RUM: A Social and Sociable History

The ring, which the museum purchased recently from a private owner, carries a flat-surfaced bloodstone finely engraved with a classical male head.

It’s presumed Bligh used it to stamp imprints on wax seals.

William Bligh is most notoriously remembered for the mutiny on board the Bounty in 1789 and his extraordinary 3000-mile open boat voyage to Timor.
In 1806 he arrived in Port Jackson to take up a new appointment as Governor of the Colony of New South Wales, succeeding Governor Philip Gidley King.

He clashed with private settlers and with senior officers of the New South Wales Corps and these tensions came to a head in January 1808 when the prominent free settler John Macarthur was facing trial for failure to pay a shipping bond.
Critical of the Corps’ conduct of the trial, Bligh accused certain officers of treasonable procedures. The crisis escalated on 26 January when the senior officer of the NSW Corps, Major George Johnston, ordered Macarthur’s release and the arrest of Governor Bligh.

Bligh returned to England where he was exonerated. Johnston was court-martialled for mutiny. The events of 26 January 1808 have gone down in history as the Rum Rebellion.

One of Bligh’s supporters through the leadership crisis was a free settler named George Suttor. In November 1808 Suttor was the main force behind a petition to the British Government seeking Bligh’s reinstatement and in 1810 he sailed to England to give evidence at Johnston’s court martial.

William Bligh died in 1817 and some considerable time later his daughters gave the signet ring to Suttor as a gift of appreciation.

In a letter to Suttor at the time, Fanny Bligh wrote that she and her sister Jane were offering their father’s antique ring as “the most acceptable token we can think of as a memento of our grateful remembrance of you, your faithfulness and integrity.”

Suttor was visiting England, and the two sisters wished him a “prosperous voyage” back to New South Wales and a happy meeting there with his family.

Fanny Bligh’s letter is on display with the signet ring at the National Maritime Museum. The exhibit will remain on view in the museum’s Navigators Gallery until the end of April.