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for to the friendly and endearing behaviour of these people, may be
ascribed the motives for that event which effected the ruin of an
expedition . . .
– William Bligh
William Bligh published two accounts of the Bounty mutiny.1 Viewed in
relation to one another, they can acquire the status of hasty and reflective
responses, of part and whole, or on the other hand, of eyewitness and
modified text. The Narrative of the Mutiny, on board his Britannic
Majesty’s ship Bounty; and the subsequent voyage of part of the crew, in the
ship’s boat, from Tofoa, one of the Friendly Islands, to Timor, a Dutch
Settlement in the East-Indies, published in 1790, begins almost exactly
where his Bounty log breaks off, with Bligh’s departure from Tahiti, and
takes the reader immediately into the events of the mutiny. After
recording his own good conscience and hence good spirits upon being
consigned to the ship’s boat, Bligh addresses the question of motivation:
It will very naturally be asked, what could be the reason for such a revolt? in
answer to which, I can only conjecture that the mutineers had assured
themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheitans, than they could
possibly have in England; which, joined to some female connections, have
most probably been the principle cause of the whole transaction.
As Bligh immediately elaborates:
The women at Otaheite are handsome, mild and cheerful in their manners and
conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make
them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much attached to our people, that
they rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise, and even made
them promises of large possessions. Under these, and many other attendant
circumstances equally desirable, it is now perhaps not so much to be wondered
at, though scarcely possible to have been foreseen, that a set of sailors, most of
them void of connections, should be led away; especially when, in addition to
1
Indeed, as Philip Edwards points out, the publication afterlife of the Bounty mutiny was
initially dominated by Bligh (P. Edwards 1994:131).
226
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such powerful inducements, they imagined it in their power to fix themselves in
the midst of plenty, on the finest island in the world, where they need not labour,
and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond anything that can be
conceived. (Bligh 1977:9)
A Voyage to the South Sea, undertaken by command of His Majesty, for the
purpose of conveying the bread-fruit tree to the West Indies, in His Majesty’s
ship the Bounty, commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh. Including an
account of the mutiny on board the said ship, and the subsequent voyage of
part of the crew, in the ship’s boat, from Tofoa, one of the Friendly Islands, to
Timor, a Dutch Settlement in the East-Indies, published in 1792 while Bligh
was away on his second breadfruit voyage, with editorial intervention by
James Burney and Joseph Banks, draws on the logbook to flesh out the
earlier part of the Bounty voyage and the five-month stay at Tahiti that
preceded the mutiny. This account incorporates, with occasional significant emendation, the 1790 narrative of events immediately leading up to
and following the mutiny, repeating Bligh’s explanation quoted above
almost word for word. However, in the 1792 volume that explanation is
effectively prefaced by a subtly different account of motivation, embedded in the description of the crew’s departure from Tahiti:
We made sail, bidding farewell to Otaheite, where for twenty-three weeks we had
been treated with the utmost affection and regard, and which seemed to increase
in proportion to our stay. That we were not insensible to their kindness, the events
which followed more than sufficiently proves: for to the friendly and endearing
behaviour of these people, may be ascribed the motives for that event which
effected the ruin of an expedition, that there was every reason to hope, would
have been completed in the most fortunate manner. (Bligh 1979:141)
Bligh’s two speculations on motive, considered side by side, illustrate the
hermeneutic alternatives that I raised in the Introduction. The first sets
up an unstable relationship between a number of terms: plenty, ‘female
connections’, the ‘attach[ment]’ of the ari’i, and dissipation. Bligh
segues from an ostensibly sympathetic understanding of the desire for
such female and male attachment among men conspicuously ‘void of
connections’, to insinuations of the lure of degeneracy, via the ambivalent appeal of a life without labour. The word ‘allurements’ plays a
significant role in this process of insinuation, implicitly linking the qualities of the Tahitian women with unspoken, indeed inconceivable,
debauchery. As Bligh’s careful account of motivation unfolds, then, a
text and subtext appear to emerge. Beneath broad notions of intimacy in
the absence of existing attachments, we can spell out a hinted licentiousness. The 1792 version on the other hand simply offers synonyms for
intimacy as additional motives for the mutiny: ‘affection and regard’,
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‘not insensible’, ‘kindness’, ‘friendly and endearing behaviour’. Exegesis
and innuendo are eschewed.
In the 1790 text friendship seems to invite speculation; in the 1792
text it resists it. In the earlier version, friendship is the term that conceals
a fuller story, of sexuality, of class and its relationship to labour.
However, the composition sequence of the 1792 text suggests that
friendship and its subtexts are held in tension, rather than understood
to embody a clear order of understanding. The explanation that comes
first in this fuller version was also, in effect, a second thought: part of a
text that was elaborated later. Its relatively unparsed formulation of
friendship as motive for the mutiny is thus simultaneously reinstated
and displaced by the chronologically subsequent reiteration of the 1790
explanation. Both accounts of motivation are at once primary and secondary. And they have, as I noted, other types of competing authority
that it is difficult to weigh: the effect of raw impression versus editorial
intervention, partiality versus completion.2 The hierarchy of the two
explanations of the mutiny as text and subtext, then, cannot be demarcated. Rather they constitute sustained alternatives, whose relevance
depends upon and highlights our inclination to read denotatively or
connotatively.
Other friendship alternatives emerge between these two accounts.
Less than a page before he writes of complicated male and female
friendship and its influence on sailors ‘void of connections’ in the 1790
text, Bligh states:
Notwithstanding the roughness with which I was treated, the remembrance of
past kindnesses produced some signs of remorse in Christian. When they were
forcing me out of the ship, I asked him, if this treatment was a proper return for
the many instances he had received of my friendship? he appeared disturbed at
my question, and answered, with much emotion, ‘That, – captain Bligh, that is
the thing; – I am in hell – I am in hell.’ (Bligh 1977:8)
Bligh’s reproach reiterates the keynotes of eighteenth-century friendship
discourse. Christian has on the one hand broken the reciprocal contract
of friendship, offering no ‘proper return’ to his mentor. But the friendship claim is also seen as the vector of true emotion in a situation of
otherwise confused and false feeling. To inquire of the mutineer’s capacity for friendship constitutes a moment of truth, that strips away the
potential legitimacy or illegitimacy of other claims about abuses of
power, and returns the protagonists to a world of absolute judgement:
2
Scholars have complicated even the terms of these oppositions, focusing for instance on
Bligh’s open boat voyage as itself a period of intense editing of his story for Bligh. See in
particular P. Edwards 1994:125–40, and Reimann 1996:198–218.
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to hell. Above all, friendship is the question that can momentarily slow
the inevitable course of events. Within Bligh’s ‘hasty’ narrative it represents a pause for thought.
When Bligh explicitly reinstates friendship as a cause of the mutiny in
his 1792 account, it seems to me that he too has been forced to dwell on
friendship. And two pages before he cites ‘the friendly and endearing
behaviour of these people’ as ‘motives for that event which effected the
ruin of an expedition’, he again offers a further insight into friendship,
this time from the beach rather than on deck:
I now made my last presents to several of my friends, with whom I had been most
intimate . . . Several people expressed great desire to go with us to England.
Oedidee, who was always very much attached to us, said, he considered it as his
right, having formerly left his native place, to sail with Captain Cook. Scarce any
man belonging to the ship was without a tyo, who brought him presents, chiefly
of provisions for a sea store. (Bligh 1979:139)
As Anna Neill has noted, this reference to the particular friendship
bonds of crew members is missing from Bligh’s logbook account of the
departure from Tahiti. Neill interprets Bligh’s remarks as ‘the concerned
observation that within a short time such an intimacy grew between the
crew members and the natives’ (Neill 2002:173), but I think Bligh is
concerned rather, in this retrospective insertion, to highlight an understanding of friendship as reciprocal obligation. The passage references a
series of transactions that translate acknowledged sentiment into an
understanding of what is owed. The give and take of Bligh’s prestation
and the taios’ provisioning frames the more explicit assertion by Hitihiti
(‘Oedidee’) of a chain of obligation that links Bligh’s voyage back to
Cook’s. However, what Bligh seems to want to highlight here is the fit
between his understanding of the obligations of friendship and that of
the people with whom he has been interacting. As preface to his further
comments on friendship in the 1792 text, these recollections show
Bligh giving the ethnographic measure of those friendships that, he soon
after reiterates, were the mutiny’s cause. Precisely unlike Christian, the
Tahitians through the taio pact recognize the logic of ‘proper return’.
The story of the Bounty mutiny has fallen prey to the ‘for or against’
logic that it enacted. The first two voices commenting on the events of
the mutiny were those of Bligh and of Edward Christian, and were both
texts of exculpation. But Bounty scholarship seems particularly and
enduringly partisan: arguments are framed as further trials of crew
and captain, and historians continue to identify as friend or foe of
Christian or Bligh. In the process of disclosing the particular ingredients
of naval and class stratification, masculine narcissism or suppressed
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sexual tension that produced this extreme rupture between men of the
same country of origin, scholars have weighed the degree to which
Tahitian connections, and particularly those with women, could have
indeed been instrumental to the mutiny.3 But the concern has been with
unravelling the mutiny’s compelling plot. In this chapter I consider the
events and archive of the mutiny primarily in terms of account keeping
rather than narrative. I suggest that the question of ‘proper return’ was
integral to the framing of the voyage and the mutiny, and that the British
crew members’ thinking on this subject was crystallized by their Tahitian
friendships and exchanges.
Account keeping
Where Captain Bligh have wrote single he should have wrote plurel –
– John Fryer
Bligh was the keeper of accounts on the Bounty in more than one sense.
As Greg Dening has elucidated, the dual role he assumed on the voyage,
of purser as well as captain, involved inherent conflicts of interest:
Pursers were objects of almost universal suspicion because they distributed
provisions, accounted for every ounce of food and every farthing of expense.
Pursers were the brokers of every transaction on a ship and had to find a profit in
these transactions if they were to win back the surety they had laid down . . . Any
man who became purser had to have some genius for knowing what would
adversely affect him and had to labour instantly to record whatever he counted
and measured. A mean spirit and calculating shrewdness were his chief defences.
The altruism expected of a captain glimmered lowly behind the parsimony
anticipated from a purser. (Dening 1992:23)
The conflict between altruism and calculation Dening highlights in
Bligh’s divided role echoes that within friendship discourse. And it
inflects all the first-hand reports of the voyage, rendering each of them
an ‘account’ in both the primary and secondary senses. The most
compelling alternative version to Bligh’s is James Morrison’s Journal
. . . describing the mutiny and subsequent misfortunes of the mutineers, together
with an account of the island of Tahiti. Discussing the semiotics of Morrison’s text, Dening isolates two recurrent ‘yarns’: food and bad language.
The obsessive quantification of food in the early pages of the journal,
3
Rutter n.d., Fullerton n.d., Darby 1965, Nicolson 1965, Barrow 1989, Christian 1999.
Owen Rutter prefaces his True Story of the Mutiny: ‘many books have been written on that
melodrama of the sea, both fact and fiction . . . Moreover, most writers have shown a bias
against Bligh, since sympathy is always bound to be with the underdog, who was Fletcher
Christian’ (Rutter n.d.: 13).
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and the sense of affront that is registered when weights appear to be
short or inadequate substitutes are made to serve for the staples of bread
and meat – ‘pumpions’ (pumpkins) in place of loaves, oil and sugar in
place of butter and cheese – is contrasted with the plenty that greets the
sailors at Tahiti.
