It was not decreed by destiny that courage and endurance so heroic should be thwarted in the last gasp. Forty-one days after they had so boldly set out from Tofa in the South Seas they made a landfall on the dim and misty shore of the island of Timor. The log recorded a total distance sailed of 3618 nautical miles, which in round numbers amounts to four thousand land, or statute, miles. No wonder that the feat appeared scarcely credible to these castaways themselves whom the mutineers of the _Bounty_ had turned adrift with no more than a fortnight’s provisions in a fearfully overcrowded open boat. And every man of the seventeen was alive and ready to be patched up and set on his feet again. Bligh had no idea where the Dutch settlements were, so he held on along the coast, past very lovely landscapes of mountain, woodland, and park-like spaces. Coming to a large bay, he tacked in and saw a little village of thatched huts. Natives paddled out to meet the boat and told the party where to find the Dutch governor of Timor. In the next harbor they discovered two square-rigged vessels, so they hoisted the union jack as a distress-signal, and anchored off the fort and town of Coupang. This was the end of their troubles. Bligh bought a small schooner from the courteous Dutch governor, and so carried his men to Samarang, where they found passage to Batavia, and were sent home in a Dutch East Indiaman. It was Commander Bligh himself who took to England the first tidings of the mutiny of the _Bounty_, which aroused great popular interest and indignation. In 1790 he published an account of his sufferings and the heroic voyage to Timor, and in response to the public clamor the Admiralty speedily fitted out the frigate _Pandora_ to hunt down Fletcher Christian and his fellow-criminals and fetch them home for trial and punishment. The voyage of the _Pandora_ resulted in tragic shipwreck and another sensational episode of open boats. As a sequel it is inseparable from the strange and unhappy romance of the _Bounty_ and her people. Captain Edwards of the _Pandora_ frigate was a martinet of a naval officer, without sympathy or imagination, and the witchery of the South Seas held no lure for him. His errand was to run down the mutineers as outlaws who deserved no mercy and to take them home to be hanged. First touching at Tahiti, the _Pandora_ found that a number of the sentimental sinners still remained on that island, but that Fletcher Christian and the rest had sailed away in the _Bounty_ to search for a retreat elsewhere. With a hundred and fifty bluejackets to rake the valleys and beaches of Tahiti, Captain Edwards soon rounded up fourteen fugitives, who were marched aboard the _Pandora_ and clapped into irons. [Illustration: EARLY AMERICAN SHIP OF THE 18TH CENTURY]