With Hindsight

The Launch, Pacific Ocean, April 28, 1789.

My darling Betsy, 

Only with you can I be truly open and admit the truth.  Much as I long for you now, I would not wish you to suffer my travails for a single second. If you were here, you would know exactly what to say to soothe my troubled thoughts. 

All these years at sea should have sharpened my instinct for danger, yet to recognise the storm gathering around me proved impossible until it was too late. 

I carry these pages in my coat pocket now, written in the gloom of the open launch while around me the men sleep fitfully. I must record the horrors of what befell me in the final hours before the greatest humiliation of my life.

In the days before my command was stolen from me, the crew fell into a stubborn silence whenever I appeared on deck. Nevertheless, I walked straight and held myself as tall as my modest height allowed. In my everyday uniform of blue coat, breeches, waistjacket, white lapels worn open, and the gold-washed brass buttons you so admired, I felt the old, unmatchable pride of having earned my place. Having begun as a ship’s boy — a captain’s servant — it had taken years of toil and discipline to reach my station. I had always considered it the highest honour to serve my King and country.

Yet did you know that beyond all that, I counted your love as my true achievement? The thought of what my promotion would mean for you and the girls back home gave every stride across those well-scrubbed decks a sense of purpose.

And yes. Pride.

Hindsight makes the warning signs seem stark. The breadfruit had been my responsibility, and I had taken every precaution. Yet hundreds of pots, requiring constant light and moisture, had claimed every corner of a vessel too small for its burden. I had asked the carpenter to line the floor with lead to hold in the damp. I could not understand then that, to the men, my duty had transformed their ship into something else entirely: a floating greenhouse in which they had become secondary to the King’s mission. I had even surrendered my own cabin, sacrificing the one sanctuary aboard that remained mine. The Great Cabin, once a refuge of charts and quiet reflection, became a humid, lead-lined nursery. I refused to see what I had surrendered.

I sat at my desk, surrounded by the scent of damp peat and the cloying sweetness of Artocarpus altilis. The smell of the earth was heavy and demanding. To my left, a row of saplings in their clay pots stood like silent sentries, their broad leaves casting long, jagged shadows across the map of the Pacific I had nearly finished. Every healthy leaf, every root that had taken hold in Tahitian soil and survived the salt spray of a demanding voyage, was a promise kept to you, my love. It was proof I had not failed.

In difficult hours, and always before sleep, I turned your image over in my mind. I saw you in the doorway of our house in Lambeth, smoothing the linen shirt I wore beneath my coat. I replayed your whispered words: “Return to me, William. Keep yourself safe.”

I planned to. I would bring the bounty of the world back to England and give my dear girls everything they deserved.

But as I looked at the plants, I felt a strange, nagging sense of being adrift. Not upon the sea, where I knew every current and star, but among the men, whose loyalty should have been absolute.

I could hear them through the bulkheads. Their laughter was different now, seasoned by months in the paradise of Tahiti. For them: revelry and ease. For me, despite all beauty: a slow hardening of purpose. In my presence, they were careful enough, but I sensed a shift. All decorum had fallen away, leaving only appetite and exhaustion. I told myself they had been spoiled by easy sun and lack of discipline. I saw it in their walk, even in the way they handled the rigging.

I had work to do, most especially with Fletcher Christian. Somehow I needed to restore the man I had helped create.

Fletcher. My protégé. My friend. He had sat at our table, teased our girls and dandled the baby on his knee, before we set sail. In the early years, he had worked alongside me gladly. Perhaps I even saw in him the shadow of the sons God chose to take from us.

I had mentored him and taught him to read the stars with the same precision I used for my own logs. We spent many evenings in my cabin, before the plants claimed it, drinking wine and talking of the future. I convinced myself he was a man cut from my own cloth. But now, when I caught his disgruntled expression through the foliage of a particularly large breadfruit, he looked altered. In my mind, he had become like the Tahitian soil — rich, dark, and volatile. I believed discipline was the only remedy.

“Mr. Christian,” I called, my voice tight.

He stepped into the cabin, and for a moment, the green leaves seemed to frame him like an island king. He was heavily marked with the island’s symbols. To my eyes, there was nothing regal about his demeanour. He looked unkempt, as though the place had loosened his roots.

“The watering schedule for the third tier has been neglected,” I said, looking back at my chart. “The plants are thirsty. If their roots begin to sour in the pot, no prayer in the Admiralty can save this mission.”

“The men are thirsty, too, sir,” he replied quietly. There was something in his tone. 

“The men can recover from a hungry belly or a dry throat,” I snapped, finally meeting his eyes. “A sailor is expected to endure hardship. A plant cannot. We are here to undertake the King’s mission, Mr. Christian. Do not forget it.”

