550 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
certain points can be established with a considerable degree of prob- 
ability, enabling others to be deduced from them. 
As we have seen, his unhappy experience at Tahiti had convinced 
Christian that he must seek for his future home an island which was 
uninhabited, unvisited, and without a harbor suitable for shipping. 
He would then land his belongings, including the livestock and plants, 
run the Bounty ashore and, after stripping her of everything useful, 
set her on fire and settle down (Edwards and Hamilton, 1915, p. 38). 
This much Christian freely imparted to those left behind on Tahiti. 
He would have been foolish to have mentioned any more specifically 
where he intended to go; but actually, while he already possessed a 
very clear idea of what he wanted, he did not then know himself 
where it could be found. His alleged statement to Henry Hillbrant 
that he intended to investigate the suitability of Atafu, an atoll in 
the Tokelau Group discovered by Byron in 1765, must, I think, be 
regarded as a blind, since the Bounty never went there: if so, it turned 
out to be a successful one, sending the unimaginative Captain Ed- 
wards, in H.M.S. Pandora, on a wild goose chase which took him 
thousands of miles in the wrong direction (Edwards and Hamilton, 
1915, pp. 40, 45-46). Once Edwards had passed so far to the westward 
it was a moral certainty that he would not attempt to beat back 
against the trades to renew his search. 
From the two accounts left by Jenny and three separate statements 
made by Adams, none of which contains any major inconsistencies, 
it appears that after dropping the women off at Moorea it was pro- 
posed to prospect the Marquesas Islands, to the northeast of Tahiti, 
for a suitable location for the intended settlement. While this sug- 
gestion was being debated, the Bounty was kept on various tacks in 
the hope of sighting some uncharted and uninhabited island, ap- 
parently in the vicinity of Tahiti itself (Beechey, 1831, vol. 1, p. 80; 
Moerenhout, 1837, vol. 2, p. 292). 
Instead of settling in the Marquesas, however, Adams told Folger 
in 1808 that they “went in search of a group of islands, which you may 
remember to have seen on the chart placed under the head of Spanish 
discoveries. They crossed the situation of those imaginary isles, and 
satisfied themselves that none existed” (Folger, 1819, p. 265). 
This is, in fact, what I believe they did. It must be remembered 
that in 1790 the identification of the discoveries of Mendana and 
Quiros were still not recognized in England and they were generally 
considered to lie well to the west of their actual position. To quote 
Beaglehole: 
Dead reckoning had led Mendana to put his Western Isles 1,700 leagues from 
Peru; they were in reality 2,000 miles more distant. It was natural that by 
1646 they should be incorporated into the Marquesas, that in the passage of 
time their supposed longitude should vary from 2,400 to 7,500 miles west of 
