"Nordhoff, Charles & Hall, James Norman - Bounty 02 - Men Against the Sea 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall James)

He called to Matthew Quintal, one of the seamen: "Quintal, take Mr. Ledward to his cabin, and let him have what cloathing he needs. He is to take the small medicine chest, but see to it that he takes nothing from the large one."

He then left me abruptly, and that was my last word with this misguided man who had doomed nineteen others to hardships and sufferings beyond the power of the imagination to describe.

The small medicine chest was provided with a handle, and could easily be carried by one man. Fortunately, I had always kept it fully equipped for expeditions that might be made away from the ship; it had its own supply of surgical instruments, sponges, tourniquets, dressings, and the like, and a hasty examination assured me that, in the way of medicines, it contained most of those specifics likely to be needed by men in our position. Quintal watched me narrowly while I was making this examination. I put into the chest my razors, some handkerchiefs, my only remaining packet of snuff, and half a dozen wineglasses, which later proved of great use to us. Having gathered together some additional articles of cloathing, I was again conducted to the upper deck. The launch was already in the water; Captain Bligh, John Fryer, --the master, --the boatswain, William Cole, and many others had been sent into her. Churchill halted me at the gangway to make an examination of the medicine chest. He then ordered me into the boat, and the chest and my bundle of cloathing were handed down to me.

I was among the last to go into the launch; indeed, there were but two who followed me -- Mr. Samuel, the captain's clerk, and Robert Tinkler, a midshipman. The launch was now so low in the water that Mr. Fryer, as well as Captain Bligh himself, begged that no more men should be sent into her; yet there were, I believe, two midshipmen and three or four seamen who would have come with us had there been room. Fortunately for us and for them, they were not permitted to do so, for we had no more than seven or eight inches of freeboard amidships. There were, in fact, nineteen of us in the launch, which was but twenty-three feet long, with a beam of six feet, nine inches. In depth she was, I think, two feet and nine inches. Each man had brought with him his bundle of cloathing; and with these, and the supplies of food allowed us by the mutineers, we were dangerously overladen.

But there was no time, as yet, to think of the seriousness of our situation. The launch was veered astern, and for another quarter of an hour or thereabouts we were kept in tow. The mutineers lined the Bounty's rail, aft, hooting and jeering at us; but it was to Mr. Bligh that most of their remarks were addressed. As I looked up at them, I found myself wondering how a mutiny into which well over half the ship's company had been drawn could have been planned without so much as a hint of danger having come to the knowledge of the rest of us. I personally had observed no sign of disaffection in the ship's company. To be sure, I had witnessed, upon more than one occasion, instances of the rigour of Captain Bligh's disciplinary measures. He is a man of violent temper, stern and unbending in the performance of what he considers to be his duty; but the same may be said of the greater part of the ships' captains in His Majesty's service. Knowing the necessity for strict discipline at sea, and the unruly nature of seamen as a class, I by no means considered that Captain Bligh's punishments exceeded in severity what the rules and necessities of the service demanded; nor had I believed that the men themselves thought so. But they now showed a passion of hatred toward him that astonished me, and reviled him in abominable language.

I heard one of them shout, "Swim home, you old bastard!" "Aye, swim or drown!" yelled another, "God damn you, we're well rid of you!" And another: "You'll flog and starve us no more, you . . ." Then followed a string of epithets it may be as well to omit. However, I must do their company the justice to say that most of the jeering and vile talk came from four or five of the mutinous crew. I observed that others looked down at us in silence, and with a kind of awe -- as though they had just realized the enormity of the crime they were committing.

They had given us nothing with which to defend ourselves amongst the savages, and urgent requests were made for some muskets. These were met with further abuse; but at length four cutlasses were thrown down to us, and for all our pleading we were given nothing else. This so enraged Captain Bligh that he stood in his place and addressed the ruffians as they deserved. Two or three of the seamen leveled their pieces at him; and it was only the superior force of his will, I believe, which prevented them from shooting. We heard one of them cry out: "Bear off, and give 'em a whiff of grape!" At this moment the painter of the launch was cast off, and the ship drew slowly away from us. I cannot believe that even the most hardened of the mutineers was so lost to humanity as to have turned one of the guns upon a boatload of defenseless men, but others of our number thought differently. The oars were at once gotten out, and we pulled directly astern; but the ship was kept on her course, and soon it was clear to all that we had nothing more to fear from those aboard of her.

At this time the Bounty was under courses and topsails; the breeze was of the lightest, and the vessel had little more than steerageway. As she drew off, we saw several of the men run aloft to loose the topgallant sails. The shouting grew fainter, and soon was lost to hearing. In an hour's time the vessel was a good three miles to leeward; in another hour she was hull down on the horizon.

