On April 28, 1789, Fletcher Christian led a mutiny against Lt. William Bligh, the commanding officer of the British cutter HMS Bounty. It has become one of the most famous mutinies in maritime history, inspiring multiple books and movies, and even a musical.
The expedition of the Bounty was organized by the Royal Society, and tasked with transporting breadfruit plants from Tahiti to British colonies in the Caribbean; it was hoped that they would grow well there, and become an additional source of food. Command of the expedition was given to Lt. William Bligh. He was only 33, but had been serving on Royal Navy ships since the age of seven. It was not unusual at the time for “young gentlemen” to serve on Navy vessels to gain the experience they would need to become full members of the Navy in adulthood.
It was a small crew—46 men, including 2 civilian botanists—and a young one, ranging in age from 15 to 40. Fletcher Christian was only 23, but he had sailed with Bligh on two previous expeditions, and had become a skilled navigator under Bligh’s instruction.
The Bounty left England in October 1787, planning to sail around South America to reach the Pacific. In March 1788, Bligh elevated Christian to the rank of Acting Lieutenant. Bligh did not formally remove John Fryer from his post as second in command, but increasingly assigned Fryer’s duties to Christian.
Storms in the southern Atlantic forced the ship to change course and sail around Africa, heading through the Indian Ocean to Tahiti. As the Bounty neared Tahiti in October 1788, Bligh and Fryer had a major confrontation. Bligh assembled the crew and read the Navy’s Articles of War—essentially threatening Fryer with court-martial—and Fryer backed down.
The Bounty spent five months in Tahiti. During that time, many of the crew became romantically and sexually involved with local women. Some of the men found regular partners; others were more promiscuous. Nearly half the crew was treated for venereal disease during their stay in Tahiti. Bligh was a strict disciplinarian under the best of circumstances, but as his crew became increasingly distracted from their work, he became an even harsher commander.
By April 1789, many of the crew were reluctant to abandon the relative relaxation of their months in Tahiti for the discipline of the sea. In the weeks after leaving Tahiti, Bligh was reported to be increasingly erratic and paranoid, often taking his anger out on Christian.
An April 22 stop at Tonga made the relationship between the two men even worse, when Christian failed to acquire necessary supplies and blamed Bligh for ordering him to go ashore unarmed. A few days later, Bligh accused Christian of stealing food from the captain’s private supply, and punished the entire crew by putting them on half rations.
Christian was increasingly depressed, and not sleeping well. On April 28, he and his allies among the crew seized command of the Bounty, setting adrift Bligh and 18 other members crew in a 23-foot launch with a few days worth of food and water, and some nautical charts.
Bligh’s best chance for survival, he decided, was a 4,000 mile journey to a Dutch colony in Timor. He put the launch on starvation rations—an ounce of bread and half a cup of water per man each day. Miraculously, the small boat made it to Timor on June 14, with all 19 men still alive.
Meanwhile, Christian used Bligh’s good name to obtain supplies from some Tahitian chiefs, and attempted to settle on Tubuai, an island about 450 miles away from Tahiti. He hoped that would be far enough away that they would not be found by the Royal Navy if Bligh somehow survived and reported his mutiny. The mutineers were not greeted warmly in Tubuai, and by the time they decided to return to Tahiti, the chiefs there had learned of Christian’s deception. He left quickly, though several of his crew chose to remain.
The Bounty now carried Christian, eight of his fellow mutineers, and 20 captive Tahitians (14 of them women) who had been brought on board under false pretenses. After a three month journey, this small community arrived in January 1790 at uninhabited Pitcairn Island. It seemed an ideal spot for the mutineers to settle; it was remote enough that they could hope not to be found, and there was ample food and water.
For a time, the group lived in peace on Pitcairn, but conflict between the mutineers and the Tahitians reached a head in 1793-94, when several men, including Christian, died in a series of murders.
Bligh had finally made it back to England in March 1790. News of the mutiny had already reached England, and Bligh was greeted as a hero; his memoir of the events became a best-seller. In late 1990, the Admiralty sent another ship, the Pandora, to Tahiti to find the mutineers.
Fourteen surviving members of the Bounty crew were quickly located. Only ten survived a particularly difficult journey back to England, where they were court-martialed. Four were acquitted; they were Bligh loyalists who were not set adrift only because the launch didn’t have room for them. Three men were pardoned, and three were hanged.
The community on Pitcairn Island wasn’t discovered until 1808 when an American ship found them. By that time, only one of the Bounty mutineers was still alive. By the time the news reached England in 1810, the Admiralty chose to take no action against him.
For many years, the most popular history of the mutiny was John Barrow’s 1831 account, The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of the HMS Bounty. More recently, Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty purports to correct the historical myths, and offers a more sympathetic portrayal of Lt. Bligh.
The classic fictional account of the events is Mutiny on the Bounty, the 1932 novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. John Boyne’s novel Mutiny tells the story through the eyes of Bligh’s 14-year-old valet.
The story of the Bounty has been told on film several times. The earliest surviving version is the 1933 Australian film In the Wake of the Bounty, which mixes fictional re-enactments of the events with anthropological and documentary footage of the mutineers’ descendants on Pitcairn Island. Fletcher Christian is played in this film by Errol Flynn, making his movie debut.
Also This Week
April 29, 1945
Tammi Terrell was born. Terrell was a Motown singer of the late 1960s, best known for her duets with Marvin Gaye, including “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” and “You’re All I Need to Get By.” Terrell and Gaye were on stage in 1967 when she collapsed; doctors found that she had a brain tumor. Terrell had several operations over the next three years, but died on March 16, 1970, at the age of 24. Terrell’s body of work was small, and is gathered in two collections: her solo recordings, and her duets with Gaye.
April 30, 1945
Annie Dillard was born. Dillard’s dozen books cover a wide range of genres and subjects. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek presents a year in the life of nature near Dillard’s Virginia home; The Writing Life is a collection of essays on writing; An American Childhood is a memoir of growing up in 1950s Pittsburgh. Dillard has also written two novels: The Living is about the European settlement of the Pacific Northwest and The Maytrees is a romance set during World War II.
April 29, 1950
Phillip Noyce was born. Noyce is an Australian film and television director. His first few films were little seen outside Australia, but the 1989 thriller Dead Calm (one of Nicole Kidman’s first major roles) brought him international attention. Three of Noyce’s films are available for streaming at Hoopla. Harrison Ford stars in the spy thriller Patriot Games; The Quiet American is an adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel; and Rabbit-Proof Fence is the story of three young Australian Aboriginal girls, trying to return to their family after being taken from their home by the government.
April 29, 1960
Robert J. Sawyer was born. Sawyer is a Canadian science fiction novelist whose themes include the intersection of human and machine consciousness, the gray areas at the boundaries of science and religion, and first contact with alien life. There are often significant elements of mystery writing in his novels. He was won both of the major American science fiction awards—the Hugo for Hominids, in which we discover a parallel universe where Neanderthals are the dominant species, and the Nebula for The Terminal Experiment, in which a scientist suspects that machine copies of his mind may be murdering his rivals.