534 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
quent abandonment and the defection of the majority of Chris- 
tian’s party; and the last four a voyage in the Bounty for those who 
remained that ranks with the epics of Pacific exploration, and led to 
the discovery of one of the principal islands in the South Seas. 
That it is now possible to tell this story for the first time is due to 
two fairly recent discoveries (or more properly rediscoveries) : the 
Journal of James Morrison, covering the Tubuai period, and the two 
narratives of Teehuteatuaonoa, or Jenny, the wife of Isaac Martin, for 
the voyage to Pitcairn. 
Morrison’s Journal was seen and cited by both Barrow and Lady 
Belcher, but the quotations are meager and not always scrupulously 
reproduced. After Lady Belcher’s death the manuscript disappeared 
and, despite all efforts to trace its whereabouts, it was not until about 
1930 that it was discovered safely deposited in the Mitchell Library 
at Sydney: it has now been published (Morrison, 1935). 
Morrison, who was one of the Bounty’s crew who elected to remain 
in Tahiti, evidently prepared this journal from notes made at the 
time. It is possible to verify the correctness of so many of his state- 
ments from other sources that one is left in no doubt as to its relia- 
bility, at least where his personal interests are not concerned. 
Owen Rutter, in his introduction to the published edition, pays 
tribute to “the meticulous detail, the niceness of observation and the 
accuracy of the dates” in the journal; and his encomiums are well 
earned, for Morrison was a born observer and recorder with a genuine 
and sympathetic interest in the island peoples, whether on Tahiti or 
Tubuai. With but little training he would have made a first-rate 
anthropologist. 
Jenny was also in her way a remarkable character. Described as 
“a, good looking woman in her time,” she went with John Adams to 
Tubuai and was tattooed by him AS/1789 on her left arm.* She 
landed on Pitcairn as Isaac Martin’s wife but was never reconciled to 
life there, possibly because she had no children of her own to com- 
pensate for the loss of her relatives and friends on Tahiti. 
After the death of her husband, Jenny led the abortive attempt 
of the women to leave Pitcairn in a boat, and finally succeeded in 
getting away by the whaler Sultan in 1817. On her return to Tahiti 
she gave two separate accounts of her experiences; one published in 
the Sydney Gazette for July 17, 1819 (Teehuteatuaonoa, 1819),* and 
the second in the Bengal Hurkaru for October 2, 1826 (Teehuteatua- 
onoa, 1826).5 She was also interviewed by Kotzebue in March 1824, 
3 John Adams signed on the Bounty as Alexander Smith, but changed to his proper name 
after Folger’s visit to Pitcairn in 1808. 
4This is an entirely different account from her later narrative, though not inconsistent 
with it, and is concerned for the main part with the period after the settlement. 
5 An account dictated to the Rev. Henry Nott in the presence of Capt. Peter Dillon and 
communicated by the latter verbatim to the Bengal Hurkaru. 