He stiffened, and for a brief second I almost spoke more gently, almost bridged the distance between us. But the gap had already widened into a chasm filled with rustling leaves and the scent of rot. I was counting the growth of the saplings; I was not measuring the resentment growing in him.

Just before sunrise, I was torn from sleep by shouting.

My door was flung open.

For a moment, I wondered if the ship had foundered. But even through the fog of sleep, I felt something cold against my skin. Not the cold of the sea. Steel.

I was hauled from my cot, the thin linen of my nightshirt offering no protection. My hands were tied roughly behind my back. I stood in the centre of the cabin that had become my nursery, and for a brief, absurd second, I believed I must still be dreaming. The air was thick with breadfruit. Humid, heavy, and suffocating.

The smell of the earth brought me fully awake.

“What is the meaning of this?” I demanded, my voice sounding distorted in that gloomy, green-choked light.

Fletcher stood before me, a stranger with madness in his eyes. Bloodshot from rum, they carried a fever that had not come from the sun. He held a cutlass, its blade glinting in the dim light.

“I tried to warn you before. It is over, sir,” he said, unable to conceal the tremor in his voice.

“What are you talking about, you damned fool?”

“Enough!”

Roughly gripped and bound by the men, I refused to surrender the one thing I had left: my dignity. Even in my nightshirt, I stood as straight as the cord would allow.

“You are a shallow, ungrateful coward,” I spat. “No true gentleman. A rotted vine, twisted by the soil that allowed you to grow.”

I went too far. I felt it the moment the words left me.

His bayonet pressed against my throat.

The men around him — men I had commanded, men whose families I had ensured were cared for while acting as purser, watched on in uneasy silence. 

Then I was dragged through the foliage of my own cabin, the broad leaves slapping against my face like wet hands.

“Take him on deck!” Christian screamed, barely human. You would never have recognised him as the man who once complimented you on your cooking.

One of the breadfruit pots was knocked over in the scuffle. The clay shattered. Dark, damp earth spilled across the lead-lined floor. It was a small, broken thing, easily replaced, yet in that moment it felt like the end of the world.

On deck, the order I had spent my career enforcing had vanished. The ship was a confusion of bare chests and frightened faces. I stood by the rail, the wind whipping through my nightshirt, shivering but unyielding.

One or two of the men were calling, “Kill him, kill him!”

Many stood bewildered, not knowing what to do. Some looked at me fearfully, as though asking forgiveness for what they had not yet done. I set their names in my memory for when I am called to account later. For the first time, I saw not anger in their eyes, but exhaustion.

“Shut your mouths,” Christian roared, “or I’ll kill all of you!”

There was horror in his face. It was as if he could hardly believe his own actions, but was now forced to see them through.

The sea was still. For a few agonising beats, everyone waited.

“Get his clothes and a few things to help him navigate,” Christian ordered. “We will cast him adrift in the boat with any men who wish to go with him.”

“Fletcher!” I called out as they lowered the launch. “You can be better than this! This is the island speaking, not the officer I believed you to be.”

“You! You are unspeakable!” His spittle landed on my face. “Can’t you see? There is no going back now.”

He wrung his hands, a frantic, desperate motion that told me he had already lost himself. He had the ship, he had the sword, but he was rudderless. I doubted he would control that rabble for long.

Finally, I was lowered into the twenty-three-foot boat with eighteen others — men who had remained loyal, or perhaps who had more sense than to stay. They included David Nelson, the weary botanist with whom I had shared the burden of preserving the King’s plants.

As we hit the water, the mutineers began to clear the decks. They picked up the breadfruit pots and hurled them overboard. I watched them bob away, the green leaves bright against the deep blue of the Pacific. The salt would kill them. A tear rolled down poor Nelson’s cheek before he turned away.

I sat at the tiller, the salt already encrusting on my skin. Eighteen men huddled before me, pale with fear. And in that moment, the gardener fell away.

I was a captain again. Their only hope.

“We have thirty-six hundred miles to Timor,” my voice rose above the swells. “I have no charts, but I have my memory. I have brought men home before. Now row.”

As the oars cut through the sea, I thought of you, Betsy. I thought of our home in Lambeth. In the distance, the Bounty slipped into the mist, a ghost of wood and failed dreams. Fletcher is welcome to it. He is merely a man in command of a floating ruin, alone with the consequences of what we both allowed to happen.

I hold the sextant — the one tool he allowed me — and search the stars. I have knowledge, I have experience, and I have my promise to the woman who is my true North.

Now I am adrift in what yet might prove to be a grave, but for the first time in months, the air feels clean. The cloying smell of damp peat has been replaced by the sharp sting of salt.

I calculate the rations. A teaspoon of rum, a quarter of a breadfruit. The irony is not lost on me.

Thinking of you, I measure the distance in heartbeats. I cannot allow myself to fail.

I am coming home to you, my one true love,

William.