Mutiny on the Bounty

The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty.  

Narrated by Patrick Tull

Documentary  broadcast by History Channel broadcasted as part of the Sea Tales series in 1997. Produced by MPH Entertainment for A&E Television Networks.

For five perfect months they lingered and loved in a tropical Garden of Eden.  But one quiet night on the other side of the world a shocking act of seagoing treachery would forever render their Paradise lost……

 “What is the meaning of this violence? 

Hold your tongue, sir.  The ship has been taken.  Get into the launch, sir.

I have a wife and four children;  and you have danced my children upon your knee.

It's too late!   I have been in Hell!”

For over 200 years it's been the most infamous case of rebellion at sea;  a tale of two mariners who could weather tempests and gales,  but still could not control their own violent human passions.  

 [William Bligh]

Our tale begins in late eighteenth-century England during the great era of the glorious square riggers.  In those days it took uncommon skills to set out against the sea:  expertise in mathematics, navigation,  cartography;  abilities that took a special genius, or a lifetime of training, to acquire.

From an early age William Bligh seemed destined for a distinguished naval career.  Born near Plymouth, England, the child of a humble customs officer,  the man who was to one day command the Bounty was already a Sailing Master, or chief navigator, by age 22;  and by 26 he'd married into a wealthy influential family from the Isle of Man.  Bligh had risen far in a very short time,  by all accounts by dint of his singular dedication and ambition.  Bligh’s talent and enterprising nature soon paid off for the plum assignment.  He boarded the Resolution as Sailing Master for the third voyage of the nation's greatest adventurer, Captain James Cook.  

Sven Wahlroos: Bligh worshipped Cook.  He thought him the ideal commander. Bligh used him as a model all his life.

 But, during the four-year voyage, Bligh's fatal flaws and all-consuming vanity, and open disdain of those he judged less competent than himself were already in evidence.   Bligh so alienated the other officers sailing with Cook that,  when the expedition's journals were published, they excluded many of his maps and denied him his due credit.   It was a slight that embittered Bligh and made him more rigidly determined than ever to succeed beyond the dreams of any of these lesser men. 

Sven Wahlroos: Bligh was a man who could not in any way understand his impact on other people.   He never understood that.  He always saw himself as a victim of incompetence or the malicious plotting against him -  he was somewhat paranoid.  As a consequence he had great difficulties all his life. He never had a friend that we know of : there's a lot of Bligh’s correspondence from Bligh and we can't find a single friend that he ever had.  

[The Mission of the Bounty]

He may have behaved badly with his equals and subordinates but the crafty and talented Bligh had a gift for impressing powerful patrons.   In 1787 Sir Joseph Banks, president of Britain's premier scientific party ,the Royal Society, convinced King George III to undertake an expedition to Tahiti and recommended Bligh as captain.   The  mission -  to collect breadfruit trees for transplantation in Jamaica where entrepreneurial plantation owners like Banks were desperate for a cheap food source for their slave labour.

Ray Mahoney: It  wasn't a very important mission but Bligh thought this was a great opportunity for advancement in the Royal Navy.   He was very ambitious and wanted to get ahead, like most Royal Navy officers at the time,  and looked on this as a great challenge.

The 90-foot 215-ton frigate Bethia was selected as the vessel that would transport the exotic bread that grew on trees on what higher-ups in the Admiralty mockingly referred to as the grocery errand.  Perhaps to lend more import to the voyage,  Joseph Banks suggested re-christening her the HMS Bounty.   

Before even setting foot aboard the ship that was forever to be linked with his name,  Bligh suffered the indignity of learning that his request to be promoted had been rebuffed by the Admiralty.  He would be a captain by name but not by rank. 

Greg Dening: You could only be a captain by long years of waiting or in military service,  and they weren't going to let him be captain for what they thought was a tin-pot voyage.  The Admirals said they thought it was really a small ship on a small task,  which they didn't want to do anyway. 

The Admiralty added other frustrating obstacles to the voyage.   To make space for the storage of the breadfruit plants they awkwardly reconfigured the ship, planning to cram into her tiny hull an unusually large crew of sailors and botanists. 

Sven Wahlroos: One third of the ship was sealed off in a sense for breadfruit plants.  Even Bligh had only a little cubicle to sleep in.   The Bounty was actually more crowded than a World War Two submarine.   There's no question about that.

