The Mutiny on the Bounty occurred in the Pacific Ocean on 28 April 1789. Disaffected crewmen, led by acting-Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, seized control of the Royal Navy merchant ship HMS Bounty from its captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and 18 loyalists adrift in the ship's open launch. The reasons behind the mutiny are still debated.
Bounty had left England in 1787 on a mission to collect and transport breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies. A five-month layover in Tahiti, during which many of the men lived ashore and formed relationships with native Polynesians, led those men to be less amenable to naval discipline. Relations between Bligh and his crew deteriorated after he reportedly began handing out increasingly harsh punishments, criticism and abuse, with Christian being a particular target. After three weeks back at sea, Christian and others forced Bligh from the ship. Twenty-five men remained on board afterwards, including loyalists held against their will, and others for whom there was no room in the launch.
Bligh and his adrift crew navigated more than 3,500 nautical miles (6,500 km; 4,000 mi) in the launch to reach safety. After Bligh reached England in April 1790, the Admiralty despatched HMS Pandora to apprehend the mutineers. Fourteen were captured in Tahiti and imprisoned on board Pandora, which then searched without success for the contingent of Christian's party that had hidden on Pitcairn Island. After turning back towards England, Pandora ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, with the loss of 31 crew and four prisoners from Bounty. The ten surviving detainees reached England in June 1792 and were court-martialled; four were acquitted, three were pardoned and three were hanged.
Christian's group remained undiscovered on Pitcairn until 1808, by which time only one mutineer, John Adams, remained alive. His fellow mutineers, including Christian, were dead, killed either by one another or by their Polynesian companions. No action was taken against Adams. Descendants of the mutineers and their accompanying Tahitians have lived on Pitcairn into the 21st century.
Background
Bounty and its mission
His Majesty's Armed Vessel (HMAV) Bounty, or HMS Bounty, was built in 1784 at the Blaydes shipyard in Hull, Yorkshire, as a collier named Bethia. It was renamed after being purchased by the Royal Navy for £1,950 in May 1787 (equivalent to £264,789 in 2025). It was three-masted, 91 feet (28 m) long overall and 25 feet (7.6 m) across at its widest point, and registered at 230 tons burthen. Its armament was four short four-pounder carriage guns and ten half-pounder swivel guns, supplemented by small arms such as muskets. As it was rated by the Admiralty as a cutter, the smallest category of warship, its commander would be a lieutenant rather than a post-captain and would be the only commissioned officer on board. Nor did a cutter warrant the usual detachment of British marines that naval commanders could use to enforce their authority.
Bounty had been acquired to transport breadfruit plants from Tahiti, then rendered "Otaheite", a Polynesian island in the South Pacific Ocean, to the British colonies in the West Indies. The expedition was promoted by the Royal Society and organised by its president, Sir Joseph Banks, who shared the view of Caribbean plantation owners that breadfruit might grow well there and provide cheap food for slaves. Bounty was refitted under Banks' supervision at Deptford Dockyard on the River Thames. The great cabin, normally the quarters of the ship's captain, was converted into a greenhouse for over a thousand potted breadfruit plants, with glazed windows, skylights and a lead-covered deck and drainage system to prevent the waste of fresh water. The space required for these arrangements in the small ship meant that the crew and officers would endure severe overcrowding for the duration of the long voyage.
Bligh
With Banks' agreement, command of the expedition was given to Lieutenant William Bligh, whose experiences included James Cook's third and final voyage (1776–80) in which he had served as sailing master, or chief navigator, on HMS Resolution. Bligh was born in Plymouth in 1754 into a family of naval and military tradition. Appointment to Cook's ship at the age of 21 had been a considerable honour, although Bligh believed that his contribution was not properly acknowledged in the expedition's official account. With the 1783 ending of the eight-year American War of Independence—in which the French Navy fought from 1778—the vast Royal Navy was reduced in size, and Bligh found himself ashore on half-pay.
