WRECK OF THE PANDORA.(1791 wreck of ship transporting Bounty mutineers)

By air, the Great Barrier Reef can be seen for what it truly is. From the height of thirty-seven thousand feet, or from the fifteen hundred feet of a high-winged, low-flying charter--or from the one hundred feet of, say, the crow's nest of a ship of sail--there is little hint of the coral forests that constitute the planet's largest living organism; rather, the reef is revealed to be a lurking, erratic chain of amoeba-shaped blobs, lagoon-encircled half-moons, and vaguely oblong chunks that bring to mind enormous drifting opal-colored whales. The reef system runs in two roughly parallel lines--the inner reef, piecemeal and confused, and the more massive outer reef, whose long banks of coral can extend virtually unbroken for hundreds of miles. From just north of Fraser Island, off the southern coast of Queensland, to the tip of Cape York, the northernmost point of the Australian continent, the reef runs for more than twelve hundred and fifty miles. At its northern extremity, it disintegrates into messy fragments that, along with countless shoals, atolls, sandbars, and isles, litter the narrow, hundred-mile divide between Papua New Guinea and Australia, formerly known as the Endeavour Strait and today as the Torres Strait.

Under skies scattered with broken clouds, shadows darken and patch the water, mingling among the great reef patterns. This is the scene that presents itself to a ship intent on navigating the Queensland coast, or entering the channel of the strait. Today, even possessing radar and charts and guided by beacons, no ship is allowed through the strait unless directed by an approved pilot. For sailing ships of an earlier era, these were waters fraught with unknowable dangers; some twenty-five hundred wrecks are estimated to be strewn along the reef, and many more undoubtedly lie undiscovered.

On the morning of August 25, 1791, a lone British naval vessel sailing west toward the Endeavour Strait spotted the warning sign of breakers. Hauling south, the ship skirted the shoal upon which, as her captain noted, the deceptive sea broke very moderately, "in some places barely perceptibly."

The ship, H.M.S. Pandora, a twenty-four-gun frigate under the command of Captain Edward Edwards, was approaching the final leg of her long voyage. She had departed English shores ten months earlier, in November, 1790. Once through the Endeavour Strait, there would remain a sixteen-thousand-mile run back to England. The second British ship to enter this passage, the Pandora was returning with her commission only partially fulfilled. As the Admiralty's sailing orders had stipulated, Edwards's ship had been "fitted out for the express purpose of proceeding to the South Seas in order to endeavour to . . . bring in confinement to England . . . Fletcher Christian and his associates." Edwards had not found Fletcher Christian; but on board Pandora, securely confined in irons, were fourteen of the twenty-five mutineers of the Bounty.

News of the mutiny had reached England in an extraordinary manner--it had been brought by the Bounty's commander himself, Lieutenant William Bligh, who had appeared at the Admiralty, in Whitehall, on the morning of Monday, March 15, 1790, to give a full report. Almost a year earlier, before dawn on April 28, 1789, his ship, en route from Tahiti, had been seized by a small gang of armed men led by Master's Mate and Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, Bligh's protege and his companion of two previous voyages. Taken from his cabin at gunpoint and led on deck wearing only his nightshirt, Bligh had been bound by the mizzenmast while Fletcher Christian stood guard over him with a bayonet. In the confusion and turmoil of the next few hours, Bligh, the ship's master, two midshipmen, and the ship's clerk had all been ordered into the Bounty's launch, a twenty-three-foot open boat, fitted with oars and two masts. To the amazement of Christian, a stream of volunteers had also grimly picked up bundles of possessions and gone over the side to join their captain.

The mutiny had been spontaneous, unpremeditated, and highly personal--the rash act of a man who had been drinking into the early hours of the morning and had come to find his commander's constant, critical mentoring unbearable. Like any young naval officer, Fletcher Christian had been destined for the commanding quarterdeck of a man-of-war--in view of which his inability to endure the verbal criticism of his superior officer on a peaceable breadfruit run in the South Pacific did not bode especially well. Despite the surprise tactics of the mutiny, which had carried many men unthinkingly along, and the obvious attractions of returning to Tahiti, fully half the Bounty's company had sought to join Bligh in the launch. When the small boat was finally cast off from the ship, she was crammed with nineteen men and provisions for five days, and was so overloaded that she showed no more than seven inches of freeboard in the calm morning waters--the mere length of a man's hand, as one survivor later recalled. Four other men loyal to Bligh were known to have been detained against their will on the Bounty. "Never fear, my lads, I'll do you justice if ever I reach England," Bligh had called out to the loyalists. As the launch set off into the Pacific, Bligh and his companions heard the cheerful, triumphant cry of "Huzzah for Otaheite" trailing behind their departing ship.

The Bounty had left Tahiti--Otaheite--only weeks before, having spent five months on this "Paradise of the World," as Bligh affectionately called the island, collecting breadfruit trees that were to be transplanted across oceans to the West Indies. Following the rigors of the ten-month outward voyage--and of the sailors' own hard lives in England--this tropical sojourn in a place of preeminent beauty, where food and sex could be found in casual abundance, was transforming. The sailors had adapted readily to the agreeable Tahitian culture. Most of the men had themselves tattooed, and a number had undergone the painful procedure of having their entire backsides blacked over--a Tahitian practice that bestowed much prestige, especially in the eyes of women. Bligh had allowed female guests to stay the night on ship, while the men stationed on shore, under the command of Fletcher Christian, enjoyed even greater freedom. The women of Tahiti, as Bligh later famously wrote, were "handsome, mild and cheerful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved." They were also sexually playful and available for the mere price of iron nails. Gonorrhea, or "venereals," had been introduced to the islanders by earlier ships--the French blamed the English, the English blamed the French--and, while Bligh sought to spare the islanders future infection by having the ship's surgeon monitor his men's health, all the men, at one time or another, appear to have enjoyed sexual partners. "I can only conjecture that the Pirates . . . have Ideally assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheitans than they could possibly have in England," Bligh wrote in a letter following his ordeal. Now, with the Bounty in their hands, Christian and the mutineers could return to the "happy island"--to the velvet-aired climate, the lush tropical landscape, the plentiful food, and the beautiful, compliant women.