Had that been all Bligh had been forced to endure before setting sail on the Bounty,  it would have been enough to arouse his volatile temperament.  But the Admiralty added to his woes by ordering him to sail to Tahiti by the treacherous Cape Horn shortcut,  then stalling him at port while the fleeting window of good weather and winds slipped away.   Bligh shared his bitter disappointment in a letter to a colleague:

 “If there is a punishment that ought to be inflicted on a set of men for neglect, I am sure it ought on the Admiralty for my three weeks detention at this place.  This has made my task very arduous indeed.  For,  to get round Cape Horn at the time I shall be there,  I know not how to promise myself any success.  And yet I must do it,  or I suppose my character will be at stake.   Had Lord Holmes sweeten this difficult task by giving me promotion, I should have been satisfied.”

 For Bligh's secret ambition was to make this voyage flawless.   This would be his chance to show the world that he was the greatest sailor ever to conquer the seas;  and he would tolerate nothing less than perfection.

[Fletcher Christian]

Meanwhile the remainder of Bounty’s 46-man crew was signing on board.   The junior Master’s Mate aboard the Bounty was 23-year old Fletcher Christian,  who had been recommended by Bligh's beloved wife Elizabeth.   Bligh had sailed with Christian before and accepted him without hesitation.   Unlike the rest of the Bounty’s officers,  Christian was a true gentleman,  from an influential Cumberland family that had recently suffered a reversal of fortune.   The seventh of ten children,  the formerly privileged Christian had turned to the Navy as a means of earning a living.   It was clear that Bligh favoured young Christian and was grooming him for much greater things.  Christian was grateful to Bligh for his friendship and patronage,  but there existed between the two men an ambiguous tension that observers noted from the start.

Greg Dening: People commented on a peculiar relationship that existed between them.  It wasn't too clear what that relationship actually was,  but people felt that there was an uncomfortable element in it which no one really was able to pinpoint.  Bligh was a populist,  the person scragging his way to the top,  and Christian,  the gentleman.

Well-spoken, dynamic and athletic,Christian was instantly popular among the men of the Bounty. But there was another side to his personality, a darker side, that the proud earnest young man kept well-masked beneath his outgoing demeanour. 

Sven Wahlroos: He had what psychologists today would call  borderline personality traits..  He tended to idolise,  and also despise.   He was given to mood swings and often let the emotions take over his judgment.

 Shortly before Christian was to depart on the Bounty,  an evening of drink and talk spent with his brother Charles may have had a significant impact on his later judgment.  Charles Christian had been a surgeon aboard the merchant frigate Middlesex.  

Ray Maloney: Fletcher Christian learned that there had been a mutiny on the Middlesex.  It was an unsuccessful mutiny, put down by the captain,  but Charles Christian, the surgeon,  was named as one of the prime mutineers.   The idea of his brother’s mutiny kind of took mutiny out of the unthinkable and put it in the realm of the possible.

[The Voyage out]

 Unaware of the immortality that was soon before her, the Bounty finally set sail from Portsmouth Harbour on December the 23rd 1787.   Bligh ordered a southwesterly course for Cape Horn.   Leaning on the ship's rails, forty-six  men watched the jagged English coastline slowly recede from view.   Could they ever have imagined the strange fate that awaited them?

From the earliest days of her  ill-fated voyage the Bounty  faced squalls and rough weather.   Still,  according to Bligh’s self-congratulatory log,  crew morale was high:

“My little ship does wonderfully well.  My men are all well and cheerful.  Few seamen and officers, I may venture to say,  can ever boast of more comforts at sea”.

 But the Journal of the Boatswain's Mate,  the conscientious 27-year old James Morrison,  tells a different tale of shipboard life.   Early in the voyage two cheeses were found missing from the ship's stores.  An irate Bligh assembled the crew on deck and accused the sailors of thievery.  Then,  in an act of insolence in front of the Bounty’s forty-six men,  the ship's Cooper reminded his captain that the cheeses had been taken off the boat and delivered to Bligh's own home before leaving the docks in England.  Bligh’s deception was revealed,  and his wrath became uncontrollable: “Mr. Bligh told the Cooper he would give him a damn good flogging if he said any more about it”.

Ray Maloney:  I think that's the point at which the crew’s  respect for Bligh started to deteriorate.   Because they recognized now they did not have a straightforward honest officer.   They had just another run-of-the-mill who was going to line his pockets.

