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The purposes of this investigation are several:

(1) To present the long & short-term causes of the mutiny in the light of a new tool as well as a new conceptual approach. The tool is the process of Events Matrixing; whereby the actions of the participants are viewed against a background of natural & other causes & conditions placed upon them by time & place. The Events Matrix is composed of all these interactions between people & the world around them, how they are affected by that world & how they affect it.

The conceptual keys I use in this paper are restriction, confusion, & neglect. These impact upon the matrix in that they limit the actions & perceptions of the participants, & the participants reshape & modify the matrix as they progress through it.

(2) To reconstruct as far as possible the actions & intentions of those aboard HMAV Bounty, primarily between 04:00 & 13:00 on Tuesday 28th April 1789, but also at other significant times & dates. Primary sources were not easily available given the size & timeframe of this project. This reconstruction will come primarily from the quality books written most recently about the mutiny, which summarise & bring to life best the incidents & personalities of these involved, as well as providing a wealth of other information.

It is not my intention to more than briefly describe the reality of Bligh & Bounty, the lack of floggings & general brutality, etc. There is neither the space nor the need, this is not a retelling of the narrative of Bounty. I have constructed the first complete chronology of the story, from Bligh's birth till the death of the last mutineer, John Adams, on Pitcairn 75 years later, with all significant dates in between. Wherever necessary the reader should refer to this. In addition there is a set of maps detailing the routes the ships took, where they landed & when, a set of diagrammes viewing Bounty inside & out, & a complete list of crew & their occupations before & after the mutiny, & their fates. Whole books could be--indeed have been--written in the last twenty years to disprove the general public image of Bligh & Christian & the mutiny, to varying levels of effect. Most people either do not know or care, or give a typically stereotypical response, or are passionately pro one & anti the other, for many reasons. I take the view that Bligh & Christian were both necessary to produce the final outcome, as were other members of the crew & other natural elements. There are no innocents. Edward Christian's successful muckspreading about Bligh while he was on the second breadfruit voyage (see the chronology) meant Bligh won the battle for survival in the launch & in the Navy after, but lost the war in the public eye & in posterity & historical longevity. Who Bligh really was is not what we remember.

One of the things I find interesting about the mutiny is whether changing individuals would make a difference to the events, the same way changing generals at a battle would affect the outcome. It seems that only the inclusion of Bligh & Christian would have guaranteed a mutiny the way it occurred. Obviously Bligh would need to be selected, in order to cause the rest of the selections. Christian would need to be there, with the ambiguous relationship between them, neither completely friends-as-gentlemen-at-sea nor as professional colleagues.

Remove Christian & the whole reason for the disputes disappears. It was not a classic mutiny, merely resembling one. It was not a revolt by men against tyranny, nor against incompetence or injustice, it was one man trying to get another out of his life, & convincing other crewmembers to take revenge for petty disputes with whomever they had occurred. [1]

METHODOLOGY: EVENTS MATRIXING EXPLAINED

Put simply, the Events Matrix is the net created by people being alive & conscious & active within the world, interacting with each other. It has always existed, it began with the Big Bang; matter & area & the concept of differentiating between events. Everything you do is contained within this Events Matrix, because you can neither be somewhere without matter nor can you escape the passage of time. You exist for a time as an entity within the matrix & interact with your surroundings in an active or inactive sense.

You do not even leave the Events Matrix in your current form when you die, for you exist in the minds & memories of other people, at whatever remove. For most of us this is limited to family & friends; for a few it is possibly the memory of most of the world's population. There is a considerable number of individuals who are to all intents & purposes immortal, for they are recreated into the consciousness of new generations of people through the mass media of books, photographs, television & radio.

Neil Armstrong, Jesus Christ & J.F.K have a kind of immortality because we all know who they were, what they did, how they sounded & what they looked like. More importantly for the process of Events Matrixing, they continue to affect the living world because people know about them & are influenced by their actions & ideas. Such individuals continue within the Events Matrix (affecting people & events) long after their physical presence has gone. [2]

