An editor’s cut from Karl Lorbach’s first exposé on Bligh and Banks
The Great Bounty Conspiracy — Bligh and his Breadfruit
Chapter Five
Of visionary things and gentleman’s schemes
Between 26 October 1788 and 5 April 1789, it was mostly the wet season in Tahiti. This was when the Bounty was anchored at Matavai Bay and Oparre Harbor. Covering this period, Bligh and the boatswain’s mate, James Morrison, each left an account of their adventures on ship and on shore for posterity. But their journals, treasures as they may be, are both documents that were recopied a long time after the events had occurred. Both Bligh and Morrison had acquired strong personal reasons to embellish the facts or to conceal certain events, with the manipulative advantage of hindsight, which is exactly what they did. So in the absence of reliable evidence for determining what happened at Tahiti, the breadfruit plant has proved an invaluable investigative tool. At Cape Horn, Bligh got frustrated by the weather: at Tahiti, his gardener’s efforts were not only frustrated by hot, wet, humid, and windy conditions, they were hampered by a host of unexpected technical problems. In popular portrayals of the Bounty, we are systematically fed with impressions of the Bounty bobbing peacefully at anchor with blue skies above: serious problems not really surfacing till Bligh and his men go merrily on their way. Neither concept is correct. More often the skies were dark-grey than sky-blue and to use a seafarers vulgar, while anchored the Bounty would often pitch and roll its guts out for days.
As the tethered Bounty was buffeted by seasonal gales at Tahiti, its bare spidery rigging daring electric leaden skies, botanising was stalled by squalls and lashing tropical rain, Bligh did his damnedest to flog obedience into a seaman, and the cooper did his utmost to make more suitable plant tubs. Meanwhile back in England, Nepean remarked to Stevens that it was Banks ‘who planned the Expedition undertaken by Lieutenant Bligh in the Bounty Store Ship’.i Yes, and it was Banks who would be disgraced if Bligh was to fail, which indeed he did, but Bligh wasn’t all to blame. Bligh wasn’t so sure how much he was or wasn’t, so he worried about what his patron would think, and he worried about his money, and added to that, he was terrified of the Torres Strait – Bligh feared the French might go through before him and that he might follow and sink. Bligh was forever fearful of failure and what may lie ahead. So with his thoughts pulled in all directions, in desperation he grasped at something foolish to palliate those awful woes. Bligh had at some irrational moment played the conjurer of human stupidity: the young lieutenant pondered the unthinkable, a deed which only a man with nothing to lose may do. For Bligh, mutiny was deliverance from ignominy: death was a fear even less than his fear of failure. In short, Bligh became a very dangerous man.
i Nepean to Stevens, 30 Jan.1789.
[Illustration – Arthur McNeil]
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