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© F.Coakley , 2003
[From Manx Quarterly, #26, 1921]
" Captain Bligh's Second Voyage to the South Seas.," by Ida Lee {Mrs Charles Bruce Marriott, F.R.G.S., Hon. F.R.A.H.S.).-Newly published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 39 Paternosterrow, London. Price, 10s 6d.
" The Mutiny of the Bounty." By Sir John Barrow, late Permanent Secre tary to the Admiralty. Published in 1831; republished in the " World's (Classics " series by the Oxford University Press in 1914, with an Introduction by Admiral Sir Cyprian.Bridge, G.C.B.
"Nessy Heywood." By Arthur W. Moore, M.A., C.V.O., Speaker of the House of Keys.-Published in 1913, by Brown and Son, Douglas. (Copies obtainable at the office of this paper.)
The mutiny of the Bounty is one of the great historical mutinies of the world, and the voyage of 3,618 nautical miles rods uncharted seas which Captain Bligh and his companions accomplished in days, in a wretchedly-provisioned open boat, is still described by one of the most eminent living seamen as " that most marvellous of all voyages of shipwrecked mariners." The story has been told over and over again recorded authoritatively the the Permanent Secretary to the Admiralty of the day, and re-hashed by anonymous hacks for the instruction of children in the Sunday-Schools. It captured the imagination of Byron, and part of it has been recounted in verse under the style of "The Island; or, Christian and his Comrades." The utterer of the phrase, " That, Captain Bligh, that is the thing; I am in hell ! in hell!" might very well have taken his place in the gallery of Byronic heroes;-but unluckily the story did not catch the poet in a mood of inspiration, and the result was only another addition to that dreadful slag-heap which Byron has bequeathed to posterity along with his precious metal.
The story is, of course, of peculiar interest to the people of the little island of Man. The central character in the drama was a member of perhaps the most celebrated of Manx families; and thanks particularly to the pen of Sir John Barrow, the English-reading public is never likely to lose the picture of the virtues and charms of Nessy Heywood. Any book, therefore, which further illuminates the character of Captain Bligh, which contains sidelights on the incidents of the mutiny, is worthy of attention of patriotic Manxmen and women.
A previous reviewer has remarked of Mrs Bruce-Marriott's look that it presents Captain Bligh in a more favourable light than that in which it has been customary to regard him. What is meant by that statement is that Bligh is here seen to be something more than a mere tyrant who.lost his ship, because he had goaded his men into desperation. Our authoress frankly admits that the verdict of history has gone against Bligh in the matter of the mutiny, and she makes no attempt to obtain a reversal of that verdict. She simply, in an impersonal and undramatic way, adduced proof that Bligh, whether or no he had littlenesses, was a big man. He was sailing master to the great Captain Cook; he was a magnificent navigator and explorer, and his work had signal results, both immediately and prospectively-the present authoress declares, " it is not too much to say that his countrymen are indebted to him for the first knowledge of Fiji and of the islands in the Torres Straits "; and however despotic he may have been in the humdrum days of ordinary sea service, in times of emergency he was a leader in a thousand. The man who was entrusted with the task of introducing the bread fruit, the product of Tahiti, or Otaheite, as it was then called, into the West Indies, and of enabling botanical researches of the first moment to be prosecuted-for that was the errand which was interrupted by the mutiny, and which was accomplished in this second voyage-cannot have been mediocre in mind or character.
It is fascinatingly interesting to visualise a criminal trial from the standpoint of some persons other than the wronger or the avenger. Such an experiment was undertaken with brilliant success when Browning wrote " The Ring and the Book." Such an experiment was also undertaken when Sir John Barrow quoted extensively from the letters of Nessy Heywood, and when Mr A. W. Moore enshrined those letters, with some other personallia concerning " the charming Nessy," in a small book intended for the particular benefit of the heroine's countrymen. The real title for that collection of letters is, " The Trial from the Standpoint of the Accused's Sister." And they illustrate, with rare emotional appeal, what must be a vital aspect of almost every criminal investigation that ever took place.
