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Aitutaki - Fiji Islands
George Hamilton - Peggy
Piripiri - John Sival
Richard Skinner - Vreedemberg
AITUTAKI
Aitutaki is the most north-western of the southern Cook Islands and lies at 18 degrees 52 minute South, 159 degrees 45 minutes West, 140 miles due north of Rarotonga and 680 miles west of Tahiti. It was discovered by Bligh on April 11, 1789, seventeen days before the mutiny.
In his voyage to bring the Bounty mutineers to justice Captain Edwards sailed to Aitutaki in the Pandora , arriving at the island on May 19, 1791.
ATAFU (Duke of York) ISLAND
The smallest of the three large atolls in the Tokelau (Union) group, situated at 8 degrees 31 minutes South, 172 degrees 31 minutes West; discovered in 1765 by the British explorer John Bryon.
In order to put pursuers on the wrong trace, Christian ‘confided” to able seaman Henry Hillbrant, a mutineer who stayed on Tahiti, that he planned to settle on Atafu. The ruse worked: it sent Captain Edwards in HMS Pandora on a wild goose chase thousands of miles in the wrong direction.
BENTHAM, George
Pursuer on the Pandora; a good choice, because he had visited Tahiti before on one of Cook's voyages.
BROWN, John, alias BOUND, John
A bloodthirsty scallawag who was marooned on Tahiti by Captain Cox of the Mercuty (Gustaf III) when she left the island on September 2, 1789. On the ship he had cut up another crew member’s face with a razor. . . .
When Captain Edwards arrived in the Pandora on March 23, 1791, he took an immediate liking to Brown – who must have been something of a “soul-mate” – and engaged him in betraying his former comrades-in-arms. Brown turned to the job with relish and, with the help of bribed natives, soon had everyone rounded up. Edwards then took the kindred spirit with him when he sailed on May 8.
Presumably Brown survived the wreck of the Pandora , but his subsequent fate is unknown to the writer of this sketch.
CORNER, Robert
Second Lieutenant on the Pandora . He was a courageous, humane, and efficient officer who is often praised in surgeon Hamilton’s account of the voyage. He died in 1820.
Corner was in charge of all landings on the islands where the mutineers, or traces of them, were sought. Being third in command, there was not much Lieutenant Corner could do for the prisoners, but he did what he could. Morrison writes:
. . . when the roughness of the weather gave the ship any motion, we were not able to keep ourselves fast, to remedy which we were threatened to be stapled down by the Captain, but Mr. Corner [sic] gave us some short boards to check ourselves with, which he made the carpenters secure, and thereby prevented us from maiming each other and ourselves.
DODDS, James
Quartermaster on the Pandora, sailed with master's mate Oliver from Upolu in the Samoas to Rembang on Java in the schooner Resolution.
DOLPHIN BANK
A reef off Point Venus on the northern coast of Tahiti, named after the ship Dolphin which carried the discoverer of Tahiti, Samuel Wallis, around the world.
Christian came close to running the Bounty aground on Dolphin Bank when he left Tubuai on June 16, 1789. He lost an anchor in the process (which was later retrieved by the Pandora ). It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened if the Bounty had foundered or been disabled. Less than two months later the brig Mercury arrived in Tahiti and if Christian had still be there, his whereabouts would soon have become known. Moreover, the delay involved in repairing the Bounty or in building a new ship could have enabled Captain Edwards to capture him.
DUCIE ISLAND
Atoll 290 miles east of Pitcairn (24 degrees 40 minutes South, 124 degrees 47 minutes West); uninhabited; discovered on March 16, 1791 by Captain Edward Edwards in the Pandora while searching for the mutineers. It was named after Baron Francis Ducie, a captain in the Royal Navy.
Christian and his fellow fugitives never knew how close they came to being discovered and returned to England for trial. If Edwards had continued his voyage on the same parallel he would have sighted Pitcairn and, since he made a point of investigating each island he passed, he would most probably have captured them. As it was, he turned northward and missed the island.