Philip Edwards and K. A. Reimann have both examined the subtle
variations in account keeping between the different primary texts of the
Bounty mutiny, focusing on scenes that highlight the significance of
terms of exchange and equality (P. Edwards 1994:125–40; Reimann
1996). One important prequel to the immediate events of the mutiny
that is excluded from Bligh’s Narrative, and is filled in by both John
Fryer and James Morrison, regards the flare up of Bligh’s temper over
what he believed to be a depletion in the store of coconuts he had
reserved on board the Bounty’s deck. In both Fryer’s and Morrison’s
accounts, this is the event that precipitates the mutiny. And its narration
involves a shifting language of exchange, with the alternating terms
gifting, trade and theft coding labile interpersonal relations. So, to quote
Morrison’s version,
In the Afternoon of the 27th Mr. Bligh Came up, and taking a turn about the
Quarter Deck when he missed some of the Cocoa Nuts which were piled up
between the Guns upon which he said that they were stolen and Could not go
without the knowledge of the Officers, who were all Calld and declared that they
had not seen a Man toutch them, to which Mr. Bligh replied ‘then you must have
taken them yourselves’, and ordered Mr. Elphinstone to go and fetch evry Cocoa
nut in the Ship aft, which He obeyd. He then questioned evry Officer in turn
concerning the Number they had bought, & Coming to Mr. Christian askd Him,
Mr. Christian answerd ‘I do not know Sir, but I hope you dont think me so mean
as to be Guilty of Stealing yours’. Mr. Bligh replied ‘Yes you dam’d Hound I do –
You must have stolen them from me or you could give a better account of them –
God dam you, you Scoundrels, you are all thieves alike, and combine with the
men to rob me – I suppose you’ll Steal my Yams next, but I’ll sweat you for it,
you rascals. (Morrison 1935:40–41; compare Fryer 1934:55–6)
As accusations of theft rendered objects of exchange items of suspicion,
the randomly piled coconuts were systematically counted. The term
‘accounting’ shifts from the nebulous realm of story to the literal realm
of ‘the Number’: if Christian cannot ‘give a better account of them’ –
cannot tell a self-exonerating tale – then the bald account of figures will
be left to tell the tale in his place. But what in turn inflects this intense
affective charge around the notion of accountability?
The Bounty had just departed Annamooka in the Tonga islands,
which, as Morrison points out, ‘was likely to be the last Island where
Iron Currency was the Most valuable’. That is, it was the last time that
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the crew would be able to trade really effectively between cultures: to
take advantage of their ironware to accumulate both local crafts – ‘Matts,
Spears & many Curiositys’ that would have a continued exchange value
when they returned to England – and food items ‘for Private Store’.
Thus, after ‘two Hours liberty was given to the people to expend their
trade’, Morrison recalls, ‘the ship was fairly lumbered that there was
scarcely room to stir in any part’ (Morrison 1935:39). He reports that at
this stage Bligh detained some Tongan chiefs. Bligh accounts for this
action in his 1792 text as an attempt to get a stolen grapnel returned. He
was following Cook’s repeated but ultimately disastrous policy here, but
claims that once he realized that it was unlikely to be successful, he freed
the chiefs, gave them unexpected gifts, of which ‘they were unbounded
in their acknowledgements; and I have little doubt but that we parted
better friends than if the affair had never happened’ (Bligh 1979:153).
In Morrison’s version, the chiefs were simply, inexplicably detained:
moreover, in a way that breached etiquettes of hospitality and rank.
Morrison comments,
At this the Chiefs seemd much displeased, on which they were ordered down to
the Mess room where Mr. Bligh followed them and set them to peel Cocoa Nuts
for His Dinner. He then came up and dismissd all the Men but two, that were
under arms, but not till he had passd the Compliment on officers & Men to tell
them that they were a parcel of lubberly rascals . . . (Morrison 1935:39)
Again the coconuts become symbolic here of Bligh’s perceived tendency
to disrespect the status of others. There is little basis for thinking that
Bligh would have asked the chiefs to prepare his food. As noted earlier,
the word tapu in its various spellings appears almost as frequently in
European accounts of Oceanic contact as does taio, and the common
example given of its broad-ranging and hierarchical injunctions is the
exclusion of high-ranking individuals from the preparation of food. Bligh,
who was already on his second voyage to the Pacific and seems to have
borne his predecessors’ examples constantly in mind, would have been
fully aware of the offence such a demand would provoke. However,
Morrison adduces Bligh’s purported action, after the crew’s months in
Oceania, as a shocking act of cultural misreading. Breaching status and
infringing tapu, it provides further evidence of what Morrison represents
as the commensurate disrespect – the false ‘Compliment’ – of mislabelling
Officers and Men as rascals, all of a ‘parcel’. How could men as disparate
in rank and culpability as the Bounty’s crew not find themselves united
against a commander who bundles them together like coconuts?
But there are more coconuts to count. When Morrison writes of the
Bounty’s departure from Tahiti, he figures coconuts not as items of
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trade, but as gifts of friendship: ‘the Natives to show the last token of
their Freindship loaded us with presents, & the Ship became lumbered
with Hogs Cocoa Nuts & Green Plantains for Sea store’. Morrison gives
an example of a particular farewell exchange, where Bligh and the
carpenter, Purcell, a figure deeply at odds with the captain, proffer
parting gifts:
Mr. Bligh gave Matte a Musquet two pistols some powder & Ball flints &c. and a
Chest to keep his trade & Amunition in, the Chest being also filld with the
Presents Mr. Bligh had made him; the Carpenter also Gave him an Amercian
Musquet with all which he seemd highly Pleased, but was at quite a loss how to
express himself on the occasion and when they landed loaded the Boat with
Cocoa Nuts when she returned & was hoisted in. (Morrison 1935:35)
It is unclear whether the gifts of captain and carpenter are mutually
reinforcing or competitive, but their effect is apparently to flummox the
recipient. They cannot be accommodated; the return load of coconuts
becomes a sign of destabilized, rather than achieved, reciprocity. Once
again, the ground of contention is friendship and its locally coded
relationship to practices of exchange, negotiations of status and performances of sentiment.
Bligh was afraid of alternative accounts. As K. A. Reimann points out,
he had felt the injustice of a single official voyage account, having been
accorded little recognition in that of Cook’s final voyage,4 although he
had ‘made a substantial contribution to those aspects of the voyage that
proved a success’ (the charting of the Sandwich Islands and the northwest Pacific) (Reimann 1996:201). Yet when it came to his own captaincy, it seems Bligh felt that writing had the potential to imply an act of
sedition. Lieutenant Francis Godolphin Bond, First Lieutenant of the
Providence, reported to his brother from St Helena, towards the end of
the second breadfruit voyage, Bligh’s paranoia regarding the existence
of other reports:
Among many circumstances of envy and jealousy he used to deride my keeping a
private journal, and would often ironically say he supposed I meant to publish . . .
Every officer who has nautical information, a knowledge of natural history, a
taste for drawing, or anything to constitute him proper for circumnavigating,
becomes odious; for great as he is in his own good opinion, he must have
entertained fears some of his ship’s company meant to [submit] a spurious
Narrative to the judgment and perusal of the publick. (Mackaness 1953:71)
As Bond is fully aware, Bligh is afraid that his position of command
remains unstable: that his capacity to control the voyage account is his
4
A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784), a text completed by Lieutenant James King.
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only distinction. He is unable to realize or even to recognize the potential
of a ship’s crew for mutually reinforcing endeavour. What might be aid
becomes threat. Yet with the use of the word ‘spurious’ Bond also
ventriloquizes Bligh and de-authorizes his own report, indicating that a
belief in the relationship between captaincy and control of accounts is on
another level a matter of broad consensus rather than paranoid delusion.
Bligh’s attack on Bond’s writing has involved setting up an opposition
between work and writing, coded as public and private duties. He
admonishes Bond: ‘No person can do the duty of a 1st Lieut. who does
more than write the day’s work of his publick Journal’ (Mackaness
1953:69). However, John Fryer uses the same distinction implicitly to
criticize Bligh’s command of the Bounty launch, deferring pointedly in
his own retrospective journal to Bligh’s first-hand narrative: ‘I must refer
the reader to Captain Bligh’s narrative as I would only write the truth to
the best of my knowledge and the best of my recollection as I had neither
ink nor paper – Mr Bligh made all the necessary remarks – I steerd and
rowd in the Boat as any other man.’ Fryer continues, ‘when we came to
Timor I asked Captain Bligh for a ruff coppy of the Log for my own
satisfaction and he refused to let me have it’ (Fryer 1934:63; for Bligh’s
launch journal, see Bach 1987). Fryer apologized in similar terms for his
retrospective account of the events of the mutiny at the Bounty court
martial by pointing out that ‘our attention from that time to our arrival at
Timor [was] so much taken up by the attention to our Preservation that it
was not possible for us to make any Note or Memorandum at the time,
even if I had had the means’ (Rutter 1931:76). Metaphors of honest
labour and jealous hoarding are deployed subtly to damn Bligh even as
he is described going to great lengths to weigh food rations with evenhandedness and to take an equal share of all physical burdens in a situation
of extreme distress. Account keeping, then, reveals concerns, not just
about authority, but about labour and care, and the relationship between
self and other. Yet in the end, all the Bounty’s accounts had equal weight.
Proper Returns
Otaheitia independent of its women had many inducements not only for
the sailor but the philosopher. He might cultivate his own ground and trust
himself and friends for his defence – he might be truly happy in himself and
his happiness would be increased by communicating it to others.
– Robert Southey
I have suggested that friendship and its reciprocal entailments – gifting,
loyalty – were key values traded on the deck of the Bounty on 28 April
1789. I want further to argue here that the ways in which these terms
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were bandied imply a relationship to the codes and practices of taio that
both captain and mutineers had developed during their time in Tahiti.
Descriptions of friendships and friendship ceremonies become key
moments of disputation in the dialogue between Bligh’s, Morrison’s
and the Pandora accounts of Tahiti. In reading taio, ostensibly with
proto-ethnographic detachment, while also representing their authors
as embraced in different ways by its bonds, each of these texts simultaneously stakes a claim to best understanding the breakdown in relations
between men that occurs on the Bounty.
From the moment the anchor drops in Bligh’s 1792 account, the
concern is with the politics of securing friendship. Bligh comes equipped
with what he believes to be an achieved knowledge of the ways in which
exchange and friendship are co-implicated in Tahiti, based on his experiences there during Cook’s third voyage. He counts on established friendship links, and the particular diplomatic strategies of his mission have
been formulated according to local practices of friendship-making as he
has come to understand them. On the first day, as we saw in Chapter 1,
he searches in vain among his visitors for people ‘of much consequence’
(Bligh 1979:61). On the second day ‘several chiefs’ arrive, and ceremony
and exchange may begin:
Among these were Otow, the father of Otoo, and Oreepyah, his brother; also
another chief of Matavai, called Poeeno: and to these men I made presents. Two
messengers likewise arrived from Otoo, to acquaint me of his being on the way to
the ship; each of whom brought me, as a present from Otoo, a small pig, and a
young plantain-tree, as a token of friendship. The ship was now plentifully
supplied with provisions; every person having as much as he could consume.
