James Morrison (1760–1807) was a British seaman and mutineer who took part in the Mutiny on the Bounty.
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James Morrison was a native of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland where his father was a merchant and land entrepreneur. He joined the navy at 18, serving as Clerk on the Suffolk, Midshipman on the Termagant, and Acting Gunner on the Hind. In 1783, he passed his Master Gunner's examination.
James Morrison was the Boatswain's Mate on board the Bounty. The Master Gunner's position having been filled two days prior to his application, he may have taken the lesser post because of his eagerness to go along on the 'scientific expedition.'
After the mutiny, Morrison was one of 16 mutineers who returned to Tahiti after the failed attempt to build a colony on Tubuai, while Fletcher Christian and 8 others sailed the Bounty on to Pitcairn Island.
Along with the others who then lived as 'beachcombers' in Tahiti, he was captured here by Captain Edward Edwards of Pandora on 29 March 1791, and brought back to England for court-martial.
While on Tahiti, he led an eight-month effort to build a schooner from local timber with which he secretly hoped to get to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies and from there return to England. He kept this to himself until the project was nearing completion, when he took a few others into his confidence. The schooner completed and christened Resolution, they spent many days boiling seawater to get salt sufficient to cure hundreds of pounds of pork for which they in turn had to build casks. They departed from Tahiti the day before the Pandora dropped anchor in Matavai Bay; but in the end the voyage was given up as impracticable owing to their lack of navigation instruments, problems with the schooner's rigging and their inability to carry sufficient water. However when the Pandora departed with the mutineers locked up in Pandora's Box. Captain Edward Edwards had confiscated and renamed the schooner Matavai, after ordering it re-rigged with canvas and rope from the Pandora's stores. The schooner was manned by some of the Pandoras and taken along as a tender. Six weeks later the Pandora and the Matavai became separated, and Edwards, giving her and her crew up for lost, sailed on. The Pandora later came to grief on the Great Barrier Reef, and the surviving crew and prisoners, 99 men in all, had to use the ship's boats to continue on. When they reached Samarang, Java, the Matavai and her crew were there. Having arrived in Surabaya five weeks earlier, they were making their way to Batavia (Jakarta) under a military escort, the Dutch governor suspecting them of being pirates from the Bounty. Edwards eventually purchased the schooner by paying the crew their share of the prize money, and gave it to the governor of Batavia as a gift.
At the court-martial judgment, delivered on 18 September 1792, Morrison was sentenced to be hanged. However the court recommended mercy to the King, and, perhaps aided by a letter testifying to his good character from Captain Stirling of the Termagant, he and Peter Heywood were pardoned on 26 October 1792. While incarcerated, Morrison wrote an account describing the Bounty's journey and the island and customs of Tahiti. He was very critical of Bligh's behavior toward his officers. He was even more critical of the officers at the time of the mutiny, writing 'The behaviour of the Officers on this Occasion was dastardly beyond description none of them ever making the least attempt to rescue the ship...'
Following his pardon, Morrison returned to naval service. He reached the rank of Master Gunner, and saw action in the Mediterranean. After serving as a gunnery instructor in Plymouth, he joined Admiral Sir Thomas Troubridge in his flagship the Blenheim, on which he had served as a young Gunner's Mate prior to his Bounty experience. The Blenheim sank on 1 February 1807 in a tropical cyclone off Madagascar with the loss of all on board.
Morrison's life was the subject of a novel in Gaelic, Iain F. MacLeòid's Am Bounty (Inverness, 2008).