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Fletcher Christian — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Naval career

See here for a comparison of assignments to William Bligh

Fletcher Christian began his naval career at a late age, joining the Royal Navy as a cabin boy when he was already seventeen years old (the average age for this position was between 12 and 15). He served for over a year on a third-rate ship-of-the-line along with his future commander, William Bligh, who was posted as the ship's sixth lieutenant. Christian next became a midshipman on the sixth-rate post ship HMS Eurydice and was made master's mate six months after the ship put to sea. The muster rolls of HMS Eurydice indicate Christian was signed on for a 21-month voyage to India. The ship's muster shows Christian's conduct was more than satisfactory because "some seven months out from England, he had been promoted from midshipman to master's mate".

After Eurydice had returned from India, Christian was reverted to midshipman and paid off from the Royal Navy. Unable to find another midshipman assignment, Christian decided to join the British merchant fleet and applied for a berth on board William Bligh's ship Britannia. Bligh had himself been discharged from the Royal Navy and was now a merchant captain. Bligh accepted Christian on the ship's books as an able seaman, but granted him all the rights of a ship's officer including dining and berthing in the officer quarters. On a second voyage to Jamaica with Bligh, Christian was rated as the ship's second mate.

In 1787 Bligh approached Christian to serve on board HMAV Bounty for a two-year voyage to transport breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies. Bligh originally had every intention of Christian serving as the ship's master, but the Navy Board turned down this request due to Christian's low seniority in service years and appointed John Fryer instead. Christian was retained as master's mate. The following year, halfway through the Bounty's voyage, Bligh appointed Christian as acting lieutenant, thus making him senior to Fryer.

On 28 April 1789, Fletcher Christian led a mutiny on board the Bounty and from this point forward was considered an outlaw. He was formally stripped of his naval rank in March 1790 and discharged after Bligh returned to England and reported the mutiny to the Admiralty Board.

Mutiny on the Bounty

In 1787, Christian was appointed master's mate on Bounty, on Bligh's recommendation, for the ship's breadfruit expedition to Tahiti. During the voyage out, Bligh appointed him acting lieutenant. Bounty arrived at Tahiti on 26 October 1788 and Christian spent the next five months there.

Bounty set sail with its cargo of breadfruit plantings on 4 April 1789. Some 1,300 miles west of Tahiti, near Tonga, mutiny broke out on 28 April 1789, led by Christian. According to accounts, the sailors were attracted to the "idyllic" life and sexual opportunities afforded on the Pacific island of Tahiti. Following the court-martial of captured mutineers, Edward Christian argued that they were motivated by Bligh's allegedly harsh treatment of them. Eighteen mutineers set Bligh afloat in a small boat with eighteen of the twenty-two crew loyal to him. Of those who went with Bligh only one man died (killed by natives); of those remaining after rescue: three died of malaria and two others were lost at sea. Bligh's first detailed comments on the mutiny are in a letter to his wife Betsy, in which he names Peter Heywood (a mere boy not yet 17) as "one of the ringleaders", adding: "I have now reason to curse the day I ever knew a Christian or a Heywood or indeed a Manks [sic] man. Bligh's later official account to the Admiralty lists Heywood with Christian, Edward Young and George Stewart as the mutiny's leaders, describing Heywood as a young man of abilities for whom he had felt a particular regard. To the Heywood family Bligh wrote: "His baseness is beyond all description." Heywood was found guilty but pardoned; Stewart drowned when the Pandora sank in 1791; Young slept through the mutiny although he did join the mutineers ex post facto.

Following the mutiny, Christian first travelled to Tahiti, where he married Maimiti (also known as Mauatua), the daughter of one of the local chiefs. He then attempted to build a colony on Tubuai, but there the mutineers came into conflict with natives. Abandoning the island, he stopped briefly in Tahiti again, and dropped off sixteen crewmen. These sixteen included four Bligh loyalists who had been left behind on Bounty and two who had neither participated in, nor resisted, the mutiny. The remaining nine mutineers, six Tahitian men and eleven Tahitian women, then sailed eastward. In time, they landed on Pitcairn Island, where they stripped Bounty of all that could be floated ashore before Matthew Quintal set it on fire, stranding them. The resulting sexual imbalance, combined with the effective enslavement of the Tahitian men by the mutineers, led to insurrection and the deaths of most of the men.

Death

The American seal-hunting ship Topaz visited Pitcairn in 1808 and found only one mutineer, John Adams (who had used the alias Alexander Smith while on Bounty), still alive along with nine Tahitian women. The mutineers who had perished had, however, already had children with their Tahitian wives. Most of these children were still living. Adams and Maimiti claimed Christian had been murdered during the conflict between the Tahitian men and the mutineers. According to an account by a Pitcairn woman named Jenny who left the island in 1817, Christian was shot while working by a pond next to the home of his pregnant wife. Along with Christian, four other mutineers and all six of the Tahitian men who had come to the island were killed in the conflict. William McCoy, one of the four surviving mutineers, fell off a cliff while intoxicated and was killed. Quintal was later killed by the remaining two mutineers, Adams and Ned Young, after he attacked them. Young became the new leader of Pitcairn.

John Adams gave conflicting accounts of Christian's death to visitors on ships that subsequently visited Pitcairn. He was variously said to have died of natural causes, committed suicide, become insane or been murdered.

Christian was survived by Maimiti and his son, Thursday October Christian (born 1790). Besides Thursday October, Fletcher Christian also had a younger son named Charles Christian (born 1792) and a daughter Mary Ann Christian (born 1793). Through Thursday and Charles, Fletcher is the ancestor of almost everybody with the surname Christian on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands, as well as the many descendants who have moved to Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

Rumours have persisted for more than two hundred years that Christian's murder was faked, that he had left the island and that he made his way back to England. Many scholars believe that the rumours of Christian returning to England helped to inspire Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

There is no portrait or drawing extant of Fletcher Christian that was drawn from life. Bligh described Christian as "5 ft. 9 in. high [175 cm] - Dark swarthy complexion. Hair – Blackish or very dark brown. Make – Strong. A star tatowed [sic] on his left breast, and tatowed [sic] on the backside. His knees stand a little out and he may be called a little bow legged. He is subject to violent perspiration, particularly in his hand, so that he soils anything he handles".