The first outburst of organized mutiny came when Bligh’s ship, the Director, was refitting at the Nore, “the ship’s company ordering that Lieutenants Ireland and Church and Mr. Birch, the master, be dismissed from duty for ill usage to them as they alleged.” No charges were made at this time against Captain Bligh, however, and exactly a week passed before he also was compelled to surrender his command and go ashore. He was far from inactive, though, and was appointed to the Admiralty’s board of strategy for suppressing the mutiny.
As the mutinous month passed, the position of the rebels became more desperate, and they were goaded into foolhardy actions. First they blockaded the Thames, and then helped themselves to provisions from passing merchant ships. Parliament acted summarily to deal with the mutiny at all costs. New batteries of guns were erected at the mouth of the river, the navigation marks were removed and a number of loyal vessels were ordered to the attack. The mutineers at last recognized their position as hopeless. Their overtures were rejected. Some of the crews tried to take the ships to sea, and during the next few days some bloody struggles took place. But by June 13, most of the mutineers had hauled down their red flag and asked for a general pardon. Thus the mutiny fizzled out. As might have been expected, Bligh’s ship, the Directory was the last to capitulate.
Parker and many other leaders were executed, several were flogged from ship to ship, a few were even transported to Australia. Captain Bligh was not removed from his command by the Admiralty, as he would have been if he had been guilty of undue harshness leading to mutiny. He was again put in charge, and soon after led the Director into a battle which enormously enhanced his reputation as a good officer.
This was the Battle of Camperdown on October 11, when Bligh’s ship had a single-handed encounter with the Dutch flagship Vryheid, a seventy-four-gun ship which, it is true, had been somewhat battered by others before being tackled by the smaller Director, Not one of Bligh’s men was killed, and only seven were wounded. It was in this engagement that John Williamson, who when in charge of the launch of Kealakekua had refused to rescue Captain Cook, was in command of the Agincourt. He was accused of cowardly behavior, and put out of the service; Lord Nelson thought he should have been hanged.
Four years later Bligh accomplished his greatest naval success, in command of H. M. S. Glatton at the Battle of Copenhagen on April 2, 1801. This vessel had been chosen to lead the third line, and she slugged away at the Danish commodore in a long, hot action. Damage to the ship was serious, and seventeen men were killed and thirty-four wounded, but Bligh held on tenaciously and achieved a victory. After the battle he proudly recorded in his log: “Lord Nelson in the Elephant, our second ahead, did me the honor to hail me to come on board, and thank me for the conduct of the Glatton.” In the following month Bligh was put in command of a fine seventy-four-gun ship, and on May 21 the Royal Society bestowed upon him the honor of electing him a fellow “in consideration of his distinguished services in navigation, botany, etc.”
On May 2, 1804, Bligh was on active service in command of H. M. S. Warrior, on guard to defend England against the invasion being prepared by Napoleon. Here again he was involved in a court-martial, this time defending himself from the accusations of a disgruntled lieutenant, John Frazier.
As a result of a squabble during which Bligh accused Frazier of neglect of duty, the lieutenant was brought to a court-martial on November 23 for “contumacy and disobedience.” Frazier may have been a malingerer; at least he was the sort of man who was fond of hugging a grievance and willing to ruin his own career if he could make his commanding officer suffer in retaliation. He therefore launched a countersuit, charging Bligh with “calling me rascal, scoundrel, and shaking his fist in my face,” and claiming that at various times Bligh had “behaved himself towards me and other commissioned, warrant, and petty officers in the said ship in a tyrannical and oppressive and unofficerlike behavior.”
