in this letter to you."

"Thank you, Mr. Christian," said Bligh shortly, and at that moment, turning his head, he caught sight of me. I uncovered, stepping forward to present myself. "Ah, Mr. Byam," he went on, "this is Mr. Christian, the master's mate; he will show you your berth and instruct you in some of your duties...And, by the way, you will dine with me on board the Tigress; Captain Courtney knew your father and asked me to bring you when he heard that you would be on board." He glanced at his large silver watch. "Be ready in an hour's time."

I bowed in reply to his nod of dismissal and followed Christian to the ladderway. The berth was a screened-off space of the lower deck, on the larboard side, abreast of the main hatch. Its dimensions were scarcely more than eight feet by ten, yet four of us were to make this kennel our home. Three or four boxes stood around the sides, and a scuttle of heavy discoloured glass admitted a dim light. A quadrant hung on a nail driven into the ship's side, and, though she was not long from Deptford, a reek of bilge water hung in the air. A handsome, sulky-looking boy of sixteen, in a uniform like my own, was arranging the gear in his box, and straightened up to give me a contemptuous stare. His name was Hayward, as I learned when Christian introduced us briefly, and he scarcely deigned to take my outstretched hand.

When we regained the upper deck, Christian lost his air of preoccupation, and smiled. "Mr. Hayward has been two years at sea," he remarked; "he knows you for a Johnny Newcomer. But the Bounty is a little ship; such airs would be more fitting aboard a first-rate."

He spoke in a cultivated voice, with a trace of the Manx accent, and I could barely hear the words above the racket from the forward part of the ship. It was a calm, bright winter morning, and I studied my companion in the clear sunlight. He was a man to glance at more than once.

Fletcher Christian was at that time in his twenty-fourth year,—a fine figure of a seaman in his plain blue, gold-buttoned frock,—handsomely and strongly built, with thick dark brown hair and a complexion naturally dark, and burned by the sun to a shade rarely seen among the white race. His mouth and chin expressed great resolution of character, and his eyes, black, deep-set, and brilliant, had something of hypnotic power in their far-away gaze. He looked more like a Spaniard than an Englishman, though his family had been settled since the fifteenth century on the Isle of Man. Christian was what women call a romantic-looking man; his moods of gaiety alternated with fits of black depression, and he possessed a fiery temper which he controlled by efforts that brought the sweat to his brow. Though only a master's mate, a step above a midshipman, he was of gentle birth—better born than Bligh and a gentleman in manner and speech.

"Lieutenant Bligh," he said, in his musing, abstracted way, "desires me to instruct you in some of your duties. Navigation, nautical astronomy, and trigonometry he will teach you himself, since we have no schoolmaster on board, as on a man-of-war. And I can assure you that you will not sup till you have worked out the ship's position each day. You will be assigned to one of the watches, to keep order when the men are at the braces or aloft. You will see that the hammocks are stowed in the morning, and report the men whose hammocks are badly lashed. Never lounge against the guns or the ship's side, and never walk the deck with your hands in your pockets. You will be expected to go aloft with the men to learn how to bend canvas and how to reef and furl a sail, and when the ship is at anchor you may be placed in charge of one of the boats. And, last of all, you are the slave of those tyrants, the master and master's mates."

He gave me a whimsical glance and a smile. We were standing by the gratings abaft the mainmast, and at that moment a stout elderly man, in a uniform much like Bligh's, came puffing up the ladderway. His bronzed face was at once kindly and resolute, and I should have known him for a seaman anywhere.

"Ah, Mr. Christian, there you are!" he exclaimed as he heaved himself on deck. "What a madhouse! I'd like to sink the lot of those Jews, and heave the wenches overboard! Who's this? The new reefer, Mr. Byam, I'll be bound! Welcome on board, Mr. Byam; your father's name stands high in our science, eh, Mr. Christian?"

"Mr. Fryer, the master," said Christian in my ear.

"A madhouse," Fryer went on. "Thank God we shall pay off tomorrow night! Wenches everywhere, above decks and below." He turned to Christian. "Go forward and gather a boat's crew for Lieutenant Bligh—there are a few men still sober."

"There's discipline on a man-of-war at sea," he continued; "but give me a merchant ship in port. The captain's clerk is the only sober man below. The surgeon...Ah, here he is now!"

Turning to follow Fryer's glance, I saw a head thatched with thick snow-white hair appearing in the ladderway. Our sawbones had a wooden leg and a long equine face, red as the wattles of a turkey cock; even the back of his neck, lined with deep wrinkles like a tortoise's, was of the same fiery red. His twinkling bright blue eyes caught sight of the man beside me. Holding to the ladder with one hand, he waved a half-empty bottle of brandy at us.

"Ahoy there, Mr. Fryer!" he hailed jovially. "Have you seen Nelson, the botanist? I prescribed a drop of brandy for his rheumatic leg; it's time he took his medicine."

"He's gone ashore."

The surgeon shook his head with mock regret. "He'll give his good shillings to some Portsmouth quack, I'll wager. Yet here on board he might enjoy free and gratis the advice of the most enlightened medical opinion. Away with all bark and physic!" He flourished his bottle. "Here is the remedy for nine tenths of human ills. Aye! Drops of brandy! That's it!" Suddenly, in a mellow, husky voice, sweet and true, he began to sing:

"And Johnny shall have a new bonnet
And Johnny shall go to the fair,
And Johnny shall have a blue ribbon
To tie up his bonny brown hair."

Lieutenant Bligh, an old hand in the Navy, was nowhere to be seen. On the morrow the men would receive two months' wages in advance, and on the following day we should set sail on a voyage to the other side of the world, facing the hardships and dangers of seas still largely unexplored. The Bounty might well be gone two years or more, and now, on the eve of departure, her crew was allowed to relax for a day or two of such amusements as sailors most enjoy.

While I waited for Bligh in the uproar, I diverted myself in studying the rigging of the Bounty. Born and brought up on the west coast of England, I had loved the sea from childhood and lived amongst men who spoke of ships and their qualities as men gossip of horses elsewhere. The Bounty was ship-rigged, and to a true landsman her rigging would have seemed a veritable maze of ropes. But even in my inexperience I knew enough to name her sails, the different parts of her standing rigging, and most of the complex system of halliards, lifts, braces, sheets, and other ropes for the management of sails and yards. She spread two headsails—foretopmast-staysail and jib; on fore and main masts she carried courses, topsails, topgallants, and royals, and the mizzenmast spread the latter three sails. That American innovation, the crossjack, had not in those days been introduced. The crossjack yard was still, as the French say, a vergue sèche,—a barren yard,—and the Bounty's driver, though loose at the foot, was of the gaff-headed type, then superseding the clumsy lateen our ships had carried on the mizzen for centuries.

As I mused on the Bounty's sails and ropes, asking myself how this order or that would be given, and wondering how I should go about obeying were I told to furl a royal or lend a hand at one of the braces, I felt something of the spell which even the smallest ship casts over me to this day. For a ship is the noblest of all man's works—a cunning fabric of wood, and iron, and hemp, wonderfully propelled by wings of canvas, and seeming at times to have the very breath of life. I was craning my neck to stare aloft when I heard Bligh's voice, harsh and abrupt.

"Mr. Byam!"

I gathered my wits with a start and found Lieutenant Bligh, in full uniform, at my side. He gave a faint quizzing smile and went on: "She's small, eh? But a taut little ship—a taut little ship!" He made me a sign to follow him over the Bounty's side.

Our boat's crew, if not strictly sober, were able to row, and put their hacks into it with a will. We were soon alongside Captain Courtney's tall seventy-four. The Tigress paid Mr. Bligh the compliment of piping the side. Side boys in spotless white stood at attention by the red ropes to the gangway; the boatswain, in full uniform, blew a slow and solemn salute on his silver whistle as Bligh's foot touched the deck. Marine sentries stood at attention, and all was silent save for the mournful piping. We walked aft, saluting the quarter-deck, where Captain Courtney awaited us.

Courtney and Bligh were old acquaintances; he had been with Bligh on the Belle Poule, in the stubborn and bloody action of Dogger Bank six years before. Captain Courtney was a member of a great family—a tall, slender officer, with a quizzing glass and a thin-lipped ironic mouth. He greeted us pleasantly, spoke of my father, whom he had known more by reputation than otherwise, and led us to his cabin aft, where a red-coated sentry stood at the bulkhead, a drawn sword in his hand. It was the first time I had been in the cabin of a man-of-war, and I gazed about me curiously. Its floor was the upper gun-deck and its ceiling the poop; so the apartment seemed very lofty for a ship. The ports were glazed, and a door aft gave on the stern-walk, with its carvings and gilded rail, where the captain might take his pleasure undisturbed. But the cabin itself was furnished with Spartan bareness: a long settee under the ports, a heavy fixed table, and a few chairs. A lamp swung in gimbals overhead; there were a telescope in a bracket, a short shelf of books, and a stand of muskets and cutlasses in a rack about the mizzenmast. The table was laid for three.

