Beyond the Bounty Read Online Free Page A

enough.’
    Then I had a bit of a chuckle to myself until I saw Maimiti on her knees in the shadow of the palms, crying her pretty brown eyes out.
    Taking a deep breath, I knelt down beside her, gently patting the silky skin of her shoulders.
    ‘There, there,’ I said, like a kindly priest at your true believer’s deathbed. ‘There, there, don’t cry, my duck of diamonds. For he is at rest now, and gone to a far better place.’
    I sounded very sincere. I almost believed myself. Although a part of me wondered what place could ever be better than the soft bed of Maimiti, the king’s daughter.
    Sob, sob, sob, she went, the poor thing. The black hair was still covering that beautiful face. I gently tried to pull it away from her eyes, her nose, her mouth – especially that.
    ‘Now, now,’ I said. ‘Don’t cry your little heart out. For old Ned Young is here to comfort you in your hour of need. What can I do to comfort you, my lovely one? Now if we could just slip into these bushes for a moment …’
    She spat in my face.
    A good one, it was – full of feeling and well aimed.
    It caught me right on the bridge of my frequently broken nose, and dribbled down that sad excuse for a hooter, the spit only veering off to the right when it reached my upper lip.
    Then she was up and screaming at me. Her fists hammering my chest.
    And I was too shocked to move.
    ‘You killed Fletcher Christian!’ she howled. ‘You ugly dog! You toothless old man! You killed my love!’
    ‘I killed no man,’ I gasped, and I stepped away from her.
    She spat again, this time on the ground.
    ‘You burned the
Bounty
!’ she hissed, that black fire in her eyes. ‘You killed the only good man among you!’
    The funny thing about Maimiti is that she sounded a lot like Fletcher Christian. Because she had learned the lingo from him, I suppose, she had a bit of the dandy and fop in her voice like our poor grilled skipper himself.
    But I think that was true of all of us. The ones who learned English, and the ones who learned Tahitian. We all had our language lessons in bed.
    She spat a third and final time.
    ‘You remarkable pig!’ she growled, and I shivered with shock. For they were the very words that Fletcher Christian had uttered just before we put William Bligh in his boat.
    Then she was off down the path and gone, and I knew that she would be watched by other greedy eyes as she tore at her widow’s rags.
    And I saw that nothing had changed.
    We had travelled to the far side of the world. We had suffered storms, inhumanity and thirst. We had been half-drowned, flogged within an inch of our lives and nearly killed because our precious cargo of bloody breadfruit mattered more than our own lives.
    We had thrown away England and invited the hangman’s rope because we had known true freedom, and all the pleasure of the flesh, and what it means to be loved.
    And now we were marooned on the island at the end of the world with no means of ever leaving.
    Yet what had really changed?
    Nothing.
    Our story was still all about the women.

4
The Last of the Rum
    Midnight came and the moon rose full and white.
    We huddled around a fire on the beach, deciding what was to be done and how we were to live our new lives. We were eight English sailors without a ship.
    My jaw was swollen from some awful ache and I chewed bitterly on a short stump of wood. It did no good, but I chewed it anyway.
    ‘Men,’ said John Adams with a mighty sigh. ‘We are a dwindling band of brothers. There were not many of us when we set sail from Portsmouth and now there are even less.’
    Murmurs of agreement around the campfire. I did a quick tally in my noggin, although it wasn’t easy with that wretched face ache.
    After our noble rebellion against injustice, we had put eighteen men in Bligh’s little boat. Thus condemning them, we believed, to certain death in the freezing depths of the Pacific or in the boiling cooking pots of hungry, lip-smacking savages.
    Fletcher