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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Ellison scored a point here, for us, not for himself. Even the members of the Court maintained with difficulty their expressions of dignified severity.

Hayward: If Captain Bligh made use of the words, “My lads,” it was to the people already in the boat and not to those in the ship.

The Court: Your opinion, then, is that Captain Bligh was not alluding to any of the people remaining in the ship?

Hayward, realizing that the Court itself considered his opinion preposterous, then acknowledged that Bligh might have been referring to those in the ship.

The malicious manner in which he had testified astonished me. This was particularly true in his evidence concerning Morrison and me. He must have known, in his heart, that we were as innocent as himself; yet he lost no opportunity to throw what doubt he could upon the purity of our intentions. Morrison he had never liked, and this ill-will was heartily returned; but my relations with Hayward on the Bounty, although never cordial, had not been unfriendly. I had the clearest recollection of the events of the mutiny. Hayward had never once spoken to me on that morning, and Stewart had told me that he had only seen Hayward at a distance. And yet Hayward had testified that he had told one or the other of us to go into the boat. The true facts were that he was so terrified throughout the whole of this time as to be ignorant of what he did, or said. It was my opinion at the time of the court-martial, and it is so still, that he arranged his recollections of what had taken place so as to put his own actions in the most favourable possible light. He was a man easily dominated by others of stronger character, and I believe that his long association with Captain Edwards, of the Pandora, who considered all of us piratical scoundrels, had completely coloured Hayward’s own opinions.