Mutiny on the Bounty

[4][n 1] Bounty had been acquired to transport breadfruit plants from Tahiti (then rendered "Otaheite"), a Polynesian island in the South Pacific Ocean, to the British colonies in the West Indies.

The expedition was promoted by the Royal Society and organised by its president Sir Joseph Banks, who shared the view of Caribbean plantation owners that breadfruit might grow well there and provide cheap food for the slaves.

The great cabin, normally the quarters of the ship's captain, was converted into a greenhouse for over a thousand potted breadfruit plants, with glazed windows, skylights, and a lead-covered deck and drainage system to prevent the waste of fresh water.

[10] With Banks' agreement, command of the expedition was given to Lieutenant William Bligh,[11] whose experiences included Captain James Cook's third and final voyage (1776–80) in which he had served as sailing master, or chief navigator, on HMS Resolution.

Bligh was anxious to depart quickly and reach Cape Horn before the end of the short southern summer,[38] but the Admiralty did not accord him high priority and delayed issuing the orders for a further three weeks.

[44] Bligh's despatches to Campbell and Banks indicated his satisfaction; he had no occasion to administer punishment because, he wrote: "Both men and officers tractable and well disposed, & cheerfulness & content in the countenance of every one".

[52] On 2 April, as Bounty approached Cape Horn, a strong gale and high seas began an unbroken period of stormy weather which, Bligh wrote, "exceeded what I had ever met with before ... with severe squalls of hail and sleet".

On 17 April, he informed his exhausted crew that the sea had beaten them, and that they would turn and head for the Cape of Good Hope—"to the great joy of every person on Board", Bligh recorded.

[57] At one stage during the sojourn, Bligh lent money to Christian, a gesture that the historian Greg Dening suggests might have sullied their relationship by becoming a source of anxiety and even resentment to the younger man.

They passed the remote Île Saint-Paul, a small uninhabited island which Bligh knew from earlier navigators contained fresh water and a hot spring, but he did not attempt a landing.

The weather was cold and wintry, conditions akin to the vicinity of Cape Horn, and it was difficult to take navigational observations, but Bligh's skill was such that on 19 August he sighted Mewstone Rock, on the south-west corner of Van Diemen's Land and, two days later, made anchorage in Adventure Bay.

Bligh was impatient to be away, but as Richard Hough observes in his account, he "failed to anticipate how his company would react to the severity and austerity of life at sea ... after five dissolute, hedonistic months at Tahiti".

[79] On 22 April 1789, Bounty arrived at Nomuka, in the Friendly Islands (now called Tonga), intending to pick up wood, water, and further supplies on the final scheduled stop before the Endeavour Strait.

"[94] Christian originally thought to cast Bligh adrift in Bounty's small jolly boat, together with his clerk John Samuel and the loyalist midshipmen Hayward and Hallett.

Christian ordered the two carpenter's mates, Norman and McIntosh, and the armourer, Joseph Coleman, to return to the ship, considering their presence essential if he were to navigate Bounty with a reduced crew.

[100] Samuel saved the captain's journal, commission papers and purser's documents, a compass and quadrant, but was forced to leave behind Bligh's maps and charts—fifteen years of navigational work.

[104] Bligh hoped to find water and food on Tofua, then proceed to the nearby island of Tongatapu to seek help from King Poulaho (whom he knew from his visit with Cook) in provisioning the boat for a voyage to the Dutch East Indies.

A visit to Tongatapu, or any island landfall, might incur similarly violent consequences; their best chance of salvation, Bligh reckoned, lay in sailing directly to the Dutch settlement of Kupang in Timor, using the rations presently on board.

[n 9] This was a journey of some 3,500 nautical miles (6,500 km; 4,000 mi) to the west, beyond the Endeavour Strait, and it would necessitate daily rations of an ounce of bread and a quarter-pint of water for each man.

[134] Tubuai had been discovered and roughly charted by Cook; except for a single small channel, it was entirely surrounded by a coral reef and could, Christian surmised, be easily defended against any attack from the sea.

Although Cook had actually been killed ten years earlier, the use of his name ensured generous gifts of livestock and other goods and, on 16 June, the well-provisioned Bounty sailed back to Tubuai.

Of the sixteen men who had voted to settle in Tahiti, he allowed fifteen ashore; Joseph Coleman was detained on the ship, as Christian required his skills as an armourer.

Wahlroos argues that the smoke signals were almost certainly a distress message sent by survivors of the Lapérouse expedition, which later evidence indicated were still alive on Vanikoro at that time—three years after their ships Boussole and Astrolabe had foundered.

Wahlroos is "virtually certain" that Edwards, whom he characterizes as one of England's most "ruthless", "inhuman", "callous", and "incompetent" naval captains, missed his chance to become "one of the heroes of maritime history" by solving the mystery of the lost expedition.

[173] The survivors of Bligh's open-boat journey gave evidence against their former comrades—the testimonies from Thomas Hayward and John Hallett were particularly damaging to Heywood and Morrison, who each maintained their innocence of any mutinous intention and had surrendered voluntarily to Pandora.

[181] Much of the court-martial testimony was critical of Bligh's conduct—by the time of his return to England in August 1793, following his successful conveyance of breadfruit to the West Indies aboard Providence, professional and public opinion had turned against him.

[197] Two of the four surviving mutineers, Young and Adams, assumed leadership and secured a tenuous calm, which was disrupted by the drunkenness of McCoy and Quintal after the former distilled an alcoholic beverage from a local plant.

Over the years, many recovered Bounty artefacts have been sold by islanders as souvenirs; in 1999, the Pitcairn Project was established by a consortium of Australian academic and historical bodies to survey and document all the remaining material, as part of a detailed study of the settlement's development.

[209] The journal was heavily edited by Joseph Banks, who told Bligh: "We shall abridge considerably what you wrote ... to satisfy the public and place you in such a point of view as they shall approve.

However, Bligh's reputation as the archetypal bad commander remains: The Baltimore Sun's reviewer of Alexander's book wrote "poetry routed science and it has held the field ever since".