I well remember the silence that seemed to flow in upon our little company directly we had been cast adrift -- the wide silence of mid-ocean, accentuated by the faint creaking of the oars against the tholepins. We rowed six oars in the launch, but were so deeply laden that we made slow progress toward the island of Tofoa, to the northeast of us and distant about ten leagues. Fryer sat at the tiller. Captain Bligh, Mr. Nelson, Elphinstone, -- the master's mate, -- and Peckover, the gunner, were all seated in the stern sheets. The rest of us were crowded on the thwarts in much the same positions as those we had taken upon coming into the launch. Bligh was half turned in his seat, gazing sombrely after the distant vessel; nor, during the next hour, I think, did he once remove his eyes from her. He appeared to have forgotten the rest of us, nor did any of us speak to remind him of our presence. Our thoughts were as gloomy as his own, and we felt as little inclined to express them.

My sympathy went out to Mr. Bligh in this hour of bitter disappointment; I could easily imagine how appalling the ruin of his plans must have appeared to him at a time when he had every expectation of completing them to the last detail. We had been homeward bound, the mission of our long voyage -- that of collecting breadfruit plants in Otaheite, to be carried to the West Indies -- successfully accomplished. This task, entrusted to his care by His Majesty's Government through the interest of his friend and patron, Sir Joseph Banks, had deeply gratified him, and well indeed had he justified that trust. Now, in a moment, his sanguine hopes were brought to nothing. His ship was gone; his splendid charts of coasts and islands were gone as well; and he had nothing to show for all the long months of careful and painstaking labour. He found himself cast adrift with eighteen of his company in his own ship's launch, with no more than a compass, a sextant, and his journal, in the midst of the greatest of oceans and thousands of miles from any place where he could look for help. Small wonder if, at that time, he felt the taste of dust and ashes in his mouth.

For an hour we moved slowly on toward Tofoa, the most northwesterly of the islands composing the Friendly Archipelago. This group had been so christened by Captain Cook; but our experiences among its inhabitants, only a few days before the mutiny, led us to believe that Cook must have called them "friendly" in a spirit of irony. They are a virile race, but we had found them savage and treacherous in the extreme, as different as could be imagined from the Indians of Otaheite. Only the possession of firearms had saved us from being attacked and overcome whilst we were engaged in wooding and watering on the island of Annamooka. Tofoa we had not visited, and as I gazed at the faint blue outline on the horizon I tried, with little success, to con- vince myself that our experiences there might be more fortunate.

Many an anxious glance was turned in Captain Bligh's direction, but for an hour at least he remained in the same position, gazing after the distant ship. When at length he turned away, it was never to look toward her again. He now took charge of his new command with an assurance, a quiet cheerfulness, that heartened us all. He first set us to work to bring some order into the boat. We were, as I have said, desperately crowded; but when we had stored away our supplies we had elbowroom at least. Our first care was, of course, to take stock of our provisions. We found that we had sixteen pieces of pork, each weighing about two pounds; three bags of bread of fifty pounds each; six quarts of rum, six bottles of wine, and twenty-eight gallons of water in three ten-gallon kegs. We also had four empty barricos, each capable of holding eight gallons. The carpenter, Purcell, had succeeded in fetching away one of his tool chests, although the mutineers had removed many of the tools before allowing it to be handed down. Our remaining supplies, outside of personal belongings, consisted of my medicine chest, the launch's two lugsails, some spare canvas, two or three coils of rope, and a copper pot, together with some odds and ends of boat's gear which the boatswain had had the forethought to bring with him.

To show how deeply laden we were, it is enough to say that my hand, as it rested on the gunwale, was repeatedly wet with drops of water from the small waves that licked along the sides of the boat. Fortunately, the sea was calm and the sky held a promise of good weather, at least for a sufficient time to enable us to reach Tofoa.

Reliefs at the oars were changed every hour, each of us taking his turn. Gradually the blue outline of the island became more distinct, and by the middle of the afternoon we had covered well over half the distance to it. About this time the faint breeze freshened and came round to the southeast, which enabled us to get up one of our lugsails. Captain Bligh now took the tiller and we altered our course to fetch the northern side of the island. Not eighteen hours before I had had, by moonlight, what I thought was my last view of Tofoa, and Mr. Nelson and I were computing the time that would be needed, if all went well, to reach the islands of the West Indies where we were to discharge our cargo of young breadfruit trees. Little we dreamed of the change that was to take place in our fortunes before another sun had set. I now cast about in my mind, trying to anticipate what Captain Bligh's plan for us might be. Our only hope of succour would lie in the colonies in the Dutch East Indies, but they were so far distant that the prospect of reaching one of them seemed fantastic. I thought of Otaheite, where we could be certain of kindly treatment on the part of the Indians, but that island was all of twelve hundred miles distant and directly to windward. In view of these circumstances, Mr. Bligh would never attempt a return there.