(Bligh 1979:62–3)
Despite the claim to local knowledge – Bligh initiates ceremony and
interprets ‘tokens’ – there is much improvisation as well as recapitulation
in what follows. Poeno, as ari’i of Matavai, takes Bligh ‘to the place
where we had fixed our tents in 1777, and desired that I would now
appropriate the spot to the same use’ (Bligh 1979:63). Two women, who
were staining tapa cloth (fabric made from the bark of the papermulberry tree), offer refreshments, and when Bligh leaves present
him with the mat ‘which they put on me after the Otaheite fashion’.
Meanwhile, Bligh figures himself as auditor of British largesse, receiving
unfavourable reports of the cattle left by Cook, but also having ‘the
satisfaction to see, that the island had received some benefit from our
former visits. Two shaddocks were brought to me, a fruit which they had
not, till we introduced it. And among the articles which they brought off
to the ship, and offered for sale, were capsicoms, pumkins, and two
young goats’ (Bligh 1979:63, 64). Exchange relations, in other words,
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are already fully entangled: the Tahitians bring for trade products that
the British have previously gifted to them. Webber’s portrait of Captain
Cook, left with Tu in 1777, is brought on board to be repaired, and the
Tahitians explain that ‘Toote [Cook] had desired Otoo, whenever any
English ship came, to show the picture, and it would be acknowledged as
a token of friendship’ (Bligh 1979:64). The British gift, like the friendship it continues to betoken, requires maintenance. Bligh’s highly
controlled narrative at this point performs what it seeks to depict. Each
description is effectively entailed, creating an inventory in favour of the
British, into which Bligh’s subsequent request for breadfruit can be
inserted, diplomatically, as a justified claim – a ‘proper return’ rather
than a ‘free gift’. As Bligh concedes in retrospect, ‘Perhaps so much
caution was not necessary, but at all events I wished to reserve to myself
the time and manner of communication’ (Bligh 1979:67).
Despite his tight grip of translation and interpretation in these passages, Bligh is all at sea when it comes to the specific rituals of Tahitian
friendship. He ultimately seems unsure when official friendship with Tu
has been secured, describing two ceremonies that vary in format and
degree of formality. The first is a fairly straightforward exchange of
names, followed instantly by a carefully tallied gift exchange:
[Otoo] came with numerous attendants, and expressed much satisfaction at our
meeting. After introducing his wife to me, we joined noses, the customary manner
of saluting, and, to perpetuate our friendship, he desired we should exchange
names. I was surprized to find, that, instead of Otoo, the name by which he
formerly went, he was now called Tinah. The name of Otoo, with the title of
Earee Rahie, I was informed had devolved to his eldest son, who was yet a minor, as
is the custom of the country. The name of Tinah’s wife was Iddeah: with her was a
woman, dressed with a large quantity of cloth, in the form of a hoop, which was
taken off and presented to me, with a large hog, and some bread-fruit. I then took
my visitors into the cabin, and after a short time produced my presents in return.
The present I made to Tinah (by which name I shall hereafter call him) consisted
of hatchets, small adzes, files, gimblets, saws, looking-glasses, red feathers, and
two shirts. To Iddeah I gave ear-rings, necklaces, and beads; but she expressed a
desire also for iron, and therefore I made the same assortment for her as I had for
her husband. Much conversation took place among them on the value of the
different articles, and they appeared extremely satisfied; so that they determined
to spend the day with me, and requested I would show them all over the ship, and
particularly the cabin where I slept. This, though I was not fond of doing,
I indulged them in; and the consequence was, as I had apprehended, that they
took a fancy to so many things, that they got from me nearly as much more as I had
before given them. (Bligh 1979:65)
As I observed in Chapter 2, name exchange involved an implicit destabilization as well as cementing friendship, enshrining various possibilities
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of misconstrual – of status, or simply of pronunciation. Here at the very
point at which he achieves a taio relationship with the man whose
preeminence he awaited, Bligh is thrown into confusion about where
true authority now lies: is it in fact with the ‘minor’, Tu? According
to Tahitian codes of inheritance, ‘kin-Titles’ – that is, offices associated
with the complexly imbricated official religion and politics – passed
immediately to the heir at birth. As Douglas Oliver explains, ‘thereafter,
the child’s father continued to perform the secular jobs associated with
his released kin-Titles during his heir’s minority, but the religious rights
and duties associated with those kin-Titles were transferred to the heir’
(Oliver 1988:46). Status is at best divided: more confrontingly, the
father may be a mere figurehead, with true control in the hands of one
conventionally understood to be his dependant. This sense of destabilized authority is, I think, responsible for the other slips of control in this
passage: the sense that Tina may now be, not only a mere cipher of
power for the true authority, his son, but for a powerful wife ’Itea, who
appears to control the reciprocal prestation, and who rejects Bligh’s
decorative trinkets and requests replicas of her husband’s masculine
gifts – tools of iron.5 Finally, Bligh represents himself as swindled by
the very system he has attempted so carefully to exploit: forced through
the insinuations of hospitality to offer double what he intended.
The published account differs in small but significant ways from
Bligh’s log. In the log, where the confusion of name exchange follows
more closely the pattern I outlined, mispronunciation is the factor
producing subtle shifts of identity: ‘He taking the Name of Bligh, which
he could pronounce no way but Bry, and I that of Tinah.’ The ‘red
feathers’ are more specifically described as ‘two very fine red Wings of
Flamingoes which I had procured at the Cape of Good Hope for the
purpose’ (Bligh 1937: I, 373). And the manipulation of gifting is more
proliferative: ‘He was not satisfied here, for after my showing him the
ship, he begged of everyone he met with, took some of the Gentlemens
handkerchiefs, and asked for Shirts and other Articles’ (Bligh 1937: I,
374). The common denominator in the alterations seems to be an
attempt to cement Bligh’s authority: not to allow him to be mockable
as the captain who puts too much anticipatory thought into his exotic
gift, is exposed to the ‘bad language’ (to adopt Dening’s term) of
5
Oliver conveys prepositionally a sense of Tahitian female power as predicated on the
successful manipulation of power rather than its direct manifestation: ‘Since females did
not perform religious duties, and seldom if ever any secular administrative ones, the
duties associated with their kin-Titles usually passed through rather than to or from them’
(Oliver 1988:46).
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Intimate Strangers
mispronunciation, and is unable to protect his crew from Tina’s
importuning.
The second taio ceremony described in the 1792 account, which
follows the text of the log much more faithfully, involves a more ceremonial gifting, orchestrated by the Tahitians and resulting in the public
proclamation of the taio bond. Bligh is summonsed to Tina’s brother’s
house:
At this place I found a great number of people collected, who, on my appearance,
immediately made way for me to sit down by Tinah. The croud being ordered to
draw back, a piece of cloth, about two yards wide and forty-one yards in length,
was spread on the ground; and another piece of cloth was brought by Oreepyah,
which he put over my shoulders, and round my waist, in the manner the chiefs
are clothed. Two large hogs, weighing each above two hundred pounds, and
a quantity of baked bread-fruit and cocoa-nuts, were then laid before me, as a
present, and I was desired to walk from one end of the cloth spread on the
ground to the other, in the course of which, Tyo and Ehoah were repeated with
loud acclamations. (Bligh 1979:69; compare Bligh 1937: I, 376)
Although once again there is a sense that Bligh is playing to a script he
doesn’t fully understand, there is much relative comfort in this encounter. The main actors are all men. Bligh finds himself costumed as an
ari’i. The word taio and its synonym, hoa, are actually enunciated to
describe the ceremony, and greeted with acclaim. However, once again
his description is haunted by the notion of proper return:
This ceremony being ended, Tinah desired I would send the things on board,
which completely loaded the boat; we, therefore, waited till she came back, and
then I took them on board with me; for I knew they expected some return. – The
present which I made on this occasion, was equal to any that I had made before;
but I discovered that Tinah was not the sole proprietor of what he had given to
me, for the present I gave was divided among those who, I guessed, had
contributed to support his dignity; among whom were Moannah, Poeenah, and
Oreepyah; Tinah, however, kept the greatest part of what I had given, and every
one seemed satisfied with the proportion he allotted them. (Bligh 1979:69–70)
Again, exchange threatens to proliferate in ways that transform Bligh’s
insider knowledge to paranoia. Tina’s ostensible status and largesse may
be fragmented, and with that his authority. And this in turn offers an
unstable reflection for Bligh’s sense of command at the very moment he
has been declared Tina’s taio – effectively, just as he has become Tina. In
terminology that exactly replicates that of his log (Bligh 1937: I, 376),
and thus, we can be certain, predates the mutiny and its retrospective
insights, Bligh falls back on a notion of just measure: all are satisfied with
their allotment. The insistence on proper reciprocation according to
‘allotted’ proportion that emerges from his local knowledge of Tahitian
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friendship practices has particular resonances for the rupture that ensues
on the deck of the Bounty.
The name exchange between Tina and Bligh sets up a reflection
between captaincy and chieftainship. The logbook includes reflections
on the precariousness of Tina’s authority that are expunged from the
1792 account, presumably because of their implications for Bligh’s
ability both to establish and mirror true authority. For instance, in the
period intervening between the ceremonies cementing his friendship
with Tina (‘Otoo’), he writes in the log, ‘what I have seen proves
evidently what was generally thought of Otoo, (except by Captn. Cook
in particular,) and that he is a Man only nominally possessed of power,
or otherwise he has not abilities to govern, which may be the Case, as the
Cheifs revile him upon all occasions. He has nevertheless consequence’
(Bligh 1937: I, 375). Bligh indicates his awareness that the apparent
interchangeability of terms such as ‘consequence’ and ‘power’ can
become a false equation in practice. Although the reference to Cook
serves to justify the choice of Tina as his taio, perhaps equally, he and
Cook, identical in their endorsement of Tina, represent two faces of
captaincy – false status and true authority; consequence and power.
That Bligh should judge and forge relationships of power effectively is
integral to negotiating for the breadfruit plants that are the Bounty’s
main object. In the 1792 account he is eager to represent his prior
knowledge of the Tahitian friendship–exchange nexus as the key to his
diplomatic handling of his mission. However, once again this manifests
as a control of accounts, one whose tendency towards paranoia even he
is prepared to acknowledge: ‘I had given directions to every one on board
not to make known to the islanders the purpose of our coming, lest it
might enhance the value of the bread-fruit plants, or occasion other
difficulties. Perhaps so much caution was not necessary, but at all events
I wished to reserve to myself the time and manner of communication’
(Bligh 1979:67). Bligh’s full directions are worth comparing with Cook’s
‘Rules’, quoted at the beginning of Chapter 2, for the way in which they
bring a new level of explicit calculation to bear on familiar injunctions to
cultivate friendship and trade equably:
Rules to be observed by every Person on Board, or belonging to the ‘Bounty’, for
the better establishing a Trade for Supplies or Provisions and good Intercourse
with the Natives of the South Sea, wherever the Ship may be at.
1st. At the Society, or Friendly Islands, no person whatever is to intimate that
Captain Cook was killed by Indians; or that he is dead.
2d. No person is ever to speak, or give the least hint, that we have come on
purpose to get the bread-fruit plant, until I have made my plan known to the
chiefs.
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3d. Every person is to study to gain the good will and esteem of the natives;
to treat them with all kindness; and not to take from them by violent means, any
thing they may have stolen; and no one is ever to fire, but in defence of his life.
