Harrison Christian - Men Without Country: The true story of exploration and rebellion in the South Seas

For my family

Fletcher Christian led a mutiny on the British naval ship Bounty in April 1789; that much we know for sure. We have no want for facts about the mutiny itself, because a court martial pored over every physical detail. We know roughly what orders, insults and meaningful looks passed between the sailors, where they stood on the decks of the ship, and who among them carried muskets or cutlasses. A jury of captains in wigs and blue coats listened to the evidence and condemned three men to death by hanging. That was supposed to be the end of an interesting and obscure episode in naval history.

But the public interest in the story was only beginning. There was a sense the true drama of the Bounty voyage had been suppressed. The court martial revealed little in the way of cause or circumstance; it was only interested in sorting the mutineers from the innocents. William Blighs baffled account of the mutiny did not ring true, and Christian remained an enigma, because he was never caught. Adding to that, the setting of his escape was ripe for myth and mystery. To Europeans, the Pacific was still alive with the shapes and forms of some atavistic dream, a place of incredible torments and delights where tethers to the Old World wore thin. Bligh crossed the threshold of that legendary world and returned with a strange tale. Fletcher Christian remained behind in it forever. Or did he?

Elusive as he was, Christians descendants are scattered around the globe. He left three children on Pitcairn Island, including Charles Christian, my fifth great-grandfather. A Tahitian baby girl who arrived at Pitcairn Island with the mutineers on the Bounty, eleven months old at the time, grew up to be a woman known as Sully, my fifth great-grandmother. Among the migrants from Pitcairn Island to Norfolk Island in 1856 was my fourth great-grandfather Isaac Christian. My grandfather John Garton Christian was born on Norfolk Island and migrated to New Zealand as a young boy in the shadow of World War II. My father Brett Stephen Christian was born and raised in Auckland.

When I was growing up, my father told me I was a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian. I heard how Christian overthrew Bligh in the worlds most famous mutiny. How he cast the lieutenant adrift, sailed the Bounty off the map and stranded himself on an island in the Pacific. I saw Christian and Bligh portrayed by actors like Marlon Brando and Anthony Hopkins. It was thrilling to think I was descended from such a man, and still is. But as I grew older, I realised the movies were works of fiction. The real story was unfinished, full of unanswered questions.

Men Without Country is my personal quest to know the Bounty characters and the world they lived in. My relation to Fletcher has no doubt coloured the contents of these pages, but I hope it hasnt disqualified me from writing a balanced account. My trade is journalism, and I have applied a journalistic method to the story. All quotes are taken from journals, letters, court proceedings, and other documents from the time. For smoother reading and easier comprehension, I have replaced archaic place names with their modern ones, and corrected misspellings and capitalisations, except where I think those spelling errors reveal something about a character.

Harrison Christian

Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows, a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

On the evening of 15 January 1790, a gang of fugitives on the Royal Navy ship Bounty, searching the Pacific for a hideout from the law, raised an island that was remarkably well suited to their purposes. It was a high volcanic rock, thousands of miles from any continent, in a part of the world that was still poorly mapped and understood. The islands shoreline had all the qualities of a natural fortress, rising in sheer cliffs out of a lather of heavy surf, and allowing no anchorage for passing ships. No white man had ever set foot on it, but petroglyphs and stone figures recalled an outpost of Polynesians who had since perished or moved on. Despite its puny size (it was not much larger than New Yorks Central Park, with an area of just two square miles), the island was blessed with all the necessities of life. A freshwater stream ran down from the mountains, and fertile soils supported wild crops of bananas, breadfruit and yams.

According to British common law, the sailors on the Bounty were pirates, robbers and mutineers deserving of hanging. Their leader, 25-year-old Fletcher Christian, had rebelled against the ships commander, Lieutenant William Bligh, and cast him adrift in a small boat with a huddle of loyalists in the Tongan islands. In the eight and a half months since, Christian and his supporters had ranged across the Pacific intending to start a secret colony, beyond the reach of Royal Navy ships that would inevitably come to hunt them. They had skirted disaster, narrowly avoiding other European ships and running into conflict with Polynesian tribes. Their attempt to settle another island, Tubuai in present-day French Polynesia, was a bloody failure. They were probably the first Europeans to lay eyes on Rarotonga, where the local populace remembered their ship for generations thereafter as a floating island that came bearing iron and oranges.

HMS Bounty was a leaky shell of the small but well-turned-out navy vessel that had sailed from Spithead years earlier. Her crew had jettisoned spars, sails and anchors while her timbers warped and shrunk in the tropical sun. Seawater would have rained through her decks onto the weary heads of her crew as they worked the bilge pumps. Before they raised their island, the Bounty mutineers had not seen land for two months. Morale was fading as Christian carried his followers east against the trade winds, poring over the books in Blighs library and working to solve an old riddle before patience ran out.

Pitcairn Islands true location was unknown to the world. The British commander Philip Carteret had charted it decades earlier, but his recorded longitude was off by about three degrees, putting the island two hundred miles west of its actual position. Carteret did not have access to the latest gadgetry and he resorted to dead reckoning, a guesswork based on his vessels speed, drift and compass heading. In the eighteenth century, islands could still outwit their discoverers and spend years dancing across the map, expanding into continents, shrinking into rocks and fogbanks, or simply vanishing altogether. Pitcairn was such an island. Even the great Captain James Cook had failed to find it again.

Christian had read Carterets description of the island in Blighs library and pinned his faith on it. When he reached the erroneous coordinates and found nothing but open sea, he correctly guessed that the longitude was a mistake, while the latitude, a much easier calculation, was probably correct. The Bounty zigzagged east, along the line of latitude, until Pitcairns towering form appeared out of the heat haze in mid-January. The seas around the island were so violent that Christian had to wait three days before he could go ashore with a scouting party. A couple of days later he returned with a joyful expression such as we had not seen on him for a long time past. Pitcairn fulfilled all his requirements and crucially, it seemed devoid of inhabitants. He decided to settle the island, though not all the members of his company shared his resolve. While Christian was ashore, John Mills, the forty-year-old gunners mate, tried and failed to persuade the others to leave their leader behind and run for Tahiti.