The Nesey Heywood of actual fact is not so arresting a figure as the Jeanie Deans of literature. Jeanie speaks with the terrible simplicity of Nature; Nessy is a highly accomplished gentlewoman, who writes consciously eloquent letters in the idiom of the excessively artificial eighteenth century, and who addresses her brother in verse as "Lyeidas." And Nessy had no opportunity of being heroic in deed as well as in sentiment. The immortal journey by foot from Edinburgh to London to plead far a sister'i pardon makes an immeasurably greets appeal to the imagination, than the journey narrated this:
" If there is the least apprehension entertained by the people of Liverpool for his life-go, for Heaven's sake, to Portsmouth, without waiting for me. I can go alone. Fear, and even despair will support me through the journey." " On Monday, while at breakfast, she was informed that a small fishing vesell would sail from Douglas for Liverpool it half-an-hour, and she promptly embarked."
" We did not arrive till after a "most tempestuous passage of forty-nine hours, with the wind directly contrary the whole way. . . At the mouth of the river we met a small open fishing-boat, into which I got, as I was told I should by that means arrive two hours sooner than I should otherwise have done; and, as the sea was very high, every wave washed over me, and I had a complete wetting."
Similarly, the immortal interview between the cottage girl and the Queen is but weakly paralleled in pathos by the " observations " which Nessy addressed to the Earl of Chatham, First Lord of Admiralty - the Great -Commoner's brother, and the hero of the farcical expedition to Walcheron - upon the evidence which had resulted in Peter Heywood being condemned to death. But in Elysium-if one may adopt the idiom of the period-in Elysium one may be sure that Jeanie Deans acknowledges Nessy Heywood as a sister.
To read the letters of Nessy to Peter, and the relevant correspondence, is to share the room with that genteel family in that genteel house on the Douglas Parade. One feels in one's own soul the thrill of indignation with which Nessy and her sisters received-and fortunately intercepted-the letter sent by Bligh to their newly widowed mother:
" I received your letter this day, and feel for you very much, being perfectly sensible of the extreme distress you must suffer from the conduct of your son Peter. His baseness is beyond all description."
In a letter sent to the lad's uncle at the same time, Bligh had observed that 'it will give me much pleasure to hear that this friends can bear the lass of him without much concern." " Bearing the loss of him" meant, in all probability, if the punitive expedition which was being sent out at that time brought home its prisoners, seeing him hanged by the neck!
The tears will not be far away as any reader of common sensibility reads such passages as those.
"I will not ask you, my beloved brother, whether you are innocent of the dreadful crime of mutiny; in the transactions of that day were as Mr. Bligh has represented them, such is my conviction of your worth and honour, that I will, without hesitation, stake my life on your innocence. If, on the contrary, you were concerned in such a conspiracy against your commander, I 'll be as firmly persuaded his conduct was the occasion for it. But, alas I could any occasion justify so atrocious an attempt to destroy a number of our fellow-creatures? No, my dearest brother, nothing but conviction from your own mouth can possibly persuade me that you would commit antion in the smallest degree inconsistent th honour and duty."
* * * * *
" Nessy, has written to our faithful and kind friend, Mr Heywood, of Plymouth, for his advice, whether it would proper for her to come up to you; if he consents to her doing so, not a moment shall be lost, and how happy shall I be when she is with you! Such a sister as she is! Oh! Peter, she in a most valuable girl."
" Mr Heywood has, in his last letter to me, rather disapproved of my intention to go to you; the reason he urged against was, that as you will now be taken every care of, and will receive the utmost tention from your friends, I could do no essential service, and that he feared I might, by seeing you in your present situation, agitate and perhaps injure both you and myself.
With respect to you, my lore, that on has great weight with me, because your mind ought for the present to be kept cool and composed; and I would not lessen that composure even by affording you all I could, a painful pleasure in seeing me; but, as for myself, no danger, no fatigue, no difficulties would deter me. I have youth, health, and excellent spirits-these, and the strength of my affection, would support me through it all.