Morrison later wrote of another troubling incident.   When Bligh tried to serve the crew partially spoiled pumpkin in exchange for their regular allotment of bread, the sailors, notoriously protective of their rations, complained:  “Mr. Bligh exclaimed, You damned infernal scoundrels!  I'll make you eat grass, or anything you can catch, before I have done with you.”

Ray Maloney: He would fly into these uncontrollable rages and then he would almost become incomprehensible -  so much so that the crew  were  looking at each other and saying,  What's wrong with this man?  He's just not making sense.

Bounty lore holds that Bligh was physically violent.  But his rages  rarely resulted in floggings, which were an accepted and customary form of naval discipline.   In fact William Bligh flogged his men far less than any Royal Navy captain at that time.

Sven Wahlroos:  Bligh never abused his crew physically during all the voyage of the Bounty.  The abuse was verbal. He was very authoritarian, very contemptuous, very insulting.   

Bligh had another habit to rankle many in his crew.  Following the examples of Captain Cook who had pioneered a more progressive humane command,  Bligh was determined to ensure the physical well-being of his men.   He brought aboard a half-blind fiddler and ordered the crew on deck for dancing as mandatory daily exercise.  

Greg Dening: Now sailors loved to dance;  that was one of their great skills. I mean their balance and their rhythm in the yard.  But when you're told, Dance!  - a sailor doesn't like to be told to dance when he wants to be allowed freely  to dance.

[The attempt to round the Horn]

Four months after leaving Mother England the petty disagreements of the voyage were put aside as Bligh and the men of the Bounty encountered their first life-threatening trial,  the treacherous passage around storm-tossed Cape Horn:

 “It blew a storm of wind, the snow fell so heavy that it was scarce possible to hold the sails.  The storm exceeded anything I had met,  with a sea higher than I had ever seen before, the ship falling so heavy to windward; the sea becomes so very high and the weather-side of it like a wall.”

Ray Maloney: This was really horrendous seas,  the ship rolling so badly that the main yards on the mainmast,  the yardarms, the tips of them, would touch the wave tops.   Bligh said these were the worst seas that he had ever seen, and he had been at sea sixteen years.  

For more than four weeks the tiny vessel fought a  losing battle against the insurmountable elements of water and wind.   Finally,  beaten down by the relentless tempest, even the stubborn Bligh had to admit defeat and  reverse his course.  It was yet another bitter setback in the flawless master plan Bligh had imagined for the voyage:“ I ordered the helm to be put a weather and bore away for the Cape of Good Hope,  to the great joy of everyone on board.”

It would put him further behind schedule and add to his growing bitterness: “I do not repine but, if the cruel inattention of the Admiralty had not detained me, I should certainly have made my passage round the land.”

 Ray Maloney: He was a superb seaman and, you know he could make any ship go anywhere almost - except Cape Horn.

 Another bad omen shattered the Bounty.   A young seaman aboard the ship passed away in the night.   The ship's surgeon, a notorious drunkard, claimed the cause was scurvy.   Obsessed with the health of his men,  Bligh stomped the decks in a fury.   Perhaps the voyage was ruined for him from that moment on.   The greatness of his idol Captain Cook was indeed beyond his grasp.

In May of 1788 the Bounty  anchored at False Bay on the Cape of Good Hope after five tumultuous months at sea.   During this thirty-eight day respite to repair storm damage, something happened between Bligh and Christian that sowed the seeds for future discontent.  

Sven Wahlroos: The trouble started in Cape Town and the reason was an obligation of money.   Fletcher Christian was poor.   He wanted to send gifts to his family.   He had no money and evidently there was a loan - and you know what loans do with friendships.  

Some say that Bligh, petty and penurious a fault, demanded that Christian repay the loan before the ship returned to England.  Christian angrily refused and a wedge was driven between the master and the protégé.  

[On Tahiti]

With tensions simmering among its officers,  the Bounty  made sail from False Bay in July of 1788 and on an early October evening sighted the towering mountains of Tahiti just over the horizon.  After ten long months at sea the Bounty  dropped anchor in Tahiti's pristine Matavai Bay.  They'd withstood to torment of the Horn,  the squabbles and confinement of shipboard life, and Bligh's capricious temper and insulting outbursts.   Now all of the hardship was washed away by an enchanting welcome.   Within moments of her arrival the Bounty was surrounded by hundreds of canoes filled with joyfully shouting Tahitian men and beautiful enticing Tahitian women.   For the men of the Bounty it seemed like paradise on earth.   

