Cruelty Leads To Betrayal : HMS Bounty Mutiny – April 28, 1789

The Bounty, under the command of William Bligh, set out on an expedition to Tahiti in 1787 to collect breadfruit to transport to the West Indies. It was a long and difficult voyage and discipline was a problem. The Bounty was overcrowded and there were no marines on board to enforce the captain’s authority.

Ten months after leaving England they reached Tahiti, but it was the wrong season to collect the breadfruit, so they were forced to stay on the island for five months.

On 28 April 1789, master’s mate Fletcher Christian, along with 18 mutineers, took control of the Bounty and cast the captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and 18 of his men adrift in the Pacific Ocean in a small boat.

Though historians still argue about the true cause of the mutiny, they agree that for Christian, his captain’s accusation was the final straw. On April 28, a group of mutineers led by Christian armed themselves with the Bounty’s muskets and burst into Bligh’s cabin, taking him prisoner. “I have been in hell for weeks past with you,” Christian reportedly told Bligh.

Twenty-three days out to sea and 1300 miles from Tahiti, Christian and his men woke Bligh in the middle of the night, pointed a bayonet at him and forced him on deck. No blood was shed; instead the mutineers ordered Bligh and 18 of his loyal followers to board the Bounty’s launch.

Of the 42 men onboard, apart from Bligh and Christian, 18 joined the mutiny, two were passive and 22 loyal to Bligh (four of whom had to stay aboard the ship).

Bligh was a skilled navigator with a keen attention to detail. Armed with a magnetic compass, a 10-inch sextant, a quadrant and two books containing mathematical, astronomical and geographical information he and his men managed to navigate west across the Pacific.. They’d undertaken a voyage of 3618 nautical miles. Once recovered, the men returned to England to report the mutiny.

Having seized the Bounty, the mutineers returned to Tahiti to resume the life they had been enjoying. However, fearing the arrival of a Royal Navy ship and the consequences of their mutiny, Christian and eight of the mutineers, with Tahitian men and women, sailed the Bounty for remote and ill-charted Pitcairn Island.

The remaining mutineers and their Tahitian captives had found a safe haven on Pitcairn Island, a far-flung island in the southern Pacific. The verdant, uninhabited island seemed like a potential paradise, and the mutineers soon burned the Bounty and set up a permanent colony there.

Despite having risked everything, they now began to fight among themselves, Christian was among those killed, as eventually were all the Tahitian men, but no one left the island.

At home, Bligh was court-martialed and acquitted of responsibility for the loss of the ship. H.M.S. Pandora then set sail from England on a mission to capture the mutineers. When the crew arrived in Tahiti in March 1791, they captured the 14 surviving mutineers whom Christian had abandoned. But the Pandora foundered on the Great Barrier Reef, and four of the shackled captives drowned.

In September 1792, the 10 men who had been brought back to England faced court-martial. Under English law, any man who remained on the ship was guilty of mutiny regardless of whether he had actively participated. Four were acquitted, and six sentenced to death by hanging. Three of those six were ultimately pardoned, but the other three mutineers—Thomas Burkett, John Millward, and Thomas Ellison—were on October 29, 1794.

But the tensions that had marred their voyagepersisted on the island. The Tahitians the mutineers had taken captive resented the English men’s abuse of the women. One of the Tahitian women, Tevarua, is thought to have killed herself in response to her ongoing mistreatment. In September 1793, the Tahitian men killed four of the eight mutineers, including Christian. Within the next decade, all but one of the remaining mutineers, John Adams died.

SOUCE..Brit Maritime Mus, Natl Geo