" If I were not allowed to see you, yet being in the same place with you, would be to me joy inexpressible. However, that very, circumstance would be distressing to you, and would only be a source of mortification. I will not, therefore, any longer desire it, but will learn to imitate your fortitude and patience.
" Do you know, I envy you exceedingly? To have borne with such heroism your dreadful misfortunes-to become the idol of your relations and friends, and to be hold up as an example of worth and suffering virtue,-tell me, my love, is not such a triumph worth the purchase? Thus speaks my little bravery of spirit. Yet how does my fond affection for my dear brother shrink with horror at the bare recollection of his dangers! The sweet and pious resignation which has hitherto happily conducted you through them, is, I freely own, just what I expected from you; for such is my idea of your character, that I should have been disappointed had you acted less nobly."
' " John and Edwin desire Nessy will take up the pen for them, and tell their dearest brother Peter that they are over-joy'd at his escape from that terrible and far-distant Otaheite, and hope they may yet be able to assure him how much they have wished for his return; and they add that, if he will only take care of himself for their sakes, he may teach them by his example to be dutiful and good, that they will behave well, and be the best children in the world till he comes home to his two loving and affectionate little boys
" Robert John Heywood (aged 11).
" Edwin Holwell Heywood (aged 10)."
* * * *
"My dearest Mamma.-I have seen him, clasped him to my bosons, and my felicity is beyond expression! In person he is almost even now as I could wish; in mind you know him an angel. I can write no more, but to tell you that the three happiest beings at this moment on earth, are your most dutiful and affectionate children,
Nessy Heywood.
Peter Heywood.
James Heywood.
Love to and from all ten thousand times.'
And was Peter really innocent? Was he worthy of this noble wealth of affection ? He might not have been. Nessy, in one of her ecstasies of confidence, exclaims, " My beloved Peter never was known to breathe a syllable inconsistent with truth and honour"; but Nessy was a highly poetical young lady, and she had not in point of fact seen her brother since he was fifteen. Even before that time, he had been sent away to receive his education. Peter maintains his own side of the correspondence very finely, and asserts his innocence with a simple manliness which carries conviction, and even on what seems to be the eve of his execution, he composes a poem in which be faces eternity with all the fortitude of conscious honour. And yet-is it not natural, is it not almost a Christian duty, for a criminal to go down to the grave with a lie on his lips rather than break the hearts of those who love him and believe in him ?
" God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures
Boasts two soul-.sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her."
But really, the evidence for Peter's guiltlessness is all but overwhelming. Public opinion at the time was unanimously in sympathy with him; there is some ground for believing that the court convicted him did so because it felt that the strict letter of the King's regulations obliged it to do so, and certainly it most warmly recommended him to mercy, and its president, the famous Lord Hood, took steps immediately on Peter's pardon to find him another ship. The primary probabilities of the case are strongly against his having of has own free will made himself a partner with the mutineers. His letters show him to have been a youth of intellect and refinement; he wrote poetry, he drew, he had during his two years' stay in Otahekte :made a vocabulary of the language, and, as Captain Bligh remarks in a bitter comment :which will be allluded to later, he had while in Otaheite " regulated the garden and avenue of his residence with some taste." He was under seventeen when the mutiny occurred, and was on this first voyage, so that he was not likely to have come to feel the seasoned man's weariness of travel and hardship, or to have been bewitched by the attractions of Lotos land.
The evidence given against him at the trial was certainly very flimsy. The circumstance that he, without any compulsion, assisted in the hoisting-out of the boat in which the captain and his comrades were cast adrift, certainly looks suspicious, but Peter's explanation that it was a concession made by Christian to the captain that he should have this particular boat, rather than a smaller and much less seaworthy craft, and that therefore, in helping to hoist out the boat, he was really helping the captain, seems quite :plausible. It was a story that he gave quite consistently. At the court-martial, he expresses astonishment that an act which he had imagined to be blameless and laudable, is now being, considered as a fault; and in his first letter to his mother, he twice mentions his "assisting with the hoists" without the smallest consciousness of making an. damaging admission.
