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Captain Bligh Part 1: The Devil knows how to row

18th June, 2024

“I have been run down by my own Dogs.” – William Bligh.

A portrait miniature in the National Library of Australia depicts a man in full naval regalia, complete with his captain’s gold medal from the Battle of Camperdown displayed proudly.¹ Originally exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1814 the portrait is a remarkable one, a striking image of a curiously bloodless man in naval uniform, high porcelain forehead, thin lips, sad eyes. Painted by a retired soldier making his way as an artist, it is – of course – Rear Admiral William Bligh, aged about 60, newly a widower. This was Bligh as he would have wanted to be remembered: as a veteran of Cook’s third voyage, a Pacific explorer, the friend of Sir Joseph Banks and Lord Nelson, the fourth Governor of New South Wales. As his tombstone would have it three years later, the man who had “transported the bread fruit tree from Otaheite to the West Indies” and “bravely fought the battles of his country.”

In mid-1776, William Bligh (1754—1817) was chosen to be sailing master of HMS Resolution for Captain Cook’s third major voyage to the Pacific. For Bligh, only 21 years old and not blessed with either a particularly well-placed patron or the easiest of tempers, this was an incredible opportunity, one that was all but dashed when Cook was killed in Hawaii three years later. Back in England, Bligh was one of the few to be passed over for promotion and although he was awarded a substantial payment for his work in preparing the voyage maps for publication in the official account (1784), in a particularly stinging omission his name was left off the title-page, replaced with that of the Master’s Mate Henry Roberts (his immediate junior, that is).² Little wonder, as a classic essay by Rupert T. Gould long ago recorded, that the marginalia in Bligh’s own copy of the book were vitriolic; as Gould wryly notes, “Bligh begins his quarrel with the book on its title page.”³ James King, the main author and surviving commander, even suspected Bligh of threatening to print his own version of events, dangerous territory for any naval officer (especially as Sir Joseph Banks, the eminence grise, considered the writing of these unofficial and often bestselling books as reprehensible).⁴

Overlooked and at something of a loose end, Bligh spent much of the 1780s in the West Indies trade, when he was approached by Banks to command a voyage to transplant the Breadfruit Tree from Tahiti to the West Indies. This had been one of Banks’s daydreams for more than a decade, ever since he was approached by some of his friends among the West Indies planters who imagined it would be just the thing to supercharge their profits by providing cheaper food to the great slave estates. Bligh certainly took the command with his eyes open. Indeed, later historians can do scarcely do better than to list his reservations regarding the Admiralty’s fit-out of the Bounty: he didn’t sail with enough officers, his surgeon was a tippler with little or no interest in keeping a bright and hygienic ship, he did feel the lack of a body of Marines on board, and worried that they had underestimated the complexity of transplanting hundreds of healthy plants on long voyages. Worst of all, they kept him twiddling his thumbs for so long in port that he caught a bad season to sail, especially as they were insisting he round Cape Horn. Bligh’s bloody-minded attempt to fulfil this last command was the source of much dissension on board, weeks bashing into a gale and making no head-way, before he finally took advantage of a loophole in his instructions and turned and sailed before the Roaring Forties.

In Tahiti, Bligh must have felt that his luck had turned, not least because of his fruitful relationship with the chief, Cook’s old friend Otoo/Tinah (later Pōmare I). With a ship laden with flourishing trees and a crew fit and refreshed, Bligh was clearly feeling supremely confident. Less than three weeks later he was being violently bundled into his own long boat by his great protégé, Fletcher Christian. The scene had its most famous illustration in a large format aquatint issued by Robert Dodd in October 1790, showing ‘The Mutineers turning Lieutenant Bligh and part of the Officers and Crew adrift from His Majesty’s Ship the Bounty.’ Much like other famous Pacific scenes such as the various depictions of the death of Captain Cook in Hawaii, Dodd’s image seems in part based on eyewitness accounts. Bligh stands in the long-boat proud but frantic in his shirtsleeves (in some copies a very pure white, sometimes blue pin-striped). His antagonist, Christian, having just taken the ship and – by most accounts – visibly shaken, stands tall on the stern flanked by two of the breadfruit trees they had been sent to the Pacific to acquire. Indistinctly, in the background, some on board the Bounty seem to dance.

The most striking aspect of the image is the sense of almost total confusion, some smirking or jeering or looking resigned, some swords being handed through the windows while a man in the boat bends low to scoop water in his hat. Most of all, one wonders if Bligh was pleased by the visual confirmation about how crowded the boat appears, even if all the witnesses agreed it was sitting still lower in the water by the time they pushed off. There was jockeying on ship and boat alike, some weeping at being forced to be set adrift and still hoping to regain the relative safety of the ship, others distraught at being forcibly kept on board. It was from the boat that Bligh sang out that he would do justice to those who remained, meant as a comfort to those being detained against their will but, for one of Bligh’s verbal acrobatics, with a hint of menace as well. When the only trial of the mutineers was held three years later in London, the memory of how one had acted during this fraught moment was decisive.