Captain who refused to open P andora’s box
The British naval ship HMS Pandora, a Porcupine Class, 24-gun frigate had ended its mission in the Pacific. Captain Edward Edwards had been dispatched from England, in command of the Pandora, to hunt down the men who had taken part in the mutiny against Lieutenant William Bligh, commander of the Bounty.
He had rounded up 14 of them in Tahiti, chaining them up in a cage on deck known as “Pandora’s box”. Failing to find any sign of the Bounty itself,
Edwards decided to head back to England. But as Pandora was making its way through the Coral Sea toward the Torres Strait, the crew had difficulty finding a safe passage through the outcrops of coral.
The ship’s yawl, a small twomasted sailing boat, was sent out, under the command of
2nd Lt Robert Corner, to look for a way through. Corner sent back a signal from the yawl that he had found a way, but on August 28, 1791, at around 7.20 as Pandora was waiting for Corner to return to the ship, a strong tide pushed the ship on to a reef.
As the ship started to sink, Edwards ordered the release of three prisoners to help man the pumps, but insisted the rest remained chained. He even had armed men stand guard over them in case they tried to break their chains.
Despite a desperate struggle to save the ship, it sank the next day, with the loss of four of the mutineers and 31 of Pandora’s crew. The survivors, 89 crew and 10 prisoners, swam or took the ship’s remaining boats to a tiny nearby cay, where they stayed for three days before heading to Timor, then part of the Dutch East Indies.
They finally arrived back in England in 1792. The crew faced a court martial, over the loss of the ship, and the mutineers went on trial for mutiny, desertion and piracy.
It was one of the most sensational shipwrecks of the era, involving tales of mutiny, heroism, cruelty and, ultimately exoneration.
Only 78 of Edwards’ crew of
134 made it home. All 10 of the surviving mutineers were put on trial. Four were found not guilty, six were sentenced to death, but only three were executed. The wreck of the Pandora was discovered in 1977.