Lieutenant William Bligh and his men revelled in the indescribable splendour of Tahiti and her friendly natives,  especially the beautiful sexually expressive Tahitian women: 

“The inhabitants we found stout and well-made.  I have seen many parts of the world but Otaheite is capable of being preferable to them all,  and certainly is so considering its natural state.”

Greg Dening: A sailor's life in Tahiti bore little or no relationship at all to his life back in London or on his ship.  This is in relationship to food in its freshness and abundance,  but, above all,  it was in relationship to the sexuality of the Tahitians.

 Many of the Bounty crewmen,  young and inexperienced,  had only known the pay-for-pleasure love of jaded dockside whores.   On Tahiti they found beautiful uninhibited guileless women who wanted nothing more than to please their English visitors.  

Ray Maloney: For young healthy men,  to find  cooperative and pliable women was …Tahiti was you might say sailor’s sexual fantasy come to life.

Bligh, rigid and unyielding in this,  as in seemingly all other things,  did not partake of the favours of the Tahitian sirens.   Fletcher Christian, like the rest of the Bounty’s men, wasn't so modest…

“An intimacy between the natives and our people was already so general that there was scarcely a man in the ship who had not a tao or friend.”

 Despite their clash in Cape Town over the loan,  Christian must have remained in Bligh's favour,  for he received the plum assignment of living ashore to supervise the breadfruit nursery.  Christian soon fell in love with the island culture,  becoming instantly popular with the Tahitians and taking up with a native girl Mauowtoa.  Perhaps Christian’ s natural charisma and easy way with the natives irritating Bligh, a lonely man who was unable to make friends.   The result was that their estrangement grew,  with Christian constantly ashore on Tahiti and Bligh on the Bounty fretting over the passing time.  

The Bounty stayed anchored in Tahiti for five months,  and for five months Christian and the other sailors indulged in the intoxicating pleasures of island life.   The men were no longer locked together in a survival struggle with the sea and discipline among them began to wane.  Bligh’s tongue-lashings and his floggings grew increasingly frequent.   

Greg Dening: Bligh, I think, made a great mistake in in staying in Tahiti while the breadfruit cuttings grew and allowing all the ambivalence of behaviour and discipline which happened in port anyway but doubly so on an island like like Tahiti.

 The month of January on Tahiti proved an ominous preview of what was to come.  Under a sliver of moon three crew men deserted one night taking the ship's small cutter with them.   They were captured two weeks later by Bligh.   Realizing he couldn't afford to keep three of his best seamen in irons for the coming trip to the West Indies,  Bligh went easy on the deserters.  They were given the light punishment of forty-eight lashes.   It was a sensible decision but seemed to underscore Bligh's waning control over his own men.

On April 4th 1789 the Bounty made sail from Tahiti serenaded by the poignant farewell chants of the grieving Islanders.   Bligh ordered a course for the Indian Ocean by way of the Endeavour Straits:

“We made sail,  bidding farewell to Otaheite where for 23 weeks we had been treated with the utmost affection and regard.   To the friendly and endearing behavior of these people may be ascribed the motives for the events which follow,  which affected the ruin of an expedition which there was previously every reason to believe would have been attended with the most favorable issue.”

 As they watched their paradise fade into the ocean mist, the men of the Bounty were only weeks away from the event that would turn their grocer's errand into the most infamous voyage in maritime lore. 

[The Mutiny]

 In the days that followed Bounty’s departure from Tahiti,  Bligh’s already irascible temperament became even more volatile, his demands even more impossible.  Some say that every captain is the cause of his own mutiny and here, with the Bounty well on its way,  Bligh’s explosive outbursts sealed his fate.

 Ray Maloney:  He recognised the crew had come unglued and he was trying to get the wheels back on the wagon, and shape them up. And so he was in this period particularly annoying and aggravating to the crew and and certainly to Fletcher Christian.  

Sven Wahlroos: It was pettiness and fault-finding with the officers,  plus insults as to their competence, their integrity and their devotion to duty.   

Ray Maloney: That was the period when Christian just deteriorated, one thing after another.