"A glass of sherry with you, Mr. Bligh," said the captain, as a man handed the glasses on a tray. He smiled at me in his courtly way, and raised his glass. "To the memory of your father, young man! We seamen owe him a lasting debt."

As we drank, I heard a great stir and shuffling of feet on deck, and the distant sound of a drum. Captain Courtney glanced at his watch, finished his wine, and rose from the settee.

"My apologies. They're flogging a man through the fleet, and I hear the boats coming. I must read the sentence at the gangway—a deuced bore. Make yourselves at home; should you wish to be spectators, I can recommend the poop."

Next moment he passed the rigid marine at the bulkhead and was gone. Bligh listened for a moment to the distant drumming, set down his glass, and beckoned me to follow him. From the quarter-deck a short ladder led up to the poop, a high point of vantage from which all that went on was visible. Though the air was crisp, the wind was the merest cat's-paw and the sun shone in a blue and cloudless sky.

The order to turn all hands aft to witness punishment was being piped by the boatswain and shouted by his mates. The marines, with muskets and side-arms, were hastening aft to fall in before us on the poop. Captain Courtney and his lieutenants stood on the weather quarter-deck, and the junior officers were gathered to leeward of them. The doctor and purser stood further to leeward, under the break of the poop, behind the boatswain and his mates. The ship's company was gathered along the lee bulwarks—some, to see better, standing in the boats or on the booms. A tall ninety-eight and a third-rate like the Tigress lay at anchor close by, and I saw that their ports and bulwarks were crowded with silent men.

The half-minute bell began to sound, and the noise of drumming grew louder—the doleful tattoo of the rogue's march. Then, around the bows of the Tigress, came a procession I shall never forget.

In the lead, rowed slowly in time to the nervous beat of the drum, came the longboat of a near-by ship. Her surgeon and master-at-arms stood beside the drummer; just aft of them a human figure was huddled in a posture I could not make out at first. Behind the longboat, and rowing in time to the same doleful music, came a boat from every ship of the fleet, manned with marines to attend the punishment. I heard an order "Way enough!" and as the rowing ceased the longboat drifted to a halt by the gangway. I glanced down over the rail. My breath seemed to catch in my throat, and without knowing that I spoke, I exclaimed softly, "Oh, my God!" Mr. Bligh gave me a sidelong glance and one of his slight, grim smiles.

The huddled figure in the bows of the boat was that of a powerful man of thirty or thirty-five. He was stripped to his wide sailor's trousers of duck, and his bare arms were bronzed and tattooed. Stockings had been bound around his wrists, which were stoutly lashed to a capstan bar. His thick yellow hair was in disorder and I could not see his face, for his head hung down over his chest. His trousers, the thwart on which he lay huddled, and the frames and planking of the boat on either side of him were blotched and spattered with black blood. Blood I had seen before; it was the man's back that made me catch my breath. From neck to waist the cat-o'-nine-tails had laid the bones bare, and the flesh hung in blackened, tattered strips.

Captain Courtney sauntered placidly across the deck to glance down at the hideous spectacle below. The surgeon in the boat bent over the mutilated, seized-up body, straightened his back, and looked at Courtney by the gangway.

"The man is dead, sir," he said solemnly. A murmur faint as a stir of air in the treetops came from the men crowded on the booms. The Captain of the Tigress folded his arms and turned his head slightly with raised eyebrows. He made a gallant figure, with his sword, his rich laced uniform, his cocked hat and powdered queue. In the tense silence which followed he turned to the surgeon again.

"Dead," he said lightly, in his cultivated drawl. "Lucky devil! Master-at-arms!" The warrant officer at the doctor's side sprang to attention and pulled off his hat. "How many are due?"

"Two dozen, sir."

Courtney strolled back to his place on the weather side and took from his first lieutenant's hand a copy of the Articles of War. As he swept off his cocked hat gracefully and held it over his heart, every man on the ship uncovered in respect to the King's commandments. Then, in his clear, drawling voice, the captain read the Article which prescribes the punishment for striking an officer of His Majesty's Navy. One of the boatswain's mates was untying a red baize bag, from which he drew out the red-handled cat, eyeing it uncertainly, with frequent glances to windward. The captain concluded his reading, replaced his hat, and caught the man's eye. Again I heard the faint sighing murmur forward, and again deep silence fell before Courtney's glance. "Do your duty," he ordered calmly; "two dozen, I believe."

"Two dozen it is, sir," said the boatswain's mate in a hollow voice as he walked slowly to the side. There were clenched jaws and gleaming eyes among the men forward, but the silence was so profound that I could hear the faint creak of blocks aloft as the braces swayed in the light air.

I could not turn my eyes away from the boatswain's mate, climbing slowly down the ship's side. If the man had shouted aloud, he could not have expressed more clearly the reluctance he felt. He stepped into the boat, and as he moved among the men on the thwarts they drew back with set stern faces. At the capstan bar, he hesitated and looked up uncertainly. Courtney had sauntered to the bulwarks and was gazing down with folded arms.

"Come! Do your duty!" he ordered, with the air of a man whose dinner is growing cold.

The man with the cat drew its tails through the fingers of his left hand, raised his arm, and sent them whistling down on the poor battered corpse. I turned away, giddy and sick. Bligh stood by the rail, a hand on his hip, watching the scene below as a man might watch a play indifferently performed. The measured blows continued—each breaking the silence like a pistol shot. I counted them mechanically for what seemed an age, but the end came at last—twenty-two, a pause, twenty-three...twenty-four. I heard a word of command; the marines fell out and trooped down the poop ladder. Eight bells struck. There were a stir and bustle on the ship, and I heard the boatswain piping the long-drawn, cheery call to dinner.

When we sat down to dine, Courtney seemed to have dismissed the incident from his mind. He tossed off a glass of sherry to Bligh's health, and tasted his soup. "Cold!" he remarked ruefully. "Hardships of a seaman's life, eh, Bligh?"

His guest took soup with a relish, and sounds better fitted to the forecastle than aft, for his manners at table were coarse. "Damme!" he said. "We fared worse aboard the old Poule!"

"But not in Tahiti, I'll wager. I hear you are to pay the Indian ladies of the South Sea another call."

"Aye, and a long one. We shall be some months in getting our load of breadfruit trees."

"I heard of your voyage in Town. Cheap food for the West Indian slaves, eh? I wish I were sailing with you."

"By God, I wish you were! I could promise you some sport."

"Are the Indian women as handsome as Cook painted them?"

"Indeed they are, if you've no prejudice against a brown skin. They are wonderfully clean in person, and have enough sensibility to attract a fastidious man. Witness Sir Joseph; he declares that there are no such women in the world!"

Our host sighed romantically. "Say no more! Say no more! I can see you, like a Bashaw under the palms, in the midst of a harem the Sultan himself might envy!"

Still sickened by what I had seen, I was doing my best to make a pretense of eating, silent while the older men talked. Bligh was the first to mention the flogging.

"What had the man done?" he asked.

Captain Courtney set down his glass of claret and glanced up absently. "Oh, the fellow who was flogged," he said. "He was one of Captain Allison's foretopmen, on the Unconquerable. And a smart hand, they say. He was posted for desertion, and then Allison, who remembered his face, saw him stepping out of a public house in Portsmouth. The man tried to spring away and Allison seized him by the arm. Damme! Good topmen don't grow on every hedge! Well, this insolent fellow blacked Allison's eye, just as a file of marines passed. They made him prisoner, and you saw the rest. Odd! We were only the fifth ship; eight dozen did for him. But Allison has a boatswain's mate who's an artist, they say—left-handed, so he lays them on crisscross, and strong as an ox."

Bligh listened with interest to Courtney's words, and nodded approvingly. "Struck his captain, eh?" he remarked. "By God! He deserved all he got, and more! No laws are more just than those governing the conduct of men at sea."

"Is there any need of such cruelty?" I asked, unable to keep silent. "Why did they not hang the poor fellow and have done with it?"

"Poor fellow?" Captain Courtney turned to me with eyebrows raised. "You have much to learn, my lad. A year or two at sea will harden him, eh, Bligh?"

"I'll see to that," said the Captain of the Bounty. "No, Mr. Byam, you must waste no sympathy on rascals of that stripe."

"And remember," put in Courtney, with a manner of friendly admonishment, "remember, as Mr. Bligh says, that no laws are more just than those governing the conduct of men at sea. Not only just, but necessary; discipline must be preserved, on a merchantman as well as on a man-of-war, and mutiny and piracy suppressed."

"Yes," said Bligh, "our sea law is stern, but it has the authority of centuries. And it has grown more humane with time," he continued, not without a trace of regret. "Keel-hauling has been abolished, save among the French, and a captain no longer has the right to condemn and put to death one of his crew."

Still agitated by the shock of what I had seen, I ate little and took more wine than was my custom, sitting in silence for the most part, while the two officers gossiped, sailor-like, as to the whereabouts of former friends, and spoke of Admiral Parker, and the fight at Dogger Bank. It was mid-afternoon when Bligh and I were pulled back to the Bounty. The tide was low, and I saw a boat aground on a flat some distance off, while a party of men dug a shallow grave in the mud. They were burying the body of the poor fellow who had been flogged through the fleet—burying him below tide mark, in silence, and without religious rites.

