LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

to a New Moon for a Change of Wind and Weather.’ The gale moderated in the early hours of the following morning, and although a cold rain fell, the men were able to check and service rigging as well as clean up and dry below. With fresh gales and mere squalls, the Bounty made headway, and over the next few days, under close-reefed sails, clawed her way to 60° 14’ south; this was to be the extreme limit of her southing. For ten days, Bligh pushed the Bounty and her men through squalls of sleet and hail, ‘dark wet nights’ and strong gales, through fog and high confused seas. At midnight on the thirteenth, the ship was hit by so severe a gale that the decks were ‘twice filled with the Sea.’ Now all pumps were worked every hour. Although the hatches were closed – and had been for close to three months – the belowdecks was awash and Bligh turned over his great cabin ‘to the Use of those poor fellows who had Wet Births.’ It is not noted if Bligh himself slept at all.

      Despite all exertions – the constant fires, dry clothes, dry berths and hot food at every meal – the weeks since passing Staten Island had begun to take their toll. Huggan had his shoulder thrown out when the ship lurched, and in the midst of a ‘Very Severe’ gale and ‘a high breaking sea’, Thomas Hall, the cook, fell and broke a rib. William Peckover, the gunner, and Charles Norman, carpenter’s mate, were laid up with rheumatic complaints. Every man out of commission increased the burden of the remaining small crew.

      ‘I have now every reason to find Men and Ship Complaining, which Will the soonest determine this point,’ Bligh confided to his log.

      That point soon came, and on 17 April, Bligh determined to abandon the Horn. Only shortly before his departure from England, almost as an afterthought, he had received (through the intercession of Joseph Banks) discretionary orders from the Admiralty to make for the Cape of Good Hope if the Horn proved impossible. This Bligh now determined to do. From there, he would approach the South Seas from the opposite side of the globe. The detour would add some ten thousand miles to the voyage, but there was nothing to be done. After twenty-five days of battle with the sea, the Bounty was, at 59° 05’ south, more or less where she had begun.

      At eleven in the morning of the seventeenth, Bligh summoned all hands aft and publicly thanked them for attending to their duties throughout the trials of the last month. He then announced that he had decided to bear away for southern Africa. The General Joy in the Ship was very great on this Account,’ Bligh noted. His announcement was received with three hearty cheers.

      It was, for Bligh, a bitter, difficult decision – so difficult that only days later when the weather took a moderate turn he was induced to make one last attempt, but this was quickly abandoned. Eight men were now on the sick list, mostly with ‘Rheumatick complaints’. This, as Bligh ruefully noted, was ‘much felt in the Watches, the Ropes being now Worked with much difficulty, from the Wet and Snow.’ The men aloft on whom fell the monstrous task of handling the sails were at times incapable of getting below in the face of the storm blasts, and when they did return they ‘sometimes for a While lost their Speech.’ Reconciling himself to defeat, Bligh ‘ordered the Helm to be put a Weather,’ and the Bounty headed for the Cape of Good Hope.

      She arrived in False Bay, the preferred anchorage across the spit from Cape Town, on 24 May, after an uneventful passage. The sick men had recovered during the intervening four weeks, and refurbishment of the ship began almost at once. The day after mooring, Bligh administered a second punishment: six lashes for John Williams, a seaman from Guernsey, for neglect of duty ‘in heaving the lead’. In this case there was no expression of regret from Bligh.

      The Bounty remained in False Bay for thirty-eight days, during which time she was overhauled from top to bottom, from her rigging to new ballast in her hold, as well as resupplied. Fresh meat, celery, leeks, onions, cabbages and – as a luxury – soft bread were brought on board for storage, while Bligh’s log daily notes ‘Fresh Meat & Greens’ served at dinner. This sojourn also allowed some pleasant diversions. In Colonel Robert Gordon, the half-Dutch, half-Scottish commander of the now considerable Dutch forces at this Dutch settlement, Bligh found an entertaining companion who shared a fondness for natural history and amateur exploration. Needless to say, Sir Joseph Banks had an associate out this way, botanizing at his behest. Francis Masson, once an under-gardener at Kew, had been at the Cape for a number of years, sending back specimens and seeds to Banks. From Masson’s collections would come plants familiar to generations of British gardeners – gladioli, geraniums and freesias.

