The mutiny on the Royal Navy vessel HMS Bounty occurred in the South Pacific Ocean on 28 April 1789. Disaffected crewmen, led by Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, seized control of the ship from their captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and 18 loyalists adrift in the ship’s open launch. Bounty had left England in 1787 on a mission to collect and transport breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies.
About Mutiny on the Bounty in brief
The mutiny on the Royal Navy vessel HMS Bounty occurred in the South Pacific Ocean on 28 April 1789. Disaffected crewmen, led by Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, seized control of the ship from their captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and 18 loyalists adrift in the ship’s open launch. 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 many men to be less amenable to military discipline. Relations between Bligh and his crew deteriorated after he began handing out increasingly harsh punishments, criticism and abuse, Christian being a particular target. Bligh navigated more than 3,500 nautical miles in the launch to reach safety, and began the process of bringing the mutineers to justice. The 10 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. No action was taken against Adams; descendants of the Mutineers and their Tahitian captives live on Pitarian into the 21st century. 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 the slaves.
Bounty was refitted under Banks’ supervision at Deptford Dockyard on the River Thames. The great cabin 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. It was three-masted, 91 feet long overall and 25 feet across at its widest point, and registered at 230 tons burthen. 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. The ship was built in 1784 at the Blaydes shipyard in Hull, Yorkshire as a collier named Bethia. It was renamed after being purchased by the Navy for £1,950 in May 1787. The Bounty had been acquired to transport bread fruit plants from. Tahiti, a Polynesian island in the south Pacific, to the British colonies in the west Indies. The voyage included Captain James Cook’s third and final voyage, in which he served as sailing master, or chief navigator, on HMS Plymouth in 1754. The Royal Navy was reduced in size, and Bligh found himself ashore on half-pay.
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This page is based on the article Mutiny on the Bounty published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 16, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
