HMS Bounty’s mission was agricultural: carry breadfruit seedlings from Tahiti to the West Indies as cheap food for the enslaved. Her commander, William Bligh — a superb navigator trained under Cook — spent five open-ended months at Tahiti while the plants matured, during which his crew settled deep into island life; his master’s mate Fletcher Christian, a gentleman-volunteer Bligh had promoted and favoured, formed attachments there that mattered.
Three weeks out from Tahiti, after a mounting campaign of Bligh’s tongue-lashings — his discipline was verbal and humiliating rather than (by the era’s standards) violent; he flogged less than most — Christian cracked. Before dawn on 28 April 1789, near Tonga, he took the ship with a minority of the crew and put Bligh and 18 loyalists into the 23-foot launch with minimal provisions, a sextant, and no charts of consequence.
The boat
What followed made Bligh immortal regardless of everything else: a 3,618-nautical-mile open-boat voyage — 47 days, through storms, starvation rations he administered with scales made from coconut shell and pistol balls, and past islands too hostile to land on (one man was stoned to death by islanders at Tofua, the voyage’s only loss) — across the uncharted middle of everything, threading the Great Barrier Reef, to the Dutch port of Coupang on Timor. Navigation by memory and dead reckoning; arrival with every remaining man alive. Bligh was court-martialled for the loss of his ship, acquitted, promoted, given the breadfruit mission again (he completed it), and went on to further mutinies — the Nore’s contagion touched a later command, and as Governor of New South Wales he was deposed by his own garrison in 1808: a career-scale verdict on his man-management, though never on his seamanship.
Pitcairn
The Royal Navy’s manhunt caught only the mutineers who had stayed on Tahiti — of ten brought home alive, three hanged. Christian, eight mutineers, six Polynesian men, and twelve Polynesian women (some, by the accounts, kidnapped when the ship slipped Tahiti) had vanished. Christian found Pitcairn Island — uninhabited, cliff-bound, and, decisively, charted 300 kilometres out of position — and on 23 January 1790 the Bounty was stripped and burned in what is now Bounty Bay, erasing the settlement’s signature from the sea.
The hidden colony then ate itself: tensions over land and women — the Polynesian men treated essentially as labourers — exploded into murders that killed Christian and most of the men on both sides within four years; drink and accident took more. When the American sealer Topaz stumbled on the island in 1808, it found one surviving mutineer — John Adams, presiding as patriarch and Scripture-teacher over nine widows and a couple of dozen children speaking a blend of English and Tahitian. The Admiralty, presented with a pious island of Bounty grandchildren, quietly left him alone.
Pitcairn remains inhabited by their descendants — a few dozen people, Britain’s last Pacific territory — as is Norfolk Island, where much of the community transplanted in 1856. The Bounty’s ballast stones still lie visible in the bay; the anniversary of her burning is Pitcairn’s Bounty Day.