After a period of idleness, Bligh took temporary employment in the mercantile service and in 1785 was captain of the Britannia, a vessel owned by his wife's uncle, Duncan Campbell. Bligh assumed the prestigious Bounty appointment on 16 August 1787, at a considerable financial cost. His lieutenant's pay of four shillings a day (£70 a year) contrasted with the £500 a year he had earned as captain of Britannia. Because of the limited number of warrant officers allowed on Bounty, Bligh was also required to act as the ship's purser. To survey an important but under-explored passage, Bligh's sailing orders stated that he was to enter the Pacific via Cape Horn around South America and then, after collecting the breadfruit plants, sail westward through the Endeavour Strait. He was then to cross the Indian and South Atlantic Oceans to the West Indies islands in the Caribbean. Bounty would thus complete a circumnavigation of the Earth in the Southern Hemisphere.
Crew
Bounty's complement was 46 men, comprising 44 Royal Navy personnel (including Bligh) and two civilian botanists. Directly beneath Bligh were his warrant officers, appointed by the Navy Board and headed by the sailing master John Fryer. The other warrant officers were the boatswain, the surgeon, the carpenter and the gunner. To the two master's mates and two midshipmen were added several honorary midshipmen—so-called "young gentlemen" who were aspirant naval officers. These signed the ship's roster as able seamen but were quartered with the midshipmen and treated on equal terms with them.
Most of Bounty's crew were chosen by Bligh or were recommended to him by influential patrons. The gunner, William Peckover, and the armourer, Joseph Coleman, had been with Cook and Bligh on Resolution; several others had sailed under Bligh more recently on Britannia. Among these was the 23-year-old Fletcher Christian, who came from a wealthy Cumberland family descended from Manx gentry. Christian had chosen a life at sea rather than the legal career envisaged by his family. He had twice voyaged with Bligh to the West Indies, and the two had formed a master-pupil relationship through which Christian had become a skilled navigator. Christian was willing to serve on Bounty without pay as one of the "young gentlemen"; Bligh gave him one of the salaried master's mate's berths. Another of the young gentlemen recommended to Bligh was 15-year-old Peter Heywood, also from a Manx family and a distant relation of Christian's. Heywood had left school at age 14 to spend a year on HMS Powerful, a harbour-bound training vessel at Plymouth. His recommendation to Bligh came from Richard Betham, a Heywood family friend who was Bligh's father-in-law.
The two botanists, or "gardeners", were chosen by Banks. The chief botanist, David Nelson, was a veteran of Cook's third expedition who had been to Tahiti and had learned some of the natives' language. Nelson's assistant, William Brown, was a former midshipman who had seen naval action against the French. Banks also helped to secure the official midshipmen's berths for two of his protégés, Thomas Hayward and John Hallett. Overall, Bounty's crew was relatively youthful, the majority being under age 30; at the time of departure, Bligh was 33 years old. Among the older crewmembers were the 39-year-old Peckover, who had sailed on all three of Cook's voyages, and Lawrence Lebogue, formerly sailmaker on Britannia. The youngest aboard were Hallett and Heywood, both aged 15 when they left England.
Living space on the ship was allocated on the basis of rank. Bligh, having yielded the great cabin, occupied private sleeping quarters with an adjacent dining area or pantry on the starboard side of the ship, and Fryer a small cabin on the opposite side. The surgeon Thomas Huggan, the other warrant officers and Nelson the botanist had tiny cabins on the lower deck, while the master's mates and the midshipmen, together with the young gentlemen, berthed together in an area behind the captain's dining room known as the cockpit; as junior or prospective officers, they were allowed use of the quarterdeck. The other ranks had their quarters in the forecastle, a windowless unventilated area measuring 36 by 22 feet (11.0 by 6.7 m) with headroom of 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m).
