PANDORA – WRECKED ON 29 AUGUST 1791
In 1791 the Royal Navy’s HMS Pandora sank after hitting the Great Barrier Reef near Cape York. It had been heading home to England after a five-month hunt for His Majesty’s Armed Transport Bounty and its mutinous crew.
The mutiny on the Bounty, in which Fletcher Christian stole the ship from Lieutenant William Bligh, is famous. There are lots of books and movies about it. But the navy was not impressed and didn’t want other sailors to copy the Bounty crew. To show that you couldn’t get away with mutiny, even on the other side of the world, it sent a heavily armed ship on a special mission to track them down.
Pandora first sailed to Tahiti, where its crew captured 14 mutineers who’d split from Christian and learned that two other mutineers had died. Pandora then set off to find the other nine and spent nearly four months searching the South Pacific with no luck.
The 14 prisoners were kept shackled in a cramped cell built on the quarterdeck, that they called ‘Pandora’s Box’. It was horrible. One prisoner said:
the heat was so intense that the sweat frequently ran in streams to the scuppers, and soon produced maggots
When heading for home, Captain Edward Edwards launched a boat to scout out a safe route through the Barrier Reef. They found a gap, but while manoeuvring to pick up the boat, Pandora hit a submerged outcrop of coral. The crew battled to save the ship, and did get it off the reef, but it then sank. The survivors –89 crew, 10 prisoners and a cat – spent three days on a barren sand cay while they prepared the ship’s boats for a long voyage. Then they set off for Timor. Eighteen days and 2,200 km later, they made it.
It must have been déjà vu for poor Thomas Heywood, who’d been cast adrift with Bligh after the Bounty mutiny and spent 48 days in a small boat. He’d sailed on Pandora to help identify his former shipmates. What a dobber!