CHAPTER III.—AT SEA

At daybreak on the twenty-eighth of November we got sail on the Bounty and worked down to St. Helen's, where we dropped anchor. For nearly a month we were detained there and at Spithead by contrary winds; it was not until the twenty-third of December that we set sail down the Channel with a fair wind.

A month sounds an age to be crowded with more than forty other men on board a small vessel at anchor most of the time, but I was making the acquaintance of my shipmates, and so keen on learning my new duties that the days were all too short. The Bounty carried six midshipmen, and, since we had no schoolmaster, as is customary on a man-of-war, Lieutenant Bligh and the master divided the duty of instructing us in trigonometry, nautical astronomy, and navigation. I shared with Stewart and Young the advantage of learning navigation under Bligh, and in justice to an officer whose character in other respects was by no means perfect, I must say that there was no finer seaman and navigator afloat at the time. Both of my fellow midshipmen were men grown: George Stewart of a good family in the Orkneys, a young man of twenty-three or four, and a seaman who had made several voyages before this: and Edward Young, a stout, salty-looking fellow, with a handsome face marred by the loss of nearly all his front teeth. Both of them were already very fair navigators, and I was hard put to it not to earn the reputation of a dunce.

The boatswain, Mr. Cole, and his mate, James Morrison, instructed me in seamanship. Cole was an old-style Navy salt, bronzed, taciturn, and pigtailed, with a profound knowledge of his work and little other knowledge of any kind. Morrison was very different—a man of good birth, he had been a midshipman, and had shipped aboard the Bounty because of his interest in the voyage. He was a first-rate seaman and navigator; a dark, slender, intelligent man of thirty or thereabouts, cool in the face of danger, not given to oaths, and far above his station on board. Morrison did not thrash the men to their work, delivering blows impartially in the manner of a boatswain's mate; he carried a colt, a piece of knotted rope, to be sure, but it was only used on obvious malingerers, or when Bligh shouted to him: "Start that man!"

There were much irritation and grumbling at the continued bad weather, but at last, on the evening of the twenty-second of December, the sky cleared and the wind shifted to the eastward. It was still dark next morning when I heard the boatswain's pipe and Morrison's call: "All hands! Turn out and save a clue! Out or down here! Rise and shine! Out or down there! Lash and carry!"

The stars were bright when I came on deck, and the grey glimmer of dawn was in the East. For three weeks we had had strong southwesterly winds, with rain and fog; now the air was sharp with frost, and a strong east wind blew in gusts off the coast of France. Lieutenant Bligh was on the quarter-deck with Mr. Fryer, the master; Christian and Elphinstone, the master's mates, were forward among the men. There was a great bustle on deck and the ship rang with the piping of the bos'n's whistle. I heard the shouting of the men at the windlass, and Christian's voice above the din: "Hove short, sir!"

"Loose the topsails!" came from Fryer, and Christian passed the order on. My station was the mizzen-top, and in a twinkling we had the gaskets off and the small sail sheeted home. The knots in the gaskets were stiff with frost, and the men setting the fore-topsail were slow at their work. Bligh glanced aloft impatiently.

"What are you doing there?" he shouted angrily. "Are you all asleep, foretop? The main-topmen are off the yard! Look alive, you crawling caterpillars!"

The topsails filled and the yards were braced up sharp; the Bounty broke out her own anchor as she gathered way on the larboard tack. She was smartly manned in spite of Bligh's complaints, but he was on edge, for a thousand critical eyes watched our departure from the ships at anchor closer inshore. With a "Yo! Heave ho!" the anchor came up and was tatted.

Then it was: "Loose the forecourse!" and presently, as she began to heel to the gusts: "Get the mainsail on her!" There was a thunder of canvas and a wild rattling of blocks. When the brace was hove short, Bligh himself roared: "Board. the main tack!" Little by little, with a mighty chorus at the windlass: "Heave ho! Heave and pawl! Yo, heave, hearty, ho!" the weather clew of the sail came down to the waterway. Heeling well to starboard, the bluff-bowed little ship tore through the sheltered water, on her way to the open sea.

The sun rose in a cloudless sky—a glorious winter's morning, clear, cold, and sparkling. I stood by the bulwarks as we flew down the Solent, my breath trailing off like thin smoke. Presently we sped through the Needles and the Bounty headed away to sea, going like a race horse, with topgallants set.

That night the wind increased to a strong gale, with a heavy sea, but on the following day the weather moderated, permitting us to keep our Christmas cheerfully. Extra grog was served out, and the mess cooks were to be heard whistling as they seeded the raisins for duff, not, as a landsman might suppose, from the prospect of good cheer, but in order to prove to their messmates that the raisins were not going into t heir mouths.

I was still making the acquaintance of my shipmates at this time. The men of the Bounty had been attracted by the prospect of a voyage to the South Sea, or selected for their stations by the master or Bligh himself. Our fourteen able-bodied seamen were true salts, not the scum of the taverns and jails impressed to man so many of His Majesty's ships; the officers were nearly all men of experience and tried character, and even our botanist, Mr. Nelson, had been recommended by Sir Joseph Banks because of his former voyage to Tahiti under Captain Cook. Mr. Bligh might have had a hundred midshipmen had he obliged all those who applied for a place in the Bounty's berth; as it was, there were six of us, though the ship's establishment provided for only two. Stewart and Young were seamen and pleasant fellows enough; Hallet was a sickly-looking boy of fifteen with a shifty eye and a weak, peevish mouth; Tinkler, Mr. Fryer's brother-in-law, was a year younger, though he had been to sea before—a monkey of a lad, whose continual scrapes kept him at the masthead half the time. Hayward, the handsome, sulky boy I had met when I first set foot in the berth, was only, sixteen, but big and strong for his age. He was something of a bully and aspired to be cock of the berth, since he had been two years at sea aboard a seventy-four.

I shared with Hayward, Stewart, and Young a berth on the lower deck. In this small space the four of us swung our hammocks at night and had our mess, using a chest for a table and other chests for seats. On consideration of a liberal share of our grog, received each Saturday night, Alexander Smith, able-bodied, acted as our hammock man, and for a lesser sum of the same ship's currency, Thomas Ellison, the youngest of the seamen, filled the office of mess boy. Mr. Christian was caterer to the midshipmen's mess; like the others, I had paid him five pounds on joining the ship, and he had laid out the money in a supply of potatoes, onions, Dutch cheeses (for making that midshipman's dish called "crab"), tea, coffee, and sugar, and other small luxuries. These private stores enabled us to live well for several weeks, though a more villainous cook than young Tom Ellison would be impossible to find. As for drink, the ship's allowance was so liberal that Christian made no special provision for us. For a month or more every man aboard received a gallon of beer each day, and when that was gone, a pint of fiery white mistela wine from Spain—the wine our seamen love and call affectionately "Miss Taylor." And when the last of the wine was gone we fell back on an ample supply of the sailor's sheet anchor—grog. We had a wondrous fifer on board—a half-blind Irishman named Michael Byrne. He had managed to conceal his blindness till the Bounty was at sea, when it became apparent, much to Mr. Bligh's annoyance. But when he struck up "Nancy Dawson" on the first day he piped the men to grog, his blindness was forgotten. He could put more trills and runs into that lively old tune than any man of us had heard before a cheeriness in keeping with this happiest hour of the seaman's day.

We lost a good part of our beer in a strong easterly gale that overtook the Bounty the day after Christmas. Several casks went adrift from their lashings and were washed overboard when a great sea broke over the ship; the same wave stove in all three of our boats and nearly carried them away. I was off watch at the time, and below, diverting myself in the surgeon's cabin on the orlop, aft. It was a close, stinking little den, below the water line—reeking of the bilges and lit by a candle that burned blue for lack of air. But that mattered nothing to Old Bacchus. Our sawbones's name was Thomas Huggan and it was so inscribed on the ship's articles, but he was known as Old Bacchus to all our company. His normal state was what sailors call "in the wind" or "shaking a cloth," and the signal that he had passed his normal state earned him the name by which all hands on the Bounty knew him. When he had indiscreetly added a glass of brandy or a tot of grog to the carefully measured supply of spirits demanded at close intervals by a stomach which must have been copper-sheathed, it was his custom to rise, balancing himself on his starboard leg, place a hand between the third and fourth buttons of his waistcoat, and recite with comic gravity a verse which begins:—

Bacchus must now his power resign.

With his wooden leg, his fiery face, snow-white hair, and rakish blue eyes, Old Bacchus seemed the veritable archetype of naval surgeons. He had been afloat so long that he could scarcely recollect the days when he had lived ashore, and viewed with apprehension the prospect of retirement. He preferred salt beef to the finest steak or chop to be obtained ashore, and confided to me one day that it was almost impossible for him to sleep in a bed. A cannon ball had carried away his larboard leg when his ship was exchanging broadsides, yardarm to yardarm, with the Ranger, and he had been made prisoner by John Paul Jones.

