Edward Edwards (Royal Navy officer)

After an arduous open boat voyage from the wreck to Timor and on to Batavia (Jakarta), only 78 men of Pandora's original 134-strong crew eventually reached England, accompanied by six mutineers and four loyalists.

The court-martial was attended by William Dillon, then a midshipman, who later became a vice-admiral in the Royal Navy and described Edwards in his memoirs as a "fine, venerable-looking officer.

Edwards subsequently served for a few years as a 'regulating' captain (recruiting officer) in Argyll and Hull and then resigned himself to inactivity on the half pay list.

Yet Edwards had staunch supporters among other officers who had served under his command and he was also remembered by his niece as a "sweet old man", often out on a walk in the country lanes around his native Water Newton and Uppingham where he owned several farms.

According to an obituary in the Lincoln, Stamford & Rutland Mercury (21 April 1815), he suffered for the rest of his life from the effects of the hardships he endured during the open boat voyage to Timor after the loss of the Pandora.

[9] Notwithstanding his niece's fond memories, Edwards' conduct on the Pandora has been regarded in some circles as every bit as cruel as popular opinion claims that William Bligh was on the Bounty.

[10] Edwards, as ordered, kept his captives in close confinement, as if they had already been convicted, in spite of the fact that four of them had been identified by Bligh as being innocent and were subsequently acquitted at the court martial in Portsmouth.

Edwards was accused of being excessively callous when it came to the captives' well-being - for instance by refusing to let them use an old sail to prevent them from being sunburned on a sand cay, and also by collectively referring to, and treating them all as mutineers and pirates.

Even though six of the captives were found guilty of mutiny, only three of them – Millward, Burkitt and Ellison – were eventually executed; William Muspratt was acquitted on a legal technicality and the remaining two, Peter Heywood and James Morrison were subsequently pardoned by the King.

Sven Wahlroos, in his 1989 book, Mutiny and Romance in the South Seas, suggests that the smoke signals were almost certainly a distress message sent by survivors of the Lapérouse expedition, which later evidence indicated were still alive on Vanikoro at that time; three years after the Boussole and Astrolabe had foundered in 1788.

In Batavia the crew were divided into four groups under lieutenants Larkan, Corner and Hayward, each travelling back to England via Holland on one of three VOC ships-Horssen, Zwaan and Hoornweg.

Captain Edwards, several warrant officers, the escaped convicts and the 10 Bounty prisoners embarked with the fourth group on the Vredenburg for Cape Town.

Edwards died on 13 April 1815 and was buried in a vault in the chancel of St Remigius church, Water Newton, near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.

Admiral of the White Squadron in his Majesty's Navy third son of the said Richard and Mary Edwards He died 13th April 1815 Aged 73 Years