The strongest argument against Heywood, really, is the passionate belief in guilt which was entertained by Captain Bligh himself. Bligh alleges no specific act against Heywood, but every allusion he makes to him is couched in a tone of indignation which amounts to positive ferocity. Even the account of this second voyage to the South Seas and here comes one of the sidelights which make this book valuable to students of the mutiny - contains a remarkable example of this intensity. of feeling. One has already quoted what Mr A. W. Moore justly describes as Bligh's "brutal letter" to Heywood's mother. Nessy's uncle, writing before the trial, says: " I cannot conceal it from you that your brother appears by all accounts to be the greatest culprit of all, Christian alone excepted." To such lengths did Bligh's vindictivensm carry him that he told a friend in conversation, as an illustration of the depths of Heywood's ingratitude and deceit, that when he found himself brought up on deck in 'his shirt, with his hands bound behind him and an armed man standing over him, " his greatest hopes of assistance in suppressing the mutiny were from his dependence on Heywood's forming a party in his favour." Nessy's very proper comment on this statement is that Bligh's confidence in his other officers must base been very small when he depended on a boy, of seventeen to be his defender. But this statement does reveal the depth of Bligh's emotions on the subject of Peter Heywood.
And it was not that mutiny was a more heinous offence in an officer than in a common seaman, and that Heywood, beng the only surviving officer among those who remained in the ship, was bring made a scapegoat; for Bligh was thousands of miles away when it became known who were the survivors and who were not. The captured mutineers arrived in England on the 19th June, 1792, and we now learn that on May 12th of the same year Bligh, then revisiting Otaheite, was making the following entry in his diary : -
" Not far from this spot was the residence of Peter Heywood, the villain who assisted in taking the Bounty from me."
The authoress adds a shooked footnote that " the villain" was not sixteen years of age at the time of the mutiny. She is slightly incorrect; he was 16½;. But it is remarkable, reading right through this diary of the return visit, that although Bligh several times alludes to the mutineers collectively as " Christian and his villains," Heywood is the only person whom he brands by that epithet individually. When he records that " a fine child about twelve months old was brought to me to-day-the daughter of George Stewart, midshipman of the
Bounty," he does not say " that villain Stewart" ; he refers to Churchill and Thompson without any display of passion, though Churchill had actually invaded his cabin, and treated him with abuse and violence; and he very fairly records the statement of a native woman that certain of the Bounty's party even including one of the three who was ultimately hanged-"scarce ever spoke of me without crying." " Stewart and Heywood," he adds grimly in his summary of this conversation, " were perfectly satisfied with their situation." Bligh does not, indeed, appear from this diary to be deserving of the charges of deliberate unfairness and malice which had been levelled against him in connection with his official statements concerning the mutiny. In one of his first conversations with the natives on this second voyage, he records: -
" Coleman the armourer, they said, had not concurred in the mutiny; he had declared so to myself when I was drove away from the ship. They were glad to hear I had forgiven him."
According to the evidence given at the trial, Bligh knew that some of the men were being kept aboard the ship against their will, and he called to some of them, when he saw that the small boat was already over-crowded, " I'll do you justice, lads." To some extent, at least, he kept his word.
It is difficult, therefore, to believe that Bligh cherished this especial animus against Heywood altogether without reason. It is quite possible, as Heywood and his supporters have suggested, that Bligh conceived a prejudice against Heywood in consequence of things that were told him to the latter's disfavour during the terrible open-boat voyage. Some of theme things, as appeared at the trial, were palpably untrue, and same were of no real significance. But Bligh, judging from Heywood's own statement, may have seen him, apparently voluntarily, helping to hoist out the bows, and, apparently amicably, conversing with Churchill, who next to Christian was the prime mover in the affair.
