LITMIR.BIZ

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when the ship was taken out of commission. This had occurred four years previously, and one assumes young Hallett, at age eleven, was getting his schooling during the interim. John Hallett Sr appears to have been acquainted with Banks, and wrote to him thanking him for getting his son’s position. While the Bounty was swarming with young gentlemen – officers in training, midshipmen in waiting – the only two to hold the coveted midshipmen’s slots were Thomas Hayward and John Hallett, both protégés of Banks.

      In early October, Bligh prepared the Bounty to leave the Thames for Spithead, Portsmouth, where he was to await official orders to sail. The ship, now copper-sheathed, had been completely refitted and was stuffed with supplies – not just the food stores, clothing or ‘slops’, fuel, water, rum and bulk necessities, but all the miscellaneous minutiae of the gardener’s trade, as inventoried on a list supplied by Banks: paper, pens, ink, India ink, ‘Colours of all kinds’, spade, pins, wire, fly traps, an insect box, bottles, knives, ‘Journal Books & other usefull Books’, guns and gunpowder, shot and flints, and ‘Trinkets for the Natives’, which included mirrors and eighty pounds of white, blue and red glass beads. Bligh had also been given sixty-one ducats and forty-five Spanish dollars for the purchase of plants. Eight hundred variously sized pots for the breadfruit plants had been stowed, but as David Nelson reported to Banks plaintively, ‘as I have only room for 600, the remainder may possibly be broken.’ The pots had been made extra deep for drainage by ‘Mr. Dalton, potter’, near Deptford Creek.

      Every British naval seaman brought certain expectations to each ship he joined. He expected to endure hard labour in raw conditions, and was ever mindful that he was vulnerable to harsh and often arbitrary punishment at the hands of his officers. He expected to eat very specifically measured amounts of rank food, and to drink much liquor. Above all, he expected to exist for the duration of his service in stifling, unhygienic squalor. There would be no privacy. As the official naval allotment of fourteen inches sleeping space for each man suggests, space was always at a premium – but nowhere more so than on the little Bounty, now crammed with supplies for eighteen months’ voyaging and trade. Her fo’c’sle, an unventilated, windowless area of 22 by 36 feet, was shared by thirty-three men, while the maximum height between decks amidships was 5 feet 7 inches – the average height of the men she carried. The master’s mates, midshipmen, and young gentlemen – Fletcher Christian and a William Elphinstone, Hayward and Hallett, Peter Heywood, George Stewart, Edward Young and Robert Tinkler – were all quartered directly behind Bligh’s little pantry, separated, it is suggested, merely by canvas walls.

      On deck, amid the piles of stores, were the Bounty’s three boats. The Navy Board had placed an order for these as early as June, but the usual supplier, swamped with other work, had been forced to cry off. The Board then turned to a private contractor to build a launch of 20 feet in length with copper fastenings, and to the Deal boatyard for a cutter and a jolly boat of 18 and 16 feet, respectively. For reasons known only to himself, Bligh requested of the Navy Board that the launch and cutter, which had already been supplied, be replaced with larger models. The Board complied, and thus was acquired one of the most historic craft in maritime history, the Bounty’s 23-foot-long, 2-foot-9-inch-deep launch.

      On 9 October 1787, a drear, dull day, the pilot arrived to take the Bounty out of the Thames on the first leg of her voyage. In the Long Reach she received her gunner’s stores. Officially designated as an ‘Armed Vessel’, she was equipped with ‘four short four-pounder carriage guns and ten half-pounder swivel guns’, to quote the Admiralty’s directive – a laughably meagre firepower. Additionally, there were small arms, muskets, powder and bayonets, all locked in the arms chest, supposedly at all times under the key of the ship’s master, John Fryer.

