Category Archives: History

Arts, Australia, Books, Britain, History, Maritime

Book Review: The Bounty Mutiny & The Founding of Australia

PARADISE IN CHAINS

Mutinous Mary’s miracle on the high seas follows that of Captain Bligh who survived one of history’s most perilous voyages, a Cornish woman transported Down Under was inspired to do the same.

MOST of us know the story of Captain Bligh and the mutiny on HMS Bounty from the Hollywood movies, variously starring Charles Laughton, Trevor Howard and Anthony Hopkins, through which Bligh became a byword for shipboard tyranny.

In contrast, few have heard of the female convict Mary Bryant, transported Down Under in 1787. But, as Diana Preston’s vivid, continuously compelling book reveals, there are intriguing links between Bligh and Bryant.

Preston’s revisiting of the mutiny is rich in detail. Bligh’s orders were to sail to the Pacific island of Tahiti, gather breadfruit seedlings and take them to the West Indies to grow food for plantation slaves.

His troubles began when he arrived in Tahiti, that “fabled paradise of plenty and pleasure”.

European visitors had, from the time of the island’s discovery, been both delighted and scandalised by what they found there, and sex-starved sailors had rejoiced in what seemed like Tahitian free love.

The Bounty’s men were no different, and they were unsurprisingly reluctant to leave at the end of their five-month layover, but Bligh hauled them back to the ship.

Once they had left Tahiti, relationships on board the Bounty rapidly deteriorated. Bligh’s outbursts of temper and foulmouthed ranting undermined the men’s already low morale.

 

PARTICULARLY distressed by what he saw as his unfair treatment was Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian who, within weeks, could take it no longer.

On April 28, 1789, he and fellow mutineers took over the ship. “You have treated me like a dog all voyage,” he told Bligh. “I am determined to suffer it no longer.”

Bligh and 18 men loyal to him were ordered into an open boat 23ft long and 6ft 9in at its widest – and left to the mercies of the sea.

What followed was more extraordinary than the mutiny itself. Bligh decided to head for Timor, 3,600 miles away in the Dutch East Indies. All the men agreed to a daily ration of one ounce of bread and a quarter-pint of water, which Bligh measured out using scales and weights improvised from two coconut shells and pistol balls (which can still be seen in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London).

Unsurprisingly, these rations caused pains in the lower bowels and constipation. “Most of us 18 days without an evacuation,” noted Bligh in his sea journal.

Despite the hardships, Bligh successfully navigated his tiny boat to its destination. Six weeks later, it arrived in the Dutch harbour of Kupang and Bligh hoisted a Union Jack he had fashioned from signal flags. All but one man had survived.

In Britain two years earlier, as the Bounty was setting sail in search of breadfruit, the first plans for criminals to be exiled Down Under were drawn up.

When the First Fleet of 11 ships sailed from Portsmouth for New South Wales, there were more than 700 convicts on board. The oldest was an 82-year-old rag-and-bone woman convicted of perjury; the youngest was nine-year-old John Hudson, whose chimney-sweep master had pushed him through the skylight of a house to steal from it.

Maid Elizabeth Beckford had taken several pounds of Gloucester cheese from her mistress’s larder. Thomas Chaddick had appropriated 12 cucumbers from a kitchen garden.

Compared to these petty thieves, Mary Broad was a major criminal. She had been a highway robber and was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to transportation.

By the time she set off for New South Wales, Mary was pregnant – probably by one of her guards. During the voyage, she gave birth to a girl and took up with William Bryant, a fisherman convicted of smuggling. They married once they arrived in what was then called New Holland.

Conditions in the new colony were hellish. Deprivation and disease were everywhere, and punishments were severe.

William Bryant and his wife seem to have decided that anything was preferable to remaining in New Holland. They may well have heard of Bligh’s extraordinary journey from a passing Dutch ship captain and were inspired to steal a boat.

