The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (50 page)

BOOK: The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty

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With few possessions to collect, there was little to delay Peter’s departure. From his former shipmates, companions of the terrible, shared intimacy of fear and confinement, he took his final leave. Probably, the men wished one another well. Given Peter’s religious feeling, he undoubtedly left his friends with his blessing. After thanking the ship’s officers for the kind attention he had received, Peter was led by Graham down to one of the
Hector
’s boats and ferried to the mainland. Here they took a coach and departed for London. The original plan had been to spend the night on the road, but impatience got the better of both, and they pressed on to London.

At half past ten in the morning on the twenty-ninth, Nessy wrote perhaps the shortest epistle of her prolific career: “I have seen him—clasped him to my Bosom—& my Felicity is beyond Expression!” she raved to her mother. “I can write no more but to tell you that the three happiest Beings at this Moment on Earth are your most dutiful & affectionate Children.” In happy triumph, the letter was signed by James, by Nessy—and by Peter.

In Portsmouth, the weather continued cloudy but by the afternoon of October 28, it had turned pleasant and mild. Under these briefly benign skies, John Millward, Thomas Burkett and Thomas Ellison were led for the last time down the
Hector
’s gangway and into a gently pitching boat. On this occasion, the
Duke
was not their destination. Following delivery of the verdict, the captains had drawn lots to determine the ship on which the executions would take place. It had fallen to Captain Curtis and the
Brunswick,
half an hour’s boat journey away in the harbor.

The gun room of the
Brunswick
had been carefully prepared for the prisoners’ reception, with the gun ports closed and screens hung around a marked-off area. Within a corner of this screened enclosure, in turn, was the small “cell” to which the three men were to be consigned.

“Not a ray of light was permitted to obtrude,” an officer of the
Brunswick
recorded. “All was silent, solemn, and gloomy.” This grim atmosphere had been created out of a kind of perverse delicacy on the prisoners’ behalf, intended as a sympathetic, reverential backdrop that would not mock their affliction. Throughout the ship a mood of genuine sadness pervaded.

The prisoners themselves were brought on board under guard and, according to the anonymous officer, “tripped up and down the ladders with the most wonderful alacrity” as they made their way down to the gun room. Their expressions “were perfectly calm, serene, and chearful,” although, as the officer confessed, it shocked him to see men so full of life and health and vigor only hours away from death.

As he stood out of sight beyond the screened-off cell, the officer’s attention had been drawn early in the evening by the sound of someone reading a sermon, and he had assumed one of the chaplains had been let in to perform this service. On looking around the screen, however, he saw that it was John Millward—the would-be deserter, the reluctant mutineer—who was ministering to his companions. The prisoners continued speaking among themselves, in conversation “chearful, resigned, and manly,” until ten o’clock, when they turned to the bedrolls prepared for them and attempted to sleep.

During the night, a shocking incident occurred: The provost-martial, serving as both “gaoler and hangman,” had come into the gun room and, within earshot of the prisoners, given his opinion that “[t]he young one’s a hardened dog!” Then, as the stunned officers and other guards watched, he pulled a nightcap out of his pocket, exclaiming, “Here is one; I have all three of their caps in my pocket”—these, nightcaps of mutineers of the
Bounty,
would make profitable souvenirs.

At nine in the morning of Monday, October 29, the gun was fired and the yellow flag raised to assemble for the executions. By ten, the
Brunswick
was ringed by boats from all the ships of the fleet, manned and armed. Leaving the gun room, the prisoners thanked Captain Curtis and the officers for the humane treatment they had received during their confinement. On deck, the ship’s company stood at attention in solemn columns, “the yard ropes stretched along in each man’s hand.” Just before eleven, the prisoners were led behind four clergymen through the ranks of men up to the fo’c’sle, where they stood facing the assembled company. The fine weather of their last evening had departed, and it was now clouded over with occasional rain.

Across the harbor, men, women and children thronged the shore and filled the shallow wherries in the water, straining for a view; although, as newspapers would report, the “number of spectators . . . was certainly great, yet many respectable inhabitants purposely left the town till the melancholy scene closed.”

Accounts of the last words of these now forlorn mutineers differed wildly. According to the
Brunswick
officer, Millward had stood upon the cathead and “addressed the ship’s company, confessed the errors they had been guilty of, acknowledged the
justice
of their sentence” and warned onlookers to avoid their ways. The speech “was nervous, strong, and eloquent, and delivered in an open and deliberate manner.” But, according to the popular press, the men had embraced one another repeatedly, “saying, ‘God bless you, God receive you in mercy;’ but persisted to the last moment of their existence, that they were totally innocent of the crime for which they were to suffer.” For this last half hour of their lives, the three men received their final offices—not from the Reverend Mr. Howell or any of the other naval chaplains, but from James Morrison, boatswain’s mate, who had remained to minister to his shipmates.

Bags had been placed over the heads of each man, and now nooses were placed around their necks. At 11:26, according to Curtis’s log, the gun was fired for execution, and the crews assigned to each prisoner’s rope pulled hard away. “Thomas Burkitt was Run up to the Starboard Fore Yard Arm, Milward and Ellison to the Larboard, and There Hung Agreeable to their Sentence,” Curtis logged.

