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

his time by serving as a master until a lieutenancy was offered, there was the danger of proving too useful in that rank and advancing no further. Most masters had not been young gentlemen and were not destined for the captain’s list. In Bligh’s case the risk seemed justified. If he did his job well, he could count on the “interest” and recommendation of Captain Cook, the most highly regarded royal naval officer of his day as a cartographer and explorer.
     
    With Cook’s expedition, Bligh sailed to Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand, Tahiti, and the Pacific islands. He patrolled the west coast of North America and searched for the Northwest Passage. Cook was justly famous for maintaining the health of his crew on his long, demanding voyages, and Bligh’s own later practices would reveal that he had closely observed and learned from his mentor’s innovations in diet and ship management.
     
    From Cook’s own log, one catches only glimpses of the earnest young sailing master, usually being sent ahead of the ship in a reconnaissance boat to make a careful survey of some ticklish coast or bay. After Cook himself, Bligh was responsible for most of the charts and surveys made in the course of this last expedition, and had thus honed his already exceptional abilities.
     
    Most unforgettably, Bligh had been present at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, when on February 14, 1779, James Cook was murdered by the island natives. The events that led to this shocking tragedy would be long disputed; dispassionate reading of the numerous, often conflicting accounts suggests that Cook behaved with uncharacteristic rashness and provocation to the islanders—but that at the moment of crisis he had been betrayed by the disorder and panic of the armed marines whose duty had been to protect him. In the horrified and frightened aftermath of their loss, Cook’s officers assembled an account of the events at Kealakekua Bay that vindicated most and made a scapegoat of only one man, a Lieutenant Rickinson. Some years later, William Bligh would record his disgust with this closing of the ranks in marginal annotations made in a copy of the official publication of the voyage: “A most infamous lie”; “The whole affair from the Opening to the end did not last 10 Minutes, nor was their a spark of courage or conduct shown in the whole busyness”; “a most Hypocritical expression”; “A pretty Old Woman Story.”
     
    In Bligh’s opinion, the principal cause of the tragedy at Kealakekua Bay lay with the marines: they had failed to do their duty. After firing a first panicked volley, they had fallen back from the menacing crowd of islanders in fear, splashing and flailing to their waiting boat. “The Marines fir’d & ran which occasioned all that followed for had they fixed their bayonets & not have run, so frightened as they were, they might have drove all before them.” The person most responsible for the marines’ disorder was their commander, Lieutenant Molesworth Phillips, characterized by Bligh as a “person, who never was of any real service the whole Voyage, or did anything but eat and Sleep.”
     
    Bligh was at least in some position to pass judgment, for the day following Cook’s murder he had been sent onshore to oversee a party of men repairing the Resolution ’s damaged mast. Shortly after landing, Bligh had found himself faced with a menacing crowd and had ordered his men to stand and fire; and he had held this position until joined by reinforcements from the ship.
     
    The shock and tragedy apart, Cook’s death deprived Bligh of the valuable interest he had counted on at the expedition’s end, and which it would appear by this time he otherwise lacked; his own modest connections had been sufficient to secure him a young gentleman’s entry to naval service, but do not appear to have been extensive enough to have advanced him further. In both the subsequent flurry of promotions and the published account of the voyage, Bligh