4th. Evry person employed on service is to take care that no arms, or
implements of any kind under their charge, are stolen; the value of such thing,
being lost shall be charged against their wages.
5th. No man is to embezzle, or offer to sale, directly, or indirectly, any part of
the King’s stores, of what nature soever.
6th. A proper person or persons will be appointed to regulate trade, and barter
with the natives; and no officer or seaman, or other person belonging to the ship,
is to trade for any kind of provisions, or curiosities; but if such officer or seaman
wishes to purchase any particular thing, he is to apply to the provider to do it for
him. By this means a regular market will be carried on, and all disputes, which
otherwise may happen with the natives, will be avoided. All boats are to have
everything handed out of them at sun-set.
Given under my hand, on board the ‘Bounty’, Otaheite, 25th Oct. 1788.
Wm. BLIGH (Rutter 1931:8–9)
Bligh refuses to admit Cook’s death either explicitly, or implicitly –
echoing the text of Cook’s ‘RULES to be observe’d by every person in or
belonging to His Majestys Bark the Endevour’. At the same time, his
reordered priorities and subtle revisions cast himself as Cook’s inheritor,
declaring an alternative version of authority that itself testifies to the
lessons of Cook’s death, particularly in the attempt not only to control
the terms of trade, but to anticipate and pre-empt eruptions of violence.
Eventually the perfect moment arrives for Bligh to put in his claim.
Tina recounts the sorry history of Cook’s gifts of cattle and sheep, most
of which were appropriated or destroyed by the people of Eimeo
(Moorea) after they defeated Tina’s party in battle. Although Bligh is
aware that Tina’s pleasure in witnessing his concern ‘for the destruction
of so many useful animals’ (Bligh 1979:72) arises primarily from the
hope he will revenge the attack, Bligh proceeds as though use and
exchange were the only principles in operation, insistently refiguring
the destroyed animals as an unrecompensed debt:
I replied, that, on account of their good-will, and from a desire to serve him and
his country, King George had sent out those valuable presents to him; ‘and will
not you, Tinah, send something to King George in return?’ – ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I will
send him anything I have;’ and then began to enumerate the different articles
in his power, among which he mentioned the bread-fruit. This was the exact
point to which I wished to bring the conversation; and, seizing an opportunity,
which had every appearance of being undesigned and accidental, I told him the
bread-fruit-trees were what King George would like; upon which he promised
me a great many should be put on board, and seemed much delighted to find it
so easily in his power to send any thing that would be well received by King
George. (Bligh 1979:73)
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The reiteration of the term ‘power’ and its interplay with questions of
value here recalls Bligh’s logbook allusions to the distinction between
power and consequence. What is of consequence to Bligh is easily within
Tina’s power. While Bligh, through his insistence on his own capacity to
manipulate the conversation, asserts that it is his own party’s agenda that
is being served in this interaction, his apparent success in appearing
‘undesigned’ may once again have its reflection in Tina’s seeming ‘much
delighted’. Breadfruit cuttings are surely in this scenario Tahiti’s ‘trinkets’: ari’i and captain may both be working independently here to
achieve an atypically cost-free exchange.6
It is the role of such hidden agendas that Morrison latches onto in his
alternative account of Tahitian encounter and its ethics of friendship.
Morrison renders Bligh’s version of cross-cultural friendship dubious
both morally and ethnographically, and indeed sets up a critical relationship between these two terms. Well before his initial taio ceremony with
Tina is mentioned in the 1792 account, Bligh makes casual reference to
the fact that ‘an intimacy between the natives, and our people, was
already so general, that there was scarce a man in the ship who had
not his tyo or friend’ (Bligh 1979:67). A contrast between this relatively
uncomplicated intimacy and the hedgings and status anxieties of Bligh’s
friendship negotiations informs both accounts. However, this is not
played out as a simple distinction between formal and informal, cultural
and natural friendship, but rather as a differently nuanced sense of how
an understanding of Tahitian bond-friendship works in practice.
While the Bounty is at Matavai Bay collecting breadfruit, the contest
over friendship plays itself out in relation to the ever-vexed question of
provision. Morrison reports,
The Market for Hogs beginning now to slacken Mr. Bligh seized on all that came
to the ship big & small Dead or alive, taking them as his property, and serving
them as the ship’s allowance at one pound pr. Man pr. Day. He also seized on
those belonging to the Master, & killd them for the ships use, tho He had more
then 40 of different sizes on board of his own, and there was then plenty to be
purchaced: nor was the price much risen from the first, and when the Master
spoke to him, telling him the Hogs were his property, he told him that ‘He
Mr. Bligh would convince him that evry thing was his, as soon as it was on board,
and that He would take nine tenths of any mans property and let him see who
dared say any thing to the contrary’, those of the seamen were seized without
ceremony, and it became a favour for a man to get a Pound extra of His own hog.
6
The idea that breadfruit cost Pacific islanders nothing in labour was of course a European
myth that failed to reflect certain realities of climate and cultivation. For a detailed
analysis of this representation, see V. Smith 2006.
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Intimate Strangers
The Natives observing that the Hogs were seized as soon as they Came on
board, and not knowing but they would be seized from them, as well as the
People, became very shy of bringing a hog in sight of Lieut. Bligh either on board
or on shore, and watchd all opportunitys when he was on shore to bring
provisions to their friends but as Mr. Bligh observed this, and saw that His
diligence was like to be evaded, he ordered a Book to be kept in the Binnacle
wherein the Mate of the Watch was to insert the Number of Hogs or Pigs with
the Weight of each that came into the Ship to remedy this, the Natives took
another Method which was Cutting the Pigs up, and wraping them in leaves and
covering the Meat with Bread fruit in the Baskets, and sometimes with peeld
Cocoa Nuts, by which means, as the Bread was never seized, they were a Match
for all his industry; and he never suspected their artifice. By this means
provisions were still plenty. (Morrison 1935:29)
The description of Bligh seizing everything as his own contrasts with
Bligh’s own depiction of Tina’s gifts to him as clearly comprised of
multiple contributions. Bligh’s concern with asserting status and authority here outweighs his sense for the networked aspects of Tahitian
friendship. In Morrison’s narrative, the struggle between Bligh and the
crew members’ taios to determine the relationship between gift-giving
and friendship plays out as a contest between text and praxis. The
Tahitians ‘became . . . shy’ of bringing hogs to the ship – the term shy
reflecting the particular co-implication of affect and trade in these
fraught relations. They nonetheless seek to continue their established
practice of ‘bring[ing] provisions to their friends’, an attempt which
Bligh thwarts by imposing his book of accounts. The Tahitians retaliate
by passing off meat as breadfruit, a strategy that has implications for
both Bligh’s ethnography and his mission. The captain who took such
pains to infiltrate his breadfruit interest into Tahitian systems of
exchange is oblivious to the ways in which low-status friendships piggyback off his carefully forged alliance, and Tahitian exchange items
incorporate false measure. As he gradually fills the ship with breadfruit
plants and cramps physical conditions for his crew members, they are
shown gaining sustenance at his expense through the bonds they forge
on the beach. Friendship is already showing a capacity to interfere with
‘an expedition, that there was every reason to hope, would have been
completed in the most fortunate manner’.
One of the ways in which the crew is alive to aspects of friendship that
Bligh neglects is in its alertness and physical responsiveness to sexual
subtexts. As Greg Dening notes, the crew’s taios were typically male
relations of the women with whom they cohabited (Dening 1992:191).
The slippage between sexual and amicable relations is immediately
apparent in Morrison’s pointed description of the crew’s ‘easy’
friendships:
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evry officer and man in the ship were provided with new friends tho none
understood the language, yet we found it very easy to Converse by signs at
which these people are adepts, and some of the Weomen who came on board
became very Intiligent in a short time and soon brought their quondum
husbands into a method of discourse by which evry thing was transacted . . .
(Morrison 1935:30–1)
Here once again Morrison makes the reader aware of a language of signs
and physical signals that escapes the logics of diplomacy or accountancy.
Instead he is alive precisely to local intelligence – in its associations both
of intellect and espionage. Bligh’s sexual abstinence in Tahiti leaves him
deaf to yet another series of networks and exchange relations bound up
within Tahitian friendship: one whose power relations are, once again,
negotiated relationally. Women appear to be both instigators and objects
of exchange, but this is not the primary question: Morrison’s own
euphemistically ambiguous language is encompassed by his broader
acknowledgement of a language of signs in which the adept and
‘Intiligent’ communicate outside the constraints of explicit language.
The meat is smuggled in under the breadfruit.
I want to distinguish the kind of knowing I am identifying here from
the knowingness I have resisted throughout this book: one that might
code all friendship as sexualized. Morrison’s reading of sexual subtexts
here is precisely and demonstratively contextual; part of his claim to be a
better reader of the Tahitian scene than Bligh. The discussion of taio
ceremonies is a case in point. In Chapter 2 I quoted Morrison’s description of these male nuptials, which he describes as identical in structure to
the marriage rituals of virgin spouses. I suggested that taio might be seen
to represent for Morrison and other Europeans the sanctioned face of
relations between men whose unacceptable reflection was the more
frankly gender-troubling institution of the mahu. Lee Wallace has elegantly argued that Bligh’s discussion of the mahu, one of the most
forthright of European accounts of the institution, contrasts in its
directness and indelicacy with what she refers to as ‘the excited yet
decorous representations of heterosexual contact’ in the Pacific contact
archive (Wallace 2003:15). Wallace, it might be said, is also making an
argument for two types of knowing here. When Bligh ‘examines [the
mahu’s] privacies’, measuring the size and texture of his testicles,
Wallace suggests that he ‘gains an almost shocking intimacy with this
transgressive body’, and his ‘salty reportage reveals a fascination with
this possibility at least as strong as his avowed disgust’ (Wallace
2003:14). Morrison, who, as I noted earlier, casts his eyes away from
the mahu, his text consolidating, by its refusal to report, his ‘avowed
disgust’, would in Wallace’s terms demonstrate a refusal to be seen to
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Intimate Strangers
‘know’ the mahu. I think, rather, that the differences in the two accounts
of the mahu directly parallel those in Bligh’s and Morrison’s depictions
of the taio ceremony. For all the saltiness of his description, Bligh is
weighing and measuring a body that is known and distantiated through a
mode of scientific investigation. Far from ‘prefiguring his own later and
continually problematic imbrication in the disciplining of masculine
pleasures’ (Wallace 2003:14), Bligh’s investigation consolidates his
distance from the practices he describes. His hand on the mahu’s testicles is a testimony to the absence of desire. Morrison’s knowledge of
the marriage of male friends, on the other hand, implicates him as
participant-observer. We know he has sealed such friendship bonds.
Exposing his local knowledge exposes him to a reader’s knowingness.
Like Banks in mourner’s garb, he risks being smutted.
George Hamilton, in his account of taio, tries to imitate a Banksian
blend of scientific and salacious interest, knowledge and knowingness.
As surgeon of the Pandora, he represents the man of science on a voyage
whose otherwise blinkered singleness of purpose led to the loss
of opportunities to map new islands and rescue survivors from La
Pérouse’s ill-fated expedition.7 He thus structurally occupies the Banks
role, which he embraces with gusto: playing participant-observer with
particular relish when the topic is local sexual practices, but equally
fleshing out Captain Edwards’s rebarbatively sparse narrative with
descriptions of local agriculture and terrain, to the point where bodies
and islands seem fully conflated in his prose: ‘we examined Ulitea and
Otahah’ [Raiatea and Taha’a] (E. Edwards and Hamilton 1915:122).
