Peter Heywood Popular Books

Peter Heywood Biography & Facts

Captain Peter Heywood (6 June 1772 – 10 February 1831) was a British Royal Navy officer who was on board HMS Bounty during the mutiny of 28 April 1789. He was later captured in Tahiti, tried and condemned to death as a mutineer, but subsequently pardoned. He resumed his naval career and eventually retired with the rank of post-captain, after 29 years of honourable service. The son of a prominent Isle of Man family with strong naval connections, Heywood joined Bounty under Lieutenant William Bligh at the age of 15. Although unranked, he was granted the privileges of a junior officer. Bounty left England in 1787 on a mission to collect and transport breadfruit from the Pacific, and arrived in Tahiti late in 1788. Relations between Bligh and certain of his officers, notably Fletcher Christian, became strained, and worsened during the five months that Bounty remained in Tahiti. Shortly after the ship began its homeward voyage, Christian and his discontented followers seized Bligh and took control of the vessel. Bligh and 18 loyalists were set adrift in an open boat; Heywood was among those who remained with Bounty. Later, he and 15 others left the ship and settled in Tahiti, while Bounty sailed on, ending its voyage at Pitcairn Island. Bligh, after an epic open-boat journey, eventually reached England, where he implicated Heywood as one of the mutiny's prime instigators. In 1791, Heywood and his companions were met in Tahiti by the search vessel HMS Pandora. Heywood and one other sailor welcomed the Pandora in canoes, relieved to be rescued. However, they were arrested; the captain, Edward Edwards, had them and 12 others fettered and handcuffed in an 11-foot (3.4 m) box built for the purpose on deck. During their subsequent journey, Pandora was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, and four of Heywood's fellow prisoners drowned. In September 1792, Heywood was court-martialed and with five others was sentenced to hang. However, the court recommended mercy for Heywood, and King George III pardoned him. In a rapid change of fortune, he found himself favoured by senior officers, and after the resumption of his career, received a series of promotions that gave him his first command at the age of 27 and made him a post-captain at 31. He remained in the navy until 1816, building a respectable career as a hydrographer, and then enjoyed a long and peaceful retirement. The extent of Heywood's true guilt in the mutiny has been clouded by contradictory statements and possible false testimony. During his trial powerful family connections worked on his behalf, and he later benefited from the Christian family's generally fruitful efforts to demean Bligh's character and present the mutiny as an understandable reaction to an unbearable tyranny. Contemporary press reports and more recent commentators have contrasted Heywood's pardon with the fate of his fellow prisoners who were hanged, all lower-deck sailors without wealth or family influence and who lacked legal counsel. Family background and early life Peter Heywood was born in 1772 at the Nunnery, in Douglas, Isle of Man. He was the fifth of the 11 children (six boys and five girls) of Peter John Heywood and his wife Elizabeth Spedding. The Heywood ancestry can be traced back to the 12th century; a prominent forebear was Peter "Powderplot" Heywood, who arrested Guy Fawkes after the 1605 plot to blow up the English parliament. On his mother's side, Peter was distantly related to Fletcher Christian's family, which had been established on the Isle of Man for centuries. In 1773, when Peter was a year old, Peter John Heywood was forced by a financial crisis to sell The Nunnery and leave the island. The family lived for several years in Whitehaven, England before the father's appointment as agent for the Duke of Atholl's Manx properties brought them back to Douglas.Heywood's family had a tradition of naval and military service. In 1786, at the age of 14, Heywood left St Bees School in England to join HMS Powerful, a harbour-bound training vessel at Plymouth. In August 1787, Heywood was offered a berth on the Bounty for an extended cruise to the Pacific Ocean under the command of Lieutenant William Bligh. Heywood's recommendation came from Richard Betham, a family friend who was also Bligh's father-in-law. The Heywood family at this time was in deep financial trouble, Peter John Heywood having been dismissed by the Duke for gross mismanagement and embezzlement of funds. Betham wrote to Bligh: "his Family have fallen into a great deal of Distress on account of their father losing the Duke of Atholl's business", and urged Bligh not to desert them in their adversity. Bligh was happy to oblige his father-in-law, and invited the young Heywood to stay with him in Deptford while the ship was prepared for the forthcoming voyage. On HMS Bounty Outward journey Bounty's mission was to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti for transportation to the West Indies as a new source of food for the slave plantations. Bligh, a skilled navigator, had travelled to Tahiti in 1776, as Captain James Cook's sailing master during the explorer's final voyage. Bounty was a small vessel, 91 feet (28 m) in overall length, with a complement of 46 men crammed into limited accommodation. Heywood was one of several "young gentlemen" aboard ship who were mustered as able seamen but ate and slept with their social equals in the cockpit. His distant kinsman, Fletcher Christian, served as master's mate on the voyage. Bligh's orders were to enter the Pacific by rounding Cape Horn. After collecting sufficient breadfruit plants from the Tahitian islands he was to sail westward, through the Endeavour Strait and across the Indian Ocean. Entering the Atlantic he would continue on to the West Indies, incidentally completing a circumnavigation.Bounty left London on 15 October 1787, and after being held at Spithead awaiting final sailing orders was further delayed by bad weather; it was 23 December before the ship was finally away. This long hiatus caused Bounty to arrive at Cape Horn much later in the season than planned and to encounter very severe weather. Unable to make progress against westerly gales and enormous seas, Bligh finally turned the ship and headed east. He would now have to take the alternative, much longer route to the Pacific, sailing first to Cape Town and then south of Australia and New Zealand, before working northwards to Tahiti.Following its new route, Bounty reached Cape Town on 24 May 1788. Here, Heywood wrote a long letter to his family describing the voyage to date, with vivid descriptions of life at sea. Initially, Heywood relates, sailing had been "in the most pleasurable weather imaginable". In describing the attempts to round Cape Horn he writes: "I suppose there never were seas, in any part of the known world, to compare with those we met ... for height, and length of swell; the oldest seamen on board never saw anything to equal that ..." Bligh's decision.... Discover the Peter Heywood popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Peter Heywood books.

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