Beyond the Bounty (4 page)

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t strike anyone,’ slurred John Mills, already in his cups.

I was speechless.

‘Do you remember what Fletcher Christian said to William Bligh before we left Portsmouth?’ asked John Adams.

Jack Williams spoke up. A rare thing for the gunner’s mate. ‘Mr Christian said, “
There is no glory in it
,”’ he growled. ‘Meaning our mission. Meaning that there was no glory in men sailing for two years just to bring a cargo of breadfruit to slaves on the sugar plantations of Jamaica.’

‘He was very wrong!’ cried William Brown, the gardener. ‘The breadfruit could feed the slaves of our glorious Empire!’

Matthew Quintal chuckled and leered and rolled his crazed eyes. He was not really joining in the conversation. He was in his own unhinged universe, the great gawky lunatic.

‘Fletcher Christian was right!’ cried young Isaac Martin, getting all weepy because he missed his old mother’s cooking and knew that he would never taste it again. ‘Oh, why did we throw away our lives on such a fool’s errand? We are lost and damned forever because rich men wanted a cheap way to feed their slaves!’

‘But don’t you see?’ said John Adams, all aglow with the certainty of being right. ‘The true glory of our voyage could be here on Pitcairn Island! If we can build a place where men are equal and happy and treated fair and square, then it will be a better place than the England we left behind!’

This went down well.

The drunken fools all started congratulating themselves on their nobility. John Adams’ pious goodness was clearly catching. He went on.

‘But if we are to make this a happy land, then we cannot treat the Tahitians exactly as Bligh treated us.’

The men were silent for a moment. This clearly did not sound so appealing.

‘We must treat all men decently,’ said John Adams. ‘Brown or white. English sailor or Tahitian native. No man should be master or servant on our fair island.’

‘Or we could do it another way,’ I said. ‘Take one of the natives – any one of them will do, for they are all equally feckless – chop his head off and display it on a sharpened stick as a permanent warning to the rest of the lazy dogs. That should keep them in line without too much wear on the ship’s whip.’

Matthew Quintal chuckled with approval. But I was deadly serious. Only a mad man could not see it.

‘Hold your tongue now,’ John Adams told me. ‘No more talk of punishment, Ned Young.’

This riled me. As far as I could see, my captains were all dead men.

‘Who elected you master and commander?’ I demanded. ‘Mr John bloody Adams! The last time I looked, you were an able seaman on the
Bounty
! While I was a midshipman! I believe I have rank over you, sir! Mr John bloody Adams!’

‘But we are not on the
Bounty
any more,’ said John Adams, his eyes now mean slits.

For all his Bible-bashing, I knew he had a temper on him, and I was glad that the fire was between us. I had once seen him shatter a man’s jawbone with one punch in a Portsmouth alehouse. So John Adams was not all sweetness, light and gospels, no matter how he played it out now.

‘Do me a great service, Ned,’ he said. ‘Put your stick back in your mouth and keep it there.’

Some of them had a chuckle at that.

But I would not stop.

‘And if chopping the head off the first doesn’t do the job and put a spring in their step, then take another one of the savages, and then another,’ I suggested.

‘That’s not you talking,’ John Adams said, smiling gently now, all forgiving and Christ-like. ‘That’s just the terrible pain in your tooth.’ He nodded with sympathy. ‘It hurts you very bad, doesn’t it, Ned, my old shipmate?’

‘Perhaps just a little bit,’ I conceded.

‘And it clouds your judgement,’ John Adams declared, standing up. He nodded once. ‘Hold him down,’ he said.

Four of them were suddenly on me.

They held my arms, my legs. There was a knee on my chest and another on my stomach, knocking the wind out of me. I fought and wiggled and raved and cursed and spat, but they held me down.

‘I want that bad tooth out of your head before we talk further,’ John Adams told me. ‘Let’s see if you talk about beheadings when that tooth is out of your head.’

‘Master and commander!’ I screamed up at him, my eyes wide at the rusty pair of pliers in his hand. ‘Damn your blood! Damn your eyes!’

‘Give him rum,’ commanded John Adams. ‘Quickly, now! The rum on his lips, boys!’

