Beyond the Bounty (3 page)

Certainly they were fooling themselves.

Certainly our Tahitian wives gave us more credit than we had ever been given by a working girl in a Southampton knocking shop.

Or perhaps an English sailor is as exotic and strange to a brown Tahitian maid as she is to him. I don’t know.

After being at sea for ten months, we stayed in Tahiti for five months. Five months while we collected 1,015 breadfruit plants (somebody counted them, although it wasn’t me).

You see, although I can’t explain the gardening of the matter to you, we all understood that the breadfruits had to reach a certain stage of their growing before we could transport them to the slaves in the West Indies.

‘Men,’ said Bligh one day, frowning like Moses down from the mountain. ‘Listen now. The breadfruit is vital to the economic life of the British Empire. We must drop our anchor for a good while in Tahiti.’

That was fine by our lights. It gave us plenty of time to get to know Tahiti. And the women. We explored every lush tropical inch of the island, and of the women.

We were more than sailors on shore leave. It was not just a matter of spreading our wanton seed. Spend five months in Tahiti and man will find one woman he could spend the rest of his days with. Or perhaps more than one.

In Tahiti, we knew loving like we had never known. And we knew love.

After knowing such sweetness, how could we live on without it? After glimpsing Paradise – no, after setting anchor in Paradise for five months of bliss and free bananas – how could we sail away to the lonely, loveless sea?

That was what made our voyage away from Tahiti unbearable. Not William Bligh, whose evil ways were standard issue in the King’s navy, inhumanity being the British Empire’s most loyal and faithful servant.

During our stay in Tahiti, Bligh ordered our hides to be flogged almost on a daily basis, usually because some light-fingered natives had made off with goods that belonged to His Majesty King George. Yet the flogging didn’t seem quite so bad when you could spend the night making love under the palm trees with the South Sea moonlight shining its silvery light on your hairy English arse.

We put up with Bligh’s cruel ways so long as we had our women. But after we sailed with our cargo of breadfruit, leaving our women weeping in their little canoes and cutting their heads with rocks, as is the South Sea custom at times of grief, that is when we said, ‘Damn your blood, William Bligh! And damn your eyes!’

It wasn’t because of the constant flogging that we wanted to string up our captain. It was because he robbed us of our women.

The
Bounty
was taken by Fletcher Christian because he pined for his Maimiti just as the rest of us pined for the dusky maidens that we had left back on that Tahitian shore.

We knew we were for the noose if they ever caught us. We knew we would never see England and home and family again unless we saw it briefly with a rope around our necks.

We knew that we would be exiles forever for taking the
Bounty
.

But we did it for the women.

And the men who stuck with Bligh (and who probably followed him to the bottom of the sea, I shouldn’t wonder, or starved to death, or gave their bollocks for a native to wear as earrings), they left because of the women.

The other women.

The women back home.

The wives who were nursing newborn babies or raising small children. Or the older wives who they had loved for a lifetime. Or the sweethearts who were yet to become wives. All of it was about the women. Those who mutinied. Those who got into Bligh’s leaky boat.

The Bligh loyalists – that was what we called them, our former shipmates who wanted no part of the mutiny – got into that little boat and paddled away for their women just as surely as we sailed back to Tahiti for the women that we had left behind.

Even Bligh had a wife. I suppose he must have loved her, as much as Bligh was capable of loving anything. Certainly he was as celibate as a novice monk during our time in Tahiti. Bligh never touched a Tahitian lass with so much as a dirty breadfruit.

The women ruled our world.

Our story wasn’t about breadfruit. And it wasn’t about Bligh’s cruelty. And it wasn’t even about treating men like vermin.

It was about the women.

And even now – with Bligh no doubt dead, and with the
Bounty
burned, and Fletcher Christian freshly buried, and with us willingly shipwrecked for evermore … Even now as our mad adventure reached its bloody conclusion on the secret island of Pitcairn, I thought to myself that it was still all about the women.

I watched the slim yet curvy figure of Maimiti walk away from the grave of Fletcher Christian, the man she had loved. Her black hair tumbled down over her lovely face.

