The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander Read Free Book Online Page A

to ease Nature where we lay.” Most of the men had not moved their bowels for the duration of the journey, and some were now administered enemas through a syringe.
     
    “[T]he Surgeon of the Place who visited us could not enter the place till it had been washed by Slaves,” Morrison continued. “[W]e had laid 6 Days in this situation. . . .” A compassionate Dutch officer of the fort, clearly appalled at the prisoners’ treatment, arranged to have the men released from the stocks and placed in leg irons, manacled two by two, but otherwise at liberty to walk about. The prisoners were still almost naked, but with “some of the leaves of the Brab Tree . . . set to work to make hats,” a skill undoubtedly learned in those faraway days in Tahiti. These hats the enterprising prisoners then sold and with the little money earned bought tobacco.
     
    As it turned out, the Pandora ’s company were not the only distressed British sailors at Coupang. Some months earlier, seven men, a woman and two children had arrived at the fort in a small six-oared cutter with the story that they were part of the crew and passengers of a wrecked brig called Neptune. They too had been treated with great compassion by the Dutch authorities. And when Edwards and his men came ashore, the kind Dutchmen had hastened to their guests to bring them the good news that their captain had arrived.
     
    “What Captain! dam’me, we have no Captain,” Hamilton reports one of them had unwisely exclaimed. The small party, it turned out, had not been shipwrecked, but were convicts who had made a daring escape from Botany Bay (“they were discovered to be Cheats,” as Morrison noted self-righteously).
     
    On October 6, having recovered strength, Edwards led his entire company to sea again, this time as passengers on a Dutch East Indiaman, the Rembang. Their destination was the Dutch settlement of Batavia, on Java, from where Edwards expected to get passages to Cape Town. Here, there would be other company ships bound for Europe.
     
    This short passage from Timor to Batavia proved to be as eventful as any in the men’s now protracted travels. On the sixth day out, while they were off the coast of Flores, a tremendous storm erupted. According to Dr. Hamilton, within a few minutes “every sail of the ship was shivered to pieces. . . . This storm was attended with the most dreadful thunder and lightning we had ever experienced.”
     
    At the height of this crisis, when the ship was in imminent danger of being driven onto the lee shore, the Dutch seamen, Hamilton reported, “went below; and the ship was preserved from destruction by the manly exertion of our English tars, whose souls seemed to catch redoubled ardour from the tempest’s rage.” This appears to have been no exaggeration. Morrison himself, hardly one to volunteer praise for his captors, stated matter-of-factly that the ship was “badly found and Worse Managed and if Captain Edwards had not taken the Command and set his Men to work she would never have reached Batavia.”
     
    On October 30, the Rembang limped into Semarang, on the north coast of Java. The prisoners had been let out of irons during the battle with the storm to take turns at the pumps but had discovered they no longer had strength for this routine duty. But the spirits of the whole company were raised by an entirely unexpected and welcome surprise: the Pandora ’s little schooner, Resolution, awaited them, safely anchored in the harbor. After having lost sight of Pandora in the gale four months earlier, the Resolution ’s men set out from the Samoas to the Friendly Islands, skirted the southernmost of the Fiji group, made northwest for the Endeavour Strait, struck out for the Indonesian islands and came, through the Strait of Bali to Surabaya, on the north coast of Java. Their navigational equipment had consisted of two quadrants, a volume of Robertson’s Elements of Navigation and an edition of Guthrie’s Geographical