      The Bounty herself was in her glory – newly fitted out to the tune of thousands of pounds, sails set, piled with stores, guns gleaming and swarming with her men, the midshipmen in their smart blue coats, Bligh in his blue-and-white-piped lieutenant’s uniform with its bright gilt buttons, and the seamen in their long, baggy trousers and boxy jackets: Charles Churchill, with his disfigured hand showing ‘the Marks of a Severe Scald’; German-speaking Henry Hilbrant, strong and sandy-haired, but with ‘His Left Arm Shorter than the other having been broke’; Alexander Smith, ‘Very much pitted’ with smallpox, and bearing an axe scar on his right foot; John Sumner, slender, fair and with a ‘Scar upon the left Cheek’; William McCoy, scarred by a stab wound in the belly; William Brown, the gardener, also fair and slender, but bearing a ‘remarkable Scar on one of his Cheeks Which contracts the Eye Lid and runs down to his throat.’ With the knowledge of hindsight, they are a piratical-looking crew.

      The Bounty lingered at Long Reach for nearly a week before receiving orders to proceed to Spithead, the naval anchorage outside Portsmouth Harbour. But ‘the winds and weather were so unfavorable’, in Bligh’s words, that the short journey down the Thames and around the coast took nearly three weeks to complete.

      ‘I have been very anxious to acquaint you of my arrival here, which I have now accomplished with some risk,’ Bligh wrote to Banks on 5 November from Spithead. ‘I anchored here last night, after being drove on the coast of France in a very heavy gale.’ His plan, as he now related, was to make as swiftly as possible for Cape Horn in order to squeak through a diminishing window of opportunity for rounding the tempestuous Cape so late in the season; as he observed to Banks, ‘if I get the least slant round the Cape I must make the most of it.’ Bligh was awaiting not only a break in the weather, but also his sailing orders, without which he could not sail. He did not, however, anticipate any difficulties, noting that ‘the Commissioner promises me every assistance, and I have no doubt but the trifles I have to do here will be soon accomplished.’

      The days passed and the weather broke, and still Bligh’s sailing orders did not arrive. As the delay lengthened, his wife, Betsy, broke off nursing their youngest daughter, who was stricken with smallpox, and came down from their home in Wapping to take lodgings in Portsmouth. With impotent exasperation, Bligh watched other ships weigh anchor and slip serenely down the Channel, in the fair, fine weather. Each day that passed, as he knew, reduced the odds of a good passage around the Horn.

      There had already been warning signs that the Bounty’s voyage, so beloved to Joseph Banks, did not stand quite so high in Admiralty eyes. Back in September, Bligh had received a distinguished visitor at the Deptford docks. Lord Selkirk, a Scottish earl, ostensibly came down to use his interest to find a position for his son’s tutor, William Lockhead, who was ‘an enthusiast in regard to Natural History’ and ‘most anxious to go round the World with Mr. Bligh’; Selkirk’s son, the Honourable Dunbar Douglas, was already set to join the Bounty as yet another gentleman ‘able seaman’. With his own son destined to sail with her, Selkirk took a closer look than most at the Bounty; alarmed at what he had seen, he wrote a frank and urgent report to Banks, drawing attention to ominous deficiencies.

      The rating of Bligh’s vessel as a cutter, and not a sloop of war, was ‘highly improper for so long a voyage’, Selkirk wrote on 14 September, pointing out that the ship’s establishment did not include ‘a Lieutenant, or any Marines’. Marines essentially served the role of the commander’s security force, and Cook had never sailed on his Pacific voyages with fewer than twelve.

      But perhaps most troubling to Lord Selkirk was the issue of Bligh’s own status: ‘I was sorry to find…Mr. Bligh himself is but very indifferently used, or rather I think realy ill used,’ Selkirk had written with some force. ‘It would have been scrimply Justice to him to have made him Master & Commander before sailing: nay considering that he was, I believe, the only person that was not in some way or other prefer’d at their return of all who went last out with Capt. Cook, it would be no unreasonable thing to make him Post Captain now.’ Cook, on his very first Pacific voyage, had also sailed as a lieutenant – but the prestige of that voyage had never been in question.

      Although Selkirk did not disclose the fact, he was an old friend of Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, and it is probable that he had been leaned upon to communicate family concerns to Banks. These concerns were openly expressed in the farewell letter Betham himself wrote to Bligh a week later, offering his good wishes for the long voyage ahead: ‘I own I have a different Idea of

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