We had always used rum for medicinal purposes.

If a man needed his arm or leg sawn off, we got out the ship’s rum. If a man needed a tooth removed from his mouth or a native arrow removed from his arse, we turned to the rum.

Only now that pair of drunkards John Mills and William McCoy looked all sheepish.

‘The rum is gone,’ McCoy bleated.

‘Gone?’ roared John Adams. ‘It can’t be gone! There must be rum!’

But of course it could be gone. Because everything that we salvaged from our poor doomed ship would one day be gone. Including our lives. The rum was just the first thing to go.

‘Oh well,’ said John Adams, bending over me. ‘It can’t be helped. That bad tooth must come out tonight. Hold him tightly now.’

I could feel the stinking breath of John Mills and William McCoy in my face.

‘This is going to hurt you,’ laughed Mills, ‘a lot more than it hurts us.’

My scream rose to the starry sky.

John Adams, our holy master and commander, was right. Pitcairn Island was a land of plenty. Fruit. Fish. Game. A rich soil and a moderate climate, like a summer’s afternoon in England that would go on for all eternity. Everything was there for the picking, the hunting, the fishing, the planting and the taking. Apart from two things.

There was a shortage of women.

And there was a shortage of rum.

Not enough women.

Not enough rum.

And so, to the men who had sailed the
Bounty
, Pitcairn Island would forever be a land of famine and thirst.

They held me down and pulled my tooth out by its blackened root. My cries of agony travelled across the endless expanse of the South Seas, but there was nobody to hear them.

Nobody apart from the Tahitian men and women. They kept well back from our fire on the beach, moving in the shadows, and speaking quietly in their own language.

I watched the woman as she hunted for eggs.

She was at the top of the white cliffs, peering down at a nest perched on some stumpy branches. I licked my lips at the thought of gull eggs for dinner.

She was some distance from me. I lounged on the beach in a hammock strung between two palm trees, feeling quite exhausted from watching all her hard work.

Even from here I could see the identity of the woman.

Her name was Jenny.

She was my wife.

You might say that Jenny doesn’t sound like much of a name for a Tahitian wench. And of course you would be right.

But, you see, some of those Tahitian names were real tongue twisters. The leader of the native men was called Tetahiti – try saying that with your teeth out. Another fellow was Tararu. Then there was Maimiti and Balhadi and Taurua among the women.

It all got a bit much for uneducated seamen like me and my simple-minded shipmates. And that is why some of the Tahitians had proper Christian names that we had handed out with the buckets of glass beads.

So you might see some half-naked devil shinning up a banana tree like a monkey with his tail on fire, and his name might be George. In fact we did have a Tahitian called George, and his climbing was extremely fine.

Or you might see some dusky Tahitian beauty looking for gull eggs on the edge of a cliff, and her name might be Mary or Jane or Jenny.

And so it was.

As I lazed in my hammock, yawning and scratching my arse, the only thing that kept my eyes open was wondering how many gull eggs Jenny would find in that nest.

The gull eggs on our island were large and light blue, speckled with marks of darker blue. We stuffed them into our greedy faces either soft boiled (the white of the egg showing the faintest shade of blue) or fried up in a dollop of fat and served with the day’s catch.

Suddenly Jenny straightened, and that woke me up, for I suspected she had spied some fat eggs in the nest. She stood stock still at the top of the cliff, having a think.

The drop of the cliff was quite shallow at the top. It sloped away gently for a bit, like a harmless little hill, covered with these stumpy trees, before it reached the sheer drop to the rocks far below. So as Jenny edged carefully down to the nest, her bare feet seeking grip on the dusty white rock, she must have felt no fear.

I watched her take one scraggy little branch in her hand, and then push her long black hair from her face with the other. She had another think. Then, with her hair shining in the sun, she reached for the eggs in the nest, still holding onto the little branch for safety. Her lovely hair fell forward.

I sat up and smiled to myself.

I could almost taste those gull eggs on the back of my tongue.

But the nest was just out of reach. Those gulls knew where to build, the crafty bastards.