For practical purposes, we must restrict the Events Matrix, since at its widest it includes two entirely inanimate rocks colliding in space. Except for obvious examples like the Titanic disaster, we can usually restrict Events Matrixing to individuals actively interacting with each other. In the course of acting & being acted upon by others & by the physical world as a whole, options become restricted, possibilities for differing actions lessens, the individuals have a limited number of options to use. Only when this narrowing of the Event Matrix occurs does something important happen. Most of us go through life with a relatively wide set of options at any one point. We can choose to get up or stay in bed, which road we travel on to get to work, etc. The Events Matrix really comes into play when one of those roads is blocked, forcing you to use the other, which happens to have a drunk driver on it, who also chose to get up this morning, & who collides with you, badly injuring you & killing your passenger. Because the Events Matrix you inhabit was restricted, your options were few, the possibility of a wide range of outcomes was low, & the eventual outcome was a fatal accident. At any moment you could have modified that Matrix, by missing a light so that you arrived at the same point later & the drunk hit someone else. He or she could have been arrested before he hit you, you could have avoided him at the last moment, survived unharmed & got to work o.k, anecdotally referring to this morning's "lucky escape" in the tearoom afterwards...

The list of examples is endless, the type of interaction obvious. We operate (usually unwittingly) inside this Event Matrix every day. We all endlessly, actively modify it as we go, every action & reaction changes the Matrix, as we change within it & everyone else & everything else changes too. Every action has an equal & opposite reaction; it allows us to sort out the options, as far as we can see them, after the fact, when the outcome, good or bad, has occurred, & the available options & possibilities are known & recognised. Then these known options & actions can be used to reconstruct the Matrix from the point where the particular actions being studied became distinct from the rest of the Matrix. Where this initial point (IP) occurs depends on the bias & selection of the observer. The particular actions, intentions, & events resulting can be examined along with the options not selected to see why they were chosen or came to happen, & not the events & actions which were not. Often people have no choice, the Matrix is so restricted, as they perceive it, that they can do only one thing. On other occasions, they have specific goals & eventualities in mind, & consciously choose their options & actions to produce a certain outcome. On other occasions they are not aware of the Matrix, or the possible options, & choose accidentally, or by whimsy. [3]

Despite the enormous scale & applicability of the study of the Events Matrix, it is necessary to restrict the Matrix artificially as much as possible, & the Bounty Mutiny is a good example. This lessens the number & scale of interactions you have to cope with & account for; a kind of Occam's Razor. Any ship, but especially one before the modern era, was or is a closed system, functioning apart & separate from the rest of the people on Earth. While it is at sea there are no other people around & interaction between people is limited to those on board. Such a cutoff as this is perfect as a natural rather than artificial restriction of the Events Matrix. We are not drawing lines between groups in order to study them in isolation, (though we can if we so choose) nor are we using other distinctions such as age, sex, class or status in order to lower the number of possible interactions. Indeed, it is the type & not the number of interactions, between varying classes & status & role groups, that provides the action in the Bounty Mutiny. It was the confusion between those on board that resulted in the mutiny; on another ship, with different individuals, or with a better defined structure, this aberration would never have occurred.

It was not a classic mutiny of officers against captain, or men against officers, but of one man against his friend, followed by a widening settling of lesser disputes between other individuals aboard, most of which redefined themselves several times during the morning of the mutiny. [4] These had greater consequences later for those who stayed aboard or went in the launch, those who were killed or executed later & those who founded the Pitcairn colony. Because we can restrict the Matrix to merely forty or so individuals (though the need to see their families again, for instance, would have affected the options & hence the Event Matrix of many aboard), we can restrict the number of possible interactions, making our task simpler. The lack of detailed records of what was done & said by many of the crew also lessens the complexity of the task. Finally, bias toward or against the individuals involved by investigators both past & present, will also modify the Matrix & its contents.

When the matrix reaches the Initial Point, there are so few options that they can only follow a certain sequence & often events become inevitable; the people involved cannot escape from them. This catalyst--or Terminal Event--is influenced by the Events & Vital Events before it, & determines the possibilities for the Events that follow it. Beyond this point Events are not inevitable, because they can be markedly changed by individual action. [5]

The Events Matrix is not so much a funnel as an hourglass, a cone of decreasing diversity up to the point of the Terminal Event, & then increasing beyond it as choices are made & carried out. While events & choices can be made in times of great diversity, those which happen when there is little choice tend to be more consequential (& thus interesting) in themselves. The reason why things happen the way they do is because of the way the Event Matrix is structured by what has already happened. Momentous events happen when the EM is dramatically narrowed, as you move forwards the options are closed off, your choices are restricted the way they do as you get older, you lose chances: to be an astronaut, a world-class tennis player, a mother, etc. Career, attitude, & ideology modifications become limited.