Where Edwards’s report makes no mention of taio, Hamilton gives a full
account of the bond, and the difference between the two Pandora texts
becomes articulated via this topic as one between a refusal to see and a
seeing too much. As I noted in Chapter 2, Hamilton’s version of taio
circles around familiar questions of calculation: are gifts of friendship
generous beyond European standards or strategically entailed? Are
women objects of exchange or pleasure-seekers exploiting a system of
alienable relations? Hamilton’s whole account, in its peculiar mixture of
revelation and obfuscation, demonstrates nothing more eloquently than
the limits of a certain mode of knowingness for understanding intimacy.
When he describes the heiva:
7
Basil Thompson writes in his introduction to Captain Edwards’s bare and factual
account of the Pandora’s mission to round up the mutineers that ‘with a different
commander, the voyage would have been one of the most important in the history of
South Seas discovery’ (E. Edwards and Hamilton 1915:4).
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After half an hour’s hard exercise, the dear creatures had remüé themselves into a
perfect fureur, and the piece concluded by the ladies exposing that which is
better felt than seen; and, in that state of nature, walked from the bottom of the
theatre to the top where we were sitting on the grass, till they approached just by
us, and then we complimented them in bowing, with all the honours of war
(E. Edwards and Hamilton 1915:108)
it becomes impossible to distinguish degrees of agency and performativity, public event and private fantasy. The welter of innuendo,
peppered with French, the language of sexual knowledge in Tahiti since
Bougainville’s crew emblazoned their own public sexual performances,
signals a kind of connoisseurship that leaves the reader spectacularly
uninformed. Friendship, like everything else in Tahiti, is here a cipher
for sex. Discussion of purported local practices produces the figure of
the consummately knowing observer/interpreter, whose knowledge
remains trapped in circles of self-reference.
Alliance
He says it will show all his enemies that we are good Friends.
– William Bligh
When Hamilton briefly abandons innuendo to try to describe the more
specific valences of Tahitian friendship, female sexuality drops out of his
account, and he writes of masculine alliance, co-identity and violence:
The force of friendship amongst these good creatures will be more fully
understood from the following circumstance: Churchhill [sic], the principal
ringleader of the mutineers, on his landing, became the Tyo, or friend, of a
great chief in the upper districts. Some time after the chief happening to die
without issue, his title and estate, agreeable to their law from Tyoship, devolved
on Churchhill, who having some dispute with one Thomson of the Bounty, was
shot by him. The natives immediately rose, and revenged the death of Churchhill
their chief, by killing Thomson, whose skull was afterwards shown to us, which
bore evident marks of fracture. (E. Edwards and Hamilton 1915:110)
All accounts of the mutineers’ sojourn in Tahiti take this as a seminal
friendship anecdote: as a way of explaining the unique ‘force’ and
‘circumstance’ of the taio bond. Even Edwards’s restricted report allows
itself a brief moment of pseudo-ethnographic speculation when he
recounts that ‘Churchill, Master at Arms, had been murdered by
Matthew Thompson, and that Matthew Thompson was killed by the
natives and offered as a sacrifice on their altars for the murder of
Churchill, whom they had made a chief’ (E. Edwards and Hamilton
1915:30). For Edwards such extreme retributive loyalty must be
ascribed to a generalized notion of religious sacrifice. Bligh on the other
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Intimate Strangers
hand, as self-appointed expert on Tahitian friendship, refuses to sanctify
the deaths by reference to cultural practice. In his Providence journal he
instead restores the double murder to the framework of British justice,
which they are seen to have evaded and yet somehow fulfilled: ‘thus
these two Villains affected their own destruction, and avoided the punishment that awaited them’ (Oliver 1988:125).8
Morrison traces the relationship between the falling out of the
European friends and their Tahitian taio loyalties. Thompson and
Churchill had moved to the district of Taiarapu with Brown, a beachcomber the mutineers found living at Matavai on their return to Tahiti.
As Morrison narrates, ‘Soon after their Arrival at Tyarrabboo they had a
quarrel (which we were sensible Brown Had fomented) and parted.
Thompson making friends with Teetorea the Chief of Towtirra & uncle
to Vayheeadooa, and Churchill went to Vyeowtea to a house prepared
for him, Brown going to live with Matte who was then at Towtirra’
(Morrison 1935:93). Much of Morrison’s account of the breakup of
the friendship mixes a kind of petty playground politics – best friends
split by third parties, jealousy of new intimacies – with a violent revenge
logic reminiscent of pre-political xenia. However, two aspects of
Morrison’s reporting of the deaths stand out, both of which are specific
to the European encounter with the particularities of the taio bond.
Morrison rehearses the question of whether property or sentiment lies
at the heart of such friendships:
We knew not what to think of this business as we were inclined to think that
Thompsons death was more on account of His having the property of both, then
for Killing Churchill, but the Natives insisted that it was for killing him who they
Acknowleg’d to be a Chief in consequence of His Friendship with the late
Vayheeadooa whose Name he also bore. (Morrison 1935:94)
If he seems here to endorse scepticism about Tahitian friendship claims,
a more complex commentary on the entailments of name exchange
resonates in Morrison’s remark that ‘Thompson growing Jealous of
Churchill threatened to Shoot him if any difference or distinction was
made between them’ (Morrison 1935:93). While both have befriended
powerful ari’i at Taiarapu, when Vehiatua, Churchill’s taio, dies,
Churchill’s status as embodiment of Vehiatua’s identity becomes manifest. This is the moment at which exogenous ties triumph over endogenous similarities. Stranger loyalty takes over from the friendship of fellow
8
In the first version of his journal, Bligh describes Churchill and Thompson as
‘unfortunate Wretches’, but the words are altered in his amended journal, presumably
corrected upon his return to England, with hindsight as to the outcome of the mutineers’
trial.
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countrymen, fellow crew members, fellow mutineers. ‘Difference or
distinction was made between’ Thompson and Churchill, on no basis
of race or class, but according to local ties of friendship.
Greg Dening is a subtle commentator on the way taio worked to
ramify relations for the returned mutineers in Tahiti. He suggests that
within broader Tahitian society, it was ‘their relationship to the highly
ranked Tahitians that kept at bay much ordinary envy and anger at their
presence’ (Dening 1992:217). I have in turn tried to suggest that
‘ordinary envy and anger’ between the mutineers themselves was subject to extraordinary pressures when it encountered the varying
rewards offered by the taio bond. The kinds of intense loyalty and
violent breach that erupted as consequences of these new relationships
were in some ways the flip side of mutiny. Where the mutiny called on
the politics of allegiance, taio manifested a politics of alliance. The two
terms are, as the Oxford English Dictionary notes, sometimes confounded, but where allegiance declares a relationship of hierarchy, alliance is forged from a relationship of affinity. The former is a relationship
between subjects and objects: ‘the relation or duties of a liege-man to his
liege-lord; the tie or obligation of a subject to his sovereign, or government’; ‘the recognition of the claims which anything has to our respect
and duty’ (OED). The latter is a relationship between fellow subjects. Its
terms – kinship, consanguinity, friendship – stress the equality of its
parties: ‘union through marriage or common parentage, relationship,
kinship, consanguinity’; ‘combination for a common object’; ‘community or relationship in nature or qualities; affinity; inclusion in the same
class’; ‘people united by kinship or friendship; kindred, friends, allies’
(OED). If the mutiny required the crew members of the Bounty to
declare their allegiance, for or against government as represented by
Bligh’s command, taio allowed them to formalize an affinity across
cultural boundaries that in turn liberated them from the hierarchies of
their home culture. It gave explicit recognition to a principle of coidentity inherent in the notion of alliance. But it did so, not by weighing
or comparing affinities, but rather by risking and instantiating a bond.
Unsurprisingly, it was this aspect of taio, rather than its carefully
mastered logic of reciprocity, that seemed to confound Bligh. Upon
his return to Tahiti in the Providence in 1792, he misread alliance as
allegiance, interrogating his former taios as to their links with the
mutineers and modifying his subsequent relations with them accordingly. Bligh detected ‘a natural degree of affection in Tynah & his
Father that gave me much pleasure’ (Oliver 1988:74). However
Tina’s capacity to ally himself with the mutineers was a source of
suspicion:
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I asked him how he came to be so friendly to Christian, for that proved to me he
was not sincere in what he said. He replied – ‘I really thought you was living and
gone to England untill Christian came back the second time. I was then from
home, but all my Friends, as soon as they heard from the Men who came on
Shore, on their questioning them, that you was lost, from that time we did not
profess any friendship to him, and Christian knew it so well that he only
remained a few hours, and went away in such a hurry, that he left a second
Anchor behind him . . .’ Thus he freed himself from any suspicion on my side, &
with his usual good nature and cheerfulness regained my esteem & regard.
(Oliver 1988:75)
Once again Bligh is torn between a confidence that he can read the
‘natural’ signs of genuine sentiment in his old friend, and fear that he
is being manipulated by the friendship claim. The dilemma is both
immediately practical, and exemplary of the philosophical conundrums
we have encountered in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. For David
Hume, the suspicion engendered by the potential gap between professed
and genuine sentiment could ultimately only be reconciled by a knowledge of character. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
(1751), Hume cites two varieties of scepticism, one general:
That all benevolence is mere hypocrisy, friendship a cheat, public spirit a farce,
fidelity a snare to procure trust and confidence; and that, while all of us, at
bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises, in order
to put others off their guard, and expose them the more to our wiles and
machinations,
and the other philosophical:
That, whatever affection one may feel, or imagine he feels for others, no passion
is, or can be disinterested; that the most generous friendship, however sincere, is
a modification of self-love; and that, even unknown to ourselves, we seek only
our own gratification, while we appear the most deeply engaged in schemes for
the liberty and happiness of mankind. (Hume 2006:90)
Hume’s subsequent refutation of both these principles is primarily ad
hominem. He responds in the first instance: ‘What heart one must be
possessed of who professes such principles, and who feels no internal
sentiment that belies so pernicious a theory, it is easy to imagine.’ And in
the second, he shows that practice contradicts theory by holding up lived
examples against stated principles:
Whoever concludes from the seeming tendency of this opinion, that those, who
make profession of it, cannot possibly feel the true sentiments of benevolence, or
have any regard for genuine virtue, will often find himself, in practice, very much
mistaken. Probity and honour were no strangers to EPICURUS and his sect.
ATTICUS and HORACE seem to have enjoyed from nature, and cultivated by
reflection, as generous and friendly dispositions as any disciple of the austerer
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schools. And among the modern, HOBBES and LOCKE, who maintained
the selfish system of morals, lived irreproachable lives; though the former lay
not under any restraint of religion, which might supply the defects of his
philosophy. (Hume 2006:91)
Hume, then, posits a distinction between principle and practice against a
thesis that equally distinguishes between public statement and private
sentiment. But the confidence he achieves is in turn precarious. It
implies a social and philosophical world in which people act very differently from how they profess.
