Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

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“I have asked you to sup with me, Byam,” he said, “but you need not accept unless you choose.”

I responded, against my inclination, to his friendly overtures. I had come to resent bitterly the ruin he had brought upon us all; but under the influence of his appealing kindly manner I found my indignation melting away. I stood before Fletcher Christian, my friend, not the mutineer who had cast nineteen men adrift in a small boat thousands of miles from home. To those who blame me I can merely say that they never knew the man.

He was in great need of someone to whom he could unburden his thoughts, and I had not been five minutes in his cabin before he was speaking of the mutiny.

“When I think of Bligh,” he said, “I have no regrets. None whatever. I have suffered too much at his hands ever to care what his fate may be. But for those who went with him....”

He shut his eyes tightly and pressed his knuckles against them, as though to blot from his mind the picture of the small open boat, filled, almost to the point of foundering, with innocent men. Such desolation of heart was apparent in his voice and the expression on his face that I pitied him deeply. I knew that he would never know peace again—never until his last day. He begged me to profit by his example and never act upon impulse, and for all my sympathy I could not avoid saying that a mutiny so carefully and secretly planned could hardly be called an act of impulse.