 Following its new route, Bounty reached Cape Town on 24 May 1788. Here, Heywood wrote a long letter to his family describing the voyage to date, with vivid descriptions of life at sea. Initially, Heywood relates, sailing had been "in the most pleasurable weather imaginable". In describing the attempts to round Cape Horn he writes: "I suppose there never were seas, in any part of the known world, to compare with those we met ... for height, and length of swell; the oldest seamen on board never saw anything to equal that ..." Bligh's decision to turn east was, Heywood records, "to the great joy of everyone on board". Historian Greg Dening records a story, unmentioned in Heywood's letter, that at the height of the Cape Horn storms Bligh had punished Heywood for some minor wrongdoing by ordering him to climb the mast and to "stay there beyond the point of all endurance"; this, Dening concedes, was possibly a later fabrication to discredit Bligh.
