Mutiny on the Bounty - Did Fletcher Christian return home?
Local folklore is as formative in our imagination as fells and lakes are of the physical landscape. Cumbrian fell-lore binds us to the place we inhabit; nourishing our sense of self with a rich diet of local tales that play out against a dramatic backdrop of ancient rock and water.
In her 1999 novel, ‘Isabella’, Fiona Mountain chose romantic fiction as the vehicle to retell one of the most enduring mysteries of these parts; the supposed return from death in the South Seas of the Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian and his relationship with Isabella Curwen of Workington Hall. Best selling author Val McDermid reworks the same material in a different genre in her latest crime thriller, ‘The Grave Tattoo’. Torrential summer rain erodes a fellside to reveal the preserved remains of a tattooed corpse that might or might not be that of Fletcher Christian himself.
Both books take as given a bedrock of facts upon which they deposit layers of supposition and rumour to create their own fictional landscapes. Fletcher Christian was cousin to Isabella Curwen, who in due course married another cousin, John Curwen. Fletcher Christian was a school friend of William Wordsworth who joined Fletcher’s brother Edward in publishing a defence of Fletcher’s actions. The reports of Fletcher’s death on Pitcairn Island are contradictory and no body was ever found. There are documented contemporary sightings of Fletcher in England post mutiny by Peter Heywood, yet another cousin and one time member of the Bounty crew. Edward Christian, a solicitor of some considerable means, left no will – possibly enabling his brother to inherit anonymously.
Val McDermid’s heroine in ‘The Grave Tattoo’ is a Wordsworth scholar and firm believer in the notion that Fletcher returned to Cumbria. Furthermore, she believes he came back specifically to persuade William Wordsworth to tell the mutineer’s side of the Bounty story, which he did in the form of an epic poem. However, Wordsworth could not publish in his lifetime under risk of execution for harbouring a mutineer, and so this work became a secret lost masterpiece, the search for which is the initial quest of the book.
By marrying the Bounty story and its associated folklore to the ‘Dove Cottage industry’ that mythologises the Wordsworths, McDermid has re-spun a classic yarn of uniquely Cumbrian fabric. As for the epic poem on the Bounty Mutiny and Fletcher’s return, it may well exist. Written by Wordsworth’s collaborator on ‘The Lyrical Ballads’, the poem is known today as ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
This article was first published by the 'Times & Star' February 2006. Copyright remains the property of The Derwent Bookshop.
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