HISTORIOGRAPHY: NEGOTIATING DENING

The most active researcher in Studiae Bountiana in the late 1980's is Greg Dening. A committed post-structuralist, he views the men & the era with a fresh new eye, if not an always easily comprehensible one. The contribution of Paul Brunton of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, on the other hand, has been to put out a new annotated version of Bligh's diary, needlessly whitewashing him while managing to either denigrate Christian or ignore him entirely. Dening shines out as a thoughtful & rich investigator. Plainly we can no longer move forward in this field by supporting one protagonist & criticising the other, as scholars have tended to do. I was shocked to find Brunton at the launch of Awake! Bold Bligh! in July 1990 (shortly after my return from Pitcairn) extolling Bligh's virtues & qualities while lessening his obvious faults; & yet hardly knowing about Christian at all. Bligh's tenacity & his stolid insistence on doing the whole thing twice was viewed as endearing rather than dangerous or significant. On the whole I found it difficult to accept such deep & thorough research into only half the mutiny! [6]

By contrast Dening generates a far more interesting & challenging study. Not without fault, but one which is more advanced in scale, methodology & attitude. At the leading edge of `new history' Dening assembles a strong psychological & ethnographic array, including not only Polynesian ideas but also new slants on inter-European relations & their meanings. [7]

The lack on communication aboard is a central tenet. Bligh's insensitivity & ambiguous body & procedural ‘language' is a root cause of the mutiny. Bligh wounded psychologically rather than physically. On Bounty this was confusing & unsettling for his crew, especially his close friend Fletcher Christian. On the second Breadfruit voyage, aboard HMS Providence, (see chronology) the stress of command led Bligh into a mental & physical breakdown. He spent a considerable portion of the voyage in his cabin, beset by blinding headaches & fevers. He put these down to tropical conditions but today we would relate them to high blood pressure, stress, & tension. His problem had become medical rather than behavioural & also more severe, so that the transference of consequences--the result of the tension--was inward rather than outward. He did have blazing arguments with his officers, but his captaincy, their numbers, rank & distance from him meant they reacted differently, in addition to the different personalities. [8]

Dening, however, in both monograph [9] & book [10] digresses markedly into areas I cannot consider relevant. The identities & portraits of the judges of the Courts Martial, for instance. His work on the Beach as a zone between land & sea may be a useful tool, but the crew of Bounty did not perceive it thus, any more than they perceived human sacrifice the way Tahitians did or the deep & meaningful cycles of festival & ritual they enacted. Something they were ignorant of can hardly have affected them when they were not part of it. Nor did it play a part in the conflict of emotions between Bligh & Christian that led to the conflagration of 28th April 1789.

Dening sees the mutiny & the Pacific differently. His experiences are profoundly more mythopoeic than mine; he interacts at a deeper level of symbol & sign rather than mere practicality. I suffered both illness & serious injury during my short time in the Marquesas so my recollections are of a different nature! [11] A third of the book is spent on the Beach, before & after the time of Bounty, & a further third on the British maritime world before & after this era. It is interesting & valuable in itself, but it is less relevant. I cannot criticise it by saying it is pointless, or that it is padding out a shorter work, but it does distract the reader. Dening does acknowledge recent works in the field, & he is the first to include Glynn Christian's groundbreaking work of 1982: Fragile Paradise. Fragile Paradise is groundbreaking in that it is the first--& only-- biography of Glynn's famous ancestor. It answers many debates in the field regarding why he had to go to sea, & his dispute with Bligh over money that led to their later arguments & thence to the mutiny itself. While his work slants toward Christian apologia (as against Bligh apologia, like Brunton), it brings new light to the situation. These new facts helped me in my study, armed as I was with knowledge only Glynn Christian & Greg Dening had used before [12]

Dening goes on to use these new evidences but incorporates them into the previous material without really viewing them as significant in themselves. His focus is the psychology & perceptions, how he thinks the men felt & reacted. Dening also deeply explores Navy life as a whole, searching for the symbols & concepts used by the men. In addition to the many works on the physical side of the mutiny, this new slant now gives us the emotional, mental & symbolic side, the unseen operations of agreed meanings on appearances, expectations & behaviour. If flogging was not a full language in itself, it was at least a set of symbols, concepts, a way of regulating & comprehending the relationships between men, officers & crew. The violation of expectations played a big part in the mutiny, it was the strange, radical nature of Bligh's discipline & attitude that formed the basis for it. [13]