 The last and most lacerating of Bligh’s irrational outbursts came on the humid afternoon of April the 27th 1789.   Bligh suddenly decided to count the coconuts he'd recently brought aboard.   

Ray Maloney: Bligh looked at this pile of his coconuts and made a comment to the master John Fryer that it looked like somebody had been stealing his coconuts. 

Incensed,  Bligh ordered all hands on deck and all coconuts brought up above.  

“Mr. Bligh said they'd been stolen and that it must have been with the knowledge and connivance of the officers.  He then questioned each officer as to the number he had bought and, going up to Christian, asked him to state the number in his possession.”   

- I really do not know sir:  but I hope you do not think me so mean as to be guilty of stealing yours.

- Yes you damned hound I do.   You must have stolen them from me or you could have given a better account of them.   God damn you scoundrels!   You’re all thieves alike and combined the men to rob me. I’ll sweat you for it, you rascals!

Ray Maloney:  This was to Fletcher Christian, a man who came from a long line of aristocrats.  Honour was a great thing with these people and it certainly was to Fletcher Christian.  

His honour offended, and by a man he'd once looked up to and admired,  Christian went into an emotional tailspin.   Bligh’s insults and accusations had broken the oversensitive young officer’s spirit.

Ray Maloney: The first reaction of Fletcher Christian after this incident took place was to plan to desert the ship himself.  

Sven Wahlroos: He could think of nothing other than getting away from Bligh.  

Christian considered the near suicidal act of abandoning ship but a sultry night that brought most of the crew up on deck made it impossible to slip over the railing unnoticed. 

Near dawn on April 28^th, Fletcher Christian awoke for his watch with his head on fire. He was tired of this torment;  he had to act.  The mood on the ship was explosive and, in the darkness, a crew member said something to Christian that triggered the unthinkable in his agitated mind. [whisper: “The men are ready for anything”.]  Christian made the impulsive decision to seize the ship.   

The word spread like wildfire aboard the Bounty.  Christian and the other mutineers, less than a dozen in all, raided the arms chest, grabbing muskets and cutlasses.   They swept into Bligh's cabin and shook him awake. 

Ray Maloney: Bligh immediately started to scream bloody murder and woke everybody up on the ship.   

Bligh’s wrists were tied behind his back.  He struggled with his captors and pleaded with the men on deck to come to his aid.   But Christian was a man possessed.   

Sven Wahlroos: Christian was described as not only looking totally mad but behaving as if he were totally mad.

-The ship has been taken;  get into the launch, sir!

- I have a wife and four children in England.

-  it is too late.  I have been in Hell!

 The fierce standoff continued and each man was forced to make a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life.  Would he be a loyalist or a mutineer? 

For Christian the die had been cast long ago, and he struggled to keep his senses about him amidst the chaos on the Bounty's deck.

Ray Maloney: Fletcher Christian was yelling at Bligh to be quiet or he will run him through.  And to Bligh’s credit, Bligh essentially challenged him to go ahead and do it.   And Christian did not have the courage to do it.

 Christian took command the Bounty and ordered Bligh and eighteen loyalists into the ship's 23-foot launch.   The tiny boat wasn't large enough to hold all of Bligh’s loyalists, so some had to remain aboard the Bounty.   The rest gathered their belongings and climbed down to the waiting launch.

Ray Maloney:  Finally the last man down was Captain Bligh, all the while yelling ,trying to bring the crew to its senses and to their duty.  None of this succeeded, of course:  Christian was adamant.  Once he had taken the first step,  he recognised that there was no turning back. And so he had to do what he started out to do,  which was to get rid of Bligh.

 Even while overthrowing his tormentor,  Christian's aristocratic instincts didn't desert him. Before cutting loose the launch he gave Bligh a quadrant,  a compass,  a few books of declinations and his own personal sextant.   Finally the loyalists were given some meagre provisions and the rope connecting them to the Bounty was cut:  After having been kept some time to make sport for these unfeeling wretches, and having undergone much ridicule, we were at last cast adrift in the open ocean.

 As the launch pulled away,  the jeering mutineers triumphantly cast Bligh's cherished breadfruit plants overboard.   Christian and the others were at last free of Bligh and his tyrannical tirades.  Bligh,  furious over what would become the most notorious mutiny on the high seas, was helplessly adrift in the vast South Pacific.  