The kind of knowledge adduced here, however, is precisely of a type
precluded by the terms of contact. Although Bligh was able to reference
the question of whether Tina was genuinely professing friendship or
manipulatively courting the dominant visitor against the experience both
of previous voyagers and his own previous voyages, these are ultimately
transitory rather than embedded encounters. Tina’s explanation is not a
strong one: surviving mutineers testified that Christian planned his immediate departure from Tahiti prior to dropping off those who chose to
remain there; a number of Tahitian taios and women were on the Bounty
with Christian when it departed Tahiti again, some of whom had already
accompanied him to Tubuai, and none of whom appear to have renounced
his friendship once they became apprised of his treatment of Bligh. Moreover, Tina was not present when Christian reappeared, and his explanation
is devolved in the ‘some of my best friends tell me’ anecdotal mode. Bligh’s
eagerness to believe in Tina’s fidelity and to confirm the natural sentiment
he reads upon his features, is as integral to the exoneration of his own
command of the Bounty mission as it is to proving Christian’s guilt: it
shows that Bligh read friendship correctly on his first voyage. Indeed, his
renewed affection for Tina here, on whom he reflected more unflatteringly,
as we saw earlier, in his Bounty log, has a quality of absolution.
The politics of alliance are still strongly at work behind taio, however,
and Tina does appear to have a hidden agenda. Immediately after
asserting his renewed esteem and regard, Bligh writes, ‘Pooeno & the
Matavai People seem to be objects of great dislike to Tynah and his
Father, they requested I would undertake the War with them to destroy
those people’ (Oliver 1988:75). Poeno, it may be recalled, was Bligh’s
second Bounty chiefly taio: his and Tina’s wives rivalled each other in
their displays of grief after the Bounty was threatened by a storm in
Matavai Bay (see Chapter 4). There is, then, a symmetry between
Bligh’s desire for reassurance that Tina turned against Christian, with
whom both he and Bligh had formerly friendly relations, and Tina’s
desire that Bligh take up arms against his former friend Poeno. Bligh
manages to explain to Tina that ‘it would interfere with the busyness
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I was sent on’ to turn against Poeno (Oliver 1988:75), an explanation
that presumably would not have sufficed to justify any continued support of Christian by Tina. It is Bligh who has forged non-exclusive bonds
in Tahiti, played off ari’i against one another and divided his alliance. He
refuses to identify with his taio Tina in the way that Churchill became
identified with Vehiatua: to take on his friend’s cause.9 While his journal
does not explicitly register any sense of personal conflict over this issue
of loyalty, Bligh’s subsequent comments on an ensuing gift exchange
with Tina suggest that the strict traditional codes of friendship-making
have becoming diluted. ‘There was very little of the ancient Custom of
the Otaheitean; all that was laid aside,’ he writes; ‘I believe no European
in future will ever know what their ancient Customs of receiving
Strangers were’ (Oliver 1988:75). Bligh also displaces any sense of
infidelity back onto Tina, questioning his acquisition of a secondary
wife, the younger sister of his wife ’Itia, and in fact the widow of the
same Vehiatua whose bond with Churchill proved so definitively binding
(Oliver 1988:78). The acquisition of such secondary wives was common
practice among the ari’i, but is more fundamentally shocking to the
English, in their own cultural terms, than breaches of friendship.10 If
Tina’s affections can be so fundamentally realigned, the question of his
loyalty to Bligh must perhaps after all remain open.
Seeming Friendly
What reason had you to imagine that John Millward was friendly to you
at the time he was placed Centinel over you?
– He appeared to me to be very uneasy in Mind.
– Deposition of John Fryer, Bounty court martial
Back in England, at the trial of the mutineers, which took place between
12 and 19 September 1792, questions of loyalty and motivation were
also being played out. Ten mutineers of the fourteen apprehended by the
crew of the Pandora made it back to England for trial (four perished
when the Pandora was wrecked). These were Peter Heywood, midshipman; Joseph Coleman, armourer; James Morrison, boatswain’s mate;
9
10
Bligh does take some degree of issue with Poeno prior to Tina’s arrival (Oliver
1988:64–5); however, it is not predicated on identification with Tina. Poeno also had
more than one Bounty friendship – he became James Morrison’s taio when the mutineers
returned to Tahiti.
George Tobin also comments on Tina’s infidelity in his journal – perhaps partly from
identification with ’Itia, who was his taio – observing ‘Poor ’Itia seemed neglected for
those charms still in bloom of her younger sister and was seldom allowed to share her
lord’s bed’ (Tobin 2007:79).
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Charles Norman, carpenter’s mate; Thomas McIntosh, carpenter’s crew;
and the seamen Thomas Ellison, Thomas Burkitt, John Millward,
William Muspratt and Michael Byrn. Coleman, Norman, McIntosh
and Byrn were acquitted; Heywood and Morrison were pardoned; and
Muspratt was subsequently acquitted on a technicality. The trial, I want
to argue, once again pitted account keeping against local knowledge, and
attempted to distinguish between cultural fluency and degeneracy. As
each accused defended himself, he was above all putting into practice
lessons he had learned in Tahiti: how can one distinguish, in the absence
of possibilities of direct verbal communication, from expression, tone or
the manipulation of objects, whether intentions are friendly? How is
goodwill performed?
Primarily, it was inaction that had to be defended. The accused
adopted a variety of postures to explain what they claimed was not active
malice but fundamental passivity. Morrison, Millward and Burkett
argued that their willingness to take weapons into their hands was
motivated by an agreement with the Master, Fryer, sealed by whispered
words and handshakes, to try to retake the ship. Norman, Coleman and
McIntosh, already exonerated by Bligh, and Byrn, the semi-blind fiddler, pleaded a different passivity: forced to remain on board because of
their varied skills as carpenters, armourer, and musician, they registered
their resistance with cries and tears. Heywood and Ellison, from different ends of the class spectrum, pleaded the innocence of extreme youth:
both were seventeen years old at the time of the trial. They claimed in
retrospect to have suffered a trauma: they were the, again passive,
victims of temporary confusion. The failure of any real assumption of
agency leaves both witnesses and defendants grasping at the slippery
signs of friendly intention. Fryer claims that he made a signal to John
Millward, the Gunner, ‘who I thought seemed friendly’, and that he had
gauged this friendly feeling from the fact that ‘He appeared to me to be
very uneasy in Mind’ (Rutter 1931:74, 79). Morrison was perceived to
be an ally when ‘his appearance gave me reasons to speak to him to be on
his Guard; he appeared to be friendly’ (Rutter 1931:81). The accused
grasp at every manifestation of both goodwill and confusion, adducing
equally their bustle to provision the launch and their willingness to stay
behind, their emotion and lack of emotion, as evidence of this elusive
friendliness.
Tears, tokens of sensibility that, as we saw in Chapter 4, were taken as
indices of genuine Tahitian feeling by Bligh during the Bounty voyage,
are here significantly evidential. John Fryer testifies: ‘Thomas McIntosh,
Carpenter’s Mate, another of the Prisoners, and Charles Norman,
another of the Prisoners, were leaning over the rail apparently to me to
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be crying – Michael Byrn, another of the Prisoners, in one of the Boats
crying’ (Rutter 1931:77). Not all such tears are equal, however. When
interrogated as to his interpretation of the men’s crying, William Cole
the Boatswain makes a distinction:
You have said that you did not see any of the Prisoners shew marks of
disapprobation of what was going on – What was the Cause of Coleman,
Norman, and Michael Byrn’s crying as you have represented them to be? –
They wanted to come away; as to Byrn I do not know why he was crying.
I suppose for no other reason he was blind he could not see, to my knowledge.
(Rutter 1931:87)
Peter Heywood, Thomas Ellison and Thomas Burkett all testify that the
officers Hayward and Hallet, who both subsequently spoke particularly
vindictively against the mutineers (Hayward had also accompanied
Edwards on the Pandora voyage and had notably displayed no sympathy
towards his former shipmates), shed their own significant tears when
told by Christian they could not remain on the Bounty:
I was influenced in my Conduct by the Example of my Messmates, Mr. Hallet
and Mr. Hayward, the former of whom was very much agitated and the latter,
tho’ he had been many years at Sea, yet, when Christian ordered him into the
Boat he was evidently alarmed at the perilous situation, and so much overcome
by the harsh Command, that he actually shed tears . . .
When the two later Gentlemen Rec’d the order they weep’t Bitterly and
Mr. Hayward begged to know what he had done to be sent out of The Ship . . .
Mr. Hallett said (with tears in his Eyes), ‘I hope you will not insist upon
it, Mr. Christian.’ (Rutter 1931:139, 176, 187)
Yet if tears in these cases betray ignobility and not merely sentiment,
their absence remains more crucially damning. Peter Heywood must
account for his dry eyes as an alternative manifestation of agitation. He
claims an excess of feeling has stymied its display: ‘The Spectacle was as
sudden to my Eyes as it was unknown to my Heart – and both were
Convulsed at the Scene’; ‘It is not in my power to describe my feelings
upon seeing the Captain as I did’ (Rutter 1931:138). Heywood seems
here to draw on Adam Smith’s model of ‘silent and majestic sorrow’, but
the ‘convulsed’ eye that does not weep had proved unconvincing to
Bligh, as we saw earlier, when he encountered the mourning Tahitian
mother. Like that mother, Heywood has been accused of not merely
failing to weep, but laughing (Rutter 1931:143). In his defence, he in
turn calls on the spectacle of his own mournful mother: ‘My Parents (but
I have only one left, a solitary and Mournful Mother who is at home
weeping and trembling for the Event of this day)’, and indeed a chorus of
female relatives whose tears stand in for his own: ‘the consolation or
settled misery of a dear Mother and two Sisters who mingle their tears
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together and are all but frantic for my situation – pause for your Verdict!’
(Rutter 1931:147, 148). If this constitutes an attempt to recast his
apparent lack of emotion, in Adam Smith’s terms, as appropriate masculine restraint, Heywood also continues to perform his youth and
innocence here: he appears at the court martial primarily as the boy –
the son and brother – rather than the man.11
The trial returns repeatedly to the ambiguous expressions of Heywood
and Morrison during the mutiny. Hayward is asked how he distinguishes
between the motives of Morrison and McIntosh, who both gave practical
assistance to the mutineers, and responds, ‘The Difference was in the
Countenances of the People, tho’ Opinion may be ill-grounded; the
Countenance of the one was rejoiced and the other depressed.’ However,
he suspects Heywood of being on the side of the mutineers, although
when asked, ‘Did you observe any Marks of Joy or Sorrow on his
Countenance or Behaviour?’ he replies, ‘Sorrow’, an inconsistency
picked up by the court (Rutter 1931:121). As Greg Dening has shown,
the trial of the mutineers was theatre. The repeated references to ‘marks’
of emotion recalls the eighteenth-century acting theory that I discussed
in Chapter 4, and indeed the crew members’ defences divide along the
lines of such theory. McIntosh, Norman, Coleman and Byrn assert
the identity of their expression with their feeling of sorrow (‘the
Sorrow I expressed at being detained was real and unfeigned’ (Rutter
1931:161)), while Heywood and Morrison question the legibility of
emotion in the play of facial feature. Accused of laughter by Hallet,
Heywood asks whether he could ‘have been able to particularise the
Muscles of a man’s Countenance even at a considerable distance from
him’ (Rutter 1931:143). If the testimony of his fellow officers is legitimate, then the connection between face and feeling must be false,
Heywood implies, since ‘I am sure, if the Countenance is at all an Index
to the Heart, mine must have betrayed the sorrow and distress he has so
accurately described’ (Rutter 1931:146). Morrison’s defence goes further. In responding to the accusation, ‘My Countenance has also been
compared with another employ’d on the same business’, he asserts, ‘This
Honorable Court knows that all Men do not bear misfortunes with the
same fortitude or equanimity of Mind, and that the face is too often a bad
index to the Heart.’ Indeed, his very ability to mask his feelings is
represented as part of his collected endeavour to turn the mutiny
around: ‘If there were No sorrow mark’d in my Countenance, it was to
11
John Barrow dwells, in his defence, on the relationship of Peter Heywood with his
mother and sisters, and reproduces some of their correspondence (Barrow
1989:202–218).