The cronies of Old Bacchus were Mr. Nelson, the botanist, and Peckover, the Bounty's gunner. The duties of a gunner, onerous enough on board a man-of-war, were of the very lightest on our ship, and Peckover—a jovial fellow who loved a song and a glass dearly—had some leisure for conviviality. Mr. Nelson was a quiet, elderly man with iron-grey hair. Though devoted to the study of plants, he seemed to derive great pleasure from the surgeon's company, and could spin a. yarn with the best when in the mood. The great event in his life had been his voyage to the South Sea with Captain Cook, whose memory he revered.

Mr. Nelson's cabin was forward of the surgeon's, separated from it by the cabin of Samuel, the captain's clerk, and he was to be found more often in the surgeon's cabin than in his own. All of the cabins were provided with standing bed places, built in by the carpenters at Deptford, but Bacchus preferred to sling a hammock at night, and used his bed as a settee and the capacious locker under it as a private spirit room. The cabin was scarcely more than six feet by seven; the bed occupied nearly half of this space, and opposite, under the hammock battens, were three small casks of wine, as yet unbroached. On one of them a candle guttered and burned blue.

Another cask served as a seat for me, and Bacchus and Nelson sat side by side on the bed. Each man held a pewter pint of flip—beer strongly laced with rum. The ship was on the larboard tack and making heavy weather of it, so that at times my cask threatened to slide from under me, but the two men on the settee seemed to give the weather no thought.

"A first-rate man, Purcell!" remarked the surgeon, glancing down admiringly at his new wooden leg; "a better ship's carpenter never swung an adze! My other leg was most damnably uncomfortable, but this one's like my own flesh and bone! Mr. Purcell's health!" He took a long pull at the flip and smacked his lips. "You're a lucky man, Nelson! Should anything happen to your underpinning, you've me to saw off the old leg and Purcell to make you a better one!"

Nelson smiled. "Very kind, I'm sure," he said; "but I hope I shall not have to trouble you."

"I hope not, my dear fellow—I hope not! But never dread an amputation. With a pint of rum, a well-stropped razor, and a crosscut saw, I'd have your leg off before you knew it. Paul Jones's American surgeon did the trick for me.

"Let's see—it must have been in seventy-eight. I was on the old Drake, Captain Burden, and we were on the lookout for Paul Jones's Ranger at the time. Then we learned that she was hove-to off the. mouth of Belfast Lough. An extraordinary affair, begad! We actually had sight-seers on board—one of them was an officer of the Inniskilling Fusileers in full uniform. We moved out slowly and came up astern of the American ship. Up went our colours and we hailed: "What ship is that?" 'American Continental ship Ranger!' roared the Yankee master, as his own colours went up. 'Come on—we're waiting for you!' Next moment both ships let go their broadsides...Good God!"

The Bounty staggered with the shock of a great sea which broke into her at that moment. "Up with you, Byam!" ordered the surgeon; and, as I sprang out of his cabin toward the ladderway, I heard, above the creaking and straining of the ship and the roar of angry water, a faint shouting for all hands on deck. Then I found myself in an uproar and confusion very strange after the peace of the surgeon's snuggery.

Bligh stood by the mizzenmast, beside Fryer, who was bawling orders to his mates. They were shortening sail to get the ship hove-to. The men at the clew lines struggled with might and main to hoist the stubborn thundering canvas to the yards.

My own task, with two other midshipmen, was to furl the mizzen topsail—a small sail, but far from easy to subdue at such a time. The men below brailed up the driver and made fast the vangs of its gaff. Presently the Bounty was hove-to, all snug on the larboard tack, under reefed fore and main topsails.

The great wave which had boarded us left destruction in its wake. All three of our boats were stove in; the casks of beer which had been lashed on deck were nowhere to be seen; and the stern of the ship so damaged that the cabin was filled with water, which leaked into the bread room below, spoiling a large part of our stock of bread.

In latitude 39°N. the gale abated, the sun shone out, and we made all sail for Teneriffe with a fine northerly wind. On the fourth of January we spoke a French merchant vessel, bound for Mauritius, which let go her topgallant sheets in salute. The next morning we saw the island of Teneriffe to the southwest of us, about twelve leagues distant, but it fell calm near the land and we were a day and a night working up to the road of Santa Cruz, where we anchored in twenty-five fathoms, close to a Spanish packet and an American brig.

For five days we lay at anchor in the road, and it was here that the seeds of discontent, destined to be the ruin of the voyage, were sown among the Bounty's people. As there was a great surf on the beach, Lieutenant Bligh bargained with the shore boats to bring off our water and supplies, and kept his own men busy from morning to night repairing the mischief the storm had done our ship. This occasioned much grumbling in the forecastle, as some of the sailors had hoped to be employed in the ship's boats, which would have enabled them at least to set foot on the island and to obtain some of the wine for which it is famous, said to be little inferior to the best London Madeira.

During our sojourn the allowance of salt beef was stopped, and fresh beef, obtained on shore, issued instead. The Bounty's salt beef was the worst I have ever met with at sea, but the beef substituted for. it in Teneriffe was worse still. The men declared that it had been cut from the carcasses of dead horses or mules, and complained to the master that it was unfit for food. Fryer informed Bligh of the complaint; the captain flew into a passion and swore that the men should eat the fresh beef or nothing at all. The result was that most of it was thrown overboard—a sight which did nothing to soothe Bligh's temper.

I was fortunate enough to have a run ashore, for Bligh took me with him one day to wait upon the governor, the Marquis de Branchefortàé. With the governor's permission Mr. Nelson ranged the hills every day in search of plants and natural curiosities, but his friend the surgeon only appeared on deck once during the five days we lay at anchor. Old Bacchus had ordered a monstrous supply of brandy for himself—enough to do the very god of wine, his namesake, for a year. Not trusting the shore boats with such precious freight, he had obtained the captain's permission to send the small cutter to the pier, and when a man went below to inform him that his brandy was alongside, the surgeon came stumping to the ladderway and clambered on deck. The cutter was down to the gunwales with her load; as there was a high swell running, Old Bacchus stood by the bulwarks anxiously. "Easy with it!" he ordered with tender solicitude. "Easy now! A glass of grog all around if you break nothing!" When the last of the small casks was aboard and had been sent below, the surgeon heaved a sigh. I was standing near by and saw him glance at the land for the first time. He caught my eye. "One island's as like another as two peas in a pod," he remarked indifferently, pulling out a handkerchief to mop his fiery face.

When we sailed from Teneriffe, Bligh divided the people into three watches, making Christian acting lieutenant, and giving him charge of the third watch. Bligh had known him for some years in the West India trade, and believed himself to be Christian's friend and benefactor. His friendship took the form of inviting Christian to sup or dine one day, and cursing him in the coarsest manner before the men the next; but in this case he did him a real service, since it was ten to one that, if all went well on the voyage, the appointment would be confirmed by the Admiralty, and Christian would find himself the holder of His Majesty's commission. He now rated as a gentleman, with the midshipmen and Bligh; and Fryer was provided with a grievance both against the captain, and—such is human nature—against his former subordinate.

Nor were grievances wanting during our passage from Teneriffe to Cape Horn. The people's food on British ships is always bad and always scanty—a fact which in later days caused so many of our seamen to desert to American vessels. But on the Bounty the food was of poorer quality, and issued in scantier quantities, than any man of us had seen before. When Bligh called the ship's company aft to read the order appointing Christian acting lieutenant, he also informed them that, as the length of the voyage was uncertain, and the season so far advanced that it was doubtful whether we should be able to make our way around Cape Horn, it seemed necessary to reduce the allowance of bread to two thirds of the usual amount. Realizing the need for economy, the men received this cheerfully, but continued to grumble about the salt beef and pork.

We carried no purser. Bligh filled the office himself, assisted by Samuel, his clerk—a smug, tight-lipped little man, of a Jewish cast of countenance, who was believed, not without reason, to be the captain's "narker" or spy among the men. He was heartily disliked by all hands, and it was observed that the man who showed his dislike for Mr. Samuel too openly was apt to find himself in trouble with Lieutenant Bligh. It was Samuel's task to issue the provisions to the cooks of the messes; each time a cask of salt meat was broached, the choicest pieces were reserved for the cabin, and the remainder, scarcely lit for human food, issued out to the messes without being weighed. Samuel would call out "Four pounds," and mark the amount down in his book, when anyone could perceive that the meat would not have weighed three:

Seamen regard meanness in their own kind with the utmost contempt, and that great rarity in the Service, a mean officer, is looked upon with loathing by his men. They can put up with a harsh captain, but nothing will drive British seamen to mutiny faster than a captain suspected of lining his pockets at their expense.

