WHAT’S THE STORY?
A CANNON from the infamous mutiny ship HMS Bounty has been sold at an auction in Dumfries for £17,000, somewhat more than the auctioneer’s estimate but considerably less than the half-a-million quid which one English tabloid predicted it would sell for.
There was considerable international interest in the sale, given the connection to the Bounty which was captured by the mutineers led by Fletcher Christian, played in different movies by Errol Flynn, Clarke Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson – handsome chaps all of them, but playing someone who was a swarthy, rough and ready type.
WHY WAS THE BOUNTY SO FAMOUS/INFAMOUS?
AT a time when the Royal Navy roamed the seas with impunity, the Bounty under Captain William Bligh was sent on a trip to Tahiti to collect 1000 breadfruit plants which the British Government hoped would make a good source of cheap food for slaves in the west Indies. The ship dallied far too long in Tahiti where the charms of the local women proved irresistible. Bligh may also have been a very hard taskmaster, but there is little evidence of that. Led by Lieutenant Christian, who had married a Tahitian woman, some 22 officers and crew mutinied on the homeward voyage.
Bligh and colleagues were cast adrift to make an epic small boat voyage of 3500 miles to safety, with the loss of just one man who was killed by natives at their first port of call.
The mutineers sailed the Bounty back to Tahiti, took their women and some men and sailed to Pitcairn Island having tried and failed to settle on Tubuai. They went via Tahiti where 16 mutineers decided to stay.
On reaching Pitcairn, to stop any of the mutineers leaving, she was burned on January 23 1790. The auctioneers rightly called the mutiny “a significant and interesting part of British maritime history” because mutiny aboard ship was relatively rare.
When the Navy went after the mutineers, they caught 14 on Tahiti and they were taken back to Britain where most but not all were convicted and hanged – four mutineers were actually killed when HMS Pandora that captured them sank.
WHAT HAPPENED TO CHRISTIAN AND THE OTHER MUTINEERS?
THE accepted version is that after fathering two children with his Tahitian wife, Christian was murdered by one of the Tahitian men who had sailed with him.
A fight broke out and another four mutineers and all six Tahitian men were killed. Of the men, only John Adams survived to be found by an American ship which called at the island in 1805. Adam was jailed and later pardoned.
Christian, Adams and the rest had lived long enough to father a dynasty. Their descendants can be found around the Pacific to this day.
DID THE CANNON DEFINITELY COME FROM THE BOUNTY?
WITHOUT a doubt. It was the right size – a four pounder some 67 inches (170 cms) in length – of a standard naval gun issued to a ship like the Bounty which was not a warship but a merchant vessel with some guns to ward off pirates.
More importantly, we know the gun was brought to Liverpool in 1898 and in 1913 Evelyn Stuart Parker took the gun to Little Cumbrae Island.
Evelyn’s son, Ian Robertson Parker, sold it in 1960 to Peter Kaye, a businessman. It was from his estate that it was offered for sale.
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