Bligh was brought to trial in February, 1805. The evidence showed that he was certainly subject to outbursts of wrath and profanity accompanied by violent gestures. On cross-examination, Lieutenant Alexander Boyack agreed that Bligh was accustomed “to use a great deal of action with his hands, without having any particular meaning in it.” Boyack also deposed: “I have heard Captain Bligh call Mr. Keltie, the master, a vile man, a shameful man—‘Oh, you are a disgrace to the service, damn you, you lubber!’ … I have frequently heard him damn Lieutenant Johnston and call out, ‘Oh, you, Mr. Johnston, God damn you, sir, what are you about?’ … I heard him often call the boatswain an infamous scoundrel, an audacious rascal, a vagrant and a dastardly villain.” Lieutenant William Pascoe affirmed that he had heard Bligh “call the master a Jesuit and an old rogue, and say, ‘Let me have none of your rigadoon steps here.’ ”
On the other hand, Mr. William Simmons, a gunner, stoutly vowed that “to his knowledge Captain Bligh had never called him a ‘long pelt of a bitch.’ ” Lieutenant George Johnston, who had served under Bligh for three years in other ships, firmly defended the captain’s conduct. The court dismissed Frazier from the Navy, and adjudged Bligh “to be reprimanded and to be admonished to be in future more correct in his language.” With this rap over the knuckles for intemperate diction—a not uncommon failing in the British Navy, from Lord Nelson on down—Bligh was restored to command of his ship. This court-martial had little effect on his career, for less than two months later he was signally honored by an appointment to one of the best and toughest positions available to any naval officer, even though some of his contemporaries suspected that he was being kicked upstairs.
The advisers who drew up specifications for this job said they needed “one who has integrity unimpeached, a mind capable of providing its own resources in difficulties without leaning on others for advice, firm in discipline, civil in deportment, and not subject to whimper and whine when severity of discipline is wanted to meet emergencies.” An additional drawback to the job was that it would require the holder to relinquish active connection with the Navy, which in Blight’s case would mean sacrificing his chances of becoming an admiral.
Nevertheless, when the job was offered, Bligh quickly accepted and thus launched himself into an extremely violent position that would be the occasion for his fourth and most serious mutiny.
The task which presented so many challenges was that of serving as civilian governor of England’s mushrooming new penal colony in New South Wales on the recently settled continent of Australia. The government in London foresaw that a rigorous man like Bligh could, in these formative years, establish significant patterns upon which the entire future of Australia might be built, and many historians have felt that Bligh might have accomplished that feat had he not run into an adversary who, for ability, determination and malice, made Fletcher Christian look like a weak-kneed, vacillating village vicar.
In fact, William Bligh in his new job had two mortal enemies. The first was John Macarthur; the second was an extraordinary regiment of English soldiers. Bligh never took on a tougher adversary than the New South Wales Corps.
It had been raised in England for special service in Australia and had been assembled under a private contract with one Major Francis Grose, who made a lot of money peddling the officerships to the highest bidders. These men, in turn, gained extraordinary privileges, most noteworthy being that of a monopoly on the right to import rum. Thus the officers of the Corps came to Australia not primarily as military men but as business adventurers determined to make their fortunes quickly. A contemporary described them as a body of men “banded together on every suitable occasion to maintain by violence and injustice what they had obtained by the sacrifice of honor.”
In fact, the ship that brought the Corpsmen to Australia in 1790 was loaded to the gunwales not with ammunition or stores, but with cheap goods brought out as the officers’ private luggage for huckstering among the few free settlers and the many convicts. Quickly the Corpsmen obtained an all-powerful grip on the economy, becoming intimate with
the convicts they were supposed to be guarding and enticing the women into concubinage through the judicious scattering of small presents among the young girl convicts. By the time Bligh arrived, New South Wales boasted of 395 legally married women and 1035 convict concubines.
More important, perhaps, was the strangle hold the Corpsmen attained on the economy of the young colony, for they were officers only by accident; in truth they were sheep breeders, farmers, merchants, shipbuilders, speculators and grogshop owners.
Around 1795 the officers of the Corps obtained a virtual monopoly on all alcoholic spirits arriving in the colony, which they bartered, at a profit of four or five hundred percent, to the settlers and thus kept them in a state of peonage. Bligh’s predecessor, Governor P. G. King, had found that despite his efforts, the colony was inundated with imported liquor.