While the Bounty was still in the northeast trades, an incident occurred which gave us reason to suspect Bligh of meanness of this kind. The weather was fine, and one morning the main hatch was raised and our stock of cheeses brought up on deck to air. Bligh missed no detail of the management of his ship; he displayed in such matters a smallness of mind scarcely in accord with his commission. This unwillingness to trust those under him to perform their duties is apt to be the defect of the officer risen from the ranks,—or "come in through the hawse-hole," as seamen say,—and is the principal reason why such officers are rarely popular with their men.

Bligh stood by Hillbrandt, the cooper, while he started the hoops on our casks of cheese and knocked out the heads. Two cheeses, of about fifty pounds weight, were found to be missing from one of the casks, and Bligh flew into one of his passions of rage.

"Stolen, by God!" he shouted.

"Perhaps you will recollect, sir," Hillbrandt made bold to say, "that while we were in Deptford the cask was opened by your order and the cheeses carried ashore."

"You insolent scoundrel! Hold your tongue!"

Christian and Fryer happened to be on deck at the time, and Bligh included them in the black scowl he gave the men near by. "A damned set of thieves," he went on. "You're all in collusion against me—officers and men. But I'll tame you—by God, I will!" He turned to the cooper. "Another word from you and I'll have you seized up and flogged to the bone." He turned aft on his heel and bawled down the ladderway. "Mr. Samuel! Come on deck this instant."

Samuel came trotting up to his master obsequiously, and Bligh went on: "Two of the cheeses have been stolen. See that the allowance is stopped—from the officers too, mind you—until the deficiency is made good."

I could see that Fryer was deeply offended, though he said nothing at the time; as for Christian,—a man of honour,—his feelings were not difficult to imagine. The men had a pretty clear idea of which way the wind blew by this time, and on the next banyan day, when butter alone was served out, they refused it, saying that to accept butter without cheese would be a tacit acknowledgment of the theft. John Williams, one of the seamen, declared publicly in the forecastle that he had carried the two cheeses to Mr. Bligh's house, with a cask of vinegar and some other things which were sent up in a boat from Long Reach.

As the private stocks of provisions obtained in Spithead now began to run out, all hands went "from grub galore to the King's own," as seamen say. Our bread, which was only beginning to breed maggots, was fairly good, though it needed teeth better than mine to eat the central "reefer's nut"; but our salt meat was unspeakably bad. Meeting Alexander Smith one morning when he was cook to his mess, I was shown a piece of it fresh from the cask—a dark, stony, unwholesome-looking lump, glistening with salt.

"Have a look, Mr. Byam," he said. "What'll it be, I wonder? Not beef or pork, that's certain! I mind one day on the old Antelope—two years ago, that was—the cooper found three horseshoes in the bottom of a cask!" He shook his pigtail back over his shoulder and shifted a great quid of tobacco to his starboard cheek. "You've seen the victualing yards in Portsmouth, sir? Pass that way any night, and you'll hear the dogs bark and the horses neigh! And I'll tell you something else you young gentlemen don't know." He glanced up and down the deck cautiously and then whispered: "It's as much as a black man's life is worth to pass that way by night! They'd pop him into a cask like that!" He snapped his fingers impressively.

Smith was a great admirer of Old Bacchus, whom he had known on other ships, and a few days later he handed me a little wooden box. "For the surgeon, sir," he said. "Will you give it to him?"

It was a snuffbox, curiously wrought of some dark, reddish wood, like mahogany, and very neatly fitted with a lid; a handsome hit of work, carved and polished with a seaman's skill. I found leisure to visit the surgeon the same evening.

Christian's watch was on duty at the time. Young Tinkler and I were in Mr. Fryer's watch, and the third watch had been placed in charge of Mr. Peckover, a short, powerful man of forty or forty-five, who could scarcely remember a time when he had not been at sea. His good-humoured face had been blackened by the West Indian sun, and his arms were covered with tattooing.

I found Peckover with the doctor and Nelson—squeezed together on the settee.

"Come in," cried the surgeon. "Wait a bit, my lad—I think I can make a place for you."

He sprang up with surprising agility and pushed a small cask into the doorway. Peckover held the spigot open while the wine poured frothing into a pewter pint. I delivered the snuffbox before I sat down on my cask, pint in hand.

"From Smith, you say?" asked the surgeon. "Very handsome of him! Very handsome indeed! I remember Smith well on the old Antelope—eh, Peckover? I have a recollection that I used to treat him to a drop of grog now and then. And why not, I say! A thirsty man goes straight to my heart." He glanced complacently about his cabin, packed to the hammock battens with small casks of spirits and wine. "Thank God that neither I nor my friends shall go thirsty on this voyage!"

Nelson stretched out his hand for the snuffbox and examined it with interest. "I shall always marvel," he remarked, "at the ingenuity of our seamen. This would be a credit to any craftsman ashore, with all the tools of his trade. And a fine bit of wood, handsomely polished, too! Mahogany, no doubt, though the grain seems different."

Bacchus looked at Peckover quizzically, and the gunner returned the look, grinning.

"Wood?" said the surgeon. "Well, I have heard it called that, and worse. Wood that once bellowed—aye, and neighed and harked, if the tales be true. In plain English, my dear Nelson, your mahogany is old junk, more politely called salt beef—His Majesty's own!"

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Nelson, examining the snuffbox in real astonishment.

"Aye, salt beef! Handsome as any mahogany and quite as durable. Why, it had been proposed to sheathe our West India frigates with it—a material said to defy the attacks of the toredo worm!"

I took the little box from Nelson's hand, to inspect it with a new interest. "Well, I'm damned!" I thought.

Old Bacchus had rolled up his sleeve and was pouring a train of snuff along his shaven and polished forearm. With a loud sniffing sound it disappeared up his nose. He sneezed, blew his nose violently on an enormous blue handkerchief, and filled his tankard with mistela.

"A glass of wine with you gentlemen!" he remarked, and poured the entire pint down his throat without taking breath. Mr. Peckover glanced at his friend admiringly.

"Aye, Peckover," said the surgeon, catching his eye, "nothing like a nip of salt beef to give a man a thirst. Let the cook keep his slush. Give me a bit of the lean, well soaked and boiled, and you can have all the steaks and cutlets ashore. Begad! Just suppose, now, that we were all wrecked on a desert island, without a scrap to eat. I'd pull out my snuffbox and have one meal, at any rate, while the rest of you went hungry!"

"So you would, surgeon, so you would," said the gunner in his rumbling voice, grinning from ear to ear.

CHAPTER IV.—TYRANNY

One sultry afternoon, before we picked up the southeast trades, Bligh sent his servant to bid me sup with him. Since the great cabin was taken up with our breadfruit garden, the captain messed on the lower deck, in an apartment on the larboard side, extending from the hatch to the bulkhead abaft the mainmast. I dressed myself with some care, and, going aft, found that Christian was my fellow guest. The surgeon and Fryer messed regularly with Bligh, but Old Bacchus had excused himself this evening.

There was a fine show of plate on the captain's table, but when the dishes were uncovered I saw that Bligh fared little better than his men. We had salt beef, in plenty for once, and the pick of the cask, bad butter, and worse cheese, from which the long red worms had been hand-picked, a supply of salted cabbage, believed to prevent scurvy, and a dish heaped with the mashed pease seamen call "dog's body."

Mr. Bligh, though temperate in the use of wine, attacked his food with more relish than most officers would care to display. Fryer was a rough, honest old seaman, but his manners at table put the captain's to shame; yet Christian, who had been a mere master's mate only a few days before, supped fastidiously despite the coarseness of the food. Christian was on the captain's right, Fryer on his left, and I sat opposite, facing him. The talk had turned to the members of the Bounty's company.

"Damn them!" said Bligh, his mouth full of beef and pease, which he continued to chew rapidly as he spoke. "A lazy, incompetent lot of scoundrels! God knows a captain has trials enough without being cursed with such a crew! The dregs of the public houses..." He swallowed violently and filled his mouth once more. "That fellow I had flogged yesterday; what was his name, Mr. Fryer?"

"Burkitt," replied the master, a little red in the face.

"Yes, Burkitt, the insolent hound! And they're all as bad. I'm damned if they know a sheet from a tack!"

"I venture to differ with you, sir," said the master. "I should call Smith, Quintal, and McCoy first-class seamen, and even Burkitt, though he was in the wrong..."

"The insolent hound!" repeated Bligh violently, interrupting the master. "At the slightest report of misconduct, I shall have him seized up again. Next time it will be four dozen, instead of two!"

Christian caught my eye as the captain spoke. "If I may express an opinion, Mr. Bligh," he said quietly, "Burkitt's nature is one to tame with kindness rather than with blows."

Bligh's short, harsh laugh rang out grimly. "La-di-da, Mr. Christian! On my word, you should apply for a place as master in a young ladies' seminary! Kindness, indeed! Well, I'm damned!" He took up a glass of the reeking ship's water, rinsing his mouth preparatory to an attack on the sourcrout. "A fine captain you'll make if you don't heave overboard such ridiculous notions. Kindness! Our seamen and kindness as well as they and Greek! Fear is what they do understand! Without that, mutiny and piracy would be rife on the high seas!"

