LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

speaking, if not a step backward in the command hierarchy of his profession, at least a step sideways. For a young man of Bligh’s background and aspirations, the desired position following a successful midshipman apprenticeship was that of lieutenant, which would put him securely on the promotional ladder leading to the post of captain. A master, on the other hand, for all the rigour of his responsibilities, received his appointment not as a commission from the Admiralty, but by a warrant from the Naval Board. These were important distinctions, professionally and socially. And while it was not unusual for a young man to bide his time by serving as a master until a lieutenancy was offered, there was the danger of proving too useful in that rank and advancing no further. Most masters had not been young gentlemen and were not destined for the captain’s list. In Bligh’s case the risk seemed justified. If he did his job well, he could count on the ‘interest’ and recommendation of Captain Cook, the most highly regarded royal naval officer of his day as a cartographer and explorer.

      With Cook’s expedition, Bligh sailed to Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand, Tahiti, and the Pacific islands. He patrolled the west coast of North America and searched for the Northwest Passage. Cook was justly famous for maintaining the health of his crew on his long, demanding voyages, and Bligh’s own later practices would reveal that he had closely observed and learned from his mentor’s innovations in diet and ship management.

      From Cook’s own log, one catches only glimpses of the earnest young sailing master, usually being sent ahead of the ship in a reconnaissance boat to make a careful survey of some ticklish coast or bay. After Cook himself, Bligh was responsible for most of the charts and surveys made in the course of this last expedition, and had thus honed his already exceptional abilities.

      Most unforgettably, Bligh had been present at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, when on 14 February 1779, James Cook was murdered by the island natives. The events that led to this shocking tragedy would be long disputed; dispassionate reading of the numerous, often conflicting accounts suggests that Cook behaved with uncharacteristic rashness and provocation to the islanders – but that at the moment of crisis he had been betrayed by the disorder and panic of the armed marines whose duty had been to protect him. In the horrified and frightened aftermath of their loss, Cook’s officers assembled an account of the events at Kealakekua Bay that vindicated most and made a scapegoat of only one man, a Lieutenant Rickinson. Some years later, William Bligh would record his disgust with this closing of the ranks in marginal annotations made in a copy of the official publication of the voyage: ‘A most infamous lie’; ‘The whole affair from the Opening to the end did not last 10 Minutes, nor was their a spark of courage or conduct shown in the whole busyness’; ‘a most Hypocritical expression’; ‘A pretty Old Woman Story’.

      In Bligh’s opinion, the principal cause of the tragedy at Kealakekua Bay lay with the marines: they had failed to do their duty. After firing a first panicked volley, they had fallen back from the menacing crowd of islanders in fear, splashing and flailing to their waiting boat. ‘The Marines fir’d & ran which occasioned all that followed for had they fixed their bayonets & not have run, so frightened as they were, they might have drove all before them.’ The person most responsible for the marines’ disorder was their commander, Lieutenant Molesworth Phillips, characterized by Bligh as a ‘person, who never was of any real service the whole Voyage, or did anything but eat and Sleep.’

      Bligh was at least in some position to pass judgement, for the day following Cook’s murder he had been sent onshore to oversee a party of men repairing the Resolution’s damaged mast. Shortly after landing, Bligh had found himself faced with a menacing crowd and had ordered his men to stand and fire; and he had held this position until joined by reinforcements from the ship.

      The shock and tragedy apart, Cook’s death deprived Bligh of the valuable interest he had counted on at the expedition’s end, and which it would appear by this time he otherwise lacked; his own modest connections had been sufficient to secure him a young gentleman’s entry to naval service, but do not appear to have been extensive enough to have advanced him further. In both the subsequent flurry of promotions and the published account of the voyage, Bligh found himself somewhat marginalized; whether this was because he had made known his highly impolitic views of the expedition cannot be determined. But to his intense annoyance and mortification, the carefully drawn charts he had made throughout the voyage were published under another’s name.

      Following his return to England, Bligh had indulged in a rare holiday and returned to the Isle of Man, with, as subsequent events would suggest, a determined objective; only months after his return, in February 1781, William Bligh was married to Elizabeth Betham, the pretty, twenty-seven-year-old daughter of well-to-do and exceptionally well-educated parents. Richard Betham, Elizabeth’s father, was the receiver general, or collector of customs, in Douglas, and the friend of such distinguished men as philosopher David Hume and economist Adam Smith, with whom he had been a student at university. William Bligh, prudent, diligent and ambitious, would have had much to recommend him as a husband. For Elizabeth Betham, intelligent and brought up in a family of enlightened thinkers, Bligh’s participation in a high-profile expedition of discovery and exploration was also an attraction, evidence that the young officer was a cut above the usual naval man. By now Bligh had not only served with, and been deeply affected by, the most progressive sea captain of his age, but also, as his ship logs would reveal, he shared Cook’s unflagging interest in recording not only the coasts and harbours but also the people and places he encountered. As Elizabeth Bligh had undoubtedly appreciated, William Bligh not only was ambitious in the naval line, but also possessed the diligent, enquiring curiosity that might destine him for association with the ‘scientifically’ minded men of the Royal Society.

      Following his marriage, Bligh had served as a fifth or sixth lieutenant in a series of short commissions during the winding down of the American War of Independence. By 1782, the navy had begun to scale back and reverted to offering the meagre fare of peacetime – two shillings a day and no opportunity for prize money from enemy ships. William Bligh, newly married and now with a young daughter to support, had at first lain low in the Isle of Man, where life was famously cheap, and where, as he told a relative, he could at least get plenty of books and ‘improve’ himself by reading. But these circumstances were tolerable for only so long, and by the middle of 1783, Bligh had received permission from the Admiralty to take mercantile employment abroad; so for four years, until his appointment to the Bounty, Bligh had plied the rum and sugar trade from England to the West Indies for his wife’s wealthy merchant uncle, Duncan Campbell.

      Bligh was of average to below-average height. His hair was black, his skin ‘of an ivory or marble whiteness’; in later years, it would be remarked of him that ‘his face, though it had been exposed to all climates, and to the roughest weather, was, even as years began to tell upon him, far from appearing weather-beaten, or coarse.’ He did not, then, have the look of a rough ‘salt’. Nonetheless, he was widely experienced, having served in time of war, in voyages of discovery and in the merchant trade, from the Pacific to the West Indies. Other considerations are likely to have recommended him in Admiralty eyes. While it was the often expressed opinion of Joseph Banks that the Bounty voyage was now exclusively about breadfruit transportation, the Admiralty had one other, highly regarded objective, as was clear from the sailing orders Bligh eventually received: after leaving Tahiti, his orders instructed him, ‘you are to proceed from thence through Endeavour Streights (which separate New Holland from New Guinea).’ The navigation and survey of this important, little-known and dangerous passage – where Cook himself had run aground – was of great interest to the Admiralty, and there were few naval men better qualified, or available, to undertake this than Captain Cook’s able sailing master.

      For William Bligh, now not quite thirty-three years old and a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Navy, the command of Sir Joseph Banks’s prestigious breadfruit journey implied more than a return to naval service from the obscurity of the sugar trade – it put Bligh squarely in Cook’s footsteps.

      The object of all the former voyages to the South Seas,’ Bligh himself wrote, ‘has been the advancement of science, and the increase of knowledge. This voyage may be reckoned the first, the intention of which has been to derive benefit from those distant discoveries.’

      The vessel

Скачать книгу