When he reached Tahiti, under a flag of distress, Captain Pond wanted to get a whole new crew and leave the mutineers in jail there, but the American Consul wouldn't allow it. Taking on his original crew again, he ordered them to man the windless, but they refused, because they wanted to spend another night on Tahiti. Pond enlisted some French marines from a man-of-war nearby to help him with his problem. Once the "Julia Ann" was under way, he mustered the crew and put every other man in chains and turned them over to the French to take ashore and lock up.

The "Julia Ann" had "barely gained a comfortable offing" when it was discovered that she was being pursued by a fleet of boats from the harbor. She outran them until the wind died down and then the French came on board again and declared that she had deserters from every ship in the harbor stowed away and hidden on board. Pond invited them to thoroughly search the ship. They only found a couple of their own men, but after they left, nineteen more stowaways were discovered hiding in the steerage. He says that they "were mostly seafaring men, and were assigned to their several stations, thus giving me a powerful crew in numbers at any rate, if not in reliability." He goes on to say that the "daily scenes on board of our ship were simply indescribable, profanity, drunkenness, disorder and insubordination were the order."