The king’s daughter. The captain’s widow. I admired the way her rump rolled rhythmically up and down as she walked.

‘Someone should comfort that poor child,’ I said to John Adams, who was sitting on the grass hunched over his open Bible, muttering to himself about the wrath of the Lord.

He looked up from the good book.

‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Ned,’ he said. ‘Shall I ask one of the women to stay with her?’

‘No, I’ll do it,’ I said, perhaps a little too quickly. But my Bible-thumping shipmate got a teary glint in his eye.

‘You’re a good man, Ned Young,’ he said, and I scarpered off after Maimiti before he had a chance to change his mind.

She was off up a grassy path that led away from our settlement. As I trotted after her, I encountered some drunken piece of scum lounging against a palm tree with a bottle of rum in his hand. It was John Mills, a gunner’s mate, and as different to Bible-loving John Adams as chalk is to cheese.

He leered at me in his insolent fashion. (As a general rule they are a rough lot, the gunner’s mates.)

‘Off to sample some of the captain’s port, are we, Ned?’ he said, rolling his eyes and grinning foolishly and almost puking his guts up with merriment.

‘Still your tongue, John Mills,’ I said.

I leaned down and gave him the back of my hand across his stupid face and he didn’t like the taste of it as much as his rum. But he was too drunk to stand up and fight me like a man.

I moved quickly on, having for a moment lost sight of the lovely Maimiti’s magnificent backside (surely one of the finest views in all the South Seas).

The drunken gunner’s mate called after me.

‘You can’t do that to me, Ned Young! There are no more officers and men! Now there are only men, Ned! You cannot strike me!’

I answered him over my shoulder.

‘Examine your broken nose,’ I shouted, ‘and you will find that I can strike you well enough.’

Then I had a bit of a chuckle to myself until I saw Maimiti on her knees in the shadow of the palms, crying her pretty brown eyes out.

Taking a deep breath, I knelt down beside her, gently patting the silky skin of her shoulders.

‘There, there,’ I said, like a kindly priest at your true believer’s deathbed. ‘There, there, don’t cry, my duck of diamonds. For he is at rest now, and gone to a far better place.’

I sounded very sincere. I almost believed myself. Although a part of me wondered what place could ever be better than the soft bed of Maimiti, the king’s daughter.

Sob, sob, sob, she went, the poor thing. The black hair was still covering that beautiful face. I gently tried to pull it away from her eyes, her nose, her mouth – especially that.

‘Now, now,’ I said. ‘Don’t cry your little heart out. For old Ned Young is here to comfort you in your hour of need. What can I do to comfort you, my lovely one? Now if we could just slip into these bushes for a moment …’

She spat in my face.

A good one, it was – full of feeling and well aimed.

It caught me right on the bridge of my frequently broken nose, and dribbled down that sad excuse for a hooter, the spit only veering off to the right when it reached my upper lip.

Then she was up and screaming at me. Her fists hammering my chest.

And I was too shocked to move.

‘You killed Fletcher Christian!’ she howled. ‘You ugly dog! You toothless old man! You killed my love!’

‘I killed no man,’ I gasped, and I stepped away from her.

She spat again, this time on the ground.

‘You burned the
Bounty
!’ she hissed, that black fire in her eyes. ‘You killed the only good man among you!’

The funny thing about Maimiti is that she sounded a lot like Fletcher Christian. Because she had learned the lingo from him, I suppose, she had a bit of the dandy and fop in her voice like our poor grilled skipper himself.

But I think that was true of all of us. The ones who learned English, and the ones who learned Tahitian. We all had our language lessons in bed.

She spat a third and final time.

‘You remarkable pig!’ she growled, and I shivered with shock. For they were the very words that Fletcher Christian had uttered just before we put William Bligh in his boat.

Then she was off down the path and gone, and I knew that she would be watched by other greedy eyes as she tore at her widow’s rags.

And I saw that nothing had changed.

We had travelled to the far side of the world. We had suffered storms, inhumanity and thirst. We had been half-drowned, flogged within an inch of our lives and nearly killed because our precious cargo of bloody breadfruit mattered more than our own lives.

