The Age of Gold by H.W. Brands Page A

but who would become his country’s hero in just a few years.
    After an easy run eastward for a week and a day, the ship sighted the islands called the Three Kings, off the northern tip of New Zealand’s North Island. Captain Cobb kept the bearing east, to win as much seaway as possible before turning north into the trade winds that would push them back west. A single squall upset the smooth sailing, tilting the ship almost on beam ends in the middle of the night and leaving the passengers to survey a chaotic deck the next morning. On his earlier voyage out from England, Archer had discovered in himself a spryness about the rigging; twelve years later he astonished the
Elizabeth Archer
’s crew with his ability to scamper aloft with the best of the tars. He amazed even himself one dark night when the crew began reefing the main topsail while he was perched on the main topsail yard. Suddenly his seat swung away beneath him, leaving him dangling one-handed from the topsail stay. He managed to grasp a shroud with his other hand, and slid down the rigging, alighting with a bounce beside Captain Cobb, who was nearly as surprised as Archer himself had been two seconds before.
    Several days after this, the captain proposed landing at Pitcairn Island, where the passengers might purchase fresh fruit and vegetables to complement their biscuit and mutton. Archer appreciated the shrewdness in the offer. In asking the passengers to pay for what he should have been supplying, Cobb calculated that few aboard would want to miss this singular opportunity to visit one of the most storied landfalls in the entire Pacific. Asall knew, Pitcairn had been the last refuge of the mutineers of the HMS
Bounty
, seized in 1789 from its commander, Lieutenant William Bligh. Every English lad could recite the strangely stirring tale of how the brutal Bligh and eighteen loyalists had been cast adrift by Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers; how Bligh and the others had managed to steer their open boat four thousand miles to Timor, where Dutch colonists arranged their return to England; how Christian and the mutineers had sailed to Tahiti, where several were eventually captured by the Royal Navy and taken to England for trial and execution; how Christian and a handful of the other leaders of the mutiny, along with a number of Tahitians, had secretly sailed to the once-discovered but since-forgotten island of Pitcairn; how one by one the Pitcairn colonists had murdered one another till a single mutineer, a dozen Tahitians, and assorted offspring of the mutineers and Tahitians remained; how the long arm of British law had finally tracked down this last rebel but took pity on him and let him live out his days as the doddering patriarch of his sorry tribe.
    Captain Cobb’s invitation to visit the mutineers’ redoubt elicited enthusiastic approval. Archer was one of the first into the boat lowered over the side; after a strenuous bit of rowing (the height of the cliff that dominated the shore had caused Cobb to underestimate the ship’s distance from the island) and with the help of a whaleboat sent out to greet them, the visitors made their way through the treacherous surf to the beach.
    It was obvious to Archer that conditions had improved since the colony’s nadir.
    At least a score of people of both sexes and all ages now rushed upon us, seized our hands, and, shaking them most cordially, bade us welcome in excellent English. A comely, well-built set of folks they were, many of the men and nearly all the young women and children having tolerably fair, rosy complexions, with black or dark brown hair, the women’s neatly gathered on the top of their heads, and fastened there in graceful, wavy ringlets. The men were all dressed in light European clothes, and the women wore a loose jacket of light striped stuff, reaching below the waist, and a longstrip of the same kind of stuff wound round and fastened to the waist.
    (Edward Hargraves rendered a