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

the mast until a vacancy arose among the officers.
     
    “Wages were no object, he only wished to learn his profession,” he had told Bligh, adding, “we Mid-shipmen are gentlemen, we never pull at a rope; I should even be glad to go one voyage in that situation, for there may be occasions, when officers may be called upon to do the duties of a common man.”
     
    To this honorable request Bligh had responded favorably. Christian was taken on board the Britannia as a seaman, and on his return from the West Indies, according to his brother, “spoke of Captain Bligh with great respect.” He had worked hard alongside the common sailors, but “the Captain had been kind to him,” instructing him in the art of navigation. At the same time Christian had observed “that Captain Bligh was very passionate; yet he seemed to pride himself in knowing how to humour him.” On their second voyage Christian was entered as nominal “gunner” but, as Bligh made clear, was to be treated as an officer. Christian, it would seem, had become Bligh’s protégé. Bligh had taken pains not only to instruct the ambitious young man, but to elevate him, regularly inviting him to join him and his officers at his table for dinner. Christian for his part must have passed muster with his captain, for Bligh was not one to suffer fools, and it was Bligh who recommended Christian to the Admiralty as midshipman on the Bounty. “[A]s it was understood that great interest had been made to get Midshipmen sent out in this ship,” Fletcher’s brother would write, “Christian’s friends thought this recommendation . . . a very great obligation.” On the return from the South Seas, Fletcher could expect to be promoted to lieutenant.
     
     
     
    This promising naval career had not been in the Christian family’s original plans for its second-youngest son; and as the family itself was to play a significant part in the shaping of the events ahead, it is well to introduce its members here. Fletcher Christian was born on September 25, 1764, in his parents’ home in Cumberland, and had been baptized that same day, in Brigham Church, some two miles distant. Baptism on the day of birth was unusual, and implies that the newborn child was not expected to live. His parents, Charles and Ann, had already lost two infants.
     
    Charles Christian came from an old Manx family that had been settled on the English mainland since the seventeenth century. At the age of twenty-two he had married Ann Dixon, the daughter of a dyer and a member of the local gentry well connected with other important north-country families. Ann’s mother was a Fletcher, another old and established Cumberland family. It was for his grandmother’s family that Fletcher Christian was named.
     
    Charles had grown up in the Christians’ ancestral home, Ewanrigg, a forty-two-bedroomed mansion with crenellated battlements overlooking the sea. Reputedly, the property had been won by the Christians from the Bishop of Sodor and Man in a card game. Charles’s mother, Bridget Senhouse, could trace her ancestry back fourteen generations to King Edward I. Such distinctions bore little practical weight, however, and as a younger son (and one of eleven children), Charles inherited only his name and some shares in various family interests. Like all but the eldest son, he was expected to make his own way, which he did as an attorney-at-law, and later as coroner for Cumberland. The main boost to his fortune was his marriage—Ann brought with her a small but respectable property called Moorland Close, just outside Cockermouth, described locally as “a quadrangular pile of buildings, in the style of the mediæval manor house, half castle and half farmstead.” The surrounding wall, originally built to rebuff Scottish border raiders, during Fletcher’s boyhood benignly enclosed an orchard and gardens, while the former guard stand had been converted into a little summer house.
     
    Ten children were born to