The anomaly of a line regiment in the liquor business worked this way. The government, controlled by senior officers of the military, claimed the right to purchase all spirits arriving in the port. The officers could buy all they wanted on favorable terms. They obtained convict women as barmaids and opened grogshops. It was a matter of common knowledge that the chief constable of the territory held a license and sold rum right opposite the jail door.
The demand for spirits was brisk, for there were few other forms of entertainment for the ticket-of-leave man or the hard-laboring settler. “Individual powers of consumption were incredibly great,” wrote a visiting surgeon. “The expiree farmer, and his not more intemperate prisoner servant, broached the vessel, poured out its contents into buckets, and drank until they were insensible, or until, roused almost frantic, they were swift to shed blood.” For rum, the settlers would sell or mortgage their farms and their bodies. And the officers of the Rum Corps got all the profits. They would send peddlers throughout the country districts to offer liquor against the future crop, at a good rate of interest. Consequently the farms sooner or later fell into the hands of the traders in uniform. All grain and general produce was put into the royal storehouse and the officers would draw inflated bills against the treasury, thus robbing not only the settlers but the government at home.
The officers of the Rum Regiment even exploited the men under them. The privates were paid not in cash but in goods from the stores, often worth only half what they were entitled to; if a soldier objected, he might be sent to the guardhouse, tried and sentenced to imprisonment. Thus the smart soldier would take anything that was issued to him, and use it to barter for whatever he needed. Usually he needed rum, which served in place of money in this isolated colony across the world from London.
What made the situation intolerable was that these same Corpsmen, who in Bligh’s time contained in their ranks no less than seventy ex-convicts, formed the only law enforcement agency in New South Wales, and the governor had to rely upon them in his supervision of the convict colony. Bligh was acquainted with the above facts when he accepted orders to rehabilitate the settlement, but it is unlikely that he even dimly foresaw the amount of trouble into which he was heading when he sailed from England in February, 1806, leaving behind his wife and all his daughters except one, Mrs. John Putland, who accompanied her Navy husband.
Bligh’s dignity promptly involved him in a new quarrel on the voyage. His civilian transport, the Lady Sinclair, was in a convoy under the charge of H. M. S. Porpoise, commanded by Captain Joseph Short. This officer interpreted his instructions as meaning that he would command the convoy, subject to Bligh’s orders concerning course and ports. Bligh as senior officer considered himself in supreme command of all the ships, even though he was no longer an active naval officer. A series of violent quarrels arose. At one time Bligh, without consulting Short, went so far as to alter the course of the Lady Sinclair, and Short finally had to fire two shots, one across Bligh’s bows, and another astern. Although Short attempted some reconciliation at the Cape, he had unfortunately also quarreled with some of his own officers. As soon as the vessels reached Sydney, Bligh appointed a court of inquiry, and Short was found guilty of some breaches of naval discipline. Bligh thereupon had Short arrested and sent back to England. After a court-martial a year later, Short was honorably acquitted, but his brush with Bligh had ruined his career.
Bligh’s new command was the tiny settlement of Sydney, which did not even foreshadow the great metropolis of today. In 1806 it was a jumble of dwellings and barracks, dotted here and there with a windmill. On its rutted roads jostled gangs of convicts at work, sailors off the trading ships in the Cove, lounging soldiers of the Corps, a few free settlers and various officials of the penal colony. Around the gun battery on the east side of the Cove was a region where Bligh’s writ did not run. This slum, called The Rocks, was termed by a contemporary “that fortress of iniquity more like the abode of a horde of savages than the residence of a civilized community.” Every other hut was a tavern haunted by grog-swilling seamen, thieves and runaway convicts, and this human jungle also housed gambling hells and brothels, humorously called “cock and hen clubs.”
In contrast, in the center of the village, facing the Cove, was the dignified edifice of Government House, a two-storied, whitewashed building, with a hill behind it whose trickling springs caused an unpleasant dampness in the rooms. Here reigned as chatelaine Bligh’s beloved and respectable daughter Mary, nursing her invalid husband and acting as her father’s hostess.
