Peter Heywood

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Captain Peter Heywood (1772- 1831) was a Manx naval officer and convicted mutineer best known for being part of the Mutiny on the Bounty.

The voyage on the Bounty in 1787 was Heywood's first, and he served as a midshipman. He was close friends with Fletcher Christian, who would go on to lead the Bounty mutineers. Heywood himself was not considered as one of the ringleaders involved in the mutiny, and this was counted in his favour during his trial.

Following the mutiny and after a failed attempt to colonise Tubuai -one of the Austral Islands- Heywood returned to Tahiti with 15 others, following a split in the mutineers' ranks. Christian with some of the Bounty's crew and some Tahitian men and women sailed the Bounty on to Pitcairn Island, where the ship was burned. Heywood and the 15 others who elected to go it alone were captured when Captain Edward Edwards on HMS Pandora arrived at Tahiti searching for them.

The "mutineers" left on Tahiti were those among the Bounty crew who had not gone with Bligh in the open boat (which had space limitations and was a particularly dangerous option), but had no intention of remaining in the Pacific Islands with the other mutineers. A number of them had been building a schooner to take them to the Dutch East Indies so they could find passage to England when the Pandora arrived.

Heywood, James Morrison and five other "mutineers" presented themselves to the Pandora, believing -rather naively as it transpired- that the ship had come to rescue them. Instead, they were arrested as "piratical villains" and imprisoned on the quarterdeck in a wooden jail known as "Pandora's Box". Heywood and his companions (fourteen in total) spent four months imprisoned in this box, chained and in leg-irons. The box was in direct sun-light and poorly ventilated, and was the equivalent of being jailed in a sauna for four months.

Also on board the Pandora was former Bounty shipmate (and William Bligh loyalist) Thomas Hayward. Evidently Heywood inquired of Hayward, but was received coldly.

When the Pandora sank off the Torres Strait, Heywood was amongst the ten prisoners who survived the shipwreck and made the fifteen day journey to Timor (along with 98 other men) in the four open boats. For much of this time he was forced to lie at the bottom of the boat, under the seats.

Following the shipwreck of the Pandora on the voyage back to England (in which several of the arrested mutineers drowned), Heywood arrived in England in 1792, was court-martialed, and sentenced to death. He received a pardon, and upon the recommendation of Lord Hood was permitted to rejoin the Royal Navy.

Subsequently he served aboard his uncle, Sir Thomas Pasley's ship HMS Bellerophon and was eventually made a post-captain. He declined the rank of commodore on the Great Lakes in Canada in 1818 citing poor health. He nearly achieved the rank of admiral but this was prevented by his death at age 58.

His stepdaughter, Diana Jolliffe, was the wife of Admiral Edward Belcher.

Heywood is perhaps most notable for inspiring the character of Roger Byam, who was the main character and narrator in the novel The Mutiny On The Bounty. Byam also appeared in films that were based on the novel.

[edit] References

• Conway, Christiane (2005). Letters from the Isle of Man - The Bounty-Correspondence of Nessy and Peter Heywood. The Manx Experience. ISBN 1-873120-77-X.