Mel Gibson as Fletcher Christian and Anthony Hopkins as William Bligh in 1984 film The Bounty[Orion]Captain William Bligh died a vice-admiral in London, while his mutinous lieutenant Fletcher Christian apparently met a violent death on the tiny island of Pitcairn just three years after arriving there. But their direct descendants have wrangled ever since about who did what to whom on HMS Bounty on April 28, 1789. There has even been the occasional threat of violence.
As naval historian Charles Miller once put it: “The Blighs versus the Christians is like two football teams, like Rangers and Celtic. It’s gone on for 200 years and it’s still going on.”
Now, however, the feud is being laid to rest. Maurice Bligh, the captain’s 70-year-old great-greatgreat-grandson, will travel from his home in Kent to Tahiti where Jacqui Christian, 44, great-greatgreat-granddaughter of Fletcher, will present him with a Bible taken from Bligh’s cabin on the night of the mutiny. He will promptly return it in a gesture of goodwill.
The saga began when the Bounty was sent from England to carry breadfruit saplings from Tahiti to the West Indies. Once the crop was introduced there it would feed the slave population and enable cotton plantations to expand.
The officers and crew spent a few relaxed months in Tahiti waiting for the saplings to grow. But conditions aboard were cramped once they took on the cargo and three weeks into the voyage half the crew mutinied. Some returned to Tahiti but Christian and eight men sailed on in search of an island that would be secure from the outside world. They took with them six Polynesian men, 12 women and a girl.
With an area no more than two square miles, Pitcairn is halfway between New Zealand and Peru. It was named after the English midshipman who first sighted it in 1767 but his ship did not put ashore because the landing was too difficult. It was uninhabited but fortunately for the mutineers long-gone settlers had planted coconut palms and breadfruit.
The newcomers arrived in January 1790. Within a decade there was only one mutineer left. Five of them, apparently including Christian, were killed by the Tahitian men they had been treating as slaves.
The remaining four fought back and killed the Tahitian men, but one drowned himself, another was killed and a third died of asthma and by 1800 the only surviving male was John Adams, who assumed patriarchal control. The mutineers had fathered 23 children who formed the basis of a growing community. The population was around 200 when the island was incorporated into the British empire in the mid-19th century but waves of emigration have sapped it and the island is now home to about 48 people.
With no airstrip or roads and the nearest phone 3,000 miles away in New Zealand, it’s no idyll. Writer Dea Birkett, who chronicled her stay there in her book Serpent In Paradise, warned: “The weather is abysmal: stuck in the sub-tropics, most days are either steamy or stormy, with strong winds blowing the corrugated iron roofs from the flimsy hardboard homes and bringing down the banana trees. There are no beaches and it would be more sensible to pack waterproofs than a bikini.”
A handshake and book exchange won’t settle a two-century-old score
That scandal divided Pitcairners but the one thing the descendants of the Bounty rebels tend to agree on is the legitimacy of the mutiny. They have popular culture on their side: three Hollywood films have depicted Bligh as a sadistic bully and Christian as the liberator. But research has shown Bligh flogged fewer people than any other British captain of his day. Historians have tried to burnish his reputation by suggesting that Christian, a member of the landed gentry, was a snob who resented taking orders from a captain who was only a customs officer’s son or that the mutiny leader was a drug addict who went crazy after his supplies of laudanum ran out.
This infuriates the Pitcairners. Glynn Christian, a TV chef who used to have a regular slot on BBC Breakfast Time, threatened to punch Maurice Bligh when he repeated the drug story. “Why, more than 200 years after the event, do the Blighs have to dress up theory as fact?” he complained.
Bligh responded: “I was simply trying to get at the truth. Glynn Christian’s problem is he doesn’t listen. He has been brainwashed by Hollywood. In his mind’s eye Fletcher Christian is Marlon Brando.”
Dea Birkett doesn’t believe the feud will end so easily. “A handshake and book exchange won’t settle a two-century-old score,” she tells me. “When I was on Pitcairn the islanders spoke as if the mutiny happened yesterday. Their memory of what they felt was an injustice against them was undiminished and unbounded. Even now I wouldn’t risk going to Pitcairn if my last name were Bligh.”
But novelist Nadine Christian told the Daily Express from Pitcairn yesterday: “There has always been the Bligh vs Christian ‘feud’ here but it’s always been lighthearted jesting, mostly over who was the greatest sailor, or who caused the most trouble. Maurice Bligh, ironically, is one of Pitcairn’s greatest supporters.” He visited Pitcairn in 1971, forming a lasting friendship with island leader Tom Christian, who died last year. He said this weekend he was looking forward to “publicly ending the silly fictionalised feud between the Blighs and the Christians”.
As far as history is concerned Bligh was neither a sadist nor a great leader: he humiliated his officers with withering put-downs and faced another mutiny in 1797.
A more interesting question may be what happened to Christian. There were sightings of him in England and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says it’s not impossible that he returned in secret to his family.
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