[The voyage of the launch]

Now captain of a much more modest vessel,  the vengeful commander wasted no time before starting to document his side of the story:

If the mutiny had been occasioned by any grievances, either real or imaginary, I must have discovered symptoms of discontent which would put me on my guard.  But it was far otherwise. With Christian in particular,  I was on the most friendly terms.

Greg Dening:  The launch wasn't thirty yards away from the Bounty when Bligh began to question why was there a mutiny.   He begins to describe each of the mutineers:  how old they were, how high they were, what sort of tattoos they had on them .

“Fletcher Christian, twenty four,  five feet nine inches high, dark swarthy complexion,  makes strong. He is subject to violent perspiration, particularly in his hands,  so that he soils anything he handles.”

Christian had given Bligh enough food to sustain the launch loyalists for only five days.

Ray Maloney:  Christian expected that Bligh would try to go to one of the islands and make friends and try to survive there until either a boat came, or they died, or they were assimilated into the society;  but he just didn't reckon with the determination and the capabilities of Bligh.  

Bligh first set a course for the nearby island of Tofua and he and his crew went ashore to look for food.   But their arrival aroused the attention of neighbouring Islanders who gathered in a threatening mob surrounding Bligh and his men.   As the tension rose, Bligh heard a sound that filled his heart with dread:

Ray Maloney: When Bligh saw natives starting to knock stones together and gather in large numbers,  Bligh knew that it was time to try to leave the island.   So they walked down through this mass of yelling natives and got to the launch.   At that point the natives started to the attack.

Bligh and his men narrowly escaped,  losing a loyalist seaman to the savage attack of the natives. 

Greg Dening: At that time he makes the decision he can't go to another Island.   He can't land,  so he makes the decision that he will go to Timor - that's 4,000 miles across open sea.

 Bligh would have to call upon all of his considerable gifts of navigation and seamanship to steer the launch through treacherous open seas to the Dutch colony of Timor.   He'd never been there and he had no charts.   Some would call it a foolhardy decision but Bligh was confident of his abilities:

“I found my mind most wonderfully supported and began to conceive hopes, notwithstanding so heavy a calamity, to be able to recount to my King and country my misfortune.”

 With scarce provisions, no shelter from the weather, and virtually no navigational tools, conditions aboard the overcrowded launch were withering to body and soul:

 “Our allowance for the day was a quarter of a pint of coconut milk and the meat which did not exceed two ounces to each person,  and for supper, an ounce of the damaged bread and a quarter of a pint of water.”  

“Our situation on Monday morning, the 11th of May, was extremely dangerous for the sea frequently running over our Stern which kept us bailing with all our strength.” 

“ At noon it was almost calm no Sun to be seen and some of us shivering with cold. Course since yesterday 89 miles.”

[The Mutineers]

 Meanwhile the Bounty, with Christian at the helm, made sail for Tubuai, a nearby island inhabited by natives who would prove to be far less amiable than the Tahitians.  

Greg Dening: The two things that the mutineers want most of all is meat and women.  But there's no pigs,  there's no meat on Tubuai.  And the to Tubuaian Islanders will not let them near the women.

 After a brief trip to Tahiti to bring back women,  the mutineers decided to build a settlement  despite the island’s shortcomings.  Christian set the men to work constructing Fort George.  

Ray Maloney: Typical of the Englishmen,  the first thing they did was put up an English flag on a flagpole and start this fort.  

But the battles with the native Islanders quickly escalated.  Christian realised that, for their own survival, the mutineers would have to leave – but  some of the Bounty refugees wanted to return to Tahiti, their Shangri-la.  Christian new Tahiti would be a death sentence.  Sooner or later the British Navy would send a ship to capture them and Tahiti would be the first place the Navy would look.

Greg Dening: Christian says to them,  If you gotta go back to Tahiti, I want only one thing and that's the Bounty.  And they take a vote and sixteen of them vote to go back and nine vote to stay with Christian.  

Most of those who returned to Tahiti were the same loyalists who couldn't fit in the launch at the time of the mutiny.   Since they were innocent of any wrongdoing, they fully expected that British authorities would not treat them as criminals.  Among them was young James Morrison who was relieved to be back on the island paradise:  “We found the Tahitians ready to receive us with every mark of hospitality, the whole of them striving to outdo each other in civility and kindness toward us;  and all were glad when we said that we'd come to stay with them.”

[The launch cont.]