"Aye," admitted Fryer, as if regretfully. "There is some truth in that."

Christian shook his head. "I cannot agree," he said courteously. "Our seamen do not differ from other Englishmen. Some must be ruled by fear, it is true, but there are others, and finer men, who will follow a kind, just, and fearless officer to the death."

"Have we any such paragons on board?" asked the captain sneeringly. "In my opinion, sir," said Christian, speaking in his light and courteous manner, "we have, and not a few."

"Now, by God! Name one!"

"Mr. Purcell, the carpenter. He..."

This time Bligh laughed long and loud. "Damme!" he exclaimed, "you're a fine judge of men! That stubborn, thick-headed old rogue! Kindness...Ah, that's too good!"

Christian flushed, controlling his hot temper with an effort. "You won't have the carpenter, I see," he said lightly: "then may I suggest Morrison, sir?"

"Suggest to your heart's content," answered Bligh scornfully. "Morrison? The gentlemanly boatswain's mate? The sheep masquerading as a wolf? Kindness? Morrison's too damned kind now!"

"But a fine seaman, sir," put in Fryer gruffly; "he has been a midshipman, and is a gentleman born."

"I know, I know!" said Bligh in his most offensive way; "and no higher in my estimation for all that." He turned to me, with what he meant to be a courteous smile. "Saving your presence, Mr. Byam, damn all midshipmen, I say! There could be no worse schools than the berth for the making of sea officers!" He turned to Christian once more, and his manner changed to an unpleasant truculence.

"As for Morrison, let him take care! I've my eye on him, for I can see that he spares the cat. A boatswain's mate who was not a gentleman would have had half the hide off Burkitt's back. Let him take care, I say! Let him lay on when I give the word or, by God, I'll have him seized up for a lesson from the boatswain himself!"

I perceived, as the meal went on, that the captain's mess was anything but a congenial one. Fryer disliked the captain, and had not forgotten the incident of the cheeses. Bligh made no secret of his dislike for the master, whom he often upbraided before the men on deck; and he felt for Christian a contempt he was at no pains to conceal.

I was not surprised, a few days later, to learn from Old Bacchus that Christian and the master had quitted the captain's mess, leaving Bligh to dine and sup alone. We were south of the line by this time.

At Teneriffe, we had taken on board a large supply of pumpkins, which now began to show symptoms of spoiling under the equatorial sun. As most of them were too large for the use of Bligh's table, Samuel was ordered to issue them to the men in lieu of bread. The rate of exchange—one pound of pumpkin to replace two pounds of bread—was considered unfair by the men, and when Bligh was informed of this he came on deck in a passion and called all hands. Samuel was then ordered to summon the first man of every mess.

"Now," exclaimed Bligh violently, "let me see who will dare to refuse the pumpkins, or anything else I order to be served. You insolent rascals! By God! I'll make you eat grass before I've done with you!"

Everyone now took the pumpkins, not excepting the officers, though the amount was so scanty that it was usually thrown together by the men, the cooks of the different messes drawing lots for the whole. There was some murmuring, particularly among the officers, but the grievance might have ended there had not all hands begun to believe that the casks of beef and pork were short of their weight. This had been suspected for some time, as Samuel could never be prevailed on to weigh the meat when opened, and at last the shortage became so obvious that the people applied to the master, begging that he would examine into the affair and procure them redress. Bligh ordered all hands aft at once.

"So you've complained to Mr. Fryer, eh?" he said, shortly and harshly. "You're not content! Let me tell you, by God, that you'd better make up your minds to be content! Everything that Mr. Samuel does is done by my orders, do you understand? My orders! Waste no more time in complaints, for you will get no redress! I am the only judge of what is right and wrong. Damn your eyes! I'm tired of you and your complaints! The first man to complain from now on will be seized up and flogged."

Perceiving that no redress was to be hoped for before the end of the voyage, the men resolved to bear their sufferings with patience, and neither murmured nor complained from that time. But the officers, though they dared make no open complaints, were less easily satisfied and murmured frequently among themselves of their continual state of hunger, which they thought was due to the fact that the captain and his clerk had profited by the victualing of the ship. Our allowance of food was so scanty that the men quarreled fiercely over the division of it in the galley, and when several men had been hurt it became necessary for the master's mate of the watch to superintend the division of the food.

About a hundred leagues off the coast of Brazil, the wind chopped around to north and northwest, and I realized that we had reached the southern limit of the southeast trades. It was here, in the region of variable westerlies, that the Bounty was becalmed for a day or two, and the people employed themselves in fishing, each mess risking a part of its small allowance of salt pork in hopes of catching one of the sharks that swam about the ship.

The landsman turns up his nose at the shark, but, to a sailor craving fresh meat, the flesh of a shark under ten feet in length is a veritable luxury. The larger sharks have a strong rank smell, but the flesh of the small ones, cut into slices like so many beefsteaks, parboiled first and then broiled with plenty of pepper and salt, eats very well indeed, resembling codfish in flavour.

I tasted shark for the first time one evening off the Brazilian coast. It was dead calm; the sails hung slack from the yards, only moving a little when the ship rolled to a gently northerly swell. John Mills, the gunner's mate, stood forward abreast of the windlass, with a heavy line coiled in his hand. He was an old seaman, one of Christian's watch—a man of forty or thereabouts who had served in the West Indies on the Mediator, Captain Cuthbert Collingwood. I disliked the man,—a tall, rawboned, dour old salt,—but I watched with interest as he prepared his bait. Two of his messmates stood by, ready to bear a hand—Brown, the assistant botanist, and Norman, the carpenter's mate. The mess had contributed the large piece of salt pork now going over the side; they shared the risk of losing the bait without results, as they would share whatever Mills was fortunate enough to catch. A shark about ten feet long had just passed under the bows. I craned my neck to watch.

Next moment a small striped fish like a mackerel flashed this way and that about the bait. "Pilot fish!" cried Norman. "Take care—here comes the shark!"

"Damn you!" growled Mills. "Don't dance about like a monkey—you'll frighten him off!"

The shark, an ugly yellowish blotch in the blue water, was rising beneath the bait, and all eyes were on him as he turned on his side, opened his jaws, and gulped down the piece of pork. "Hooked, by God!" roared Mills as he hove the line short. "Now, my hearties, on deck with him!" The line was strong and the messmates hove with a will; in an instant the shark came struggling over the bulwarks and thumped down on deck. Mills seized a hatchet and struck the fish a heavy blow on the snout; next moment six or seven men were astride of the quivering carcass, knives out and cutting away for dear life. The spectacle was laughable. Mills, to whom the head belonged by right of capture, was seated at the forward end; each of the others, pushing himself as far aft as possible, to enlarge his cut of shark, was slicing away within an inch of the next man's rump. There were cries of "Mind what you are about, there!"

"Take care, else I'll have a slice off your backside!" And in about three minutes' time the poor fish had been severed into as many great slices as there had been men bestriding him.

The deck was washed, and Mills was picking up the several slices into which he had cut his share of the fish, when Mr. Samuel, the captain's clerk, came strolling forward.

"A fine catch, my good man," he remarked in his patronizing way. "I must have a slice, eh?"

In common with all of the Bounty's people, Mills disliked Samuel heartily. The clerk drank neither rum nor wine, and it was suspected that he hoarded his ration of spirits for sale ashore.

"So you must have a slice," growled the gunner's mate. "Well, I must have a glass of grog, and a stiff one, too, if you are to eat shark to-day."

"Come! Come! My good man," said Samuel pettishly. "You've enough fish there for a dozen."

"And you've enough grog stowed away for a thousand, by God!"

"It's for the captain's table I want it," said Samuel.

"Then catch him a shark yourself. This is mine. He gets the best of the bread and the pick of the junk cask as it is."

"You forget yourself, Mills! Come, give me a slice—that large one there—and I'll say nothing."

"Say nothing be damned! Here—take your slice!" As he spoke, Mills flung the ten or twelve pounds of raw fish straight at Samuel's face, with the full strength of a brawny, tattooed arm. He turned on his heel to go below, growling under his breath.

Mr. Samuel picked himself up from the deck, not forgetting his slice of shark, and walked slowly aft. The look in his eye boded no good fortune to the gunner's mate.

The news spread over the ship rapidly, and for the first time aboard the Bounty Mills found himself a popular man, though there was little hope that he would escape punishment. As Old Bacchus put it that night, "The least he can hope for is a red-checked shirt at the gangway. Samuel's a worm and a dirty worm, but discipline's discipline, begad!"

I believe that a day will come when flogging will be abolished on His Majesty's ships. It is an over-brutal punishment, which destroys a good man's self-respect and makes a bad man worse. Landsmen have little idea of the savagery of a flogging at the gangway. The lashes are laid on with the full strength of a powerful man's arm, with such force that each blow knocks the breath clean out of the delinquent's body. One blow takes off the skin and draws blood where each knot falls. Six blows make the whole back raw. Twelve cut deeply into the flesh and leave it a red mass, horrible to see. Yet six dozen are a common punishment.