We had thrown away England and invited the hangman’s rope because we had known true freedom, and all the pleasure of the flesh, and what it means to be loved.

And now we were marooned on the island at the end of the world with no means of ever leaving.

Yet what had really changed?

Nothing.

Our story was still all about the women.

Midnight came and the moon rose full and white.

We huddled around a fire on the beach, deciding what was to be done and how we were to live our new lives. We were eight English sailors without a ship.

My jaw was swollen from some awful ache and I chewed bitterly on a short stump of wood. It did no good, but I chewed it anyway.

‘Men,’ said John Adams with a mighty sigh. ‘We are a dwindling band of brothers. There were not many of us when we set sail from Portsmouth and now there are even less.’

Murmurs of agreement around the campfire. I did a quick tally in my noggin, although it wasn’t easy with that wretched face ache.

After our noble rebellion against injustice, we had put eighteen men in Bligh’s little boat. Thus condemning them, we believed, to certain death in the freezing depths of the Pacific or in the boiling cooking pots of hungry, lip-smacking savages.

Fletcher Christian had set another sixteen men ashore in Tahiti. Some of these were loyalists (there had been too many to fit them all in Bligh’s boat). Some were mutineers who were anxious to get back to lovemaking under the palm trees – the fools! Dear old Tahiti was the very first place the King’s navy would look for us.

By the time we finally reached Pitcairn there were just nine of the
Bounty
crew left. And now we had lost our captain to an unfortunate fire.

There were the Tahitians, of course. Eleven women, the one with the baby, and a few more already swelling with child, as well as six native men. But I did not count the Tahitians. They did not sit with us around the fire but lurked in the shadows of our new home, jabbering in their own language.

As far as I was concerned, it was just the eight of us left.

Myself.

The godly John Adams.

That drunken scum John Mills.

William McCoy, another hardened drunkard.

Jack Williams – the silent type. Typical armourer’s mate. I gave him a wide berth because there was an air of violence about him.

Then there was the four-eyed gardener, William Brown, who liked to call himself a Botanist’s Assistant, as though digging up a few breadfruit made him Lord Muck of Cow Shit Farm.

Then there was young Isaac Martin, a good lad who I liked. He was perhaps the only one of us whom life had yet to tarnish.

And finally there was Matthew Quintal, a tall, thin man who sat gibbering to himself as he stared at the dancing flames of the fire. He was mad as a March hare, and marked by God or the Devil for a very sticky end.

But then weren’t we all?

‘This island is where we live and this island is where we will die,’ said John Adams.

I looked at his face through the fire on the beach. I removed the stick from my mouth.

‘Unless we are found,’ I said. ‘Then we will die on the island we left behind, and where our mothers pine for us still.’

Matthew Quintal burbled as though something hilarious had been said.

I glared at him, chewing furiously on my stick.

‘Does something trouble you, Ned?’ said John Adams. ‘I notice you are chewing on a stick.’

‘A mere trifle,’ I said. ‘A slight pain of the jawbone. It is of no matter. Thank you kindly for asking.’

Then John Adams spoke frankly to me.

‘Ned, there are some words that need to be spoken,’ he said. ‘Ned Young, you are rough with your fellow Englishmen and you treat our Tahitian allies even worse, often striking them for no good reason.’

‘Thank you, John,’ I said.

‘It was not a compliment, Ned.’

I looked surprised.

‘Truly?’ I said. ‘Because it sounded like compliment. It sounded like high praise indeed for making an attempt to run a tight ship when others would be happy to whore and booze the day away.’ I unfurled my lips at that drunken scum John Mills. ‘For someone has to keep order and discipline on this lonely patch of sand we now call home,’ I said.

John Adams nodded. ‘I agree, we must do better than we are doing if we are to make a success of our new land.’ He looked at me. ‘But that does not mean a place where men are beaten at will. Ned, it has been brought to my attention that you struck John Mills. And that you have struck other men.’

I was furious at this unjust slander.

‘Only Tahitians!’ I cried. ‘It is true I gave John Mills here my hand for his drunken lip, but I swear the only other men I have struck have been the natives!’