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

the young couple, six of whom survived infancy. Fletcher was the fifth surviving child, born twelve years after his eldest brother, John. Although Fletcher was raised in a large family, with cousins and relatives nearby in every direction, his childhood was made precarious by the early death of his father, who passed away in 1768. A month before he died, Charles Christian had written his will declaring himself “weak of body,” which suggests a protracted illness.
     
    Ann Christian was now left to raise six children on her own. Fletcher was not yet four; his elder brothers, John, Edward and Charles, were sixteen, ten and six, respectively; his sister, Mary, was eight, while little Humphrey was just three months old. Money was, and evidently had long been, a problem. As early as the year of his first son’s birth, Charles Christian senior had borrowed from his eldest brother, and family records indicate a series of other large “loans” made in later years. Still, under Ann’s management, care was given to Fletcher’s education, and he was sent first to Brigham’s one-room parish school and then to the Cockermouth Free School, which he attended for seven years—and where a younger contemporary was William Wordsworth, the future Poet Laureate.
     
    Cockermouth and Moorland Close stood on the edge of the Lake District, “the wildest, most barren and frightful” landscape in England. Years later, Wordsworth would romanticize and memorialize the savage grandeur of fractured crags and sweeping valleys, scored with streams and dark tarns. Cockermouth, situated against the backdrop of Mt. Skiddaw on the Derwent and Cocker Rivers, was by all accounts a pleasant market town, its two main streets lined with stout stone houses roofed with thatch and blue slate.
     
    Little is known of Fletcher Christian’s Cumberland upbringing, but his schoolmate William Wordsworth never forgot the wild freedom this countryside gave his childhood:
     
     
    Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child,
In a small mill-race severed from his stream,
Made one long bathing of a summer’s day;
Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again
Alternate, all a summer’s day, or scoured
The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves
Of yellow ragwort; or when rock and hill,
The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,
Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone
Beneath the sky, as if I had been born
On Indian plains, and from my mother’s hut
Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport,
A naked savage, in the thunder shower.
     
     
     
    While Fletcher Christian rode back and forth between the orchards and gardens of Moorland Close to Cockermouth, his two oldest brothers, John and Edward, went off to Cambridge and to professions in law. It was Edward who, as a new fellow of his college, handled his mother’s affairs when her finances finally and fatally bottomed out. The crisis occurred in 1779, although to judge from the size of her debts it had been building for years. Somehow, together with her eldest son, John, she had managed to accumulate debts to the tune of £6,490 0s. 11d. The family, it appears, had been living for years with no regard for reality, and now Ann Christian was faced with the humiliating prospect of debtor’s prison. John Christian, her husband’s wealthy brother and head of the family, once again bailed them out, but seems to have made it clear that he could not be counted upon to do so again. In partial compensation, John Christian assumed ownership of Moorland Close and all effects attached to it.
     
    Through Edward’s special pleading and contributions from his own modest fellowship, he succeeded in scraping together an annuity of forty guineas per annum for his mother, with which, as he observed, she would “be able to live comfortably any where, so that if she is not secure from arrests at Moorland Close, I should have now no objections to the family’s removing to the Isle of Man.” In the