I have long been fascinated by tales of the sea. One of the most interesting of these tales is the story of the mutiny on the HMS Bounty in 1789. I recently looked into this and wrote the following summary of the basic facts.
The HMS Bounty set sail from England in December 1787 with a crew of 44 Royal Navy personnel and two civilian botanists. Its mission was to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and transport them to the British West Indies as a cheap food source for the slaves there. (Ironically, a later successful expedition brought breadfruit to the West Indies, but the slave population refused to eat it, fearing it was poisonous.)
The initial plan was to sail around the southern tip of South America, but severe weather forced a change of route. Captain Bligh rerouted around the tip of Africa instead, which added 7,000 miles to the journey.
After ten months at sea, the Bounty arrived in Tahiti in October 1788. The crew spent five months on the island collecting and preparing 1,015 breadfruit plants for transport. Captain Bligh allowed the crew to live on shore to tend to the potted plants, and during this time the crew became immersed in Tahitian culture, many of them forming relationships with Tahitian women.
The ship finally left Tahiti on April 4, 1789. The mutiny occurred 24 days later, in the early morning hours of April 28th. Fletcher Christian had the night watch the night before, and he and his fellow mutineers broke into the weapons arsenal and took Captain Bligh prisoner in his cabin. The rest of the non-mutineering crew did not violently resist, after seeing their captain tied up and helpless.
The captain and five of his crew were ordered into the ship's boat, which is a small boat used for transport between a ship and the shore. Thirteen other crew members loyal to Bligh chose to join Bligh in the open boat rather than remain with the mutineers on the Bounty. With no maps or compass and limited provisions, Bligh used his photographic memory of the geography of the area to navigate his way on a 4,000-mile journey to the Dutch colony of Kupang, on the island of Timor. After 47 days at sea, Bligh had lost only one man on the journey, a crew member who was killed by hostile natives when Bligh stopped at the island of Tofua to look for supplies.
Those left on the Bounty sailed to the island of Tubuai, where they tried to settle. After three bloody months of conflict with the natives, they left and sailed back to Tahiti. Fletcher Christian's goal was to find an island where he and the other mutineers would never be discovered, so remaining on Tahiti was not an option for him. However, 16 crew members elected to stay on Tahiti. These 16 included four crew members who were loyal to Captain Bligh, but who could not get onto the open boat because of the limited space. (These four were ultimately exonerated at the court-martial, after Captain Bligh testified they were blameless in the mutiny.)
Christian set sail from Tahiti in September, 1789, with eight other crewmen, six Tahitian men, and 11 Tahitian women. (The imbalance of men to women figured into the later conflicts.)
After four months, Christian happened upon Pitcairn Island, an uninhabited island which he recognized as being misplaced on the Royal Navy's charts. The group settled there and the Bounty was burned so that noone would ever by tempted to leave.
The settlement on Pitcairn Island was not discovered until 1808. By that time only one mutineer, John Adams, remained, the rest having perished from disease or internal conflicts within the group. The Brits elected not to proceed legally against Adams at that late date. Today the population of Pitcairn is estimated at only 35 permanent residents, down from a high of 233 in the 1930s. Most are descendants of the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitian settlers.
After Captain Bligh returned to England and told his story of the mutiny, the British navy sent the HMS Pandora to the South Pacific to locate and round up the mutineers. Fourteen of the men were found on Tahiti and imprisoned on the ship, the other two having died in a quarrel. The Pandora then spent three months exploring the islands in the area searching for the remaining mutineers, with no luck.
Finally, the Pandora gave up and headed back toward home, but it ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef on August 29, 1791, resulting in the death of four of the prisoners. The survivors left in open boats and eventually made their way back to England. There the remaining ten prisoners were court-martialed, with the four innocent ones acquitted, and the other six convicted, Three of those six were pardoned, and the other three were executed.
Captain Bligh was court-martialed first, before the alleged mutineers. The purpose was for the British Admiralty to determine what happened and to what extent Bligh was guilty of wrongdoing leading to the mutiny. Bligh was exonerated, and continued to serve in the British Navy.
In 1806 Bligh was appointed governor of the Australian state of New South Wales, but due to his authoritarian nature he was again the target of a mutiny, in which he was overthrown and put under house arrest in the Rum Rebellion. This time he was not court-martialed, but he did give evidence against the two mutineers, who were convicted but given only a slap on the wrist. After this debacle Bligh remained in the royal navy but without another important command.
The excellent 1935 movie depicts Bligh as holding out his hand to the Admiral in charge of the Bounty court-martial after his acquittal, with the Admiral refusing to shake it. The clear message here is that the Admiral admired Bligh's considerable navigational skills, but had disdain for Bligh's poor people skills. It's a good exmaple of how life comes to us not in black and white, but in varying shades of gray.