Jenny got on her knees and leaned further out. Then at last they were in her hand. Those light blue gull eggs with their dark freckles. Three of the little beauties, as far as I could see, with one more still in the nest.

Jenny reached for the remaining egg.

I thought to myself,
Soft-boiled or fried in a dollop of fat, Ned?

And then she fell.

The stumpy root that she was holding onto came away all at once. At least, that’s how it looked. One moment it was attached to the chalky side of the cliff, and the next it was attached to thin air.

Although the slope of the cliff was gentle, poor Jenny had reached out a long way to steal the eggs of the gull.

And there was no way back.

She fell.

At first she scrambled up the side of the cliff – the top must have seemed so close, and then suddenly so far away.

But she was always falling.

For a terrible second or two she seemed to clutch the gull eggs to her breast, as if she thought that they could still be brought to the dinner table. Then she was sliding down the cliff and the eggs dropped.

And so did she.

She was over the side of the cliff and spinning in the air, always falling, and the rocks were rushing to claim her.

I was on my feet and I called her name.

And I could not stop calling her name.

As if that might bring her back.

As if that might give her life.

Because Jenny was my wife.

And I loved her, you see.

I stumbled back to the camp, my vision blinded by tears.

‘Jenny,’ I said, my voice all choked with loss. ‘Jenny, Jenny.’

I struggled to understand what had happened. I had just watched my wife die while picking eggs. She was on a cliff. Then she fell. It sounded so simple. And yet I struggled to understand how easily happiness could fall apart.

I call her my wife. Of course she was a maid that I met on Tahiti. Perhaps not much of a maid. She had certainly paddled her canoe around the island with the local boys once or twice before I ever dropped my anchor. I do not doubt that.

Still, she was my wife. Perhaps they would not have called her my wife in England, but we were a long way from England. And when she fell, my world fell with her.

I was in the camp before I realised that my shipmates were all stinking drunk. In these early days we still squatted in rough shelters made from palm leaves and bamboo and whatever bits of driftwood we could scavenge from the beach.

Outside these hovels, the sailors loafed about like lords of the realm, rolling with stupid laughter and pawing at any women who were foolish enough to get close.

William McCoy shoved a glass jar in my hand.

‘We did it, Ned!’ he cried excitedly, too drunk to realise that he was talking to a man with bitter tears on his face. ‘We made grog! A good batch of home-made rum! Look!’

Right in the middle of our humble camp, surrounded by the mean grass huts we had assembled, there was some kind of knocked-up device.

It was a big steaming iron pot, pillaged from the mess of our dear departed
Bounty
. A wormy coil of copper connected it to a barrel that had once held our drinking water in the days when we were sailors.

‘Take a drink, Ned Young,’ McCoy screamed in my face, his reeking breath making me almost puke up my guts. ‘It is real grog we have made. Cornmeal, sugar, water, yeast and malt, all mixed up. Then all cooked up. And then we captured the steam in the barrel – and that is the secret.’ The drunken oaf took a long glug-glug-glug from the glass jar in his hand and belched like a judge on Christmas day. ‘It is stronger than our navy rum!’ he yelled.

I looked at their red, sweating faces. There was no sign of the godly John Adams, but the rest of the little crew were all accounted for.

Over William McCoy’s shoulder I could see John Mills, my enemy, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and eyeing me as if he would like to rip out my throat. Although in fairness, that was his natural expression.

And here was strong, silent Jack Williams, staring into the distance as if he was looking at something ten thousand miles away.

And slightly apart from the rest, Mad Matthew Quintal, babbling to himself and rolling his eyes, like the pride of Bedlam nut house that he was.

Even William Brown, our high-and-mighty gardener, Lord Muck of Cow Shit Farm, had his glasses hanging off of one ear while he absent-mindedly mopped at the vomit on his britches.

Young Isaac Martin was the only one among them who did not look out of his mind.

The gentle-hearted lad sawed absent-mindedly on his old fiddle, a melancholy tune from his Irish homeland, and a glass jar between his legs. The sound of his music stilled my heart for an instant, as it had so often stilled my heart when we were out on the rolling sea. Few things are more beautiful in this life than music heard at sea.