Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora. Captain R. N. Edward Edwards
scientific discovery were immense, but he faced them like a blinkered horse that has his eyes fixed on the narrow track before him, and all the pleasant byways of the road shut out. A cold, hard man, devoid of sympathy and imagination, of every interest beyond the straitened limits of his profession, Edwards in the eye of posterity was almost the worst man that could have been chosen. For, with a different commander, the voyage would have been one of the most important in the history of South Sea discovery, and the account he has written of it compares in style and colour with a log-book.
In Edwards' place a more genial man, a Catoira, a Wallis, or a Cook, would have written a journal of discovery that might have taken a place in the front rank of the literature of travel. He would have investigated the murder of La Pérouse's boat's crew in Tutuila on the spot; he would have rescued the survivors of that ill-fated expedition whose smoke-signals he saw on Vanikoro; he would have brought home news of the great Fiji group through which Bligh passed in the Bounty's launch; he might even have discovered Fletcher Christian's colony of mutineers in Pitcairn. But, on the other hand, humanity to his prisoners might have furnished them with the means of escape, and his ardour for discovery might have led him into dangers from which no one would have survived to tell the tale. Edwards had the qualities of his defects. If he treated his prisoners harshly, he prevented them from contaminating his crew, and brought the majority of them home alive through all the perils of shipwreck and famine. In all the attacks that have been made upon him there is not a word against his character as a plain, straight-forward officer, who could lick a crew of landsmen into shape, and keep them loyal to him through the stress of shipwreck and privation. If he was callous to the sufferings of his prisoners, he was at least as indifferent to his own. If he felt no sympathy with others, he asked for none with himself. If he won no love, he compelled respect.
Of his officers little need be said. Corner, the first lieutenant, was a stout seaman, who bottled up his disapproval of his captain's behaviour until the commission was out. Hayward, the second lieutenant, was a time-server. He had been a midshipman on the Bounty at the time of the mutiny, and an intimate friend of young Peter Heywood who was constrained to cast in his lot with the mutineers, yet, when Heywood gave himself up on the arrival of the Pandora at Tahiti, his old comrade, now risen in the world, received him with a haughty stare. Of Larkin, Passmore, and the rest, we know nothing.
Fortunately for us, the Pandora carried a certain rollicking, irresponsible person as surgeon. George Hamilton has been called "a coarse, vulgar, and illiterate man, more disposed to relate licentious scenes and adventures, in which he and his companions were engaged, than to give any information of proceedings and occurrences connected with the main object of the voyage." From this puritanical criticism most readers will dissent. Hamilton was bred in Northumberland, and was at this time past forty. His portrait, the frontispiece to his book, represents him in the laced coat and powdered wig of the period, a man of middle age, with clever, well-cut features, and a large, humorous, and rather sensual mouth. His book, with all its faults of scandalous plain speech, is one that few naval surgeons of that day could have written. The style, though flippant, is remarkable for a cynical but always good-natured humour, and on the rare occasions when he thought it professionally incumbent on him to be serious, as in his discussion of the best dietary for long voyages, and the physical effects of privations, his remarks display observation and good sense. It must be admitted, I fear, that he relates certain of his own and his shipmates' adventures ashore with shameless gusto, but he wrote in an age that loved plain speech, and that did not care to veil its appetite for licence. Like Edwards, he tells us little of the prisoners after they were consigned to "Pandora's Box." His narrative is valuable as a commentary on Edwards' somewhat meagre report, and for the sidelights which it throws upon the manners of naval officers of those days. Even Edwards, to whom he is always loyal, does not escape his little shaft of satire when he relates how the stern captain was driven to conduct prayers in the most desperate portion of the boat voyage. His book, published at Berwick in 1793, has now become so rare that Mr. Quaritch lately advertised for it three times without success, and therefore no excuse is needed for reprinting it.
The Pandora was dogged by ill luck from the first. An epidemic fever raging in England at the time of her departure, was introduced on board, it was thought, by infected clothing. The sick bay, and indeed, the officers' cabins, too, were crammed with stores intended for the return voyage of the Bounty, and there was no accommodation for the sick. Hamilton attributes their recovery to the use of tea and sugar, then carried for the first time in a ship of war. He gives some interesting information regarding the precautions taken against scurvy. They had essence of malt and hops for brewing beer, a mill for grinding wheat, the meal being eaten with brown sugar, and as much saurkraut as the crew chose to eat.
The first land sighted after rounding Cape Horn, was Ducie's island; probably the same island which, as the Encarnacion of Quiros, has dodged about the charts of the old geographers, swelling into a continent, contracting into an atoll, and finally coming to rest in the neighbourhood of the Solomon Islands before vanishing for ever. The Pandora was now in the latitude of Pitcairn, which lay down wind only three hundred miles distant. If she had but kept a westerly course, she must have sighted it, for the island's peak is visible for many leagues, but relentless ill fortune turned her northward, and during the ensuing day she passed the men she was in search of scarce thirty leagues away. One glimmer of good fortune awaited Edwards in Tahiti. The schooner built by the mutineers was ready for sea, but not provisioned for a voyage. She put to sea, and outsailed the Pandora's boat that went in chase of her, but her crew, dreading the inevitable starvation that faced them, put back during the night and took to the mountains, where they were all captured.
In the matter of "Pandora's Box," there were excuses for Edwards, who was bitterly attacked afterwards for his inhumanity. One of the chiefs had warned him that there was a plot between the natives and the mutineers to cut the cable of the Pandora in the night. Most of the mutineers were connected through their women with influential chiefs, and nothing was more likely than that such a rescue should be attempted. His own crew, moreover, were human. They could see for themselves the charms of a life in Tahiti; they could hear from the prisoners the consideration in which Englishmen were held in this delightful land. What had been possible in the Bounty was possible in the Pandora. Edwards regarded his prisoners as pirates, desperate with the weight of the rope about their necks. His orders were definite—to consider nothing but the preservation of their lives—and he did his duty in his own way according to his lights. And that he was not insensible to every feeling of humanity is shown by the fact that he allowed the native wives of the mutineers daily access to their husbands while the ship lay there. The infinitely pathetic story of poor "Peggy," the beautiful Tahitian girl who had borne a child to midshipman Stewart, was vouched for six years later by the missionaries of the "Duff." She had to be separated from her husband by force, and it was at his request that she was not again admitted to the ship. Poor girl! it was all her life to her. A month before her boy-husband perished in the wreck of the Pandora, she had died of a broken heart, leaving her baby, the first half-caste born in Tahiti, to be brought up by the missionaries.
"Pandora's Box" certainly needed some excuse. A round house, eleven feet long, accessible only through a scuttle in the roof, was built upon the quarter deck as a prison for the fourteen mutineers, who were ironed and handcuffed. Hamilton says that the roundhouse was built partly out of consideration for the prisoners themselves, in order to spare them the horrors of prolonged imprisonment below in the tropics, and that although the service regulations restricted prisoners to two-thirds allowance, Edwards rationed them exactly like the ship's company. Morrison, however, who seems to have belonged to that objectionable class of seamen—the sea-lawyer—having kept a journal of grievances against Bligh when on the Bounty, and preserved it even in "Pandora's Box," gives a very different account, and Peter Heywood, a far more trustworthy witness, declared in a letter to his mother, that they were kept "with both hands and both legs in irons, and were obliged to eat, drink, sleep, and obey the calls of nature, without ever being allowed to get out of this den."
Edwards now provisioned the mutineers' little schooner, and put on board of her a prize crew of two petty officers and seven men to navigate her as his tender. For the first few weeks, while the scent was keen, he maintained a very active search for the Bounty. He had three clues: first,