Coconut Chaos, Diana Souhami [leveled readers TXT] 📗

was the celebrity guest, the visiting dignitary, bearing gifts from an unimagined land. He called the island ‘The Paradise of the World’ and said he’d travelled far but found nowhere more beautiful. Chief Otoo fêted him with great goodwill and rejoicing and gave him hogs, breadfruit, fish, capsicums, pumpkins and so many coconuts that none of the crew drank water any more. Otoo’s wife and sister spread mats for him to recline on, draped him in their finest cloth, held his hands as they escorted him round the island and brought a picture of Captain Cook in a broken frame for him to repair.

Otoo asked if Christian was Bligh’s tyo – his special friend. Bligh offended Christian by saying he wasn’t, that King George the Third was his tyo. It was one offence of many. He convinced the Tahitians he was doing them a favour by taking their island’s breadfruit as a present for his king. He warned the crew not to divulge the true purpose of the visit in case this increased the cost, nor were they to mention Cook’s death for fear of creating unease.

Bligh wooed the Tahitians with nails and beads. ‘They appeared extremely satisfied,’ he wrote in his log. They also loved cast-off British clothes, would discard their clean, bright-coloured wraps for a dirty old English shirt, and were ‘mad’ for strong liquor and getting drunk on rum, brandy or wine. Bligh showed them the workings of the ship and they shouted with excitement when he fired the great guns across the sea. When they saw a swallow shot it was ‘impossible to describe the pleasure they evinced’. They picked up the spent bullets in amazement. Bligh promised, when he next visited, to bring arms and ammunition from the king. To reciprocate, Otoo had two dresses made for George the Third.

Bligh was given permission to set up camp at Point Venus. Tahitians were barred from this area. Christian supervised the erecting of tents and a bamboo shed to house the saplings and made sure that sea shells were put in the base of the pots for drainage.

Because so many plants were wanted, Bligh, Nelson the gardener and a party of men went inland to the deep valley to persuade chiefs of different regions to give them trees. That his king should want a thousand breadfruit saplings was one of the many things the Tahitians found mystifying about Bligh. They asked bemused questions about the Christian god he spoke of. Did he come from the wind or the sun? Who was there before him? Who was the mother of his only son?

With reciprocal curiosity Bligh noted Tahitian customs in his log: how they bathed each morning in fresh-water streams, how small children were such adept swimmers they could pick up any tiny bead thrown into the water, how women often slept and ate in different houses from the men, and how the ‘favours’ of married women and of unmarried women of ‘the better sort’ were as hard to obtain as in any country. But he also wrote of parents who bargained ‘the untasted charms of their child’ for a couple of shirts and three strings of beads, of women who ‘danced with their fore part Naked to the Company making many lewd gestures’, of men who bound their penises with twine and stones to the sound of flute and drum music. He expressed surprise at the islanders’ laughter at such displays.

The Tahitians lived on an island of plenty and in harmony with the sea. They built ocean-going boats bigger than the Bounty. Their diet was varied, their culture rich. They didn’t need these visitors who brought viral infections and rats from their ship. Venereal disease was passed to them and in time children were born with it. Bligh’s favoured lads, Fletcher Christian and Peter Heywood, who was sixteen, were treated for it by the egregious Dr Huggan. If Bligh was treated, it was not recorded.

The Bounty crew all found tyos and sexual partners. They bought sex with girls for beads or a shirt and anything for a nail. They got ornately tattooed and lived indulgently. But Bligh’s temper didn’t improve in this ‘Paradise of the World’. He reacted savagely when things went wrong. He’d reached Tahiti in the monsoon season so he couldn’t leave until the following April. It was difficult for him to control his crew on the island for nearly six months and he continued to view them as riff-raff. He called his petty officers neglectful and worthless and chided them for inefficiency and incompetence.

Anything unguarded on the ship and its boats, if deemed useful, was taken by the Tahitians. What was perceived by the English as pilfering was viewed differently by a society that shared material things. Bligh conceded that, ‘were the ship lying in the river Thames a hundred times more would have been stolen’. Polynesians saw a distinction between casual pilfering and clever theft. Hiro, the god of thieving, inspired only the chosen with real skill.

Within days the Bounty’s best-bower anchor was taken, then the rudder, the gudgeon from the cutter and the butcher’s cleaver. On Bligh’s instruction the boat-keeper, Robert Lamb the butcher and William Muspratt the cook’s assistant were then all lashed a dozen times for neglect of duty. The Tahitian women were shocked to witness these harsh punishments. Matthew Thompson was lashed for insolence and disobedience. William Purcell was confined to his cabin for refusing to make a whetstone. When a small Tahitian boy got injured as he helped haul the launch to the shore, Dr Huggan was too drunk to attend him. The boy survived, but Huggan died of alcohol poisoning. Bligh didn’t grieve. Huggan, who spent most of his time in bed, had given capricious treatment for fanciful ailments – pneumoniotha or cholera morbus.

In the months on Tahiti Bligh’s discipline eroded. The spare sails he’d wanted aired became mildewed, the ship’s timepiece was left to run down, the azimuth compass was stolen. He said if he’d