And Bligh did not know one thing which readers of this article know namely, that Christian and Heywood were fellow-countrymen. After all, the Manx are clannish. Christian and Heywood were both officers; they had common associations not only with the Isle of Man, but with Cumberland-for Christian was of the Cumberland branch of the family, and Heywood spent several years of his childhood in Whitehaven; and Sir Cyprian Bridge :says that Christian and Heywood owed their appointments on the Bounty to acquaintance or connexion with Bligh's wife. Heywood obviously did not collaborate in the origin of the mutiny, but he may have cast in his lot with the mutineers when the deed had been accomplished. If he or his fellow officers had been really attached to the captain, it is difficult to believe that a successful resistance could not have been put up. It is conceivable that Christian was anxious that his young compatriot should attach himself to him, and that Heywood was willing to stay. Heywood tells of a conversation which he and Stewart had with Christian in the closing scenes of the day's tragedy. He does not describe the nature of that interview, except to say that Christian communicated to him certain circumstances connected with the disaster for the satisfaction of his (Christian's) relatives, " which circumstances," he adds, " after their deaths may or may not be made public." If Christian really did make this request of Heywood, then he did contemplate that sooner or later Heywood would return to England; but at all events, the ties of a common nationality must have had their influence in the mind of the unhappy Christian.
Incidentally, one would like to know whether or not the communications made by Heywood on behalf of Christian ever were made public. So far as one knows, they were not. Are there still relatives who possess them, and could make: their contents known? Perhaps the Christian of the next generation were ashamed of their celebrated kinsman. One is not quite sure that they need have been. No one, since the first great outburst of public wrath when Bligh and his companions returned from their heroic voyage, has failed to regard Christian with pity; and it is difficult to read the story, even Bligh's own story, of the mutiny without regarding him with respect. He had had abominable provocation, and, once the first momentous decision is accepted, the is seen to have behaved with restraint and dignity. He very soon learnt to rue ever have meddled with the governing of men. And it seems only perversity that induces Sir John Barrow to reject the statement of Adams, the last survivor of the mutiny and the patriarch of the Pitcairn Island community, that Christian " maintained under circumstances of great perplexity the respect and regard of those who were associated with him, up to the day of his death." The official mind naturally preferred to believe that this ring leader in what is termed, with monotonous reiteration, " an act of piracy and mutiny," met his death because of oppression and ill-treatment of the Otaheitans.
Another interesting detail of the life the eighteen mutineers who parted from Christian, remaining at Otaheite while the latter sought a remote island where he would be safe from re-capture, is recorded in Bligh's diary of this second voyage. During these men's stay, it seemed, the Otaheitans engaged in war with a neighbouring tribe, and by aid of the Bounty's men and muskets overcame them. It is an attractive speculation to picture the ex-Deemster's son, dressed in the " country manner' and tanned and tattooed from head to foot-for Peter Heywood says that he tattooed himself lavishly in order to gain the Otaheitans' friendship and esteem and that he was a universal favourite among them-marching to war with natives against natives, and afterwards, swallowing his disgust as best he could, witnessing the ceremony, of presenting the eyes of the sacrificed foeman to the god and to the King. The Otaheitans were tremendously proud of their association with the white men — they were at great pains to excuse to Bligh their cordiality towards the mutineers — and this diary shows that they even adorned an item in their sacred regalia with the hair of the Bounty's barber.
There is one other reference in this book which may attract the Manx reader. A reference is made to a chart drawn by Peter Fannin, who was sailing master in Captain Cook's voyages, and who, it may be remembered, was a native of Douglas, and has left a most interesting map of the town as it was at the close of the eighteenth century. One wonders, too, whether Lieutenant George Tobin, who sailed with Bligh in this second voyage, and of whom Bligh speaks with much appreciation, was a member of the well-known Liverpool-Manx family of that name.
One is conscious of having let one's pen run riot over this fascinating story. One's only excuse must be that it really is a fascinating story. The whole romance, commencing with the unheralded entry into Captain Bligh's cabin and finishing with the return of the transplanted hybrids to the rock whence they were hewn, is, as Sir Cyprian Bridge describes it, "one of brutal, tyranny and oppression; of violent passions; of murderous revenge; of masterful ascendancy; of heroic endurance; of unions begun in lust and ended in plain affection; of a community originating in crime and nursed in lawlessness giving to the world the one and only real example of a Golden Age."
P. W. C
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Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received
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