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In 1790, the British Admiralty learned about the mutiny on the Bounty. Captain Bligh and his companions, who had been disembarked by Fletcher Christian in Tongan waters, made their way in their small canoe to the East Indies and from there back to England. The authorities immediately set up a punitive expedition. Captain Edwards’s orders were to search for the mutineers and bring them back alive to stand trial. At the beginning of the 20th century, Basil Thompson located Edwards’s journal and published it together with the narrative of the surgeon of the expedition, George Hamilton (only the surgeon’s narrative had been published in 1793 and, since then, had never been republished) (Thompson ed. 1915).
Edwards’s 1791 Pacific route took the ship Pandora through the Tuamotu group towards Tahiti (missing by a few miles the sighting of Pitcairn Island, where Fletcher Christian and his mates had taken refuge, while other mutineers had stayed on in Tahiti). Edwards captured the mutineers who were in Tahiti and took the small boat, a tender, that the men had just built (their plan being to attempt a crossing to the East Indies). He divided his men between the Pandora and the tender. Then he left Tahiti with the intention of finding out which of the islands might be sheltering the other mutineers. Those who had stayed in Tahiti did not know where Christian had gone, since Christian himself had not had a precise plan when he left Tahiti. But Edwards searched for the missing mutineers in the wrong direction, constantly westwards, in the Society group, in the Cook Islands, in Tokelau, and then in Samoa.
On arriving in Samoan waters, the Pandora lost sight of the tender. The ship sailed to Tonga, came back to Samoa, then sailed to Uvea (Wallis), the Santa Cruz Islands, Torres Strait, and the East Indies. The last part of the journey was made on small boats after the Pandora was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef off the north coast of Australia.[1] Meanwhile, the tender left Samoa for Tonga and then it too sailed westwards, through the Fijian islands, before reaching the East Indies, where the whole expedition was reunited.
The contacts in Samoa were very brief (Thompson ed. 1915: 49-52, 55-6, 129-31, 136, 166).
[1] Four mutineers out of the fourteen taken prisoner in Tahiti, and more than thirty members of the initial crew of a hundred and thirty men were drowned. The most famous survivor among the prisoners is James Morrison, whose journal, written in London while awaiting trial (Morrison told his narrative to a minister who wrote it down), has become the main source of information on pre-contact Tahiti.