Together with their children (they now had two) and seven other convicts, they made their bid for freedom. Heading like Bligh to the Dutch East Indies, they travelled 3,254 nautical miles along Australia’s eastern seaboard, westward through the feared Torres Strait and across the largely uncharted Arafura Sea. Whenever they ventured on shore, they were threatened by hostile natives. They faced seas “running mountains high” and lived in dread “that our boat would be staved to pieces and every soul perish”.

 

SIXTY-NINE days later, they arrived in Kupang, where they claimed to be the survivors of a shipwrecked whaler. Their true story eventually emerged and they were taken back to Britain, coincidentally on board the same ship as some of the Bounty mutineers who had been captured while enjoying more sex and sunshine in Tahiti.

Both the open-boat voyage made by Bligh and his men and the one by Mary Bryant and her companions rank among the most remarkable in maritime history.

Bligh’s subsequent career included service under Lord Nelson and a spell as Governor of New South Wales, during which he faced another mutiny.

Mary Bryant’s case was taken up by distinguished men, including Dr Johnson’s biographer James Boswell. She was given a free pardon in 1793 and returned to her native Cornwall, where she is assumed to have died some time before the end of the century.

In telling these tales in parallel, Preston provides a fresh perspective on both the endlessly fascinating saga of the Bounty and the early history of Australia.

– ‘Paradise In Chains: The Bounty Mutiny and The Founding of Australia’ by Diana Preston is published by Bloomsbury for £25

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Arts, History, Science, United States

Quantum Leaps: Benjamin Franklin

1706 – 1790

Benjamin Franklin was one of the five men who drafted the Declaration of Independence of 1776. He was also a prolific scientist.

Benjamin Franklin had a rare genius. Unlike most of the scientists chronicled on this site who were known for their outstanding talents and contributions to science, the American Franklin was brilliant in a wide range of arenas. In a five-year period between 1747 and 1752, he contributed more to science than most scientists would achieve in a lifetime of dedicated study. Yet, during other periods of his life, he operated in, and conquered, completely different fields. He was a master printer and publisher, a successful journalist and satirist, an inventor, a world-famous ambassador and, probably most notably of all, a politician at a vital time in American history. Indeed, Franklin was one of the five separate signatories of the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776 and was a key participant in the later drafting of the American Constitution.

. Studying Electricity

Franklin does, however, merit an entirely separate entry for his achievements in physics alone – he was a pioneer in understanding the properties and potential benefits of electricity. Although the phenomenon of electricity had been noted since the time of the ancients, very little was known about it from a scientific perspective, and many considered the extent of its usefulness to be limited to ‘magic’ tricks. At around the age of forty, Franklin became fascinated by electricity and began to experiment with it, quickly realising it was a subject worthy of scientific study and research in its own right. So, he sold his printing interests and dedicated himself for the next five years to understanding it.

. Flying a Kite

Although Franklin wrongly believed electricity was a single ‘fluid’ (this was an advance on earlier theories which posited the idea of two different fluids), he perceived this fluid to somehow consist of moving particles, now understood to be electrons. More importantly, he undertook important studies involving electrical charge and introduced the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in explaining the way substances could be attracted to or repelled by each other according to the nature of their charge. He also believed these charges ultimately cancelled each other out so that if something lost electrical charge, another substance would instantly gain the amount being cast away. His work on electricity reached its peak in his now famous kite experiment of 1752. Believing lightning to be a form of electricity, and in order to prove it, Franklin launched a kite into a thunderstorm on a long piece of conducting string. Tying the end of the string to a capacitor, he was vindicated when lightning did indeed charge it, proving the existence of its electrical properties. From these results and realising the potential of a device that could deflect the harmful effects of lightning strikes away from buildings and property, he developed the lightning conductor.

Franklin had also published his text Experiments and Observations on Electricity, made at Philadelphia in America in 1751, which went on to inspire future scientists in the study and development of the uses of electricity.

