On 18 July 1780, while under the command of Captain Anthony Parry, Pandora and Danae captured the American privateer Jack.

Pandora was ordered to be brought back into service on 30 June 1790 when war between Great Britain and Spain seemed likely due to the Nootka Crisis.

[15] Unknown to Edwards, twelve of the mutineers, together with four crew who had stayed loyal to William Bligh, had by then already elected to return to Tahiti, after a failed attempt to establish a colony (Fort St George) under Fletcher Christian's leadership on Tubuai, one of the Austral Islands.

Fletcher Christian's group of mutineers and their Polynesian followers had sailed off and eventually established their settlement on the then uncharted Pitcairn Island.

By now alerted to Edwards' presence, the other Bounty men fled to the mountains while James Morrison, Charles Norman and Thomas Ellison, tried to reach the Pandora to surrender in the escape boat they had built.

[17] Edwards conducted further searches over the next week and a half, and on Saturday two more men were brought aboard Pandora, Henry Hilbrant and Thomas McIntosh.

[19] On 8 May 1791, Pandora left Tahiti and subsequently spent three months visiting islands in the South-West Pacific in search of the Bounty and the remaining mutineers, without finding any traces of the pirated vessel.

If they had done so, they would very probably have discovered early evidence of the fate of the French Pacific explorer La Perouse's expedition which had disappeared in 1788.However Edwards, who was only interested in prisoners, reasoned that mutineers fearful of discovery would not be advertising their whereabouts, so he ignored the smoke and sailed on.

Sven Wahlroos, in his 1989 book, Mutiny and Romance in the South Seas, suggests 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 the Astrolabe and Boussole had foundered in 1788.

[26] Heading west, making for the Torres Strait, the ship ran aground on 29 August 1791 on the outer Great Barrier Reef.

The ten surviving prisoners were also tried; the various courts martial held acquitted four of those of mutiny and convicted six, of whom three – Millward, Burkitt and Ellison – were executed on 29 October 1792 on board the man-of-war Brunswick at Portsmouth.

[31] Peter Heywood and James Morrison received a Royal pardon, while William Muspratt was acquitted on a legal technicality.

Descendants of the nine mutineers not discovered by Pandora still live on Pitcairn Island, the refuge Fletcher Christian founded in January 1790 and where they burnt and scuttled the Bounty a few weeks after arrival.

Their hiding place was not discovered until 1808 when the New England sealer Topaz (Captain Mayhew Folger) happened on the tiny uncharted island.

The wreck of the Pandora is located approximately 5 km north-west of Moulter Cay 11°23′S 143°59′E / 11.383°S 143.983°E / -11.383; 143.983 on the outer Great Barrier Reef, on the edge of the Coral Sea.

[32][33] John Heyer, an Australian documentary film maker, had predicted the position of the wreck based on his research in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

His discovery expedition was launched with the help of Steve Domm, a boat owner and naturalist, and the Royal Australian Air Force.

Using the built-in sensors of the Royal Australian Air Force P-2V Neptune, the magnetic anomaly caused by the wreck was detected and flares were laid down near the coordinates predicted by Heyer.

[34] Archaeologists, historians and scholars at the Museum of Tropical Queensland, Townsville, continue to piece together the Pandora story, using archaeological and extant historical evidence.