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deceive those whose Act I abhorred, that I might be at liberty to seize the
first Opportunity that might appear favourable, to the retaking of the
Ship’ (Rutter 1931:166). In Diderot’s terms, Morrison’s capacity for
detachment is consummate acting.
Writing as well as performance plays an important role in the trial.
The two mutineers whose faces have proven hardest to read, Heywood
and Morrison, have a distinct authorial advantage. Both have managed
to retain journals. Heywood’s has assisted Captain Edwards ‘to form
my Letter to the Admiralty’; Edwards testifies ‘he gave me some
Account; I had recourse to his Journals, and he was ready to Answer
any Questions that I asked him’ (Rutter 1931:156). Morrison wrote up
his journal in 1792, first as he awaited trial and then as he recuperated
after receiving the king’s pardon (Maude 1968:2; Dening 1992:74).
Greg Dening has argued that his account was itself instrumental in the
outcome of Morrison’s trial: that the existence of a manuscript was
public knowledge, and that his supporters bargained for pardon on
the assurance that it would remain unpublished (Dening 1992:41). (If
this was indeed the case, it is perhaps unsurprising that, when he
repeated his breadfruit voyage, Bligh was so fearful and punishing of
Godolphin’s and other alternative journals.) Heywood and Morrison
also presented the most literary of the mutineers’ defences. Heywood’s
statement is read by an attorney: he continues to shield himself behind
protectors, and paint himself as the sentimental innocent. Morrison’s
defence is closer to legalistic detective work: he carefully builds his
case. Other mutineers are also redeemed or condemned by writing.
Muspratt employs a skilful legal counsel to conduct his case, who
eventually enables him to evade his sentence on a technicality. Thomas
Ellison, who was hanged, is the real boy victim of the court martial: the
youngest crew member, he is, whatever his degree of involvement, most
poignantly innocent of the literacy that exonerates other mutineers.
At the trial he speaks of the debts his illiteracy incurred: ‘Capt. Bligh
took great pains with me and spoke too [sic] Mr. Samule, his Clark,
to teach me Writing and Arithmetick and I believe Would have taught
me further had not this happend. I must have been very Ingreatfull
if I had in any respect assisted in this Unhappy Affair’ (Rutter
1931:177–8).
Bligh, not present to hear the words of the accused or their written
testimonies, called the mutineers to mind by their ‘marks’. At Coupang,
after his arduous open boat voyage, he drew up a list, ‘made out from the
recollection of the persons with me, who were best acquainted with their
private marks’ (Bligh 1794:277), which included the following portraits
of those who stood trial:
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Peter Heywood, midshipman, aged seventeen years, five feet seven inches high,
fair complexion, light brown hair, well proportioned; very much tattooed; and on
the right leg is tattooed the three legs of Man, as it is upon that coin. At this time
he has not done growing; and speaks with the Manx, or Isle of Man, accent . . .
James Morrison, boatswain’s mate, aged twenty-eight years, five feet eight
inches high, sallow complexion, long black hair, slender made; has lost the use
of the upper joint of the forefinger of the right hand; tattooed with a star under
his left breast, and a garter round his left leg, with the motto of ‘Honi soit qui mal
y pense’; and has been wounded in one of his arms with a musket-ball . . .
John Millward, seaman, aged twenty-two years, five feet five inches high,
brown complexion, dark hair, strong made; very much tattooed in different
parts of the body, and under the pit of the stomach, with a taoomy of Otaheite . . .
Thomas Burkett, seaman, aged twenty-six years, five feet nine inches high, fair
complexion, very much pitted with the small-pox, brown hair, slender made, and
very much tattooed . . .
William Muspratt, seaman, aged thirty years, five feet six inches high, dark
complexion, brown hair, slender made, a very strong black beard, with scars
under his chin; is tattooed in several places of his body . . .
Thomas Ellison, seaman, aged seventeen years, five feet three inches high, fair
complexion, dark hair, strong made; had got his name tattooed on his right arm
and dated 25th October 1788 . . .
William Byrne [i.e. Michael Byrn], seaman, aged twenty-eight years, five feet
six inches high, fair complexion, short fair hair, slender made; is almost blind and
has the mark of an issue on the back of his neck; plays the violin.
Joseph Coleman, armourer, aged forty years, five feet six inches high, fair
complexion, grey hair, strong made; a heart tattooed on one of his arms.
Charles Norman, carpenter’s mate, aged 26 years, five feet nine inches high,
fair complexion, light brown hair, slender made, is pitted with the small-pox, and
has a remarkable motion with his head and eyes.
Thomas M’Intosh, carpenter’s crew, aged twenty-eight years, five feet six
inches high, fair complexion, light brown hair, slender made; is pitted with the
small-pox and is tattooed.
The four last are deserving of mercy, being detained against their inclinations.
(Bligh 1794:275–7)
The ways in which the mutineers are recorded as marked begin with age
and rank, height and complexion, and end with the legacies of disease
and deformity, but the most distinguishing markings are those of the
tattoos almost all have adopted. There seems to be a correspondence, in
Bligh’s list, between tattooing and guilt, so that the four ‘deserving of
mercy’ are either untattooed or have minor or unnoticed markings.
Heywood’s heavy tattooing, on the other hand, comes as a surprise to
those who have read his protestations of youth and innocence. Indeed
his most memorable marking, the symbol of the ‘Isle of Man’, seems to
encapsulate the ambiguous status between boy and manhood that he
manipulates in his defence: although ‘not done growing’ he has tasted an
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‘isle of manhood’ in Tahiti, but the ‘Isle of Man’ is also his family seat,
referencing the birthright that will eventually be significant to his
pardon. Thomas Ellison, on the other hand, has identified himself fully
with the new island, inscribing the date of his arrival in Tahiti under his
name upon his right arm, while Millward, like Fletcher Christian, has
adopted a full Tahitian tattoo, rather than a composite of British and
local cultural symbols.
Without wishing to labour a notion of culture ‘inscribed on the body’,
there are ways in which the mutineers can be seen to have adopted a
writing and a language that communicate across the codes of ship’s law.
At a crucial moment during the mutiny, Christian is reported to have
attempted to silence Bligh by addressing him in Tahitian. The semiliterate Thomas Ellison is well equipped to translate Christian’s words
to the court: ‘Captn. Bligh Wanted to talk with him, I believe. I heard
Mr. Christain [sic] say two or three times “Mammoo, sir,” which the
meaning of the word is, “Sillance, sir”’ (Rutter 1931:175).12 This address
to the captain forms part of Ellison’s portrait of a deranged Christian: ‘he
looked like a Madman, is [sic] long hair was luse, is shirt Collair open’. But
even as he appears simply to have forgotten distinctions of rank, Christian
asserts that the crew has become bound by a new cultural language. It
includes a variety of practices from which Bligh kept himself exempt:
tattooing, sexual exchange; as well as others in which he saw himself as
expert: vocabulary, gift-giving, making significant friends. For all his
careful diplomacy, Bligh appears excluded from this achieved fluency.
Towtow
He who justly proves himself a friend is man enough nor is he wanting
to society. A single friendship may acquit him.
– Shaftesbury
Although he was adopted as a Romantic figure, Christian was, according
to Bligh’s description, a bowlegged man, ‘tattooed on his backside’, with
whom one might be quite literally reluctant to shake hands: ‘He is
subject to violent perspirations, and particularly his hands, so that he
soils anything he handles’ (Bligh 1794:275). If this makes him a distasteful associate and indeed contributes to the picture of his descent into
madness in British terms, his willing nativization opens him to a different
level of cross-cultural friendship from Bligh’s. Despite all the careful
parsing of motive, the weighing of allegiance and the rereading of gesture
12
Burkett has Christian addressing the term, less respectfully, to Hayward (Rutter
1931:185).
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that takes place at the court martial, James Morrison’s equally evidential
text makes a simple claim: that Christian understood friendship better
than Bligh; that he was a better friend. When the mutineers arrived back
at Tahiti to stock themselves with animals and foodstuffs and women for
the fortified community they planned to construct at Tubuai, Christian
told their Tahitian friends that the ship’s crew had met with Captain
Cook, that Cook had settled a country called ‘Wytootacke’ (Aitutake, in
what would become known as the Cook Islands), and that Christian and
his party were obtaining supplies to join him there. Morrison recounts:
We remained here till the 16th during which time we were plentifully supplyd
with evry necessary by the Natives our old friends nor do I think they would have
thought any worse of us had they known the truth of the Story or been any way
shy of supplying us as Mr. Christian was beloved by the whole of them but on the
Contrary none liked Mr. Bligh tho they flatterd him for His Riches, which is the
Case among polishd Nations those in power being always Courted. (Morrison
1935:52)
Christian, Morrison claims, was ‘beloved’. He made friendships that
testified to genuine sentiment, and transcended the politics of diplomacy. In both Tahitian and European terms, Christian’s friendships
purportedly prompt an uncalculated giving, far removed from that
displayed by and towards Bligh.
The romance and inconclusiveness of his story have made Christian in
particular, of all the Bounty’s cast, a figure of ongoing speculation. In
briefly turning to some of the things known and written about his time
on Pitcairn, I simply want to conclude this chapter as I began it, by
scrutinizing a claim about friendship. If, as Bligh asserted, the mutiny
could be attributed to the ‘friendly and endearing behaviour’ of Tahitians, and if, as Morrison professed, Christian held the affectionate
support of Tahitians not through any principle of abstract justice but
through the force of feeling he inspired, ‘beloved by the whole of them’,
then how did this story of cross-cultural friendship play out on Pitcairn
Island?
As Alan Frost has shown, accounts of the mutiny offer an inconsistent
composite portrait of Christian: ‘We learn that Christian was “always
cheerful”, and that he was “always sullen and morose”; that he was a
person who indulged his sexuality liberally, and that he was the very
reverse of a sensual man; that he cared about the welfare of his party, and
that he treated them capriciously and brutally’ (Frost 1994:227). Affectively and interpersonally, Christian appears equally as bad and good
friend. Frost is particularly interested in the ways in which Christian’s
story was taken up by the Wordsworth/Coleridge/Southey Romantic
circle (he was also famously and more immediately the subject of
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Byron’s ‘The Island’). Romanticism, however, is quintessentially a
literature of narcissism rather than friendship: the image of Christian
favoured by Byron, ‘Stern, aloof a little from the rest’ (Canto IV, 85), is
tempered, in the testimonies of his British supporters, by a sentimental
tribute to his capacities for inspiring male friendship. Edward Christian’s
defence of his brother figures him making repeated attempts to do alone
what the sympathetic feeling he inspires in the crew instead requires him
to do communally: to abandon Bligh. Christian is said to have been,
alternatively, carefully planning to slip away from the ship on a raft of
spars in the hope of making his way back to Tonga, or contemplating
suicide (he is described in two sources wearing a deep sea lead ‘concealed in his breast’ prior to the mutiny as ‘another resource’): either
way, he is reported to have told Norman that the mutiny ‘never would
have happened if I could have left the ship alone’ (Barney 1794:252).