EDWARDS, Edward
Captain of HMS Pandora . Edwards was one of the most ruthless commanders in the British Navy. Compared to him, Blich was a prissy Sunday school teacher. As a direct result of his inhumanity, Edwards had been the object of a mutiny aboard HMS Narcissus in 1782 and he never forgot the experience, in fact he used it as an excuse for his continued inhumanity. His very harshness probably accounted for why he was appointed (August 10, 1790) to search for the mutineers of the Bounty.
Edwards sailed from Jack-in-the-Basket, Portsmouth, on November 7, 1790. On March 16, 1791, on his way to Tahiti, he discovered Ducie Island. . . .
The Pandora anchored in Matavai Bay on March 23 and Edwards went about capturing both the mutineers and the loyalists who had remained on Tahiti when Christian left with the Bounty one and a half years earlier. Not only did he put them all in irons, but he had his men build an 18 by 11 foot “cell” on deck which had minimal ventilation and in which the fourteen men of the Bounty ’s crew were to remain chained in the tropical head for four months while Edwards kept searching for the rest of the mutineers.
The Pandora sailed from Tahiti on May 8 in company of the Resolution , the small schooner which the loyalists had built and which Edwards had manned with nine men from his ship. He arrived at Palmerston Island on May 21, 1791, where he found some spars marked “Bounty” (they had drifted there from Tubuai). At Palmerston a sudden storm blew up and Edwards lost five of his men, including a midshipman, in the jolly-boat. They were never seen again.
On June 22, the Resolution became separated from the Pandora . Edwards looked for it for two days and then sailed on to Nomuka for another fruitless search for the mutineers.
Not only did Edwards miss out on capturing Christian and his fellow mutineers (if it had succeeded, Pitcairn would probably have remained uninhabited to this day), but he missed an opportunity to become one of the heroes of maritime history. On August 13, 1791, the Pandora was sailing close to the island of Vanikoro in the Solomons and sighted smoke signals, but Edwards was interested only in mutineers and knew the signals would not have come from them, so he sailed on. We know today with virtual certainty that those were distress signals from the La Perouse expedition which had not been heard from since it left Botany Bay in February 1788. The mystery of the mission expedition was not solved until thirty-six years later.
Edwards was not a skilled navigator, and the Pandora was wrecked on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef on August 18 with the loss of thirty-one of her own crew and four from the Bounty . His cruelty is illustrated by the fact that, as the ship was sinking and the prisoners had managed to break their chains, he ordered them to be put back in irons. In the last moment one of his crew defied his orders and helped free the prisoners, but he did not have time to remove the irons from all.
In four boats Edwards and the rest of his crew with the remaining prisoners set out for Timor, much as Bligh had done two years earlier. On the way from there to Batavia they found the Resolution at Samarang. The survivors of the Pandora arrived at Spithead on June 19, 1792.
No competent commander loses thirty-five men when he has eleven hours to prepare for abandoning ship inside a reef. The author of this sketch sees no other reason for Edwards getting away with this miserable performance during his obligatory court-martial than that the judges, too, were callous when it came to the question of saving human lives.
Having achieved the rank of Rear Admiral, Edwards died at the age of seventy-three in 1815. It is a pity that newspapers of the time did not conduct interviews, because before his death he may well have heard of the rediscovery of Pitcairn and the story of Christian and the other missing mutineers. If so, we will never know how he felt about finding out how close he had come to capturing them.
FIJI ISLANDS
The Fijis constitute the easternmost island group in Melanesia ranging from 15 degrees 40 minutes to 21 degrees 00 minutes South, and from 178 degrees 00 minutes West to 176 degrees 45 minutes East. The group comprises well over 300 islands, many of which are uninhabited. . . .
Master’s mate Oliver of the Pandora and his crew in the schooner Resolution were the first Europeans to anchor at and land on a Fijian island (Matuku) and have close contact with the natives (in 1791). . . .
HMS GORGON
Captain Edwards, Lieutenant Larkin, and the ten accused mutineers who had survived the wreck of the Pandora sailed on this 44-gun frigate from Cape Town on April 6, 1792, and arrived at Spithead on June 19. The commander was Captain John Parker.
