Your friend comes to Odessa. You meet him. You take a walk along the streets of the city, see some places of interests.
VI. Compose a story about your duties on board the ship. Use the following
words and expressions:
To prepare for departure; an officer on watch; to be responsible for; to load and discharge the cargo; the navigating bridge; to keep watch; ships speed; to relieve somebody of watch.
VII. Home-reading. Read and translate orally and do all tasks in
Written form).
HUZZAH FOR OTAHEITE!
by LUIS MARDEN
Luis Marden sailed to Tahiti as the third mate of the new Bounty, a replica of the famous mutiny ship. Diving off Pitcairn Island in 1957 he found the bones of the original Bounty.
When I went to Pitcairn Island several years ago to look for the remains of the mutiny ship Bounty I used to dream of what it must have been like to sail in the Golden Age of Discovery.
Last year I voyaged to Tahiti as the early navigators did, in an 18th-century ship, a replica of the Bounty. She was built in Nova Scotia with the help of the original plans.
Many people know the classic sea story about the Bounty: in 1787 King George the Third of England sent William Bligh (Bligh had accompanied Cook on his third voyage to the South Seas, 11 years before taking command of the Bounty) in the small ship Bounty to Otaheite (Tahiti) in the South Seas to load breadfruit plants for transport to the British colonies in the West Indies. After a stay of more than five months at "the finest island in the world" part of the crew, under the leadership of Fletcher Christian, the mate, mutinied shortly after the start of the return voyage. They set Bligh and 18 members of the crew adrift in a small open boat. Bligh and the people with him made their way over approximately 4,000 miles of open sea to Timor, whence (by way of Batavia) they were able to make their way back to England. Of the mutineers, one group returned to Tahiti, on which island some of them were later captured; another group, under the leadership of John Adams (or probably Fletoher Christian), settled on Pitcairn Island. Here, according to some accounts, they mingled with the natives, and eventually formed a curiously isolated but civilized community, in sharp contrast to the earlier violence of their mutiny. According to other accounts, they were all killed by the natives, except one man (and it is true that, at the beginning of 1829, only John Adams was left alive out of the original group). So, the mutineers on Pitcairn Island were never brought to justice.
I went to Lunenburg in Nova Scotia to see the new Bounty under construction. There I met James Havens, director and nautical expert who designed the vessel. He told me that he would take no one but the working crew with him when the ship sailed for Tahiti. I had lived so long with the Bounty story that I could not conceive of not being aboard the ship when she sailed, and so it came about that I made the voyage as third mate of the Bounty
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The new Bounty was launched in the summer of 1960 at the Nova Scotia fishing port. To hold diesel engines, generators, and other equipment, the 118-foot Bounty was built about 30 feet longer than the original.
On November 7, I joined the ship in Panama, where she lay after a 13-day passage from Lunenburg. The new Bounty footed along off Tahiti with headsails, square sails, and spanker set. She reached the island after sailing 20 days across the South Pacific from Panama. Captain William Bligh of the original Bounty left England on Christmas Eve, 1787, intending to round Cape Horn; although he beat for a month against heavy seas, he could not make a westing. Reversing course, he left for the Cape of Good Hope and an eastward passage to Tahiti. His voyage took nearly 11 months in all.
The new Bounty averaged 236 nautical miles a day, Bligh108.
Crew Small by Bligh's Standards
The Canadian crew was all over the ship, setting up the rigging, loading stores, and repairing the sea damage to the blue and yellow paintwork. We would be 26 on board, an adequate number for the new Bounty.
In Bligh's time there were men allocated to each of the three masts, so that the setting, and particularly the taking in of sail could be done simultaneously. In case of a sudden squall, the ship might be in danger if canvas were not taken in with dispatch. One reason Bligh's ship needed them and ours did not was that we had two powerful auxiliary diesel engines for entering and leaving harbour, for calms and for emergencies.
The Tree That Sailed Back Home
In my baggage was one crate that I carried aboard the Bounty with great care. It contained a flourishing young breadfruit tree. Two years before, I had been in Jamaica, where I was shown two breadfruit trees, still living, of the original ones that Captain Bligh planted in 1793 after his second and successful attempt to transplant the breadfruit to the West Indies. I was taking this one back with me now to the land of its origin, after an absence of 167 years. Bounty would carry breadfruit again.
Our captain, Ellsworth Coggins, like nearly all his crew, was from Nova Scotia. Most of our seamen were young lads who had signed on because they wanted to sail in a square-rigger or because they had always wanted to see the South Seas. Nearly all the crew had sailed before.