When the experiment of settlement on Tubuai fails, Christian is again
represented as asking to see out his fate alone: ‘I desire no one to stay with
me’, only once again to find himself joined by a faithful company who
declare, ‘We shall never leave you, Mr. Christian, go where you will’ (Barney
1794:260). Edward Christian collects ‘word for word, some of the
unpremeditated expressions used by the gentlemen and people of the
Bounty in speaking of this unfortunate mutineer’, which include fervent
testimonies to his capacity to inspire friendship: ‘every officer and seaman
on board the ship would have gone through fire and water to have served him’;
‘He . . . was dear to all who ever knew him’; ‘beloved by all’ (Barney
1794:262–3).
In literary terms then, Christian may be seen to straddle the types of
the sentimental man of feeling and the solitary Romantic hero. He is a
sensitive individual in a harsh man’s world. Edward Christian depicts his
brother as emotionally overwrought in the immediate lead-up to the
mutiny: ‘tears were running fast from his eyes in big drops’. Yet such
tears are irregular and provoked, testimony to the extent of his abuse by
Bligh: ‘This was the only time he ever was seen in tears on board the ship,
and one of the seamen, being asked if he ever observed Christian in tears
before, answered, “No, he was no milk-sop”’ (Barney 1794:250–1). It is
important, however, to note the extent to which his depiction, both
as feeling and as manly, is equally reliant on what is understood to be
a Tahitian frame of reference. Thus, Edward’s defence of Christian as a
man who inspired strong male feeling is addressed to popular depictions
of his brother as highly sexually, or in turn emotionally, engaged by the
women, or a woman, of Tahiti. Edward avers that ‘the officers who were
with Christian upon the same duty declare that he never had a female
favourite at Otaheite, nor any attachment or particular connection
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259
among the women. It is true that some had what they called their girls, or
women with whom they constantly lived all the time they were upon the
island, but this was not the case with Christian’ (Barney 1794:262). This
is pseudo-ethnography in the Hamilton mode, conveniently uniting
stereotypes of native female and unruly sailor libido. But multiple
sources also cite taio bonds as evidence of the kinds of loyalty that
Christian inspired.
This is interesting in a number of ways. First, taio complicates the
adoption of a too straightforward binary opposition between homosocial or homosexual shipboard ties and island female connection in any
retrospective assessment of the mutiny (Hough 1973; Wallace 2003:51).
Taio as we have seen, primarily from Morrison, involves a kind of marriage
with, usually, another male, which is understood to formalize a significant
friendship bond entailing an exchange of identities. A compelling world of
male union, then, called the Bounty crew on shore as well as at sea.
Secondly, it involves a covert amalgamation of European and Tahitian
notions of friendship. Thus when Morrison claims that ‘we were plentifully supplyd with evry Necessary by the Natives our old friends nor do
I think they would have thought any worse of us had they known the truth
of the Story or been any way shy of supplying us as Mr. Christian was
beloved by the whole of them’, he moves seamlessly between an understanding of the exchange relationship reified by established friendship in
Tahiti and a familiar European notion of friendship as liberating forms of
trust that exceed legalistic constraints. In order to exonerate Christian
from the ignominy of the mutiny, Morrison frees taio from both its
typically disreputable association with calculation in European accounts
and its much attested particularity. Calculation is reserved to describe the
local relationship with Bligh, who has in turn been too careful to flatter
appropriate powerful figures in bestowing his friendship. Christian on the
other hand, it is claimed, inspired a level of goodwill that exceeds the
conventions of taio. Tahitians would have continued to supply Christian
because he was ‘beloved by the whole of them’ (my emphasis), not just a
particular friend: because he stimulated a force of feeling that overrode
the politics of exchange.
Finally, the complex referencing of taio bonds supports my argument
that local knowledge, and in particular taio as an instantiation of local
knowledge, is one of the most significant ways in which the justice of the
mutiny is contested. Edward Christian enshrines a moment of this
contest in his defence, when he reports:
Captain Bligh sometimes entertained the chiefs of the island, and before all the
company used to abuse Christian for some pretended fault or other . . . There is
no country in the world where the notions of aristocracy and family pride are
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Intimate Strangers
carried higher than at Otaheite, and it is a remarkable circumstance that the
chiefs are naturally distinguished by taller persons, and more open and intelligent
countenances, than the people of inferior condition. Hence these are the
principle qualities by which the natives estimate the gentility of strangers, and
Christian was so great a favourite with them that according to the words of one
person, ‘they adored the very ground he trod upon’. He was tyo, or friend, to a
chief of the first rank in the island, whose name, according to the custom of the
country, he took in exchange for his own, and in whose property he participated.
The chief dined one day with Captain Bligh and was told by him that his tyo
Christian was only his towtow, or servant. The chief upbraided Christian with
this, who was much mortified at being thus degraded in the opinion of his friend,
and endeavoured to recommend himself again to the chief by assuring him that
he, Captain Bligh, and all the officers were towtows of the King of Bretane.
(Barney 1794:257)
We see Bligh here using his knowledge of Tahitian vocabulary to mark a
distinction – possibly even make a pun – between friendship and servitude, from which Christian is in turn forced to exert his own translation
skills to redeem himself. Encounter is depicted as its own complex
performance space, in which local knowledge is required in order to
manifest signs of power. Like Morrison, who claimed that Tahitian ari’i
flattered Bligh ‘for His Riches, which is the Case among polishd Nations
those in power being always Courted’, Edward Christian makes an
argument about cultural consensus. However, he sees a natural aristocracy as uniting Christian with the Tahitian noble savage: Tahitian affirmation becomes a validation of Christian’s qualities as a gentleman and as
a friend.
Yet if his supporters set up taio as a key term in Christian’s defence,
they also establish a basis for condemning the community he established
on Pitcairn Island as a failure of principles of friendship. Because on
Pitcairn the mutineers’ Polynesian taios are definitively recast as towtows.
After leaving Tubuai and returning sixteen mutineers to Matavai Bay,
Christian and the eight mutineers who cast their lot with him cut the
Bounty’s cable and departed on the night of 22 September 1789. The
Tahitian woman Teehuteatuaonoa, known as ‘Jenny’, was one of nineteen women, a female child and six men: three from Tahiti, two from
Tubuai and one from Raiatea, who were abducted on the ship. (Of the
other women, Teehuteatuaonoa reports, one in desperation leapt off
the ship and swam back to shore, while six ‘who were rather ancient’
(Teehuteatuaonoa 1829:590) were dropped off at Moorea.) Teehuteatuaonoa lived on Pitcairn for thirty years before seeking a passage back
to Tahiti, subsequently giving two accounts of the Pitcairn community
that are unique in enabling some individuation of these ‘wives’ and taios
(Teehuteatuaonoa 1819 and 1829). One of the two Tubuaian men she
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Ruinous friendships
261
identifies was Taroamiva, the younger brother of the chief from whom
Christian had purchased the land for his proposed Tubuaian settlement,
who had left his island believing his existence there to be endangered by
his friendship with Christian (Morrison 1935:63–4; Maude 1968:17).
The Raiatean was a high-ranking man named Tararo. Teehuteatuaonoa
also names Oopee and Teimua among the Tahitian taios taken to
Pitcairn. Her own status was a relatively ambiguous one: of all the
women who went to Pitcairn she alone remained childless, and Greg
Dening describes her as taio rather than wife of the mutineer Alexander
Smith (later John Adams), ‘claimed by him and initialed with a tattoo
under her left arm, “AS/1789” ’ (Dening 1992:321).
The abduction of taios was only the first stage in a process by which
Polynesian friends were degraded to servants, and indeed slaves. None
of the Polynesians was given any land on Pitcairn. Teehuteatuaonoa
passes over the significance of such a division of resources, reporting
with a biblical simplicity, ‘They shortly after divided the ground, and
allotted to each his proportion’ (Teehuteatuaonoa 1829:591); however,
this is clearly the moment at which taios, friends bound in a commitment
to sharing resources as though they shared identities, were refigured as
serfs, labouring without land or property of their own. There were, by
Greg Dening’s calculation, ‘Nine portions, nine mutineers; there was no
land for the “blacks” (as they called the natives). Neither the six men
from Tubuai, Tahiti and Raiatea nor the twelve women and infant girl
from Tahiti were allocated land’ (Dening 1992:316). The women in fact
become part of the allotment: one each taken as wives by the mutineers,
and the remaining three shared between the Polynesian men. I have
elsewhere traced in detail the shifts by which, accompanying this division
of property, brown-skinned Polynesians were refigured as ‘blacks’ and
noble savage intimates as natural slaves (V. Smith 2003:130–2). The
rebellions and reprisals that eventually led to the murders of five of the
mutineers and all of the Tubuaian and Society Island men on Pitcairn
were all attributable to this material reconfiguration.
If the history of the mutiny has been figured as a cyclical story of
the debasement of power, friendship – Bligh’s excuse and Edward
Christian’s defence – has been left out of the picture. But tracing the
fluctuating understanding of cross-cultural friendship through the
mutiny’s archive adds significantly to our understanding of this history.
It also maps a wider shift in relations between Europeans and Oceanians
as the eighteenth century drew to a close, and visits of exploration were
replaced by the tentative early settlement of beachcombers, of whom the
Bounty mutineers were among the first, and then missionaries and
traders. As relationships became more enduringly linked for Europeans
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Intimate Strangers
to land and property, the exchanges of taio became more fraught.
Co-identity in cross-cultural friendship was not coterminous with the
fashioning of self that seemed to be rendered possible in these later
translocations. Possibly this is another factor responsible for the linguistic obsolescence of the term taio in the nineteenth century. Rhetorically,
the decline of taio registered in the early stirrings of what was to become
a full-blown literary nostalgia for the immediacy of the first South Seas
encounter. When Bligh returned to Tahiti in the Providence to complete
his breadfruit voyage, he noted, as I mentioned earlier, the decline of
traditional practice, that accompanied the creolization of increased contact: ‘it is rather a difficulty to get them to speak their own language
without mixing a jargon of English, and they are so generally altered,
that I believe no European in future will ever know what their ancient
Customs of receiving Strangers were’ (Oliver 1988:75). Bligh’s nostalgia
here for the uncompromised Tahitian culture he claims to have observed
on earlier visits is clearly tinctured by his own sense of the intervening
history of the mutiny. The mutineers had left, with their mixed race
progeny, a bastardized Tahitian language and culture, not merely structurally but ethically debased: ‘Our Friends here have benefited very little
from the intercourse they have had with Europeans since I left them. Our
Countrymen must have taken great pains to have taught them such vile
& blackguard expressions as are in the Mouth of every Tahitian’ (Oliver
1988:62). Yet it was not just criminal contact that had been detrimental:
Vancouver’s Admiralty-backed exploration voyage had equally participated, in the interim between Bligh’s two breadfruit voyages, in
changing codes of contact: ‘When the Matilda Captain Weatherhead
passed Matavai, some of the Natives swam off to him with Notes that
some of the Discovery’s People had given them to recommend them as
Tyo’s, these Notes were dated the 12th January 1792, which I suspect
was the time they Sailed’ (Oliver 1988:61–2). The conversion of taio
from form of practice to form letter, from exchange to account keeping,
is registered even by the punctilious Bligh with regret.
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