Where Dening & I part company is perspective. His is a post-structuralist approach, complex, conceptual, omniscient. In addition to the profoundly symbolic & sign-based communication, they were ambassadors for Britain, negotiating new relationships, ethnographers of a foreign culture & media for those at home. I see the mutiny & the ship as a whole from the point of view of the men involved. They were trapped together, impossibly distant from home, surrounded by a hostile sea, by tradition, by a host of pathogens in food & ship, by islands of alien beings, plant, animal & human. They reacted to these as Astronauts, not as Diplomats. Passive or hostile, the ‘natives' were alien, & added to the sense of isolation, of distance, of loneliness. It is these they felt most strongly on the day of the mutiny, when they were turned upside down & their tenuous world was shattered.

Far from being dominated by symbol & sign, when the mutiny comes it is both unstructured & disruptive. When Christian is prompted (innocently) by Stewart & incited by Young, he rapidly evolves a solution to his problem with friend/companion/captain Bligh. Instead of making a peaceful end of himself on his raft, pointedly demonstrating that Bligh was the cause, he takes it upon himself to rid the ship of Bligh. He never considers how he will rule a divided ship of mutineers & loyalists, nor how he can justify condemning all of them to ignominy & most to certain death. Ned Young retreats to await developments, in case Fletcher does something that conflicts with Young's own plans. What they were we will never know. He must have had some reason & need to hate Bligh & exile himself. We have inherited a history that did not realise this, & did not record & explore who Young was & why he did it. With Ned watching in case he falters, Fletcher launches irrevocably into dreadfully consequential action. The resultant chaos sees men dragged from their beds, sleep-befuddled & forced to make snap decisions, with armed men & a horrifying choice. Fletcher's plans are upset by leaky boats & burgeoning loyalists, & a deep regret that he must carry on. [14]

The men are only too aware of the amorality & violence of the sea, it is a passionless & insensitive killer. They must wrestle with their visceral fear. They must try & make the right decision given very little choice & no time to consider. Some join the mutineers, caught in the euphoria of being rid of Bligh, who has been hard on them all in the weeks after leaving Tahiti. They are used to hard knocks, but not unrelenting insult. Some join the mutineers & never regret, having no honour & no family to leave behind. Brown, the gardener, & not a seaman, is an example. He even goes all the way to Pitcairn with Christian! Some loyalists show amazing courage in confronting armed shipmates for supplies, which only the most hardened mutineers try to refuse them. It turns a mad scene of shouting, weeping, & pleading into a more ordered, negotiated, compromise. Only towards the end is there the dramaturgy of role-play of reconciliation, that Dening portrays. The first two & a half hours are chaotic, a frenzied blur of threats, shouts, gut- wrenching fear, sweating nerves, force & fury. As the morning wears on & men gain control of themselves, to get food, tools, a larger boat, they come to terms with their plight. As tempers cool the less brutal mutineers assist in procuring stores for the still almost certainly fatal launch trip. Bligh is already planning a return to Britain, by way of Australia & Batavia with his own memory for navigation & his own will for sustenance. [15]

It is curiously contradictory. They cannot survive if the mutineers are to remain free & undiscovered. Yet Christian stops his men killing Bligh several times, as well as others. Only hours after the cast-off, he is already consumed by guilt & remorse, wishing he could have them back to start anew. 16 The point is that it was spur-of-the-moment, snap decisions, made in fear & shock, by all of them from Christian onwards. They all had to deal with fear of death, injury, loss, capture, discovery.

They all had to choose rapidly. Some chose several times, based on what was happening at the time. Ellison, arguably the least guilty of the mutineers, paid a public price, the ones captured & drowned by Edwards in Pandora paid equally despite innocence.

It may seem unrealistic to baldly state that men do things with horrible consequences without thinking. It may seem unlikely that a man could do something so dangerous & radical without consideration. It could be said people just do not react like that, not when the stakes are that high. The only plans Fletcher made were between 04:30 & 05:00 on the day of the mutiny, not the weeks of conspiracy Bligh believed were necessary. We do not know how much thought Fletcher put into the raft or his escape, given that he worked on it for a day & a half & asked not only his midshipmen friends like Young & Stewart but also the ship's loyal but aggravating carpenter, William Purcell, for assistance. We do not know how much thought Ned Young put into his own plans before or after inciting Fletcher to mutiny, though it seems more than Fletcher did. The point is that Fletcher's plans had a maximum of half an hour’s thought, perhaps much less. It was not rational, or considered. It did not remember the rotten jolly boat, the half of the crew that was loyal to Bligh yet knew of Fletcher's torment & could not move against him. [17]