. A Prolific Inventor

From 1753 the time Franklin dedicated to science reduced dramatically due to his taking up a new post as deputy postmaster general and, later, political and ambassadorial roles. He did, however, leave a legacy of other inventions from the wide range of experiments conducted throughout his life, including: an iron furnace ‘Franklin’ stove (still in use today), bifocal spectacles, the street lamp, the rocking chair, the harmonica, an odometer and watertight bulkheads for ships. Franklin also came up with the idea of Daylight Saving Time and was the first to charter the Gulf Stream from observations made by sailors.

A man of many talents, Benjamin Franklin was a successful inventor, politician, printer, oceanographer, ambassador, journalist and, of course, scientist.

. The Legacy of Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s legacy, in addition to the many inventions such as lightning conductors, bifocal lenses and street lamps, was one of learning. He established one of the first public libraries, as well as one of the first universities: Pennsylvania, in America.

On a broader societal level, he established the modern postal system, set up police and fire fighting departments and established the Democratic Party.

He certainly lived up to his own quotation, ‘If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.’

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, Second World War

Book Review: ‘Secret Pigeon Service’

REVIEW

Intro: How our intrepid pigeons went to war to send back Nazi plans to Churchill – and why, despite top brass doubters, dropping them behind enemy lines wasn’t so bird-brained after all.

GORDON COREA tells a true story that is likely to make you gasp on every page. Once this book has been read you’ll never look at a pigeon disdainfully again. In fact, you might even feel the urge to go straight to Trafalgar Square to pay homage to the species. Some readers might find themselves muttering, again and again, the World War II expression: ‘It’s too fantastic.’

This is the story of the bravery and single-mindedness of both humans and pigeons. It throws light on all kind of facets of World War II, from the realities of life inside occupied Europe and the canny evils of the Nazi regime, to the well-meaning, but blundering, chaos of the British intelligence system, and the generosity and charm of the British pigeon-fancying fraternity.

The most astonishing thing of all, on which the story is based, is that homing pigeons (columba livia, to use their Latin name) can fly back to their home loft in any suburban location, from an unknown field in the middle of Belgium, in six-and-a-half hours. Exactly how they find their way is still a bit of a mystery to scientists.

But when reading this book, you’re constantly thinking about what it must be like to be a pigeon on its own in a gale above the churning North Sea, miles from both shores. It knows only that it must get home and has no idea that it’s carrying vital intelligence written on a tiny square of rice paper rolled up inside a cylinder attached to its ankle.

Pigeons had been used in warfare before – they were sent out in balloons during the Siege of Paris, and in World War I they flew 15 or 20 miles across the front lines.

But this cross-Channel scheme was of a whole new order. It needed an eccentric to dream up such a plan, and in this case the visionary eccentric was an alcoholic veteran spy called Rex Pearson, who was at a loose end after being sacked from his intelligence job in Switzerland.

He saw the potential of dropping pigeons in cages, with tiny parachutes, from planes flying 30,000 feet above gardens in occupied Belgium and Holland.

The cages would contain a questionnaire in Dutch, Flemish and French, a pencil, and a small bag of pigeon feed. MI6 were sceptical of the idea, seeing this as an ‘outmoded’ method of warfare. As Corera punningly quips: ‘Pigeons were low down the pecking order of intelligence requirements.’

 

BUT Pearson persisted, and the Army eventually gave permission for a small ‘Special Section (Carrier Pigeon)’ team to start Operation Columba from the bowels of the War Office, where the eccentrics in charge had a ‘Heil den Fuhrer!’ poster of Hitler on the wall, for reasons of dark humour it can only be assumed.

No Frederick Forsyth thriller could be as gripping as this real-life story. With his pigeon-like instinct for homing in on an individual human story, the author leads us to a small farmhouse deep inside occupied Belgium, and to the Debaillie family. In July 1941, they found one of the Columba’s parachuted pigeons in their back garden.