As had been predicted, Mills spent the night in irons. The kind hearts of our British seamen were evident next morning when I was told that his messmates had saved their entire allowance of grog for Mills, to fortify him against the flogging they considered inevitable. At six bells Mr. Bligh came on deck, and bade Christian turn the hands aft to witness punishment. The weather had grown cooler, and the Bounty was slipping southward with all sail set, before a light northwest breeze. The order was piped and shouted forward; I joined the assembly of officers aft, while the people fell in on the booms and along the ship's side. All were silent.

"Rig the gratings," ordered Mr. Bligh, in his harsh voice.

The carpenter and his mates dragged aft two of the wooden gratings used to cover the hatches. They placed one flat on the deck, and the other upright, secured to the bulwarks by the lee gangway. "The gratings are rigged, sir," reported Purcell, the carpenter. "John Mills!" said Bligh. "Step forward!"

Flushed with the rum he had taken, and dressed in his best, Mills stepped out from among his messmates. His unusual smartness was designed to mollify the punishment, yet there was in his bearing a trace of defiance. He was a hard man, and he felt that he had been hardly used.

"Have you anything to say?" asked Bligh of the bare-headed seaman before him.

"No, sir," growled Mills sullenly.

"Strip!" ordered the captain.

Mills tore off his shirt, flung it to one of his messmates, and advanced bare-shouldered to the gratings.

"Seize him up," said Bligh.

Norton and Lenkletter, our quartermasters—old pigtailed seamen who had performed this office scores of times in the past—now advanced with lengths of spun yarn, and lashed Mills's outstretched wrists to the upright grating.

"Seized up, sir!" reported Norton.

Bligh took off his hat, as did every man on the ship, opened a copy of the Articles of War, and read in a solemn voice the article which prescribes the punishments for mutinous conduct. Morrison, the boatswain's mate, was undoing the red baize bag in which he kept the cat.

"Three dozen, Mr. Morrison," said Bligh as he finished reading. "Do your duty!"

Morrison was a kindly, reflective man. I felt for him A that moment, for I knew that he hated flogging on principle, and must feel the injustice of this punishment. Yet he would not dare, under the keen eye of the captain, to lighten the force of his blows. However unwilling, he was Bligh's instrument.

He advanced to the grating, drew the tails of the cat through his fingers, flung his arm back, and struck. Mills winced involuntarily as the cat came whistling down on his bare back, and the breath flew out of his body with a loud "Ugh!" A great red welt sprang out against the white skin, with drops of blood trickling down on one side. Mills was a burly ruffian and he endured the first dozen without crying out, though by that time his back was a red slough from neck to waist.

Bligh watched the punishment with folded arms. "I'll show the man who's captain of this ship," I heard him remark placidly to Christian. "By God, I will!" The eighteenth blow broke the iron of Mills's self-control. He was writhing on the grating, his teeth tightly clenched and the blood pouring down his back. "Oh!" he shouted thickly. "Oh, my God! Oh!"

"Mr. Morrison," called Bligh, sternly and suddenly. "See that you lay on with a will."

Morrison passed the tails of the cat through his fingers to free them of blood and bits of flesh. Under the eye of the captain he delivered the remaining lashes, taking a time that seemed interminable to me. When they cut Mills down he was black in the face and collapsed at once on the deck. Old Bacchus stumped forward and ordered him taken below to the sick bay, to be washed with brine. Bligh sauntered to the ladder-way and the men resumed their duties sullenly.

Early in March we were ordered to lay aside our light tropical clothing for warm garments which had been provided for our passage around Cape Horn. The topgallant masts were sent down, new sails bent, and the ship made ready for the heavy winds and seas which lay ahead. The weather grew cooler each day, until I was glad to go below for my occasional evenings with Bacchus and his cronies, or to my mess in the berth. The surgeon messed with us now, as well as Stewart and Hayward, my fellow midshipmen, Morrison, and Mr. Nelson, the botanist. We were all the best of friends, though young Hayward never forgot that I was his junior in service, and plumed himself on a knowledge of seamanship certainly more extensive than my own.

Those were days and nights of misery for every man on board. Sometimes the wind hauled to the southwest, with squalls of snow, forcing us to come about on the larboard tack; sometimes the gale increased to the force of a hurricane and we lay hove-to under a rag of staysail, pitching into the breaking seas. Though our ship was new and sound, her seams opened under the strain and it became necessary to man the pumps every hour. The hatches were constantly battened down, and when the forward deck began to leak, Bligh gave orders that the people should sling their hammocks in the great cabin aft. At last our captain's iron determination gave way, and to the great joy and relief of every man on board he ordered the helm put up to bear away for the Cape of Good Hope.

The fine weather which followed and our rapid passage east did much to raise the spirits of the men on board. We had caught great numbers of sea birds off Cape Horn and penned them in cages provided by the carpenter. The pintado and the albatross were the best; when penned like a Strasburg goose and well stuffed with ground corn for a few days, they seemed to us as good as ducks or geese, and this fresh food did wonders for our invalids.

With the returning cheerfulness on board, the Bounty's midshipmen began to play the pranks of their kind the world over, and none of us escaped penance at the masthead—penance that was in general richly deserved. No one was oftener in hot water than young Tinkler, a monkey of a lad, beloved by every man on the ship. Bligh's severity to Tinkler, one cold moonlight night, when we were in the longitude of Tristan da Cunha, was a warning to all of us, and the cause of much murmuring among the men.

Hallet, Hayward, Tinkler, and I were in the larboard berth. The gunner's watch was on duty, and Stewart and Young on deck. We had supped and were passing the time at Ablewhackets—a game I have never seen played ashore. It is commenced by playing cards, which must be named the Good Books. The table is termed the Board of Green Cloth, the hand the Flipper; the light the Glim, and so on. To all a table a table, or a card a card, brings an instant cry of "Watch," whereupon the delinquent must extend his Flipper to be severely firked with a stocking full of sand by each of the players in turn, who repeat his offense while firking him. Should the pain bring an oath to his lips, as is more than likely, there is another cry of "Watch," and he undergoes a second round of firking by all hands. As will be perceived, the game is a noisy one.

Young Tinkler had inadvertently pronounced the word "table," and Hayward, something of a bully, roared, "Watch!" When he took his turn at the firking, he laid on so hard that the youngster, beside himself with pain, squeaked, "Ouch! Damn your blood!"

"Watch!" roared Hayward again, and at the same moment we heard another roar from aft—Mr. Bligh calling angrily for the ship's corporal. Tinkler and Hallet rushed for their berth on the starboard side; Hayward doused the glim in an instant, kicked off his pumps, threw off his jacket, and sprang into his hammock, where he pulled his blanket up to his chin and began to snore, gently and regularly. I wasted no time in doing the same, but young Tinkler, in his anxiety, must have turned in all standing as he was.

Next moment, Churchill, the master-at-arms, came fumbling into the darkened berth. "Come, come, young gentlemen; no shamming, now!" he called. He listened warily to our breathing, and felt us to make sure that our jackets and pumps were off, before he went out, grumbling, to the starboard berth. Hallet had taken the same precautions as ourselves, but poor little Tinkler was caught red-handed—pumps, jacket, and all. "Up with you, Mr. Tinkler," rumbled Churchill. "This'll mean the masthead, and it's a bloody cold night. I'd let you off if I could. You young gentlemen keep half the ship awake with your cursed pranks!" He led him aft, and presently I heard Bligh's harsh voice, raised angrily.

"Damme, Mr. Tinkler! Do. you think this ship's a bear garden? By God! I've half a mind to seize you up and give you a taste of the colt! To the masthead with you!"

Next morning at daylight Tinkler was still at the main topgallant crosstrees. The sky was clear, but the strong west-southwest wind was icy cold. Presently Mr. Bligh came on deck, and, hailing the masthead, desired Tinkler to come down. There was no reply, even when he hailed a second time. At a word from Mr. Christian, one of the top-men sprang into the rigging, reached the crosstrees, and hailed the deck to say that Tinkler seemed to be dying, and that he dared not leave him for fear he would fall. Christian himself then went aloft, sent the topman down into the top for a tailblock, made a whip with the studding-sail halliards, and lowered Tinkler to the deck. The poor lad was blue with cold, unable to stand up or to speak.

We got him into his hammock in the berth, wrapped in warm blankets, and Old Bacchus came stumping forward with a can of his universal remedy. He felt the lad's pulse, propped his head up, and began to feed him neat rum with a spoon. Tinkler coughed and opened his eyes, while a faint colour appeared in his cheeks.

"Aha!" exclaimed the surgeon. "Nothing like rum, my lad! Just a sip, now. That's it! Now a swallow. Begad! Nothing like rum. I'll soon have you right as a trivet! And that reminds me—I'll have just a drop myself. A corpse reviver, eh?"

Coughing as the fiery liquor ran down his throat, Tinkler smiled in spite of himself. Two hours later he was on deck, none the worse for his night aloft.

