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

Grammar, but no charts.
     
    At Surabaya, the vessel’s young commander, Master’s Mate William Oliver, had presented himself to the Dutch authorities. All Dutch settlements, however, had been alerted to the fate of the Bounty; and as David Renouard, one of the Pandora ’s midshipmen, said, it was “a singular coincidence that the mutineers who quitted Otaheite in the Bounty corresponded with ourselves both in rank and numbers.” The Resolution, built in fact by mutineers, was moreover hand-hewn from Otaheitan wood. Distrustful of Oliver’s story, the Dutch authorities politely detained the small company for a month. At length, Oliver persuaded them to let him make for Batavia, by way of Semarang, where by another uncanny coincidence the Resolution had arrived on October 29, the day before the Rembang. Between Bounty, Pandora, Resolution and the boat from Botany Bay, four epic voyages had been accomplished within a two-and-a-half-year period; the Dutch authorities, ever picking up the wreckage, must have wondered if the British had a penchant for this kind of business.
     
    The Rembang and the Resolution proceeded together to Batavia, the principal port of the Dutch East Indies. Founded in 1618, it was now a spacious town set at the head of a deep bay half a mile from the sea, its streets cut, Dutch style, by tree-lined connecting canals. Picturesque from afar, it was also reckoned to be one of the most fever-ridden and pestilential places on earth. Out of the surrounding swamp and stagnant canals, malarial mosquitoes spread like miasma. A “painted sepulchre, this golgotha of Europe,” Dr. Hamilton described the city. Dead bodies floating into the sea from the canals had struck their ship on arrival, which, as Hamilton noted, “had a very disagreeable effect on the minds of our brave fellows.” Two years earlier, four of Bligh’s men had died of fever here, after successfully weathering their great boat journey, and Bligh himself had fallen gravely ill.
     
    On arrival, Edwards arranged for his men to be housed on board a Dutch East India Company ship then in the road, or anchorage outside the harbor. Thirty of his sick were borne to a hospital—a number of these were men from the Resolution who had suffered badly in the course of their impromptu journey.
     
    In the nearly seven weeks they were detained at Batavia, the majority of the prisoners were allowed on deck only twice, although once again Coleman, Norman and McIntosh enjoyed more freedom. But it may be that the confinement afforded the men some protection from the mosquitoes. “[H]ere we enjoyed our Health,” Morrison stated, noting with satisfaction that “the Pandora ’s people fell sick and died apace.”
     
    Edwards had negotiated an arrangement with the Dutch authorities to divide the Pandora ’s complement among four ships bound for Holland by way of the Cape, “at no expense to Government further than for the Officers and Prisoners,” as he somewhat nervously informed the Admiralty. A disaster such as the loss of a ship did not allow a captain of His Majesty’s Navy carte blanche in extricating himself from the disaster. All accounts for the £724 8s. 0d. in expenses incurred between Coupang and Batavia would have to be meticulously itemized and justified on return.
     
    Edwards also used the sojourn at Batavia to write up his report to the Admiralty relating all that had transpired subsequent to January 6, 1791, the date of his last dispatch from Rio. Edwards’s report, in his own hand, filled thirty-two large, closely written pages and ranged over all his adventures—the capture of the mutineers, the fruitless search for Christian and the Bounty, the wreck of the Pandora, and the voyage to Timor. The events are narrated in strict chronological order, like a story, with discursive material about the customs and country of the islands visited and anecdotal asides (“I took this opportunity to show the Chief what Execution the Canon and