men,--"He is no better than ourselves: shoot him,
bayonet him, or fling him overboard!" they say of some obnoxious
individual raised above them by his merit. Soldiers and sailors, in
general, will bear any amount of tyranny from a lordly sot, or the son of
a man who has "plenty of brass"--their own term--but will mutiny against
the just orders of a skilful and brave officer who "is no better than
themselves." There was the affair of the "Bounty," for example: Bligh
was one of the best seamen that ever trod deck, and one of the bravest of
men; proofs of his seamanship he gave by steering, amidst dreadful
weather, a deeply-laden boat for nearly four thousand miles over an
almost unknown ocean--of his bravery, at the fight of Copenhagen, one of
the most desperate ever fought, of which after Nelson he was the hero: he
was, moreover, not an unkind man; but the crew of the "Bounty" mutinied
against him, and set him half naked in an open boat, with certain of his
men who remained faithful to him, and ran away with the ship. Their
principal motive for doing so was an idea, whether true or groundless the
writer cannot say, that Bligh was "no better than themselves;" he was
certainly neither a lord's illegitimate, nor possessed of twenty thousand
pounds. The writer knows what he is writing about, having been
acquainted in his early years with an individual who was turned adrift
with Bligh, and who died about the year '22, a lieutenant in the navy, in
a provincial town in which the writer was brought up. The ring-leaders
in the mutiny were two scoundrels, Christian and Young, who had great
influence with the crew, because they were genteelly connected. Bligh,
after leaving the "Bounty," had considerable difficulty in managing the
men who had shared his fate, because they considered themselves "as good
men as he," notwithstanding that to his conduct and seamanship they had
alone to look, under Heaven, for salvation from the ghastly perils that
surrounded them. Bligh himself, in his journal, alludes to this feeling.
Once, when he and his companions landed on a desert island, one of them
said, with a mutinous look, that he considered himself "as good a man as
he;" Bligh, seizing a cutlass, called upon him to take another and defend
himself, whereupon the man said that Bligh was going to kill him, and
made all manner of concessions; now why did this fellow consider himself
as good a man as Bligh? Was he as good a seaman? no, nor