The appendix is a direct copy of a page from STORM COMMAND: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF THE GULF WAR, by Sir Peter de la Billiere, the commander of the British contingent of the UN forces in Operations Desert Shield & Desert Storm. It is a recent example, found by chance, of exactly the same kind of situation Fletcher was in. His solution too was unthinkable & consequential, & unlike Fletcher he was in a hostile environment crawling with truck convoys, so he survived. The fact remains it was done in the heat of the moment, without consideration. The consequences were personally absolute: life or death. Despite this & the hostility of the environment they both went ahead. It can happen-often does. [18] Ney did it at Waterloo--& lost the battle. Harold II of England did it against William the Conqueror--& lost. Ramesses II did it at Kadesh--& won, but only just. Fletcher did it, & thanks to his own restraining influence on the more murderous of his men, the bravery of the loyalists & the infrequent spectral appearances of Ned Young, it was not a defeat for any, at least in the immediate sense.

The only negotiation & symbolism is at the end, when most are reconciled to their fate, save those kept aboard Bounty against their will. The plans were instant & bad, except Young's. What & why he planned we will never know. He moved behind Fletcher, behind the mutineers at Tahiti & Tubuia & again on Pitcairn. He is the last unsolved mystery of the mutiny. Bounty, mutineers, loyalists, Pandora, & Providence & Assistant are all accounted for, when they just as easily could have been lost forever, like other ships.

Young told no-one his ideas or reasons & he died withholding them, Iago, & Rudolf Hess, mysterious to the last. [19]

If Dening sees "history as a symbol science" 20, I see it as a mammoth group of weakly or strongly interacting events, happening by or to individuals depending on their actions, abilities, etc. EM can also deal with the world entirely without people being involved other than recording what happened. It is absolute & universal & is only humanocentric in that it requires, like all other things, that people see & record it at some point. Many of these events occur on a moment-to-moment basis, depending on huge numbers of interactions per second. If there is anything wrong with Dening, (& this is not intended to be a strong criticism but merely a point) it is that he rarefies (not reifies) it too much. It becomes too jargonised, too cut off, too distinct & unreal & negotiated & agreed upon. The rushing sense of its reality & the feeling of events overtaking people & their ability to slow down & react calmly & rationally to a crisis, is gone. It is less real & average & more a highly- charged, negotiated, almost SALT-Talk meeting of symbols & characters. For me the Bounty mutiny has always seemed to be a madness, a momentary lurch when rules are discarded & people advance blindly, desperately, trying to find the right thing, duelling with each other for their very lives. Dening does not create that feeling, he makes it come across as a set of exchanged proposals & symbols; computers exchanging binary code. Darby, Daniellsen, Hough, Christian make it come alive in a real & personal sense, the horror & the fear & the shock of it. The visceral sense of the stakes is very present. Dening is seeing with hindsight, calculates anew who survives & what percentage of each group, sees them accordingly in a way the participants could not. They had no idea who would survive & where & how, & did not act accordingly, until it was too late & they were dead.

Certainly as the mutiny progresses & people begin to act more rationally, they become more willing to make a going concern of the launch. Cole goes for food & a compass, later cutlasses are passed down. Mutineers--Burkett, Millward--help them, finally, willing to work together, (negotiating, perhaps?) to achieve goals; at least come to a win/win situation rather than win/lose. Christian is willing to assist the launch group--needing to do so to relieve his own guilt & remorse at setting over half the crew adrift, not just Bligh & three others. So, as Dening puts it, there was negotiation involved, steadily growing over time. At the beginning, & at other critical times, there was force, & fear, & desperation on both sides. We see the men coming to terms with their fate, the very narrow matrix they are forced to live with. [21]

I cannot help thinking Dening's quiet, negotiated mutiny is partially a product of the 1935 & 1962 MGM movies, with their slow, dignified, uprisings. Mine is contrastingly influenced by the 1984 deLaurentiis version, with its chaos, visceral sense of horror & fear, its furious struggling Bligh & sweating, hoarse, remorseful, howling Christian. "I am in hell!" delivered with far more passion & power than any of the previous versions, by a dark, twitching mad, yet not out of control Mel Gibson. [22]

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