John Adams

Who is John Adams?

John Adams was born on 4 July 1767 in Hackney, Middlesex, England, and joined the crew of HMAV Bounty under the alias Alexander Smith. He took part in the 1789 mutiny led by Fletcher Christian and, in January 1790, settled with the other mutineers and their Tahitian companions on remote Pitcairn Island. The following decade was marked by brutal internal violence, disease, and killings that left Adams as one of only two adult mutineers alive by 1799, and the sole survivor by 1800. Discovered still living on the island in 1808 by the American whaling captain Mayhew Folger, Adams was later granted an informal pardon by Britain given his age and the passage of time. In the years that followed he turned to the Bounty's ship Bible and Prayer Book, teaching the island's women and children to read, write, and practice Christian worship, and became the settlement's sole moral and civil authority. In 1825, Captain Frederick William Beechey of HMS Blossom visited Pitcairn and recorded extensive interviews with Adams about the mutiny and the settlement's violent early years, later published in Beechey's 1831 narrative; Adams's own account of Fletcher Christian's death shifted between retellings. Adams married Teio in 1825 and died on Pitcairn on 5 March 1829, the only Bounty mutineer to die of natural causes on the island. Adamstown, the island's capital and only settlement, is named in his honor.

Sources: Frederick William Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's Strait (1831) · John Barrow, The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty (1831) · Wikipedia, "John Adams (mutineer)"