Between 1783 and 1784, Blaydes Shipbuilders
built the Bethia in No 2 dry dock on the River Hull. She was a three-masted
square-rigger, with a 69 ft 11 inch long keel, was 24 ft 4 inches broad, 11 ft
4 inches deep in the hold, weighed 230 tons, and with a relatively flat-bottom,
the Bethia was built to carry coal.
In 1787, now owned by Messers Wellbank,
Sharp and Brown, she was docked at Wapping Old Stairs, on the River Thames,
London, where Sir Joseph Banks, who had been commissioned by the Admiralty to
purchase immediately a vessel of not more than 250 tons, examined her. The
vessel he recommended was to be refitted to carry a cargo of breadfruit and
mangosteen trees from Tahiti to the West Indies, where the fruits were to be
used as an inexpensive food for the plantation slaves. The owners valued the
Bethia at £2,600, officers from the Deptford shipyard estimated her to be
worth £1,820 12s 8d, and the Admiralty compromised at the price of £1,920,
buying her on May 26th 1787. She was moved from Wapping to Deptford
for refitting, which took three months to complete. £1952 was spent on rigging
and stores, with a further £2504 on her hull, which together with the purchase
price of £1950 brought the total cost to £6406 (well over half a million pounds
in today’s money).
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| Not Yet Rigged and Not In Sail |
When she had been built, the Bethia had been planked against
ship’s worm, which means all her underwater parts had been coated with
horsehair and tar, with planks nailed over them. The Royal Navy’s policy was to
cover the hulls of their ships with copper sheathing, which was expensive
because of the price of the copper but it was a better method of protecting the
timbers of the ships from the boring effects of teredo worms and barnacles, as
they could be scraped off, rather than replanking the whole ship. The Bethia
was beached broadside and careened over, the planks removed, all the iron
fittings replaced with bronze ones (to counter the galvanic effects of iron and
copper in seawater), then the hull was sheathed in copper sheets. She was then
refloated, turned around, and the same process carried out on the other side.
The improvement in speed, manoeuvrability and strength in the Navy ships soon
meant that the term ‘copper-bottomed’ came to mean anything that was utterly
reliable and trustworthy.
The Bethia was not large enough to warrant a Post
Captain, she would be commanded by a Lieutenant (who would be designated as
Captain when at sea, as commander of the vessel), and she was recategorised as
His Majesty’s Armed Vessel (HMAV) when
four four-pound cannon were added and ten half-pound swivel guns mounted on the
beams.
The between-deck and great cabin were altered to house the cargo of
plants – a false deck was built with holes cut into it for 629 pots – 433
six-inch diameter pots and 196 eight-inch pots. The lower deck was lined in
lead, with collection pipes in the corners, to conserve the water used to water
the plants; skylights were cut to improve access to sunlight and air scuttles
built to improve ventilation.
A 23 foot launch, a 20 foot cutter and a 16 foot
jolly boat were mounted on deck, and other changes made – a flag locker was
added, the bell mount changed, a Brodie stove installed, and so on. In
September 1787, she was floated alongside a hulk and re-masted, and five
anchors were taken aboard – two 13 cwt cast iron bower anchors, and three
iron-clad anchors - a 5 cwt stream used as a sheet anchor, and two smaller
kedges stored in the hold.
On December 23rd 1787 the ship left
Spithead, on the Solent, bound for Tahiti. She carried 46 men, but her
complement also included a ‘widow’s man’, a fictitious sailor who was included
on ship’s lists by the Royal Navy to allow for payments to be made to the
widows or families of any crew member lost or killed during the voyage.
She was
now under the command of Lieutenant William Bligh and had been re-named HMAV
Bounty.
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