      A few days after mooring, Bligh set out for Cape Town proper to pay his respects to the governor. The twenty-five-mile journey was made by carriage along a partly treated, mostly sandy road that led across a central tableland skirted by mountains. Bligh was greeted warmly by Governor van der Graaff, who most gratifyingly expressed his wonderment that ‘any ship would have ventured to persist in a passage’ around Cape Horn.

      Bligh’s record of his visit to Cape Town speaks only of his own impressions and it is not clear whether he made this short trip alone; but it is very possible that Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian accompanied him, for it was here at the Cape that Bligh advanced Christian money. Bligh’s attitude towards his personal finances was, and would be throughout most of his life, one of incessant anxiety and concern. Although securely a ‘gentleman’, William Bligh had from an early age been forced to make his own way in the world and, like many an officer on half pay, he had become accustomed to count and turn every penny. The road ahead offered no immediate source of improvement, and Bligh, as fastidious in his personal economy as in the running of his ship, was reconciled to a life of calculation, self-discipline and sacrifice; to the slow accumulation of security and comfort that would come only through a steady career. Unlike the Christians and Heywoods, whose anciently established sense of entitlement allowed them unblushingly to pile up debts amounting to thousands of pounds beyond any possibility of repayment, Bligh expected to balance his books. Worries about money had beset him as he departed Spithead, since, as he had noted to everyone, taking the commission had resulted in a calamitous drop in pay. Bligh’s loan to Christian, then, amounted to a significant act of friendship – one wonders whether Christian fully appreciated the compromise and anxiety this must have entailed. For his part, although freely given, this was not a gift that Bligh allowed himself or Christian to forget.

      Some three weeks after the Bounty came to anchor, the Dublin, an East Indiaman, arrived in False Bay carrying part of the Seventy-seventh Regiment, under Colonel Balfour, saluting Bounty with eleven guns, she was returned with nine. A few days later, Bligh, Colonel Gordon, botanist Masson and a Mr Van Carman were invited on board for dinner.

      ‘We had a very merry Day of it and a great deal of dancing with the Ladies in the Evening to fine Moon light,’ one officer who was present recorded in his diary; it is gratifying to imagine Lieutenant Bligh indulging in a little social levity. Colonel Gordon entertained the company with stories of his remarkable travels into the interior and, to the astonishment of his fellow diners, even managed a Gaelic song.

      In these agreeable circumstances, amidst the sympathetic company of fellow seamen from around the world who well knew the dangers of the southern ocean, Bligh reflected on what he had accomplished. ‘A Dutch Ship came in to day having buried 30 Men & many are sent to the Hospital,’ he wrote to Campbell, ‘altho they have only been out since the last of January.’ He, Bligh, had been out since the end of December. This is a credit I hope will be given to me,’ Bligh continued, confessional as always to Campbell. ‘Indeed had I not been very conversant in these matters I believe poor Fellows they would scarce ever have got here’; Bligh was referring to his own men, for whose lives he took full credit.

      ‘Upon the whole no People could live better,’ he exclaimed to Campbell, embarking on a description of his nutritious hot breakfasts and portable soups. ‘I assure you I have not acted the Purser with them,’ he let Campbell know, ‘for profits was trifling to me while I had so much at Stake.’

      It was not only in his private correspondence that Bligh enlarged upon this flattering theme of his own successful man-management. His official log offered a short dissertation on the subject: ‘Perhaps a Voyage of five Months which I have now performed without touching at any one place but at Tenarif, has never been accomplished with so few accidents, and such health among Seamen

Скачать книгу