She was not only the first lady of the colony but the leader of fashion, for by every ship her mother sent her dresses from London. One of these was the cause of the first unpleasantness that was to arouse tension between Bligh and the officers of the New South Wales Corps. It was a clinging, diaphanous French gown which revealed so much of her figure that, to forestall colonial criticism, she wore in place of petticoats a pair of long pantaloons. As she entered the church one Sunday morning on the arm of her father, the soldiers of the Corps nudged each other, sniggered and then laughed aloud. Blushing and feeling faint, Mary rushed from the church. The rage of Bligh on realizing that these upstart soldiers had ridiculed his favorite daughter soon subsided, but this insult added fuel to the flame of enmity that was shortly to arise between the Corps and the governor.
Bligh assumed his post in Sydney on August 14, 1806. His Excellency settled in Government House and at once started to institute the two difficult reforms which he had been firmly ordered to make. The first of these was to suppress the notorious rum traffic in the colony. The second was to replace the pernicious system of barter with the use of currency. Both these orders put Bligh squarely against the entrenched selfish interests of the profiteering New South Wales Corps; and this headlong collision was to produce Bligh’s greatest mutiny, the famed “Rum Rebellion.”
Even though the forces ranged against Bligh were formidable, he would probably have won except that his enemies were led by one of the most unprincipled and able men in the history of Australia. In John Macarthur, Bligh was to find an adversary as egotistic, irascible and bullheaded as himself. Here were the irresistible force and the immovable object. Macarthur today is acclaimed in Australian school-books as the great pioneer sheep raiser of the country, the one who developed the merino breed that later became the main source of Australia’s great wool industry, and he was undoubtedly an able and far-seeing man. But his personality was not of an endearing kind, and during the three years that Bligh knew and fought against him, Macarthur played a less than heroic role.
In England, Macarthur had been apprenticed to a stay-maker, whence came his Sydney nickname, “Jack Bodice.” He had previously served in the army before he bought an ensigncy in the New South Wales Corps and arrived in the colony with it in 1790. He was just twenty-three years old and married to the daughter of a country gentleman. He was swarthy, with determined square jaw, compressed lips and a pug nose. His nature was cold and harsh, that of a man on the make. He was described as being “as keen as a razor and as rapacious as a shark,” and anyone who stood in his path was likely to fall a victim to “his overwee
ning vanity, lust for wealth, aggrandizement and possession of landed property.”
Although quickly promoted to captain, “Jack Bodice” had retired from the regiment after a violent quarrel with an earlier governor, who had put him under arrest for wounding his commanding officer in a duel and had sent him to England for trial. On his return, although keeping in touch with the regiment, Macarthur devoted himself to making a fortune by raising wool on his five-thousand-acre estate called Camden. The governor bitterly pointed out that, for a full-time officer, Macarthur had earned a goodly income. “He came here in 1790 more than £500 in debt, and is now worth at least £20,000.… His employment during the eleven years he has been here has been that of making a large fortune, helping his brother officers to make small ones (mostly at the public expense), and sowing discord and strife.… Experience has convinced every man in this colony that there are no resources which art, cunning, impudence, and a pair of basilisk eyes can afford that he does not put in practice to obtain any point he undertakes.… One half the colony already belongs to him, and it will not be long before he gets the other half.”
One foundation of that fortune was indicated in the testimony of Joseph Holt: “Every soldier got twenty-five acres of land. Many of them when intoxicated sold their tickets for a gallon of rum. Mr. Macarthur used to supply them with goods, and so obtained from these improvident and foolish men their tickets, by which he acquired an enormous landed property.” On his own behalf he carried on trade with China and the South Sea Islands, and was the biggest rum retailer of them all. His defiant temper, his paranoiac conviction that anyone who opposed him was seeking his ruin, his gift for magnifying a personal slight into the status of a national wrong—all these qualities had aroused such animosity in every corner of the colony that it is remarkable that he had any supporters left; but people followed him through gullibility or fear of reprisal. Macarthur’s life had been a series of quarrels, duels, grudges and almost fatal feuds. He boasted that he had caused the government to dismiss Governors Hunter and King. He had flouted all local ordinances and challenged all comers. But now he was to meet Bligh.