While Christian and his men were going their separate ways, the men of the launch were at each other's throats,  as much from Bligh’s relentless arrogance and conniving as from the hardships of their journey.  

“He was as tyrannical in his temper in the boat as in the ship and his chief thought was his own comfort.”  

Sven Wahlroos: Bligh, for example when he distributed the food wood surreptitiously let some food fall on the deck of the boat and then, when he thought nobody saw him, pick it up so that he would get a little more than the others.  

Greg Dening: It's a voyage in which they're beginning to blame one another.  Bligh's blaming his men for not warning him;  they are blaming him for getting them into this situation. with his attitude.  It's a voyage full of hatred and it really is a terrible voyage.

 By June 7^th, after more than 35 days at sea,  Bligh’s loyalists aboard the launch had reached the limits of their physical and psychological endurance:

 “At daylight much complaining which my own fears convinced me were too well-founded:  extreme weakness,  swolled legs , hollow and ghastly countenances,  with an apparent debility of understanding seemed to be the melancholy presage of approaching dissolution.”

 But, at their lowest ebb, Bligh’s stern hand and navigational brilliance proved worthy of the task:

“Early next morning, with an excess of joy, we discovered Timor and by daylight were within two leagues of the shore.  It is not possible for one to describe the blessing the sight of this land diffused among us.  It appeared scarcely credible to ourselves that, in an open boat and so poorly provided, we should have been able to reach the coast of Timor,  having in that time run by our log the distance of three thousand six hundred eighteen miles. “

After forty-five days in the Pacific,  Bligh had guided the tiny launch to Timor in a remarkable display of seamanship.  But once again Bligh revealed the ugly pettiness of his character.  In a pointless display of decorum he waited off Timor for formal permission from the Dutch to land while several of his men lay close to dying.

[Pitcairn  Island]

 Even as Bligh reached safe haven in Timor,  his nemesis was on an odyssey of his own,  searching for a perfect hideaway,  a paradise that the British Navy might never find.  Turning to his former mentor for guidance, Christian raided the books Bligh had left behind in his cabin.  

Ray Maloney:  Finally, out of desperation, in a book Christian found Pitcairn Island which was very far to the east, something like 1300 or 1400 miles.  it's a rock just rising out of the sea: there’s no reef around it;  there's no harbour.

 Tiny isolated Pitcairn Island had abundant food, a rocky terrain and a coast so relentlessly beaten by surf as to render it inhospitable to visiting ships.  After unloading livestock and provisions from the Bounty, Christian and company stripped and scuttled the ship that would assure their infamy and set it aflame, severing their last ties to Bligh in the mutiny,  but also to their homeland.  

By the time William Bligh returned to England in 1790 after the Bounty mutiny, news of the crew's treachery had already caused a public sensation.  Bligh, anxious to preserve his reputation, released his own version of the events aboard the Bounty to the presses.

Sven Wahlroos:  This narrative was published very quickly after his arrival in England and did become a best-seller -  and has indeed never been out of print in over 200 years.

 In England official outrage over the Bounty affair swiftly prompted the Navy to send the HMS Pandora to Tahiti to hunt down the mutineers and bring them to justice.  Pandora's commander,  Captain Edward Edwards,  was one of the most ruthless officers in the British Navy,  who had himself faced mutiny several years earlier.   Edwards went after the fugitives with a merciless zeal.   On March the 23rd 1791 the Pandora arrived in Tahiti to the joy of the 14 remaining Bounty crewmen living there. 

Ray Maloney: Some of the loyalists actually paddled out in canoes and swam out to the Pandora thinking that this was to be their rescue, and they were happy as can be.

But the men had little cause to be joyful. Edwards made no attempt to distinguish between loyalists and mutineers.  He arrested and shackled every man hand and foot in a wooden cage on the ship's deck known as “Pandora's Box”.  Loyalist James Morrison described this chamber of torture in his journal: “The heat of the place when it was calm was so intense that the sweat frequently ran to the scuppers and produced maggots in a short time.”

 But there were more terrors in store for the prisoners on the Pandora.  On route to England the  vessel ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef.  Captain Edwards abandoned ship, leaving the shackled men to watch helplessly as deadly sea water poured into their cage.  At the last moment most of the Bounty men managed to escape, but four were left to drown, still locked in their manacles.  

