Fletcher Christian
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Fletcher Christian (September 25, 1764 – October 3, 1793) was a Master's Mate on board the Bounty during William Bligh's fateful voyage to Tahiti for breadfruit plants. It was Christian who seized command of the Bounty from Bligh on April 28, 1789.
Christian was born at the Moorland Close farmstead, Cockermouth, in Cumberland, England, into a prosperous family originally from the Isle of Man. When Christian was eighteen, his father died, and the young man went to sea in order to support his family.
Christian twice sailed to Jamaica with Bligh. Following the mutiny, Christian attempted to build a colony on Tubuai, but the mutineers terrorized the natives. Abandoning the island, he stopped briefly in Tahiti where he married Maimiti the daughter of one of the local chiefs on June 16, 1789. While at Tahiti he dropped off sixteen crewmen. These sixteen included four Bligh loyalists who had been left behind on the Bounty and two who had neither participated in, nor resisted the mutiny. The remaining nine mutineers, six Tahitian men, and eleven Tahitian women then settled on Pitcairn Island where they stripped the Bounty of all that could be floated ashore before Matthew Quintal set it on fire. This sexual imbalance, combined with the effective enslavement of the Taihitian men by the mutineers, led to insurrection and the deaths of most of the men.
British sailors visiting the island in 1814 found only one mutineer, John Adams, still alive along with nine Tahitian women. The mutineers who had perished had, however, already had children with their Tahitian wives. Most of these children were still living.
Adams and Maimiti claimed Christian had been murdered during the conflict between the Tahitian men and the mutineers. Along with Christian, four other mutineers and all six of the Tahitian men who had come to the island were killed in the conflict. One of the four surviving mutineers fell off a cliff while intoxicated and was killed, and Quintal was later killed by the remaining two mutineers after he attacked them.
Christian was survived by Maimiti and his son, Thursday October Christian (Born 1790), who is the ancestor of almost everybody surnamed Christian on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands, as well as the many descendants who have moved to Australia and New Zealand. Besides Thursday October, Fletcher Christian also had a younger son named Charles Christian (Born 1792) and a daughter Mary Ann Christian (Born 1793).
Rumours have persisted for more than two hundred years that Christian's murder may have been faked, that he had left the island, and that he made it back to England.
Bligh described Christian as "5 ft. 9 in. High. Dark Swarthy Complexion. Hair--Blackish or very dark brown. Make--Strong. A Star tatowed [sic] on his left Breast, and tatowed on the backside. His knees stand a little out and he may be called a little Bowlegged. He is subject to Violent perspiration, particularly in his hand, so tht [sic] he Soils anything he handles."
See Mutiny on the Bounty for a more detailed account of this famous incident. His story, and his influence on Coleridge and Wordsworth, is also examined in the 1953 biography The Wake of the Bounty by C. S. Wilkinson (London: Cassell & Company).
[edit] Trivia
He was thought to be an ancestor of author James Finn Garner. Which later turned out to be untrue.
[edit] Christian in fiction
Christian made an appearance as a possessing soul from 'the beyond' (an afterlife of horrifically complete emptiness), in The Night's Dawn Trilogy, a science fiction sequence by Peter F. Hamilton. He was portrayed positively, as a noble soul distinct from many others in his desire to help the protagonists, and to defend them from the less moral possessors.
The possibility that Christian returned to the Lake District after living on Pitcairn forms the central theme of Val McDermid's 2006 novel The Grave Tattoo.
Christian was portrayed in films by:
At least some of these films are based on the novel The Mutiny on the Bounty in which Christian is a major character and is generally portrayed positively. The authors of that novel also wrote two sequels, one of which, “Pitcairn’s Island” is the story of the tragic events after the mutiny that apparently resulted in Christian’s death along with other violent deaths on Pitcairn Island. This series of novels uses fictionalized version of minor crew members as narrators of the stories.
His name also appears in a song by the British pre- and post-punk band the Mekons, "(Sometimes I Feel Like) Fletcher Christian," from their LP So Good It Hurts (1988), as a figure that expresses the plight faced by soldiers fighting in the Falkland Islands. In The Simpsons episode "The Wettest Stories Ever Told", he was portrayed as First Mate Bart Christian.
He has also been parodied in Triple J radio play, Captain Pants, where he appears as Felcher Christian.
