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

to “the captain of an East India ship, or any other person” who brought “the true Bread-fruit tree in a thriving vegetation” to England. The matter dragged on over the years, the subject of various letters, treatises and resolutions put forth by the committee. And thus things might have remained indefinitely, with a vague and rather lowly bounty offered to any willing taker, if the enterprise had not caught the interest of Joseph Banks.
     
    Banks had privately discussed the possibility with several eager planters and botanists: needless to say, he had himself tasted the fruit on Tahiti, but had personally preferred plantains, finding that breadfruit “sometimes griped us.” By 1785, Matthew Wallen, a botanist living in Jamaica to whom Banks had sent various exotic seeds for experimental planting, wrote to Banks with the bold observation that the “King ought to send a Man of War, a Botanist & Gardener for the Plants we want,” adding he would not then “want the Example of the King of France who sends Duplicates & Triplicates of all valuable Plants to his Colonies.” Banks was in agreement that a proper government-sponsored expedition was desirable; it was also the case that he lacked breadfruit specimens of his own for Kew. That the British had fallen behind the French on this front provided useful leverage, and in February 1787, a breadfruit expedition was formally announced to the West India Committee by Prime Minister Pitt.
     
    Simultaneous with these proposals for the breadfruit expedition were the plans, now well under way, for the transportation of the first convicts from England to Botany Bay in New South Wales. Banks, who was instrumental to both ventures, had originally intended to combine the two, and had at first proposed an ambitious itinerary: a single vessel would carry the convicts to New South Wales, deposit them and then continue on to collect breadfruit in Tahiti. It did not take long, however, for Banks to awake to the fact that the two enterprises, although destined for roughly the same part of the globe, had wholly distinct requirements. An expedition devoted solely to the breadfruit was, he allowed in March 1787, “more likely to be successful.”
     
    Thus some months later, Lord Sydney, a principal secretary of state, informed Banks that the Admiralty had “purchased a Vessel for the purpose of conveying the Bread-Fruit Tree and other useful productions from the South Sea Islands to His Majesty’s West India Possessions.” The ship, formerly named Bethia, was one Banks had approved, and it had been purchased by the Admiralty for the sum of £1,950. She was to be commissioned within a few days, according to Sydney, and was “to be called The Bounty, and to be commanded by Lieutenant Bligh.”
     
    Exactly how, or through whose recommendation, William Bligh came to receive the command of the Bounty is not known. It does not appear to be the case that Banks knew Bligh personally, although he had undoubtedly heard of him, since Bligh had served as sailing master of the Resolution on Cook’s last expedition, which had departed England eleven years before, in 1776. It is possible that Banks had made a recommendation that the breadfruit expedition was best entrusted to one of Cook’s men. William Bligh, on the other hand, had certainly heard of Joseph Banks, and in his mind there was no question of to whom he was indebted.
     
    “Sir, I arrived yesterday from Jamaica,” Bligh wrote to Banks on August 6, with an outflowing of gratitude. “. . . I have heard the flattering news of your great goodness to me, intending to honor me with the command of the vessel which you propose to go to the South Seas, for which, after offering you my most grateful thanks, I can only assure you I shall endeavour, and I hope succeed, in deserving such a trust.”
     
    William Bligh had been christened on September 9, 1754, in the great naval town of Plymouth, where his father, Francis Bligh, was chief of