The ten surviving prisoners returned to England and faced court-martial for their part in the mutiny.  On September the 18th of 1792 the court passed its judgment and found six of the men guilty of mutiny.  One mutineer mounted a vigorous defence and skirted death by a legal technicality.  Two,  including James Morrison,  received King’s mercy, narrowly escaping the gallows.  But three of the men who had cast their lot with Fletcher Christian were hanged for their villainy. 

 During the trial, Bligh's version of the mutiny was refuted by every witness, even the loyalists.  Bligh wasn't even in England to defend his character.   He had misread the political winds just as he'd misread the mood of his crew aboard the Bounty, and was already ocean-bound completing his mission of delivering breadfruit to the West Indies. 

Ray Maloney:  The short temper, the abusive language, created a totally different picture.   And so the public's perception then immediately turned around. By the time Bligh got back, he just was persona non grata.

Now nearly three years had passed since the day of infamy on the decks of the Bounty.   On their Pitcairn Island hideaway, the idyllic tropical life Christian and the other mutineers had imagined was evaporating in the humid south sea air.   Christian himself seemed depressed and spent long hours brooding in a cave high above the crashing surf of Bounty Bay.

Sven Wahlroos: There is no doubt that Christian was not really happy on Pitcairn island.   There are several accounts showing him being depressed after the mutiny, saying I can never return to my homeland / there is no way I can go back / my honour is ruined.

The nine mutineers divided the island into nine equal pieces and each took a Tahitian wife.  The six Tahitian men they brought with them were forced to share three women.  

Greg Dening: Life goes on in this strange way.   Children begin to appear.   And then one of the wives of one of the mutineers dies.  The mutineer says he must have another woman and he takes one of the Tahitian men's women.   

The Tahitian men, tired of being treated like slaves by the mutineers, hatched a plot to take over the Pitcairn settlement.   One sunny afternoon in 1793 the island paradise was transformed into a bloody battlefield.   Five mutineers were slain in the savage struggle, Fletcher Christian among them -  shot in the back as he worked in his garden.   The island was wracked with violence for forty days, as the surviving mutineers joined forces with the Tahitian women and murdered the remaining Tahitian men.  

 An uneasy peace finally descended upon Pitcairn.  The remaining four mutineers were eventually reduced to just one, John Adams.  Turning to the Bounty's water-stained Bible for salvation, Adams became a devout Christian and converted the women and children of Pitcairn.  This reborn community continued its peaceful existence for eighteen years until an American whaler captained by Mayhew Folger found its way to the island in 1808.  

Greg Dening:  Mayhew Folger discovers a canoe coming out from Pitcairn,  and there's a young man looking like a Polynesian in it.  And the young man says his name is “Thursday October Christian”, and asks“Do you know Captain Bligh?”

Folger realised he'd stumbled upon the hiding place of the infamous Bounty mutineers,

Bligh, after surviving the notoriety of the Bounty mutiny, quietly resumed his naval career.  Labelled as “Bread-fruit Bligh” for his folly,  he seemed hounded by controversy, no matter where he was stationed. As the governor of the fledgling British colony in Australia, then called New South Wales, he was once again overtaken by mutiny.  This time his own officers held him under house arrest for two years.   

Ray Maloney: There's an axiom in the military that, to control men, you must first know how to control yourself. This was the thing that Bligh never learned his whole lifetime.

 Still the blameless victim in his own mind, Bligh returned to England in shame to live a quiet life with Elizabeth, his steadfast wife.  History's most infamous seafarer died without fanfare in 1817.

 And what of Fletcher Christian?  Although some have told fanciful stories of a daring escape and a  secret life in windswept Belle Isle in northern England,  it's probable that the mutineer died in the massacre on Pitcairn.   Today his descendants, and those of his companions, still inhabit this lonely island,  living the idyllic simple life Christian and his men dreamed of for themselves.  They share all histories of their notorious ancestors, passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, for over 200 years.  

To his dying day William Bligh blamed the Bounty mutiny on the temptations of Tahiti, on the lure swaying palms and inviting tropical temptresses.   Though a competent commander of ships, Bligh never came to understand that mastery of the waves requires not only individual skill, but the willing cooperation of men.   There's a moral to any legendary story,  fact or fiction, a lesson of human nature that lends the tale it's timeless air.   The mutiny on the Bounty is a reminder that, when men come together to stand against the sea, their heroic efforts can unite them or they can tear them apart.