What should they do? If they were caught sending messages to Britain, their lives would be in danger.

Corera utilises ‘parable of the sower’ cadences to sum up what happened to dropped pigeons: some were lost in planes shot down; some were handed in to the police, some fell straight into enemy hands, some were eaten by hungry locals, and some were taken by hawks.

Every now and then, however, a pigeon came into the hands of true ‘patriots’ willing to take the risk of sending a message back to Britain. It’s painful to relate the stark statistic that out of 16,554 birds dropped between 1941 and 1944, only one in ten made it home.

But this one did. The message, on both sides of a four-inch-square piece of rice paper, is reproduced in the book. It was known as ‘Message 37’, sent by the Debaillie family’s small band of patriots who called themselves ‘Leopold Vindictive’.

SPS3

Carrier pigeons were trained by soldiers to send messages back home.

This message was a thing of such lovingly detailed beauty, revealing the exact positions of German military installations, that it was shown to Winston Churchill, who hailed it as symbolic of the spirit of resistance alive inside occupied Europe.

The man who created the message was a bearded priest called Father Joseph Raskin who, as the book progresses, becomes more and more of a saint – almost a Dietrich Bonhoeffer figure.

Corera (a fully trained investigative journalist) visited and interviewed the descendants of the Debaillie family, and we can see a photograph of them holding the pigeon just before they released it with its message attached.

They knew the pigeon arrived safely because, listening illegally to their radio set, they heard the BBC’s coded message: ‘Leopold Vindictive, the key fits the lock, and the bird is in the lion’s cage.’

If only the whole book were a catalogue of mini-successes like that one. But thanks to a mixture of human error, spies who lost heart, and the refusal of rival sections of the British intelligence service to speak to one another, the story all too soon turns into one of missed opportunities and failed missions.

Raskin was desperate to repeat this message-sending, but he waited in vain for more pigeons.

Some did land, but they were too far away to be found.

Raskin’s desperation was so acute that he took many risks, joining up with other Belgian spy networks so that when the Germans arrested one spy they were easily able to ‘roll up’ the whole network – including Raskin.

The scene where this happens makes almost unbearable reading. Nevertheless, Operation Columba grew in stature as the war went on, and MI6 grudgingly admitted how useful homing pigeons could be. Hundreds of Allied lives were saved by pigeon-borne intelligence.

British pigeon-fanciers from Ipswich to Plymouth who gave up their pigeons for war use were heroes, but the pigeons were the greatest heroes of all.

Take 11-month-old Billy, for instance, who, when his bomber crew crash-landed in France in 1942, delivered his message the next day in a state of collapse. He had flown through a gale-driven snowstorm back to the RAF station in Lincolnshire.

As well as human double-agents, there were pigeon double-agents. Germans put their pigeons into Columba cages so that message intended for London found their way to a German loft, thus exposing ‘traitors’.

Patriots became terrified of ‘Gestapo pigeons’ posing as British birds. Germans, in turn, became terrified of British ‘phoney pigeons’ disguised as German pigeons, with German rings on them.

These would be sent to Britain with a German agent and then fly home to their British loft, bearing useful intelligence.

And wait for the American pigeons, who started arriving in ships in 1942. Handsome well-fed American pigeons started cross-breeding with scrawnier British pigeons, just as handsome GIs did with British girls.

The Americans developed the useful ‘pigeon bra’, which made it easier for soldiers parachuted into foreign fields to carry birds on their person.

For an agent parachuting into occupied Europe, it was a great comfort to release your pigeon and watch it fly off homewards with a message that you’d landed safely.

Corera’s gripping book is an intoxicating mixture of comedy and high seriousness.

A warning: it contains a moment of horrific Nazi violence, or, as they would call it, ‘justice’, that you won’t forget.

– Secret Pigeon Service by Gordon Corera is published by William Collins for £20

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