When most people think of a Cornish connection to the infamous mutiny on the Bounty they usually think of the unfortunate Captain William Bligh whose family was from St Tudy, near Bodmin. Very few realise that one of the main ring-leaders of those notorious events was also a Cornishman – Matthew Quintal.

I first came across Quintal’s story a few years ago and was initially excited to write about him but the more I learnt about the man the less enthusiastic I was to share his story. You see, Quintal has either been terribly misunderstood or he was a thoroughly unpleasant human-being. However, I have come to realise (with the story of Hugh Peter and others) that I cannot and should not cherry-pick which parts of Cornish history I tell – I can’t just leave out the characters whose actions or behaviour I find objectional.

Especially if the story is as good as this one!

The Quintrells

The first thing to note is that Matthew’s surname has been recorded incorrectly in most accounts about the Bounty, he was actually baptised Mathew Quintrell, not Quintal. (Errors like this one were frequent in record keeping in a time when spelling was much more inconsistent than it is now and much of the population, especially the lower classes, was illiterate.)

Quintrell is a name unique to Cornwall and almost certainly originates from the place name Quintrell Downs near Newquay, which can be traced back to the 12th century. The earliest parish record for the name is the baptism of Dorothie [sic] Quintrell in St Columb Minor in 1573 and the name, sometimes spelt Quintril, seems most common in the wider Truro and Newquay areas.

However, one branch of the family appeared in the Padstow area in the 18th century.

Matthew was baptised in St Petroc’s, Padstow’s parish church, on 3rd March 1766, his parents were Arthur Quintrell and Sarah Leverton, who had married in the same church in 1758.

Arthur was said to be a local innkeeper and shoemaker, and together the couple had five children Arthur, Susanna, Matthew, John and Sallee. Sadly Sarah passed away in 1773 when Matthew was just seven years old and Arthur was left to cope with his young family alone.

According to records held by Padstow Museum it was decided that Matthew would be sent away to live with a relation, possible his uncle John, to take some of the pressure off his father, but apparently the boy was very unhappy and soon had to be sent back to Padstow.

In his teens Matthew went to stay with an uncle in Plymouth. This uncle was a gunner on the sloop Nymph and both Matthew and his brother John joined him on the ship.

Their eldest brother, Arthur, was serving on The Eagle in the same fleet, so all the Quintrell boys were now serving in the Royal Navy.

Quintal At Sea

The Nymph had been in service in the East Indies for several years but in August 1782 she returned to Plymouth for a refit and re-coppering. Commander Richard Hill took command and then on 5th December 1782, with 16 year old Matthew Quintal on board as an able-seaman, the Nymph sailed for the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean.

On 28 June 1783 a fire broke out on board the ship close to Tortola, the largest of the Virgin Islands, and the crew were forced to abandon her. Three men died and the Nymph sank in the harbour. It is unclear how long Quintal and the rest of the crew were stuck in the Caribbean or how they returned to England.

There is also no record of what Quintal did between this time and when he joined HMS Bounty four years later but from Bligh’s description of him we know what our Cornishman looked like when he joined the crew.

“Matthew Quintal, seaman, aged 23 years, 5 foot 5 inches high, fair complexion, light brown hair, strong made . . .”

The Bounty

Much has already been written about this famous ship and the events that occurred during its voyage to Tahiti so there is little need for me to repeat it all here. We are mostly going to focus on the events that directly involved Matthew Quintal.

As an overview though, HMS Bounty, a Royal Naval merchant ship, left England on 23 December 1787 under the command of Captain William Bligh. Her mission was to sail to the South Pacific and acquire a large quantity of Breadfruit plants to take to the West Indies where they would be used to feed the slave population.

Conditions on board the ship were uncomfortable, extra space had been made for this important cargo which made the crew’s accommodation extremely cramped. The voyage itself proved very difficult as administrative delays had meant that they had left England very late in the season. This in turn meant that by the time the Bounty arrived at the Cape of Good Hope to try and cross into the Pacific continuous storms and gale force winds repeatedly beat them back and they came very close to sinking. Eventually after four months at sea Bligh was obliged to concede defeat and they charted a new course in the opposite easterly direction to circle the globe by the much longer route.

The length of the voyage and the difficult conditions were clearly making tensions run high and we know that Quintal began to cause problems on board. Bligh, who had initially been against using physical punishments, was forced to act. He wrote in his diary in March 1788:

“Until this afternoon I had hoped I could have performed the voyage without punishment to any one but I found it necessary to punish Matthew Quintal with 2 dozen lashes for insolence and mutinous behaviour.”

