Sharing Pints and Latitudes

"I took this cute photo of friends Mike and Sue Proudfoot just after giving them the April and May editions of Latitude 38," writes Jay Gardner of the Bay charter boat Adventure Cat. "Mike and Sue have sailed their 38-ft wooden Ingrid ketch, Farida, from San Francisco through the Canal, up the eastern seaboard and across the Atlantic to Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden and England. Right now they’re on their way to the Med. We met up last week at a 900-year-old pub — Pandora Inn — near Falmouth, England."

Gardner went on to explain that the HMS Pandora was the 114-ft three-masted square-rigger that sailed from Portsmouth in 1790 in search of the HMS Bounty and her mutinous crew. Though Fletcher Christian and his followers had already taken refuge on the then-uncharted Pitcairn Island, Captain Edward Edwards managed to capture 14 mutineers happily living and procreating on Tahiti. On August 21, 1791, Pandora was on her way home when she foundered on the Great Barrier Reef. All told, only 78 of the 134 men who’d been aboard at the start of the journey survived. Captain Edwards was exonerated for the loss after a court martial, but his reputation was damaged by his prisoners’ claims of cruel treatment and he never received another sea-going command. At some point during his shore-based life, Edwards apparently purchased the pub Gardener and the Proudfoot’s visited.