The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Adams, John (mutineer)

ADAMS, John, the name assumed by Alexander Smith, one of the mutineers of the Bounty. After intoxication and massacre had killed off all the mutineers but himself, he was shocked into a complete change of heart, and became sincerely pious and of upright life; he was the patriarch of the little native and half-caste group on Pitcairn's Island, taught a school and held worship there. It was nearly

20 years after the mutiny before his existence was known; and though technically liable to execution for the mutiny the English officials felt that his hardship, exile and repentance had atoned for the crime, and that it would be wrong to remove the head from the little settlement. He was left unmolested and died in 1829. See ; .