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 sailed to Jamaica twice with Bligh. After the mutiny, he attempted to build a colony on Tubuai, but the mutineers terrorized the natives. Abandoning Tubuai, he stopped briefly in Tahiti where he married Maimiti the daughter of the chief 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."

Much of the whitewashing of Christian's reputation and blackening of Bligh's reputation is due to Edward Christian, a celebrated barrister and brother of Fletcher, who wrote an impassioned statement defending his brother and had it appended to the court-martial proceedings of the 10 prisoners from the Bounty that had been captured in Tahiti and brought to London for trial. Although Bligh wrote a defense of his character supported by statements from crewmen on the Bounty and other vessels, Bligh lost the public opinion war. Thus was created the popular myth of the villainous Bligh and the noble Christian.

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:
" 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 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.
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