On the twenty-third of May we dropped anchor in False Bay, near Cape Town. Table Bay is reckoned unsafe riding at this time of year, on account of the strong northwest winds. The ship required to be caulked in every part, for she had become so leaky that we had been obliged to pump every hour during our passage from Cape Horn. Our sails and rigging were in sad need of repair, and the timekeeper was taken ashore to ascertain its rate. On the twenty-ninth of June we sailed out of the bay, saluting the Dutch fort with thirteen guns as we passed.

I have few recollections of the long, cold, and dismal passage from the Cape of Good Hope to Van Diemen's Land. Day after day we scudded before strong westerly to southwesterly winds, carrying only the foresail and close-reefed maintopsail. The seas, which run for thousands of miles in these latitudes, unobstructed by land, were like mountain ridges; twice, when the wind increased to a gale, Bligh almost drove his ship under before we could get the sails dewed up and the Bounty hove-to. I observed that as long as the wind held southwest or west-southwest great numbers of birds accompanied us,—pintados, albatross, and blue petrels,—but that when the wind chopped around to the north, even for an hour or two, the birds left us at once. And when they reappeared their presence was always the forerunner of a southerly wind.

On the twentieth of August we sighted the rock called the Mewstone, which lies near the southwest cape of Van Diemen's Land, bearing northeast about six leagues, and two days later we anchored in Adventure Bay. We passed a fortnight here—wooding, watering, and sawing out plank, of which the carpenter was in need. It was a gloomy place, hemmed in by forests of tall straight trees of the eucalyptus kind, many of them a hundred and fifty feet high and rising sixty or eighty feet without a branch. Long strips of bark hung in tatters from their trunks, or decayed on the ground underfoot; few birds sang in the bush; and I saw only one animal—a small creature of the opossum sort, which scuttled into a hollow log. There were men here, but they were timid as wild animals—black, naked, and uncouth, with hair growing in tufts like peppercorns, and voices like the cackling of geese. I saw small parties of them at different times, but they made off at sight of us.

Mr. Bligh put me in charge of a watering party, giving us the large cutter and instructing me to have the casks filled in a gully at the west end of the beach. Purcell, the carpenter, had rigged his saw pit close to this place, and was busy sawing out plank, with his mates, Norman and McIntosh, and two of the seamen detailed to the task. They had felled two or three of the large eucalyptus trees, but the carpenter, after inspecting the wood, had declared it worthless, and instructed his men to set to work on certain smaller trees of a different kind, with a rough bark and firm reddish wood.

I was superintending the filling of my casks one morning when Bligh appeared, a fowling piece over his arm and accompanied by Mr. Nelson. He glanced toward the saw pit and came to a halt.

"Mr. Purcell!" he called harshly.

"Yes, sir."

The Bounty's carpenter was not unlike her captain in certain respects. Saving the surgeon, he was the oldest man on board, and nearly all of his life had been spent at sea. He knew his trade as well as Bligh understood navigation, and his temper was as arbitrary and his anger as fierce and sudden as Bligh's.

"Damme, Mr. Purcell!" exclaimed the captain. "Those logs are too small for plank. I thought I instructed you to make use of the large trees."

"You did, sir," replied Purcell, whose own temper was rising.

"Obey your orders, then, instead of wasting time."

"I am not wasting time, sir," said the carpenter, very red in the face.

"The wood of the large trees is useless, as I discovered when I had cut some of them down."

"Useless? Nonsense...Mr. Nelson, am I not right?"

"I am a botanist, sir," said Nelson, unwilling to take part in the dispute. "I make no pretense to a carpenter's knowledge of woods."

"Aye—that's what a carpenter does know," put in old Purcell. "The wood of these large trees will be worthless if sawn into plank."

Bligh's temper now got the better of him. "Do as I tell you, Mr. Purcell," he ordered violently. "I've no mind to argue with you or any other man under my command."

"Very well, sir," said Purcell obstinately. "The large trees it is. But I tell you the plank will be useless. A carpenter knows his business as well as a captain knows his."

Bligh had turned away; now he spun about on his heel.

"You mutinous old bastard—you have gone too far! Mr. Norman, take command of the work here. Mr. Purcell, report yourself instantly to Lieutenant Christian for fifteen days in irons."

It was my task to ferry Purcell out to the ship. The old man was flushed with anger; his jaw was set and his fists clenched till the veins stood out on his forearms. "Calls me a bastard," he muttered to no one in particular, "and puts me in irons for doing my duty. He hasn't heard the last of this, by God! Wait till we get to England! I know my rights, I do!"

We were still on the shortest of short rations, and Adventure Bay offered little in the way of refreshment for our invalids, or food for those of us who were well. Though we drew the seine repeatedly, we caught few fish and those of inferior kinds, and the mussels among the rocks, which at first promised a welcome change in our diet, proved poisonous to those who partook of them. While Mr. Bligh feasted on the wild duck his fowling piece brought down, the ship's people were half starved and there was much muttering among the officers.

The whole of our fortnight in Adventure Bay was marred by wrangling and discontent. The carpenter was in irons; Fryer and Bligh were scarcely on speaking terms, owing to the master's suspicions that the captain had lined his pockets in victualing the ship; and just before our departure, Ned Young, one of the midshipmen, was lashed to a gun on the quarter-deck and given a dozen with a colt.

Young had been sent, with three men and the small cutter, to gather shellfish, crabs, and whatever he might find for our sick, who lived in a tent pitched on the beach. They pulled away in the direction of Cape Frederick Henry and did not return till after dark, when Young reported that Dick Skinner, one of the A.B.'s and the ship's hairdresser, had wandered off into the woods and disappeared.

"Skinner saw a hollow tree," Young told Mr. Bligh, "which, from the bees about it, he believed to contain a store of honey. He asked my permission to smoke the bees out and obtain their honey for our sick, saying that he had kept bees in his youth and understood their ways. I assented readily, knowing that you, sir, would be pleased if we could obtain the honey, and an hour or two later, when we had loaded the cutter with shellfish, we returned to the tree. A fire still smouldered at its foot, but Skinner was nowhere to be seen. We wandered through the woods and hailed till nightfall, but I regret to report, sir, that we could find no trace of the man."

I chanced to know that Bligh had called for the hairdresser, requiring his services that very afternoon, and had been incensed at Young when it was learned that Skinner had accompanied him. Now that the man was reported missing, Mr. Bligh was thoroughly enraged.

"Now damn you and all other midshipmen!" roared the captain. "You're all alike! If you had gotten the honey, you would have eaten it on the spot! Where the devil is Skinner, I say? Take your boat's crew this instant and pull back to where you saw the man last. Aye, and bring him back this time!"

Young was a man grown. He flushed at the captain's words, but touched his hat respectfully and summoned his men at once. The party did not return till the following forenoon, having been nearly twenty-four hours without food. Skinner was with them this time; he had wandered off in search of another honey tree and become lost in the thick bush.

Bligh paced the quarter-deck angrily as the boat approached. By nature a man who brooded over grudges till they were magnified out of all proportion to reality, the captain was ready to explode the moment Young set foot on deck.

"Come aft, Mr. Young!" he called harshly. "I'm going to teach you to attend to your duty, instead of skylarking about the woods. Mr. Morrison!"

"Yes, sir!"

"Come aft here and seize up Mr. Young on that gun yonder! You're to give him a dozen with a rope's end."

Young was an officer of the ship and rated as a gentleman, a proud, fearless man of gentle birth. Though Bligh was within his powers as captain, the public flogging of such a man was almost without precedent in the Service. Morrison's jaw dropped at the order, which he obeyed with such evidence of reluctance that Bligh shouted at him threateningly, "Look alive, Mr. Morrison! I've my eye on you!"

I shall not speak of the flogging of Young, nor tell how Skinner's back was cut to ribbons with two dozen at the gangway. It is enough to say that Young was a different man from that day on, performing his duties sullenly and in silence, and avoiding the other midshipmen in the berth. He informed me long afterwards that, had events turned out differently, it was his intention to resign from the Service on the ship's arrival in England, and call Bligh to account as man to man.

On the fourth of September, with a fine spanking breeze at northwest, we weighed anchor and sailed out of Adventure Bay. Seven weeks later, after an uneventful passage made miserable by an outbreak of scurvy and the constant state of starvation to which we were reduced, I saw my first South Sea island.

We had gotten our easting in the high southern latitudes, and once in the trade winds we made a long board to the north on the starboard tack. We were well into the tropics now and in the vicinity of land. Man-of-war hawks hovered overhead, their long forked tails opening and shutting like scissor-blades; shoals of flying fish rose under the ship's cutwater to skim away and plunge into the sea like whiffs of grapeshot. The sea was of the pale turquoise blue only to be seen within the tropics, shading to purple here and there where clouds obscured the sun. The roll of the Pacific from east to west was broken by the labyrinth of low coral islands to the east of us,—the vast cluster of half-drowned lands called by the natives Paumotu,—and the Bounty sailed a tranquil sea.

I was off watch that afternoon and e