Beyond the Bounty Read Online Free

rest of us pined for the dusky maidens that we had left back on that Tahitian shore.
    We knew we were for the noose if they ever caught us. We knew we would never see England and home and family again unless we saw it briefly with a rope around our necks.
    We knew that we would be exiles forever for taking the
Bounty
.
    But we did it for the women.
    And the men who stuck with Bligh (and who probably followed him to the bottom of the sea, I shouldn’t wonder, or starved to death, or gave their bollocks for a native to wear as earrings), they left because of the women.
    The other women.
    The women back home.
    The wives who were nursing newborn babies or raising small children. Or the older wives who they had loved for a lifetime. Or the sweethearts who were yet to become wives. All of it was about the women. Those who mutinied. Those who got into Bligh’s leaky boat.
    The Bligh loyalists – that was what we called them, our former shipmates who wanted no part of the mutiny – got into that little boat and paddled away for their women just as surely as we sailed back to Tahiti for the women that we had left behind.
    Even Bligh had a wife. I suppose he must have loved her, as much as Bligh was capable of loving anything. Certainly he was as celibate as a novice monk during our time in Tahiti. Bligh never touched a Tahitian lass with so much as a dirty breadfruit.
    The women ruled our world.
    Our story wasn’t about breadfruit. And it wasn’t about Bligh’s cruelty. And it wasn’t even about treating men like vermin.
    It was about the women.
    And even now – with Bligh no doubt dead, and with the
Bounty
burned, and Fletcher Christian freshly buried, and with us willingly shipwrecked for evermore … Even now as our mad adventure reached its bloody conclusion on the secret island of Pitcairn, I thought to myself that it was still all about the women.
    I watched the slim yet curvy figure of Maimiti walk away from the grave of Fletcher Christian, the man she had loved. Her black hair tumbled down over her lovely face.
    The king’s daughter. The captain’s widow. I admired the way her rump rolled rhythmically up and down as she walked.
    ‘Someone should comfort that poor child,’ I said to John Adams, who was sitting on the grass hunched over his open Bible, muttering to himself about the wrath of the Lord.
    He looked up from the good book.
    ‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Ned,’ he said. ‘Shall I ask one of the women to stay with her?’
    ‘No, I’ll do it,’ I said, perhaps a little too quickly. But my Bible-thumping shipmate got a teary glint in his eye.
    ‘You’re a good man, Ned Young,’ he said, and I scarpered off after Maimiti before he had a chance to change his mind.
    She was off up a grassy path that led away from our settlement. As I trotted after her, I encountered some drunken piece of scum lounging against a palm tree with a bottle of rum in his hand. It was John Mills, a gunner’s mate, and as different to Bible-loving John Adams as chalk is to cheese.
    He leered at me in his insolent fashion. (As a general rule they are a rough lot, the gunner’s mates.)
    ‘Off to sample some of the captain’s port, are we, Ned?’ he said, rolling his eyes and grinning foolishly and almost puking his guts up with merriment.
    ‘Still your tongue, John Mills,’ I said.
    I leaned down and gave him the back of my hand across his stupid face and he didn’t like the taste of it as much as his rum. But he was too drunk to stand up and fight me like a man.
    I moved quickly on, having for a moment lost sight of the lovely Maimiti’s magnificent backside (surely one of the finest views in all the South Seas).
    The drunken gunner’s mate called after me.
    ‘You can’t do that to me, Ned Young! There are no more officers and men! Now there are only men, Ned! You cannot strike me!’
    I answered him over my shoulder.
    ‘Examine your broken nose,’ I shouted, ‘and you will find that I can strike you well