Mutiny on the Bounty (1789): Bligh, Christian and Pitcairn

The mutiny on the Bounty broke out at dawn on 28 April 1789, when master’s mate Fletcher Christian and a group of sailors seized the Royal Navy vessel Bounty in the South Pacific and cast Lieutenant William Bligh adrift in an open boat. It is the most famous mutiny in naval history, both for Bligh’s extraordinary voyage to safety and for the mutineers’ hidden settlement on Pitcairn Island, whose descendants still live there today.

Background: the breadfruit voyage

The voyage grew out of the Pacific explorations of James Cook. On Cook’s first voyage, the naturalist Joseph Banks had seen breadfruit growing on Tahiti, a starchy tree fruit that could feed many people for little labour. Planters in the British West Indies wanted a cheap food source for the enslaved Africans who worked their sugar plantations, and Banks, by then President of the Royal Society, persuaded the government to send a ship to collect young plants.

The Admiralty bought a small merchant collier, the Bethia, renamed her Bounty and refitted her as a floating greenhouse, with much of the great cabin given over to pots. She was a cramped ship of roughly 215 tons, carried no marines, and was commanded by a lieutenant rather than a post-captain. Her company numbered about 46 men.

Command went to William Bligh, then 33, an outstanding navigator who had served as sailing master on the Resolution during Cook’s third voyage and had seen Cook killed in Hawaii. Among the men he chose was Fletcher Christian, a gentleman’s son from Cumberland who had sailed with Bligh twice before on merchant voyages to the West Indies. During the voyage Bligh promoted Christian to acting lieutenant.

The voyage out and five months on Tahiti

Bounty left Spithead on 23 December 1787. Bligh tried to enter the Pacific by Cape Horn, but after about a month fighting storms and contrary winds he turned east and went the long way round, via the Cape of Good Hope and Adventure Bay in Tasmania. The ship anchored in Matavai Bay, Tahiti, on 26 October 1788, after some ten months at sea.

The late arrival meant the crew had to wait for the breadfruit to reach the right stage for transplanting, and the ship stayed on Tahiti for about five months. For the sailors this was an extraordinary time: plentiful food, a warm climate, freedom ashore and close relationships with Tahitian women, some of which became lasting partnerships. Three men deserted in January 1789 and were recaptured and flogged.

Discipline grew slacker and Bligh’s temper shorter. He publicly berated his officers for negligence, and his relationship with Christian became strained. When Bounty finally sailed on 4 April 1789 she carried more than 1,000 potted breadfruit plants, and many of her crew left behind people they did not want to leave.

What happened on 28 April 1789

The immediate trigger was trivial. On 27 April, near the island of Tofua in the Tongan group, Bligh accused his officers of stealing coconuts from a pile on deck and singled out Christian as a thief. According to later testimony, Christian was so distressed that he planned to desert the ship that night on a makeshift raft.

Instead, in the early hours of 28 April, Christian and a handful of sailors armed themselves, entered Bligh’s cabin and tied his hands. Bligh was brought on deck in his nightshirt. The mutineers had no clear plan beforehand, and the ship’s company split in confused, often angry scenes. Christian ordered the ship’s launch, a boat about 23 feet long, lowered into the sea.

Bligh and 18 men loyal to him were forced into the launch with some food, water, a quadrant and a compass, but no charts. The boat was so overloaded that it sat only a few inches above the water, and several men who wished to go with Bligh had to stay on the ship; Bligh promised to remember them, and later named them as loyal. Twenty-five men remained aboard Bounty, which turned away towards Tahiti.

Bligh’s open-boat voyage

The launch’s ordeal became one of the great feats of seamanship. At Tofua, the castaways landed to look for food and were attacked by islanders; quartermaster John Norton was killed. Bligh then decided not to stop again among Pacific islands and set course for the Dutch settlement of Kupang on Timor, about 3,600 nautical miles away.

For 47 days the men lived on a ration of roughly an ounce of bread and a small measure of water a day, supplemented by rain, a few seabirds and oysters gathered on the Great Barrier Reef. Bligh navigated from memory and dead reckoning, and kept a log and rough charts of the coasts he passed, including the northern edge of what is now Vanuatu and the Torres Strait. On 14 June 1789 the launch reached Kupang with every one of its remaining 18 men alive.

Survival did not end the losses. Several men, including the botanist David Nelson, died of fever in Kupang and Batavia. Of the 19 men put into the launch, 12 eventually reached England. Bligh arrived home in March 1790, was honourably acquitted at the routine court martial for the loss of his ship, and became a public hero.

The mutineers: Tubuai, Tahiti and Pitcairn

Christian first tried to found a settlement on Tubuai, an island south of Tahiti, but fighting with the islanders and quarrels among the crew made it impossible. In September 1789 Bounty returned to Tahiti, where 16 men chose to stay, among them several who had never supported the mutiny.