And this was before they had even reached Tahiti.

Tahitian Life

By the time they got to the island in October 1788, ten months after leaving England, the crew’s morale was extremely low.

But they spent five happy months on the tropical island collecting the necessary plants and they were made very welcome by the friendly, relaxed population. The climate was comfortable, there was an abundance of food to enjoy and the women were culturally free to form sexual relationships with the new arrivals if they wished to.

It must have seemed like paradise to the tired, hungry crew of the Bounty.

There is a long tradition of tattooing on the island, in fact our word tattoo comes from the Tahitian word ‘tatau’ and visiting sailors often had their bodies adorned with these traditionally inked patterns as a kind of souvenir, as well as an exotic way to show off where they service had taken them.

Quintal it seems was one of those seamen. Bligh’s description of him includes a note that he was heavily tattooed across his buttocks “and several other places.”

The Bounty’s crew formed firm friendships and romantic attachments with Tahitian people in those months ashore so that when it came time to leave there was some resistance both from the men and the locals.

They did eventually set sail but after leaving the island relations between Bligh and the crew deteriorated even further. And three weeks later, on 28th April 1789, the mutiny broke out.

The Mutiny & Finding Pitcairn

I think we all know that Fletcher Christian was the ringleader of the ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ but it seems that our troublesome Cornishman, Matthew Quintal, was the first person he asked to join him in the rebellion.

On 28th April 1789, in the early hours of the morning, Christian approached Quintal:

“During morning watch Christian broached the idea of mutiny to Matthew Quintal, one of the able seamen. He was a likely candidate for such an enterprise, for he had suffered a flogging at Bligh’s orders and had formed a steady female attachment in Tahiti: at first Quintal refused. . .”

Life & Death in Eden – Pitcairn Island & the Bounty Mutineers, Trevor Lummis, 1999

By daybreak however Matthew had changed his mind and Bligh named him as one of the men with Fletcher when hostilities began.

Of the 42 men on board, 22 sided with Christian, 18 stayed loyal to the captain and two tried to remain neutral. Christian and the other mutineers cast Bligh and his supporters adrift in a small open top boat and then sailed the Bounty back to Tahiti.

While the majority of the crew were just happy to be back on the island and wanted to enjoy their freedom, (while they prepared to face the consequences when the Royal Navy discovered what had happened) nine men decided to take the ship further and try and escape their inevitable punishment.

These men are listed below and they were the mutineers whose whereabouts after leaving Tahiti was to remain a mystery for nearly 20 years!

The names of the Mutineers

• John Adams
• William Brown
• Fletcher Christian
• Isaac Martin
• William McCoy
• John Mills
• John Williams
• Edward Young
• Matthew Quintal

Pitcairn Island

Exactly what happened next has been the cause of much speculation and is very much open to interpretation. We only have the word of those that survived the bloody events that followed, and their stories changed multiple times as they were told and retold over the years . . .

When the mutineers set sail from Tahiti into the unknown the nine seamen were not alone, they took with them a number of the Tahitian men and women, some of them against their will. Whether Fletcher Christian, then 26 years old, actually had a plan isn’t entirely clear but it appears that they stumbled upon Pitcairn Island pretty much by chance.

As a hideout they could hardly have chosen a better place however.

Pitcairn was not only 3000 miles away in the South Pacific Ocean but it was notoriously difficult to locate as since its discovery in 1767 it had been marked in the wrong position on many charts. It took the mutineers two months but by some miracle on 15 January 1790 they sighted the island that would be their refuge, their home and their final resting place.

Pitcairn was an entirely isolated, uninhabited island; forest covered, mountainous and surrounded by high cliffs. Roughly one mile wide by two miles long there was (and still is) only one possible landing place and this can only be accessed when sea conditions are good.

The mutineers and their Tahitian companions set about building a life there and at first all seems to have gone reasonably well. The island had plenty of fresh water and food, they built themselves shelters and started to clear ground for planting crops. Children, the next generation, began to be born.

But Pitcairn was no trouble-free paradise.

In the first few weeks there was one particularly difficult question that troubled them – what to do with the Bounty. If another ship happened to pass near to the island and spotted her they would be duty bound to investigate. But if the mutineers sank her there would be no means of them ever leaving the island.

A meeting was held to decide what to do and the men were divided. Christian wanted to preserve the ship, Matthew Quintal wanted to get rid of it.

According to Jenny (one of the surviving Tahitian women) Quintal, perhaps in a challenge to Fletcher’s authority, took it upon himself to just go and set fire to the ship.

