Mutiny on the Bounty
William Bligh, ca. 1814The tale of the mutiny on the Bounty remains one of the most intriguing stories of adventure on the high seas more than 200 years after the ill fated voyage that made Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian legends.
Bound for Tahiti, the Bounty sailed from Spithead, England on 23 December 1787 under the famous Captain William Bligh. This was Bligh's second visit to Tahiti and he had many friends on the island. The Bounty stayed in Tahiti nearly six months. Having completed her mission to collect breadfruit trees from the colony, she set sail but the crew was dispirited at leaving such an easy life behind.
Detail from The Mutineers turning Lieut. Bligh and part of the officers and crew adrift from his Majesty's Ship the Bounty
Painted and engraved by Robert Dodd, 1790 DL Pf 137
The Bounty was underway to the West Indies when, on the morning of 28 April 1789, Fletcher Christian and part of the crew mutinied. He set the captain and 18 members of the crew adrift in the ship's cutter.
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Bligh was a master seaman who had previously navigated for Captain James Cook. He managed to sail the tiny vessel almost four thousand miles to Timor.
Christian and the mutineers took the Bounty back to Tahiti and then, with six Polynesian men and twelve women, sailed the ship to Pitcairn Island where they burnt it at sea. After this desperate beginning, they established a colony that remains to this day, settled by the descendents of the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian wives.
> View pages from Bligh's own logbook account of the mutiny on the Bounty
> Explore the journal of James Morrison, boatswain's mate on HMS Bounty at the time of the mutiny. 
