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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 (see Mutiny on the Bounty). It was Christian who seized command^[1] of the ''Bounty'' from Bligh on April 28, 1789.

Contents

Life

Genealogical Information

Related Information

Movie portrayals

Trivia

External Links

Notes

Further reading

Life

Born September 25, 1764 Fletcher Christian was the second youngest son of Charles Christian and Mary (or Ann?) Dixon Christian who were to have ten children, six of whom survived infancy. Fletcher's father, Charles Christian, was decended from a long line of Manx gentry, his mother tracing her ancestry back to Edward I. Fletcher's mother, Ann Dixon, decended from an old, well established Cumberland family, her mother being one of the powerful Fletcher clan; it was after his maternal grandmother's family that Fletcher Christian was named.
Charles' marriage to Ann brought with it the small but respectable property of Moorland Close, "a quadrangle pile of buildings...half castle, half farmstead."^[2] Charles died in 1768 when Fletcher was not yet four. Ann proved herself grossly irresponsible with money. By 1779, when Fletcher was fifteen, Ann had run up a staggering debt of nearly £6,500,^[3] and faced the very real prospect of debtors prison. Ultimately Moorland Close was lost, and Ann and her three younger children were forced to flee to the Isle of Man where English creditors had no power. The three elder Christian sons managed to arrange a £40 per year annuity for their mother, allowing the family to live in genteel poverty.
Other than the fact that he attended termtime St Bees School Cumberland and lived in the small Manx capital city of Douglas no real evidence exists when it comes to Fletcher Christian's youth. He next appears in 1783, now eighteen years old, on the muster roles of the H.M.S.''Eurydice'' outward bound for a twenty-one month voyage to India. The ship's muster show Christian's conduct was more than satisfactory because "...some seven months out from England, he had been promoted from midshipman to master's mate".^[4]
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 16 June 1789.^[5] 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 Tahitian men by the mutineers, led to insurrection and the deaths of most of the men.
The American seal-hunting ship ''Topaz'' visited the island in 1808 and found only one mutineer, Alexander Smith (who was using the alias 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. According to an account by a Pitcairnian woman named Jenny who left the island in 1817 Christian was shot while working by a pond next to the home of his pregnant wife. 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. Many scholars believe that the rumours of Christian returning to England helped inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.^[6]
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 that [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).

Genealogical Information

Genealogical information about Fletcher Christian and the other Bounty crewmembers can be found at the following online locations. The geneological information comes from information provided by descendents of the Bounty crew as well as historical archives.
HMS Bounty Ancestors and Cousins

George Snell's HMS Bounty Descendants Page

Norfolk Island Research and Genealogy Centre

Related Information

Pitcairn Islands Study Centre (PISC)

Fletcher Christian's biography, PISC Crew Encylopedia

Movie portrayals

Christian was portrayed in films by:

★ Errol Flynn in a 1933 Australian film

★ Clark Gable in 1935

★ Marlon Brando in 1962

★ Mel Gibson in 1984
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 versions of minor crew members as narrators of the stories.

Trivia

★ He was thought to be an ancestor of author James Finn Garner. This was later proved false.

★ 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''.

★ His name 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.

★ In a first-season episode of the comedy series Kids in the Hall, one skit features a shoe salesman named Fletcher Christian, who explains the differences between himself and the 18th-century sailor.

★ The Rasputina song "Cage in a Cave" on their album ''Oh Perilous World!'' (2007) is about Fletcher Christian, and their song "Choose Me For Champion" on the same album talks about Christian's son, Thursday October.

★ Marlon Brando portrayed Fletcher Christian in MGM studio's disastrous 1962 remake, which failed to recoup even half of its enormous budget.^[7]

External Links

History of Pitcairn Island

Notes

1. [1]
2. Alexander, Caroline, ''The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty'', (Viking Books, NY 2003) p.60
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.57
5. [2]
6. The Cambridge Journal, T. F. D. Williams, M. Oakeshott, , , Bowes and Bowes, ,
7. Marlon Brando Biography | Encyclopedia of World Biography

Further reading

★ Conway, Christiane (2005). Letters from the Isle of Man - The Bounty-Correspondence of Nessy and Peter Heywood. The Manx Experience. ISBN 1-873120-77-X.