Christian knew the Royal Navy would come looking for them. He sailed with eight other mutineers, six Polynesian men and about a dozen Polynesian women, some of whom had been taken on board without their consent. After months searching for a hiding place, they found Pitcairn Island in January 1790. It was uninhabited, hard to land on and wrongly placed on Admiralty charts. The settlers stripped the ship and burned her on 23 January 1790.

The new community soon descended into violence. The Polynesian men were treated as servants and denied land, and in 1793 they rose against the Europeans, killing five mutineers, Christian among them. The Polynesian men were all killed in turn. William McCoy died after a fall, Matthew Quintal was killed by his remaining companions, and Edward Young died of illness in 1800. That left one mutineer, John Adams (who had sailed under the name Alexander Smith), with nine or ten women and a crowd of children.

Adams turned to the Bible and taught the children to read from it, and the settlement became a quiet, devout community. It stayed hidden until February 1808, when the American sealing ship Topaz under Mayhew Folger called at Pitcairn and found the colony.

The Pandora and the court martial

The Admiralty sent the frigate HMS Pandora under Captain Edward Edwards to hunt the mutineers. Pandora reached Tahiti in March 1791 and rounded up the 14 surviving men there, guilty and innocent alike, locking them in a cramped cell on deck nicknamed “Pandora’s Box”. Two others had already died in violence on Tahiti.

On 29 August 1791 Pandora struck the Great Barrier Reef and sank. Four of the prisoners drowned, along with 31 of her crew. The survivors made their own open-boat voyage to Timor and were eventually shipped home.

Ten prisoners faced a court martial at Portsmouth in September 1792. Four, whom Bligh had named as loyal men kept on board against their will, were acquitted. Six were convicted: Peter Heywood and James Morrison received royal pardons, William Muspratt was freed on a legal technicality, and three ordinary seamen, Thomas Burkett, John Millward and Thomas Ellison, were hanged aboard HMS Brunswick on 29 October 1792.

Key people

• William Bligh (1754–1817): Commander of Bounty, a gifted navigator with an abrasive tongue. He later completed the breadfruit mission and became Governor of New South Wales, where he was deposed in the Rum Rebellion of 1808.
• Fletcher Christian (1764–1793): Acting lieutenant and leader of the mutiny, killed on Pitcairn in 1793.
• John Adams (c. 1767–1829): The last surviving mutineer and patriarch of the Pitcairn community; he was never prosecuted.
• Joseph Banks (1743–1820): Naturalist and patron who promoted the breadfruit scheme.
• Peter Heywood (1772–1831): Midshipman convicted and pardoned, who went on to a distinguished naval career.

Myths and facts

Myth: Bligh was a sadistic flogger. Bligh used the lash less often than many contemporary captains, and he worked hard to prevent scurvy. His failing was verbal: he humiliated officers in front of the men. The image of a brutal tyrant owes much to a campaign by the families of Christian and Heywood after the trial, and to films starring Charles Laughton (1935), Marlon Brando (1962) and Anthony Hopkins (1984).

Myth: the whole crew rose against Bligh. Only a minority began the mutiny, and many of those who stayed on board did so because there was no room in the launch.

Myth: Christian secretly returned to England. Rumours circulated for years, and they may have influenced writers of the time, but there is no reliable evidence. Pitcairn accounts agree that he was killed on the island in 1793.

By the numbers

Legacy

Bligh’s second breadfruit voyage, in HMS Providence (1791–1793), succeeded in carrying plants to St Vincent and Jamaica. Breadfruit is still grown across the Caribbean, though at first enslaved people largely refused to eat it.

Pitcairn Island became a British colony and is today a British Overseas Territory with a population of a few dozen. In 1856 almost the whole community of 194 people moved to Norfolk Island, though some families later returned. Remains of the Bounty still lie in Bounty Bay, and the story has inspired novels, histories and several feature films. It sits alongside the death of Captain Cook as one of the defining episodes of Europe’s eighteenth-century encounter with the Pacific.

Timeline

• 1787, 23 December: Bounty leaves Spithead for Tahiti.
• 1788, 26 October: Bounty anchors in Matavai Bay, Tahiti.
• 1789, 4 April: Bounty sails from Tahiti with its breadfruit plants.
• 1789, 28 April: Fletcher Christian seizes the ship near Tofua; Bligh and 18 men are set adrift.
• 1789, 14 June: Bligh’s launch reaches Kupang, Timor.
• 1790, January: The mutineers reach Pitcairn and burn Bounty on 23 January.
• 1791, 29 August: HMS Pandora, carrying captured men, sinks on the Great Barrier Reef.
• 1792, 29 October: Three mutineers are hanged at Portsmouth.
• 1793: Christian and four other mutineers are killed on Pitcairn.
• 1808, February: The American ship Topaz discovers the Pitcairn settlement.

Why it matters

The Bounty mutiny shows how fragile authority could be on a small ship far from home, and how the lure of Pacific islands affected European sailors. It produced one of history’s great survival voyages, a lasting debate about leadership, and a living community on Pitcairn that still traces its origins to 1789.