Fletcher Christian

Fletcher Christian (25 September 1764 – 20 September 1793) was master's mate  on board the Bounty during William Bligh's voyage to Tahiti for breadfruit plants. In the mutiny on the Bounty, Christian seized command of the ship from William Bligh on 28 April 1789.

Early life
Christian was born on 25 September 1764, at his family home of Moorland Close, Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth in Cumberland. Fletcher was the younger brother to Edward being the only two sons of Charles Christian of Moreland Close and of Ewanrigg Hall in Dearham, Cumberland, an attorney-at-law descended from Manx gentry, and his wife Ann Dixon.

Charles's marriage to Ann brought with it the small property of Moorland Close, "a quadrangle pile of buildings ... half castle, half farmstead." 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 debt of nearly £6,500 (equal to £0 today), and faced the prospect of debtors' prison. 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 (equal to £0 today) per year annuity for their mother, allowing the family to live in genteel poverty. Christian spent seven years at the Cockermouth Free School from the age of nine. One of his younger contemporaries there was Cockermouth native William Wordsworth.

He appeared in 1783, now eighteen years old, on the muster rolls of HMS Eurydice (1781) outward bound for a 21-month voyage to India. The ship's muster shows Christian's conduct was more than satisfactory because "some seven months out from England, he had been promoted from midshipman to master's mate". Christian twice sailed to Jamaica with Bligh.



Mutiny on the Bounty
In 1787, Christian was appointed master's mate on the Bounty, on Bligh's recommendation, for the ship's breadfruit expedition to Tahiti. During the voyage out, Bligh appointed him acting lieutenant. The Bounty arrived at Tahiti on 26 October 1788 and Christian spent the next five months there.

The Bounty set sail with its cargo of breadfruit plantings on 4 April 1789. Some 1,300 miles west of Tahiti, near Tonga, mutiny broke out on 28 April 1789, led by Christian.

Following the mutiny, Christian attempted to build a colony on Tubuai, but there the mutineers met with conflict with 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. While on 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 sailed eastward. In time, they landed on Pitcairn Island, where they stripped the Bounty of all that could be floated ashore before Matthew Quintal set it on fire, stranding them. The resulting 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.

Death
The American seal-hunting ship Topaz visited Pitcairn in 1808 and found only one mutineer, John Adams (who had used the alias Alexander Smith while on the Bounty), 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. Quintal was later killed by the remaining two mutineers after he attacked them.

John Adams gave conflicting accounts of Christian's death to visitors on ships that subsequently visited Pitcairn. He was variously said to have died of natural causes, committed suicide, gone insane and been murdered.

Christian was survived by Maimiti and his son, Thursday October Christian (born 1790). Besides Thursday October, Fletcher Christian also had a younger son named Charles Christian (born 1792) and a daughter Mary Ann Christian (born 1793). Thursday and Charles are the ancestors of almost everybody with the surname Christian on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands, as well as the many descendants who have moved to Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

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 his way back to England. Many scholars believe that the rumours of Christian returning to England helped to inspire Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

There is no portrait or drawing extant of Fletcher Christian that was drawn from life. Bligh described Christian as "5 ft. 9 in. high [175 cm]. blackish or very dark complexion. Hair - Blackish or very dark brown. Make - Strong. A star tatowed [sic] on his left breast, and tatowed  [sic] on the backside. His knees stand a little out and he may be called a little  bow legged. He is subject to violent perspiration, particularly in his hand, so that he soils anything he handles".

Appearances in literature
Christian's principal literary appearances are in the treatments of the Bounty story, including Mutiny on the Bounty and Pitcairn's Island. In Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy, Fletcher Christian appears as a possessed who helps two living girls escape. Val McDermid's 2006 thriller The Grave Tattoo is based on Christian's rumoured return to the Lake District and the fact that he was at school with William Wordsworth.

Film portrayals
Christian was portrayed in films by:
 * Wilton Power in The Mutiny of the Bounty (1916)
 * Errol Flynn in In the Wake of the Bounty (1933)
 * Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
 * Marlon Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
 * Mel Gibson in The Bounty (1984)

The 1935 and 1962 films are based on the 1932 novel Mutiny on the Bounty in which Christian is a major character and is generally portrayed positively. The authors of that novel, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, 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. (The other sequel, Men Against the Sea, is the story of Bligh's voyage after the mutiny.) This series of novels uses fictionalised versions of minor crew members as narrators of the stories.