Peter Heywood

Peter Heywood (June 6, 1772 – February 10, 1831) is a British naval officer who is on board HMS Bounty during the mutiny of April 28, 1789.

He is later captured in Tahiti, tried and condemned to death as a mutineer, but subsequently pardoned.

He resumes his naval career and eventually retires with the rank of post-captain, after twenty-nine years of honorable service.

The son of a prominent Isle of Man family with strong naval connections, Heywood joins Bounty under Lieutenant William Bligh at the age of fifteen and, although unranked, is given the privileges of a junior officer.

Bounty leaves England in 1787 on a mission to collect and transport breadfruit from the Pacific, and arrives in Tahiti late in 1788.

Relations between Bligh and certain of his officers, notably Fletcher Christian, become strained, and worsen during the five months that Bounty remains in Tahiti.

Shortly after the ship begins its homeward voyage Christian and his discontented followers seize Bligh and take control of the vessel.

Bligh and eighteen loyalists are set adrift in an open boat; Heywood is among those who remain with Bounty.

Later, he and fifteen others leave the ship and settle in Tahiti, while Bounty sails on, ending its voyage at Pitcairn Island.

Bligh, after an epic open-boat journey, eventually reaches England, where he implicates Heywood as one of the mutiny's prime instigators.

In 1791 Heywood and his companions are met with in Tahiti by the search vessel HMS Pandora, and held in irons for transportation to England.

Heywood and one other actually go out to the Pandora in canoes, very happy to be rescued—as they think.

They are then arrested and treated barbarously by the Captain, Edward Edwards, who has them and twelve others fettered and handcuffed in an eleven foot sqare box built for the purpose on deck.

Their subsequent journey is prolonged and eventful; Pandora is wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, four of Heywood's fellow prisoners are drowned, and Heywood himself is fortunate to survive, being the third last to get out of the box, which has only an exit eighteen inches square in the roof.

In September 1792 Heywood is court-martialed and with five others is sentenced to hang.

However, the court recommends mercy for Heywood, and King George III pardons him.

In a rapid change of fortune he fins himself favored by senior officers, and after the resumption of his career receives a series of promotions that give him his first command at the age of twenty-seven and make him a post-captain at thirty-one.

He remains in the navy until 1816, building a respectable career as a hydrographer, then enjoys 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 work on his behalf, and he later benefits 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 are hanged, all lower-deck sailors without wealth or family influence.

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