Meanwhile we proceeded on our way under a sky whose serenity seemed to mock at the desperate plight of the men in the tiny boat crawling beneath it. The sun dipped into the sea behind us, and in the light that streamed up from beyond the horizon the island stood out in clear relief. We estimated the peak of its central mountain to be about two thousand feet high. It was a volcano, and a thin cloud of vapour hung above it, taking on a saffron colour in the afterglow. We were still too far distant at sunset to have seen the smoke of any fires of its inhabitants. Mr. Bligh was under the impression that the place was uninhabited. All eyes turned toward the distant heights as darkness came on, but the only light to be seen was the dull red glow from the volcano reflected upon the cloud above it. When we were within a mile of the coast, the breeze died away and the oars were again gotten out. We approached the rocky shore until the thunder of the surf was loud in our ears; but in the darkness we could see no place where a landing might be made. Cliffs, varying in height from fifty to several hundred feet, appeared to fall directly to the sea; but when we had coasted a distance of several miles we discovered a less forbidding spot, where we might lie in comparative safety through the night.

There was but little surf here, and the sound of it only served to make deeper and more impressive the stillness of the night. Our voices sounded strangely distinct in this silence. For all the fact that we had not eaten since the previous evening, none of us had thought of food; . and when Bligh suggested that we keep our fast until morning, there was no complaint from any of the company. He did, however, serve a ration of grog to each of us, and it was at this time that I had reason to be glad of putting the wineglasses into my medicine chest, for we discovered that we had but one other drinking vessel, a horn cup belonging to the captain. The serving of the grog put all of us in a much more cheerful frame of mind -- not, certainly, because of the spirits it contained, but rather because it was a customary procedure and served to make us forget, for the moment at least, our forlorn situation. Two men were set at the oars to keep the boat off the rocks, and Captain Bligh commended the rest of us to take what rest our cramped positions might afford. The light murmur of talk now died away; but the silence that followed was that of tired but watchful men drawn together in spirit by the coming of night and the sense of common dangers.

CHAPTER II

THROUGHOUT the night the launch was kept close under the land. I had as my near companions Elphinstone, -- the master's mate, -- and Robert Tinkler, youngest of the Bounty's midshipmen, a lad of fifteen. The forebodings of the older part of our company were not shared by Tinkler, whose natural high spirits had thus far been kept in check by his wholesome awe of Captain Bligh. He had no true conception of our situation at this time, and it speaks well for him that when, soon enough, he came to an understanding of the dangers surrounding us, his courage did not fail him.

He had slept during the latter part of the night, curled up in the bottom of the boat with my feet and his bundle of cloathing for his pillow. Elphinstone and I had dozed in turn, leaning one against the other, but our cramped position had made anything more than a doze impossible. We were all awake before the dawn, and as soon as there was sufficient light we proceeded in a northeasterly direction along the coast. It was a forbidding-looking place, viewed from the vantage point of a small and deeply laden ship's boat. The shore was steep-. to, and we found no place where a landing might have been made without serious risk of wrecking the launch. Presently we were out of the lee, and found the breeze so strong and the sea so rough that we turned back to examine that part of the coast which lay beyond the spot where we had spent the night. About nine o'clock we came to a cove, and, as there appeared to be no more suitable shelter beyond, we ran in and dropped a grapnel about twenty yards from the beach.

We were on the lee side here, but this circumstance alone was in our favour. The beach was rocky, and the foreshore about the cove had a barren appearance that promised nothing to relieve our wants. It

I was shut in on all sides by high, rocky cliffs, and there appeared to be no means of entrance or exit save by the sea. Captain Bligh stood up in his seat, examining the place carefully whilst the rest of us awaited his decision. He turned to Mr. Nelson with a wry smile.

"By God, sir," he said, "if you can find us so much as an edible berry here, you shall have my ration of grog at supper."

"I'm afraid the venture is safe enough," Mr. Nelson replied. "Nevertheless, I shall be glad to try."

"That we shall do," said Bligh; then, turning to the master, "Mr. Fryer, you and six men shall stay with the launch." He then told off those who were to remain on board, whereupon they slackened away until we were in shallow water and the rest of us waded ashore.

The beach was composed of heaps of stones worn round and smooth by the action of the sea, and, although the surf was light, the footing was difficult until we were out of the water. Robert Lamb, the butcher, turned his ankle before he had taken half a dozen steps, and thus provided me with my first task as surgeon of the Bounty's launch. The man had received a bad sprain that made it impossible for him to walk. He was supported to higher ground, where Captain Bligh -- quite rightly, I think -- gave him a severe rating. We were in no position to have helpless men to care for, and Lamb's accident was the result of a foolish attempt to run across a beach of loose stones.