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tho with a very reduced Crew, & finding no Anchorage round the Island, & that the operation of landing the Stores of the Bounty as well as his live stock &c was tedious & laborious, he ran the Ship against the Rocks, a little to the Southward of the place we landed at, & after having cleared her of every thing he thought necessary, set her on fire: this certainly was a wise plan on his part to avoid detection, for as Pitcairn is mentioned in the Charts, & in all accounts I have seen of it, as uninhabited, it is not probably that any one would seek refreshments there : whereas had the wreck ever been observed by any Vessel passing that way, humanity if not curiosity would have led them to enquire, if some fellow creature in distress, might not have been cast away here: again, had the ship been preserved, there might have been a possibility that some of the dissatisfied would sale away in her & give information of the retreat of the Mutineers of the Bounty. It is therefore an extraordinary circumstance, that chance & meer accident should have led us hither, for had we been aware that Pitcairn Island was near us, we should have avoided it. We considered ourselves nearly 200 miles from it, when Land was discovered, & we verily believed that in Sight was some new discovery. To the error therefore, in which it is laid down is to be chiefly attributed this unexpected visit of ours to it; happy however that it is in our power to communicate the fate of the wretched people who compose the Crew of the Bounty after their shameful Mutiny against their Captain.
It is impossible to describe the surprize we all felt when we heard the Natives the descendants of Fletcher Christian speak the English language uncommonly well, & that this should be the general language among them; the old Women who are from Otaheite retain the Mother tongue, tho as has been mentioned before, they have picked up many English words & understand the English language tolerably. The fate of Fletcher Christian himself was such as one might have expected from his cruelty & extraordinary unfeeling behaviour: from what we could learn he was shot by a black man whilst digging in his field & almost instantaneously expired. this happened about eleven months after they were settled in the Island, but the exact dates I could not learn: the black or Otaheite man that then murdered him, was himself immediately assassinated: the cause of these disturbances & violence is thus accounted for by John Adams; that as he has before