bour.
Bligh was away on his second breadfruit voyage, but he had left behind him
as much evidence as he could collect that would be likely to secure
conviction, and one of the officers so backed up his statements that young
Heywood, a boy of fifteen, be it remembered, came near to being hanged.
Bligh's suppression of facts which would have proved that the youngsters
Stewart and Heywood were mere spectators at the worst of the mutiny, Sir
John Barrow suggests, has "the appearance of a deliberate act of malice."

The result of the trial was the just acquittal of four of the petty
officers and seamen, the conviction of Heywood, of Morrison, boatswain's
mate (a man of education, who had kept a diary of the whole business), and
of four seamen. Three of these last, one of them seventeen years of age
at the time of the mutiny, were hanged in Portsmouth [Sidenote: 1807]
Harbour. Heywood, Morrison, and a seaman named Muspratt were pardoned. It
was plain that the authorities recognized the innocence of these men, for
Heywood made a fresh start in the service, and served with distinction,
dying a post-captain in 1831, and Morrison was drowned in the _Blenheim_,
of which ship he was gunner when she foundered off the island of Rodriguez
in 1807.

What had become of the _Bounty_? In March, 1809, there reached the
Admiralty an extract from the log of an American whaler, commanded by
Matthew Folger. This extract showed the Pitcairn Island, hitherto scarcely
known and supposed to be uninhabited, had been visited by the whaler,
which found thereon a white man and several half-caste families. The man
was the sole survivor of the _Bounty_ mutineers, and the half-caste
families were the descendants of the others by their Tahitian wives. In
proof of his statements, Folger brought away with him the chronometer and
azimuth compass of the _Bounty_. War was then going on, and England paid
little attention to the news, until in September, 1814, two frigates, the
_Briton_ and the _Tagus_, visited Pitcairn, when the end of the _Bounty_
story was told to the commander by the sole survivor.

When the _Bounty_ left Tahiti, Christian took with him Young, a
midshipman; Mills, gunner's mate; Brown, one of the two botanists; and
Martin, McCoy, Williams, Quintall, and Smith, seamen. These men were
accompanied by five male islanders from Tahiti and Tubuai (in which last
place they had attempted to form a settlement and failed), three Tahitian
women,