With the pilot on board, Bounty started through the Panama Canal.
In one of the locks a worker hailed us.
"Where's the mate?" he wanted to know.
Ross McKay, our first officer, waved.
"Hey, Fletcher Christian," shouted the man on the lock gate, "the British Government has been looking for you for two hundred years!"
At the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal, we passed ships of all nations, coming in or heading out to sea.
At six o'clock the last buoy was passed and we headed into the Pacific, rolling a little as we drove into a windless sea.
I stood at the knightheads, started at the horizon and thought, Well, at last it's Huzzah for Otaheite! The mutineers had shouted these words as they set Bligh adrift and came about for the good life.
I thought of Bligh and his men. True, we were in a ship such as theirs, but we were fitted with diesel engines and refrigeration and electronic navigational gear, gliding effortlessly into the Pacific through a great canal that did not even exist in the day of the original Bounty.
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Driven Back by Cape Horn Gales
Bligh, in his crowded ship with salt-pork meals and threat of scurvy, underwent savage hardships to reach the same ocean. He had to sail to Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, and once there, met such howling gales that for 30 days Bounty could make no westing against them. She barely held her own in the icy seas.
In the end, Bligh gave up. He turned and sailed in the opposite direction, halfway around the world, to reach the Pacific we entered so easily; he covered 19,759 miles more than we did.
I went below, lay down on my mattress, turned on the electric lights, and read his log.
On April 1, 1788, he wrote: "It blew a Storm of Wind and the Snow fell so heavy that it was hardly possible to haul the sails up and furl them from the Weight and Stiffness."
At 6 in the morning he recorded next day, "the storm exceeded anything I had met with and a Sea higher than t had ever seen before... from the frequent shifting of the Wind broke very high and by running in contrary direction became highly dangerous."
Two weeks later, amid another storm, he wrote: ... I cannot expect my Men and Officers to bear it much longer... from the Violent motion of the ship the Cook fell and... broke one of his Ribs, and one Man Dislocated his shoulder.
Now hear Bligh, the "monster":
"I now ordered my Cabin to be appropriated at Nights to the Use of those poor fellows who had Wet Births, by which means it... rendered those happy who had not dry beds to sleep in."
Finally, Bligh had to write: "It is a Dear Point to give up... but it is impossible to act against the severity of this stormy Weather." He determined to bear away for the -Cape of Good Hope.
"I ordered the Helm to be put a Weather to the universal joy of all hands..."
Late in the afternoon of our Bounty's first day in the Pacific, a magnificent rainbow arched across our stern. As the stars appeared, Venus and Jupiter hung off the port bowVenus brilliant and white, and Jupiter smaller and by contrast slightly yellowish, just above and to the left. Toward midnight the sky cleared, the watch took off their clammy oilskins, and Bounty rode a slight swell under a sky of brilliant stars.
Continent Seeker Finds Tahiti and Yankee Sailor Discovers Paradise
I had the midwatch from 8 to midnight. As I paced the deck, my thoughts turned to the old-time sailors, who had crossed those same waters in similar sailing ships.
When Bligh sailed from the South Seas, he followed in the ways of brilliant navigators sent out by George III, the geographer-king.
Many scholars of his day believed in the existence of a Southern Continent, a great land mass in the South Pacific. They argued that such a continent must exist to counterbalance the earth against the weight of Europe, Asia, and North America.
One of King George's captains discovered Tahiti. Next on the scene after the Englishmen left Tahiti were French and Spanish navigators.
Much later came the American whalers. (Few today realize that the men of Nantucket, New Bedford, and New London were among the great Western pathfinders of the Pacific). The Yankee sailormen discovered island after island and brought back such tales of life in the South Seas that every youth in New England would have given an arm to go there. Herman Melville signed on as a crewman in 1840 with the whaler Acushnet. The result of this voyage was his book Typee, that forever established those islands as a paradise.
And I had made my pilgrimage, too, to Tahiti. As the new Bounty bore me once more to the South Seas, I thought often of Melville's book Typee,
After passing the Panama Canal our course was SW and the wind from the South. Once past the meridian of the Galapagos, we hoped to run into the south-east trades that blow fair for Tahiti, day after day. Then we could set square sails, the real workhorses.
On a long voyage under sail, especially in the fair winds, there is not much to do, unless a storm comes, or some unusual happening breaks the routine.
In our Bounty, except for the man at the wheel and the lockout forward, the watchkeepers did all kind of jobs: tautening the standing rigging, emptying the boats of water, varnishing the deck furniture.
