Tongan volcanic eruption may have triggered Mutiny on the Bounty.

 

Bounty mutiny, Chris Mayger

Captain William Bligh, Fletcher Christian.  Bounty. Names indelibly connected with the most famous mutiny in history. Which could have been brought to a head by an ongoing volcanic eruption in Tonga.

The Bounty had arrived in Tahiti on October 24, 1788, her mission to collect saplings of breadfruit trees. The atmosphere on board was strained before they arrived, and when the ship sailed from the idyllic island five months later, the morale was even worse. Several of the men had formed attachments with Tahitian maidens. Tahitians had stolen pieces of vital equipment, but instead of punishing them, Bligh had punished the seamen for not preventing the thefts. 

The day the anchor was weighed was stormy, with black clouds and threatening rain and gales, not a good augury for the voyage back to England.  Then, fatally, the ship made a call at the Tongan island of Nomuka, where Bligh had been before, with Captain James Cook. It had been a provisioning landcall that had not gone well.  Cook’s temper had been so inflamed by the constant thieving that he had had a chief flogged, and then, humiliatingly, had exchanged him for a pig.

It had happened more than a decade before, but memories are long.  The inhabitants were hostile, and much of the aggression was taken out on Christian, who had been sent ashore with a party of seamen to collect fresh water.  He and his gang ran away when attacked, leaving an adze and an axe behind, which Bligh thought the act of a “cowardly rascal.”

And that night, while tempers were hot, a volcano on the nearby island of Tofua flared up in the darkness, accompanied by a stench of sulphur, and a constant ominous rumbling. “As we near'd Toofoa we observed Vast Col-lums of smoke & flame Issuing from the Volcano which appear'd to be a very large one," wrote James Morrison, one of the seamen. Other mariners have recorded the vicious headaches caused by volcanic smoke.  But, despite the general bad temper, there was no sign of mutiny. The ship’s log recorded pleasant weather. “Everything very quiet on board,” it reads.

At four in the morning, the situation exploded. Bligh was forcibly hauled out of bed by Fletcher Christian and three co-conspirators. “On the 28^th April at day light in the morning Christian having the morning watch,” the captain wrote to his wife. “He with several others came into my Cabbin while I was a Sleep, and seizing me, holding naked Bayonets at my Breast, tied my Hands behind my back, and threatned instant destruction if I uttered a word.”

Bligh, with 19 companions, was set adrift in the ship’s launch. With the loss of only one man (to native attack at Tofua), he made it to Timor, stumbling ashore on June 12, 1789. The 5,098-kilometre open-boat journey is recognized now as one of the most outstanding feats of navigation in the history of the sea.

The mutineers sailed back to Tahiti, where some stayed to be recaptured and put on trial, while others formed a settlement at Pitcairn, where Christian was most probably murdered.

The question is why the mutiny ever happened. Theories abound.  “I have been used like a Dog all the voyage,” said Christian. Bligh blamed the charms of the “handsome, mild and cheerful women of Tahiti.”  But it seems very possible that simmering tempers on board the ship were inflamed to violence by the stench, the strange flickering, and the ominous rumblings of the erupting volcano on Tofua.