Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [73]
The Women are handsome—mild in their Manners and conversation—possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved—The chiefs have taken such a liking to our People that they have rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise, and even made promises of large possessions. Under these and many other attendant circumstances equally desirable it is therefore now not to be Wondered at, ‘tho not possible to be foreseen, that a Set of Sailors led by Officers and void of connections, or if they have any, not possessed of natural feelings sufficient to wish themselves never to be separated from them, should be governed by such powerfull inducement but equal to this, what a temptation it is to such wretches when they find it in their power however illegally it can be got at, to fix themselves in the most of plenty in the finest Island in the World where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are more than equal to anything that can be conceived.
Consider the makeup of naval crews in this period. They consisted of young men in the prime of sexual life, designed by evolution to pair-bond in serial monogamy with women of reproductive age. Of the crews who sailed into the Pacific from 1765 to 1793, 82.1 percent were between the ages of twelve and thirty, and another 14.3 percent between the ages of thirty and forty. The average age of the Bounty crew was twenty-six. Bligh was thirty-three. There were, in fact, seven men older than Bligh (all thirty-six or more; one was thirty-nine), making the Bounty’s crew the oldest to sail into the Pacific during this period. When they arrived at the South Pacific they exhibited little self-restraint. Of the 1,556 sailors in this general cohort, 437 (28 percent) got the “venereals.” The Bounty’s crew was among the highest at 39 percent (with Cook’s Resolution and Vancouver’s Chatham crews topping out at 57 and 59 percent, respectively). Female connections were rampant. Fletcher Christian was one of those treated for “venereals.”
After the mutiny Christian sailed the Bounty back to Tahiti, and on September 23, 1789, he left the island, taking with him eight mutineers, six Tahitian men, eleven Tahitian women, and one child. On January 15, 1790, they arrived at Pitcairn Island, unloaded the ship, and a week later torched it in a gesture of no return. On a Thursday that October, to Fletcher Christian and his Polynesian wife was born a son, which he named Thursday October Christian. Each mutineer, in fact, had taken a woman as a mate, but only three of the six Polynesian men were attached. The consequences of this inequity were predictable. After three years, the woman living with mutineer John Williams died, so he took a replacement from one of the Polynesian men, leading to jealousy, violence, and retribution, and a massacre on September 20, 1793, in which five of the mutineers were killed, including Fletcher Christian, as well as all of the Polynesian men. In subsequent years, William McCoy committed suicide, Matthew Quintal was killed by one of the other mutineers, and Edward Young died of asthma. By 1800, the only male survivor was John Adams, who lived until 1829, long enough to tell the tale of the fate of the Bounty’s mutineers. One such account, retold by Captain Philip Pipon on the HMS Tagus, offered this corroboration of Bligh’s insight into Christian’s motives:
Christian’s wife had paid the debt of nature, & as we have every reason to suppose sensuality & a passion for the females of Otaheite chiefly instigated him to the rash step he had taken, so it is readily to be believed he would have lived long on the island without a female companion.
Another British captain who visited Pitcairn in 1825, Frederick Beechey, interviewed Adams, who recalled that Christian relieved the officer on duty and, turning to Quintal, “the only one of the seamen, who Adams said, had formed any serious [female] attachment at Otaheite,” cajoled him to consider that “success would restore