The mutineers fared as mutineers have always fared. Having sailed the ship to Tahiti, they fell out among themselves, half taking the _Bounty_ to the uninhabited island of Pitcairn, where they were discovered twenty-seven years later, and half remaining at Tahiti. Of these two were murdered, four were drowned in the wreck of the _Pandora_, three were hanged in England, and six were pardoned, one living to become a post-captain in the navy, another to be gunner on the _Blenheim_ when she foundered with Sir Thomas Troubridge. One boat voyage only is recorded as being longer than Bligh's. In 1536 Diego Botelho Pereira made the passage from Portuguese India to Lisbon in a native _fusta_, or lateen rigged boat, but a little larger than Bligh's. He had, however, covered her with a deck, and provisioned her for the venture, and he was able to replenish his stock at various points on the voyage. In 1790 the publication of Bligh's account of his sufferings excited the strongest public sympathy, and the Admiralty lost no time in fitting out an expedition to search for the mutineers, and bring them home to punishment. The _Pandora_, frigate, of 24 guns, was commissioned for the purpose, and manned by 160 men, composed largely of landsmen, for every trained seaman in the navy had gone to man the great fleet then assembling at Portsmouth under Lord Howe. Captain Edward Edwards, the officer chosen for the command, had a high reputation as a seaman and a disciplinarian, and from the point of view of the Admiralty, who intended the cruise simply as a police mission without any scientific object, no better choice could have been made. Their orders to him were to proceed to Tahiti, and, not finding the mutineers there, to visit the different groups of the Society and Friendly Islands, and the others in the neighbouring parts of the Pacific, using his best endeavours to seize and bring home in confinement the whole, or such part of the delinquents as he might be able to discover. "You are," the orders ran, "to keep the mutineers as closely confined as may preclude all possibility of their escaping, having, however, proper regard to the preservation of their lives, that they may be brought home to undergo the punishment due to their demerits." Edwards belonged to that useful class of public servant that lives upon instructions. With a roving commission in an ocean studded with undiscovered islands the possibilities of scientific discovery were immense, but he faced them like a blinkered horse that has his eyes fixed on the narrow track before him, and all the pleasant byways of the road shut out. A cold, hard man, devoid of sympathy and imagination, of every interest beyond the straitened limits of his profession, Edwards in the eye of posterity was almost the worst man that could have been chosen. For, with a different commander, the voyage would have been one of the most important in the history of South Sea