The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander

sailed on Cook’s last voyage were old acquaintances of Bligh’s—they had all been paid off together in 1780, seven years before. A more substantial number of the crew, however, had sailed with Bligh more recently, and were joining the Bounty from the West Indian ships Bligh had commanded for Duncan Campbell. These men knew Bligh as a commanding officer: Lawrence Lebogue, age forty, the sailmaker from Nova Scotia; John Norton, a quartermaster, age thirty-four, from Liverpool; Thomas Ellison, able seaman, age fifteen, from Deptford, where the Bounty now lay; and Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate, aged twenty-three, cited on the muster as being from Whitehaven, in Cumberland.
     
    According to Bligh, Fletcher Christian was “Dark & very swarthy,” with “Blackish or very dark brown” hair. Standing about five foot nine, he was strongly built, although his “knees stands a little out and may be called a little bow legged.” Others would later describe his “bright, pleasing countenance, and tall, commanding figure.” While born in Cumberland, in the north of England, Christian had more recently been based on the Isle of Man, where his family had old, strong connections, and where Bligh had been living after his marriage.
     
    Fletcher, it was said by his family, had “staid at school longer than young men generally do who enter into the navy.” His first sea experience had been as a midshipman on the Eurydice in 1783, when he was eighteen and a half years of age—remarkably late in the day for a young man with his sights set on a naval career. After six months spent at anchorage in Spithead, the Eurydice had sailed for India, and for the next twenty-one months, Christian had been exposed to some of the most exotic parts of the world: Madeira, Cape Town, Madras and the Malabar Coast. Christian’s biographer would conjure the steaming coastal settlements the new midshipman encountered on this first voyage: most notably, the British Fort Saint George at Madras, defiantly set to survey the sea and surrounded by the residences of the English traders and officials, the busy traffic of lumbering oxen and sweating palanquin bearers, the rowdy trade of fine cotton, spices and green doves. The Eurydice was a ship of war, with a complement of 140 men, including a unit of marines, and Christian had also experienced for the first time British naval life in all its coarseness—bad food, complete lack of privacy, irregular sleep and rough discipline. Yet he must have prospered, or at least shown promise, for the ship muster indicates that some seven months out from England, he had been promoted from midshipman to master’s mate.
     
    Christian had returned from India in high spirits, telling a relative that “it was very easy to make one’s self beloved and respected on board a ship; one had only to be always ready to obey one’s superior officers, and to be kind to the common men.” This promising start was somewhat derailed by the inconvenient peace, which had put so many ships out of commission and, like Bligh, Christian had turned his sights from naval service to the merchant trade. The decision to approach Bligh, then working for Duncan Campbell, had been prompted, as a relative advised, because “it would be very desirable for him to serve under so experienced a navigator as Captain Bligh, who had been Sailing-master to Captain Cook.”
     
    To Christian’s request for a position, however, Bligh had returned the polite response that he already had all the officers he could carry. This was undoubtedly true, but the fact that Bligh did not stretch himself to accommodate the eager young man, as he was to do for so many young gentlemen on the Bounty, suggests that he was not in any way beholden to the Christian family; Fletcher had approached Bligh, it would appear, without benefit of interest.
     
    Upon receiving this rebuff, Christian was undeterred; indeed, he rose to the occasion, volunteering to work before