“The women wept but neither tears nor the ocean could extinguish the fire, and the Bounty burned to the waterline, hissing at the salt water as it dropped beneath the surface . . .”

Life & Death in Eden – Pitcairn Island & the Bounty Mutineers, Trevor Lummis, 1999

It was a pretty poor decision however you look at it.

Not only had they lost their only means of escape, but Quintal had also destroyed an amazing resource, the timber alone would have helped them to build structures for their new community. And that is to say nothing of the huge smoke signal that he had just sent into the sky alerting any ships in the area to their presence.

(I think that it is also interesting to note that the Bounty was the second ship that Quintal had been part of the crew of that had caught on fire. I am not suggesting that the burning of the Nymph was arson, the circumstances there are unclear, but it is just an interesting coincidence perhaps . . .)

FUN FACT: When news of the mutiny reached England in 1790 the ship dispatched to find the mutineers was HMS Pandora, captained by Admiral Edward Edwards. It has been said that Edwards retired to Cornwall and owned an inn on Restrouguet Creek which he named after his former ship – The Pandora Inn – however this is unlikely to be true. The pub was known as Passage House until 1851 and Edwards died in Cambridgeshire in 1815.

The infighting, anger and resentment on Pitcairn gradually grew and festered as the months, then years, passed.

Much of the conflict was rooted in there not being enough women for each of the men to have a ‘wife’ as well as the Englishmen’s poor treatment of the Tahitians. In September 1793 tensions reached a fever pitch and the Tahitian men attacked the mutineers killing Fletcher Christian, John Williams, Isaac Martin, John Mills and William Brown. The others only survived because their wives had warned them of the violence and they were able to hide.

After this bloody episode the violence on the island only increased as the revenge killings began.

A few months later all the Tahitian men were dead, either killed in retaliation by the widows of the mutineers they had murdered or by someone else’s hand – there are conflicting stories. Whatever the truth is, what we do know is that by 1794 only four of the original mutineers were left alive – John Adams, William McCoy, Edward Young and Matthew Quintal.

So, who was Matthew Quintal?

Quintal is said to have been a formidable character, wilful and very physically strong, Bligh wrote that he had a “quarrelsome disposition” and there is some suggestion that he bullied some of the other seamen onboard the Bounty before even the mutiny took place.

He was known to be violent, especially when he was drunk. And unfortunately a few years after their arrival on Pitcairn, in about 1795, William McCoy worked out how to distil alcohol from a native plant. From then on it is said that he and Quintal spent most of their days in a drunken haze.

Quintal was said to regularly beat the women, particularly his ‘wife’ Sarah, a Tahitian he had brought with him, who it is thought he had renamed after his mother. On one occasion he actually bit off her ear when he became enraged because he didn’t think she had caught them enough fish.

McCoy eventually drank himself into depression and an early grave, leaving just three remaining mutineers, while, according to John Adams, Quintal’s behaviour became increasingly uncontrollable.

Sarah stayed with him however, so perhaps there were some happy times between them. She gave him four children – Arthur (named for Matthew’s father), John (named after his brother), Sarah (for his mother) and Jane (after his grandmother). You could argue that the choice of these names showed a sentimental side to his character (or a lack of imagination). Perhaps he pinned for his home and the Cornish family he knew, in all likelihood, he would never see again.

When Sarah (his wife) was killed in a fall from the cliffs while she was collecting bird’s eggs, Quintal demanded Edward Young’s wife, Susannah, as a ‘replacement’ – this was despite the fact that there were now five other unattached women on the island since the death of all the other men.

It was a completely unreasonable and irrational request, but it is possible that none of the available women would agree to live with Quintal because they knew of his past violent behaviour.

Young was unwell however, possibly suffering from asthma or tuberculosis, and was no match for the Cornishman, so when Quintal tried to take Susannah from her husband by force there was little he could do. It is unclear how willing Susannah was in change of her circumstances and this new relationship. She later gave birth to a son she named Edward Quintal and, as she had been with Young for 10 years and remained childless, it is perhaps possible that she saw Matthew as a chance to start a family.

The Bloody End of Matthew Quintal

It is worth noting that almost everything we know about the events on Pitcairn comes from what John Adams recounted when their island hideout was discovered in February 1808. By then he was the only surviving mutineer – Young had died, supposedly of natural causes, in 1800. His part in the murder of Quintal was the only reprehensible act that Adams ever admitted to (claiming self-preservation) but it is somehow hard to believe that he had survived all the previous violence as an innocent bystander.