For two hours the bodies of the executed men hung from the yards. The rain became heavy, then moderated. At half past one, the bodies were cut down and ferried across the water to Haslar Hospital, that imposing refuge for the naval sick and hurt. The Navy Board was billed seven shillings and sixpence for the cost of each interment. Young Ellison, it was noted in the hospital records, was a “Captain’s servant”—another mark of the special privilege he had thrown away.

The following Sunday, the Reverend Mr. Howell, in one of his infrequent appearances in his own chapel, preached a sermon on Hebrews 13:7: “Remember then which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God; whose faith follow.”

In the very wide coverage of these men’s deaths, several newspapers chose to comment on the fact that “the sufferings of the unhappy mutineers of the Bounty were greater than it could be imagined human nature is capable of bearing.” Their shipwreck and terrible confinement under Captain Edwards was cited, but it was also curiously reported that “[b]efore the mutiny took place, from the extreme length of the voyage, forty men were put on the allowance of twelve, and even that scanty pittance consisted of food condemned.” Where this extraordinary—and false—report originated cannot be known, but it is worth noting that it appears after Morrison’s acquittal. As a pardoned mutineer still in Portsmouth, it is likely that he would have been sought out by reporters.

Another point of special interest was flagged by the officer of the
Brunswick,
who noted that “[g]reat murmurs are also carefully breathed, and are assiduously promulged, on the pardon of the midshipman and boatswain’s mate: and, according to the vulgar notion, money bought their lives; and that the others fell sacrifices to their poverty.” It was perhaps no coincidence that a number of newspapers toward the end of September reported that Mr. Heywood was “an accomplished young gentleman, genteely connected, with a fortune of 30,000l. fallen to him since he has been in confinement,” a rumor that appears to be without any basis. These were dangerous sentiments to have bandied around, with the news of the massacres in France still coming in from across the Channel. The
Brunswick
officer raised the point only to shoot it down; his entire report, and most especially his desire to accurately depict the penitents’ heartening last words, was motivated, he said, by a desire to correct such vulgar notions.

This view was also shared by Captain Hamond, again the acting port commander in Hood’s absence, who noted in his official report to the Admiralty that “the criminals behaved with great penitence, and decency.” Parties from every ship in harbor and at Spithead had attended the execution, and as he noted, from the reports he had received, “the Example seems to have made a great Impression upon the Minds of all the Ships companies present.”

The execution over, Morrison returned to naval service. Muspratt was still awaiting the outcome of his petition. By early December he knew himself reprieved, and on February 11, 1793, he learned that he had also received His Majesty’s pardon. Deeply shaken by the executions, it was reported, he had “not since spoke a word to any person; nor can he by any means be prevailed on to do so.”

After traveling to the Isle of Man to be with his family, Peter too returned to naval service. Offers for midshipman positions came from a number of sympathetic captains, including Lord Hood himself, but Peter’s immediate decision was to opt for the
Bellerophon
under his uncle Pasley. This brief service was followed by a more prestigious position on the
Queen Charlotte
—the flagship of Lord Howe, brother-in-law to James Modyford Heywood, Vice Admiral of England and commander of the Channel fleet.

On these ships, Peter discovered, perhaps to his surprise, that he had become a figure of some glamour.

“Amongst the number of our new midshipmen is Mr. Haywood, a very fine young man—who was one of the mutineers in the
Bounty,
” a fellow middie wrote excitedly to his father. “[H]e speaks in great raptures of the poeple and climate at Otaheite and would be very much pleased to go back again to his wife and children whom he left there; it is a curious circumstance,” the young writer mused, “that his associates were hanged upon the same day by which they had promised to return if cleared by their country.”

JUDGMENT

Duty.

The backbone of honor.

When in 1794, under heavy fire in the campaign of the Glorious First of June, Admiral George Bowyer lost a leg and was carried to the cockpit for treatment, he had insisted that traditional protocol be observed and that those wounded before him be assisted first. Here, however, he was thwarted, for a sailor who had also lost his own leg swore vehemently that he “would not be dressed before the Admiral.” Duty ennobled both the fallen admiral and the common seaman.

In private life duty was the demarcation between honor and discredit, gentleman and scoundrel. In public life the stakes were even higher, and nowhere more so than in the British navy, where each campaign was scrutinized, each failure of duty actionable. Admiralty files are filled with records of courts-martial brought against one officer or another for some alleged dereliction of duty—and filled too with courts-martial that officers who felt their honor impugned petitioned to have called upon themselves to clear their names. Pamphlets issued by two of the
Bounty
court-martial judges—“The reply of Sir Roger Curtis, to the person who stiles himself A neglected naval officer”; “A Refutation of the Incorrect Statements, and Unjust Insinuations . . . as far as the same refers to the conduct of Admiral Sir George Montagu, G.C.B.”—were among many similar publications produced by numerous officers to counteract charges that they had failed in some point of their duty. Such publications had even followed Cook’s voyages.

Duty was part of the cement that bound the British navy, the code of conduct that enabled the captain of a 90-gun man-of-war to stride his quarterdeck secure in the certainty that the officers and eight hundred men under his direction would perform when and as he required. Duty was what helped to form a loyal company out of a ship’s mixed complement of volunteers and impressed men, who, dragooned for the King’s service against their will, made up the majority of working seamen.

Duty was invoked at the outset of the most celebrated of all British naval battles. Leading the north column of ships of the line at the onset of the battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Lord Nelson ordered a final rally of encouragement to be signaled to his fleet. Raised aloft flag by flag, his last message had been straightforwardly simple: