Edward Edwards
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- For the US Senator, see Edward I. Edwards.
Edwards succeeded (with the help of former Bounty midshipman Thomas Hayward) in finding some of the mutineers, but Pandora shipwrecked before reaching England on the trip back. Edwards was subsequently court-martialed on the HMS Hector and held free from blame.
Edward Edwards never received another sea-going command. He subsequently served[link] for a few years as a 'regulating' captain (recruiting officer) in Argyle and in Hull and then resigned himself to (apparently inevitable) inactivity on the half pay list. However, he was promoted to Vice Admiral in 1809.
He hailed from Water Newton, a village in Huntingdonshire near Stamford (Lincs) He was remembered (ca. 1895) by his niece as a "sweet old man", often out on a walk in the country lanes around Water Newton, his birthplace, where he was buried in St Remegius Church in 1815. According to an obituary in the Lincoln, Stamford & Rutland Mercury (21 April 1815), he had suffered for the rest of his life from the effects of the hardships he endured during the open boat voyage to Timor. He died at age 73 in 1815.
Not withstanding his niece's memories, Edwards conduct on the Pandora was every bit as cruel as popular fiction (unjustifiably) claims that William Bligh was on the Bounty. Edwards was pitiless, and kept his captives in miserable conditions as if they had already been convicted (as it was, four of them had been identified by Bligh as being completely innocent and they were subsequently acquitted in London). Four captives and thirty-one crew members perished when the Pandora wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef.
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