The situation on Pitcairn, the rising tension and Matthew’s irrational behaviour, was becoming untenable, and Jenny later reported:

“Old Matt in a drunken fit, declared that he would kill all Fletcher Christian’s children and all the English that remained . . .”

Adams and Young (according to Adams, the only survivor of course) decided that they had to act.

One day in 1799, the exact date is unclear, when Quintal was supposedly visiting John Adam’s house the two other men jumped him and hacked him to death – “by means of a hatchet the dreadful work of death was soon completed”. He was just 33 years old.

It is unclear where Matthew Quintal was buried, in fact, the only known grave of any of the mutineers is John Adams’.

Quintal’s Legacy

Considering that within four years of the mutineers landing two-thirds of the men had been murdered it is perhaps amazing that Quintal survived as long as he did.

But Matthew Quintal from Padstow in Cornwall fathered five children with two women, Sarah and Susannah, on Pitcairn Island.

When a passing ship, under the command of Captain F. Arthur, visited Pitcairn in 1822 they recorded all the names of the then 50 inhabitants. As well as those with the surnames Adams, Christian, McKoy and Young there were also eleven Quintals – 2 x John, 2 x Arthur, 2 x Catherine, Elizabeth, Matthew, James, Edward and William.

But Pitcairn Island is not the only place that Quintal is likely to have descendants.

In September 1829 a Captain Bennett bumped into Quintal’s daughter, Jane, on a beach on the island of Rurutu in French Polynesia. Their conversation was printed in the newspaper in 1832.

By the 1850s the islanders, then numbering 250, had outgrown Pitcairn and in 1856 the entire population was moved to Norfolk Island. Many returned to Pitcairn over the next ten years or so.

Since then the population on the island has remained around 50 or 60 people. However, numbers are now falling and in 2021 there were only 47 people living on the island and as far as I can gather none of them are directly related to Quintal.

In the picture above, taken in 1862, the man on the far right with his thumbs hooked in his pockets is Arthur Quintal, Matthew’s eldest son, born on Pitcairn in 1795. He appears to have Matthew’s fair hair and is our best guess as to what our Cornishman may have looked like. The younger man with a bowtie, second from the left, is Arthur’s son, Matthew’s grandson, John, born on Pitcairn in 1820.

There are still Quintals on Norfolk Island to this day.

FUN FACT: In the Olympics of 1912 held in Stockholm another descendant of Matthew’s, Matthew Champion (his mother was Sarah Clara Quintal) born on Norfolk Island, competed as a swimmer for New Zealand and won them their first ever Olympic Gold medal.

Final Thoughts:

I had grown up hearing the story of the ‘Mutiny on the Bounty‘, but I first read about the community living on Pitcairn Island back in 2009, long before I ever seriously considered becoming a writer. The book, ‘Life & Death in Eden – Pitcairn Island and the Bounty Mutineers’ by Trevor Lummis, captured my imagination (I still have that well-thumbed copy) but I didn’t know then that there was any connection between that crazy story and Cornwall.

And, as I said at the beginning, once I had found the link I was disappointed to discover that Matthew had been such a seemingly unpleasant character. But it has to be said that sometimes circumstances can irretrievably change a man.

Not to make any excuses for his behaviour, it does seem that Quintal’s character changed significantly after the mutineers’ arrival on Pitcairn. He had always been a bit of a bully but after the mutiny he became a violent, drunken brute. Perhaps feelings of isolation, of being trapped on that tiny rocky piece of land in the middle of the ocean, overwhelmed him, perhaps he was afraid for his life as the violence escalated, and perhaps he regretted not following his initial instincts to not get involved in Fletcher Christian’s plot. Perhaps he just wished he could go home to Cornwall . . .

And of course, one really important point that we must always remember is that we only have John Adams’ account of how the events on the island unfolded, with the inevitable glossing over of his own part in the murders and the vilification of others.

Whatever Quintal’s faults it is still amazing to me that my small corner of the world should be connected to a story like this one! A story that is known by anyone with an interest in history and one that has been immortalised in countless books and films.

That one of the characters involved in those notorious events should hail from Cornwall and that today there are some tiny, distant islands in the vast Pacific Ocean that have inhabitants with Cornish ancestry is amazing!

Special thanks to my friend in the Royal Navy who has allowed me to use their photographs taken on a visit to Pitcairn in 2018. This article would be nothing without those images!

Further Reading:

Tangier Island, Virginia – a forgotten community founded by Cornish fishermen

Cornwall’s Connections to the Crew of the Mary Rose

The Murder of Billy Kinsman – Cornishman shot dead in Tombstone

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