HAMILTON, George
Surgeon on the Pandora . The best description of Hamilton is by Sir Basil Thomson who reprinted Hamilton’s A Voyage Round the World in H. M. Frigate Pandora (1793):
Fortunately for us, the Pandora carried a certain rollicking, irresponsible person as surgeon. George Hamilton has been called “a coarse, vulgar, and illiterate man, more disposed to relate licentious scenes and adventures, in which he and his companions were engaged, then to give any information of proceedings and occurrences connected with the main object of the voyage.” From this puritanical criticism most readers will dissent. Hamilton was bred in Northumberland, and was at this time past forty.
[He was] a man of middle-age, with clever, well-cut features, and a large, humorous, and rather sensual mouth. His book, with all its faults of scandalous plain speech, is one that few naval surgeons of that day could have written. The style, though flippant, is remarkable for a cynical but always good-natured humour, and on the rare occasions when he thought it professionally incumbent on him to be serious, as is his discussion of the best dietary for long voyages, and the physical effects of privations, his remarks display observation and good sense. It must be admitted, I fear, that he relates certain of his own and his shipmates’ adventures ashore with shameless gusto, but he wrote in an age that loved plain speech, and that did not care to veil its appetite for licence. Like Edwards, he tells us little of the prisoners after they were consigned to “Pandora’s Box.” His narrative is valuable as a commentary on Edwards’ somewhat meagre report, and for the sidelight which it throws upon the manners of naval officers of those days.
In his account, Hamilton tries to whitewash the cruel treatment of the prisoners, probably because the truth would reflect negatively on himself who did not, or could not, do more to intervene in their behalf. He does not comment on the harshness of Edwards and he avoids any mention of the sadistic Larkin.
KAO
Kao is a vast, conically shaped rock only two miles north-east of Tofua. It is the most north-western of the Tonga islands.
Kao was one of the islands on which Lieutenant Robert Corner of the Pandora landed in order to investigate possible clues as to the whereabouts of the Bounty mutineers.
LARKIN (Larkan), John
First lieutenant on the Pandora . Not much is known about Larkin, because the surgeon on board, George Hamilton, who wrote an account of the voyage, avoids mentioning him. The little we know about Larkin comes primarily from Morrison’s narrative.
He seems to have been a true sadist who enjoyed torturing the Bounty men who were imprisoned in “Pandora’s Box.” Morrison gives us an example of how Larkin treated the prisoners:
. . . Mr. Larkan the First Lieut. in trying the Handcuffs took the method of setting his foot against our breasts and hauling the Handcuffs over our heads with all his Might, some of which took the Skin off with them, and all that could be hauld off by this Means were reduced, and fitted so close, that there was no possibility of turning the Hand in them, and when our wrists began to swell he told us that “they were not intended to fit like gloves.”
Larkin appears in Nordhoff’s and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty as Lieutenant Parkin.
MARUTEA (Lord Hood's Island)
A large atoll almost 100 miles north-northwest of Mangareva at 21 degrees 30 minutes South, 135 degrees 30 minutes West. It consists of a cluster of inlets on which brushwood and some coconut palms grow. There is no entrance into the lagoon. Marutea is inhabited and is periodically visited by Mangarevans for pearl fishing.
Marueta was discovered by Captain Edwards in HMS Pandora on March 17, 1791; he named it Lord Hood’s Island.
MATUKU
Matuku is an island in the Lau group in the Fijis, situated about 290 nautical miles almost due west of Tofua at 19 degrees 09 minutes South, 179 degrees 44 minutes East. It is four and a half miles long, north to south, and three and a half miles wide. Its summit, Ngilligilli, rises to 1,262 feet.
Having been separated from her mother ship the Pandora , the Resolution , William Oliver commanding, sighted Matuku in July 1791. The men of the Resolution spent five weeks at this beautiful island, recuperating after been savagely attacked by the natives of Tofua, recuperating and getting ready for the long voyage ahead to Endeavour Straites (Torres Straits).