Expedition
To Cape Horn
On 15 October 1787, Bounty left Deptford for Spithead, in the English Channel, to await final sailing orders. Adverse weather delayed arrival at Spithead until 4 November. Bligh was anxious to depart quickly and reach Cape Horn before the end of the short southern summer, but the Admiralty did not accord him high priority and delayed issuing the orders for a further three weeks. When Bounty finally sailed on 28 November, the ship was trapped by contrary winds and unable to clear Spithead until 23 December. With the prospect of a passage around Cape Horn now in serious doubt, Bligh received permission from the Admiralty to take, if necessary, an alternative route to Tahiti via the Cape of Good Hope.
As the ship settled into its sea-going routine, Bligh introduced Cook's strict discipline regarding sanitation and diet. According to the expedition's historian Sam McKinney, Bligh enforced these rules "with a fanatical zeal, continually fuss[ing] and fum[ing] over the cleanliness of his ship and the food served to the crew." He replaced the navy's traditional watch system of alternating four-hour spells on and off duty with a three-watch system, whereby each four-hour duty was followed by eight hours' rest. For the crew's exercise and entertainment, he introduced regular music and dancing sessions. Bligh's despatches to Campbell and Banks indicated his satisfaction; he had no occasion to administer punishment because, he wrote: "Both men and officers tractable and well disposed, & cheerfulness & content in the countenance of every one". The only adverse feature of the voyage to date, according to Bligh, was the conduct of the surgeon Huggan, who was revealed as an indolent, unhygienic drunkard.
From the start of the voyage, Bligh had established warm relations with Christian, according him a status which implied that he was Bligh's second-in-command rather than Fryer. On 2 March, Bligh formalised the position by assigning Christian to the rank of acting-Lieutenant. Fryer showed little outward sign of resentment at his junior's advancement, but his relations with Bligh significantly worsened from this point. A week after the promotion, and on Fryer's insistence, Bligh ordered the flogging of seaman Matthew Quintal, who received 12 lashes for "insolence and mutinous behaviour", thereby dashing Bligh's expressed hope of a voyage free from such punishment.
On 2 April, as Bounty approached Cape Horn, a strong gale and high seas began an unbroken period of stormy weather which, Bligh wrote, "exceeded what I had ever met with before ... with severe squalls of hail and sleet". The winds drove the ship back; on 3 April, it was further north than it had been a week earlier. Again and again, Bligh forced the ship forward, to be repeatedly repelled. On 17 April, he informed his exhausted crew that the sea had beaten them, and that they would turn and head for the Cape of Good Hope—"to the great joy of every person on Board", Bligh recorded.
Cape to Pacific
On 24 May 1788, Bounty anchored in False Bay, east of the Cape of Good Hope, where five weeks were spent in repairs and reprovisioning. Bligh's log emphasised how fit and well he and his crew were, by comparison with other vessels, and expressed hope that he would receive credit for this. At one stage during the sojourn, Bligh lent money to Christian, a gesture that the historian Greg Dening suggests might have sullied their relationship by becoming a source of anxiety and even resentment to the younger man. In her account of the voyage, Caroline Alexander describes the loan as "a significant act of friendship", but one which Bligh ensured Christian did not forget.
After leaving False Bay on 1 July, Bounty set out across the southern Indian Ocean on the long voyage to their next port of call, Adventure Bay in Van Diemen's Land (now called Tasmania). They passed the remote Île Saint-Paul, a small uninhabited island which Bligh knew from earlier navigators contained fresh water and a hot spring, but he did not attempt a landing. The weather was cold and wintry, conditions akin to the vicinity of Cape Horn, and it was difficult to take navigational observations, but Bligh's skill was such that on 19 August he sighted Mewstone Rock, on the south-west corner of Van Diemen's Land and, two days later, made anchorage in Adventure Bay.
The Bounty party spent their time at Adventure Bay in recuperation, fishing, replenishment of water casks and felling timber. There were peaceful encounters with the native population. The first sign of overt discord between Bligh and his officers occurred when the captain exchanged angry words with the carpenter, William Purcell, over the latter's methods for cutting wood. Bligh ordered Purcell back to the ship and, when the carpenter stood his ground, Bligh withheld his rations, which "immediately brought him to his senses", according to Bligh.