The Mutiny on the Bounty: Bligh's epic voyage

As the world well knows, in the year 1789, Lt. William Bligh lost his ship Bounty at the hands of one Fletcher Christian and a handful of miscreants on a voyage back to England from Tahiti, where the Bounty had been sent to collect breadfruit and other useful plants of the South Pacific.

The mutiny not only deprived Bligh of his ship, but defused a grand botanical enterprise. Dumped into a lifeboat with 18 members of his crew, and with food sufficient for a week.

After the mutiny, Bligh’s crew had initially headed for the nearby island of Tofua, hoping to secure food. Armed only with four cutlasses, the crew were forced to flee when the Tofuans attacked. The Tofuans started to pull the crew's boat back in by its line when quartermaster John Norton got out of the boat, ran to untie the line so the vessel could leave and was killed in doing so. Abandoning their last hope of food supplies, what remained of the Bounty crew embarked across the Pacific.

Bligh's Attempt to Land after Mutiny on Tofua
Painting by Robert Cleveley, 1790.

Exposed to severe weather, starving and stuffed into a vessel only made to accommodate 15, they drifted for weeks. According to the Pitcairn Islands Study Center, “Death by starvation was a constant threat, the ration, served twice daily, being only one twenty-fifth of a pound of bread and a gill (quarter pint) of water with occasional additions of half an ounce of port and a teaspoonful of rum.”

Arrival of Bligh and Loyalists at Timor after Mutiny
Painting by Charles Benazech.

Bligh navigated through high seas and perilous storms over a period of 41 starving days, drawing on his memory of the few charts he had seen of the mostly uncharted waters. His completion of the 3,618-mile voyage to safety in Timor is still regarded as perhaps the most outstanding feat of seamanship and navigation ever conducted in a small boat.

The HMS Bounty Organization argues that although Bligh has been depicted as cruel, he “may be one of the greatest seamen who ever lived” as he navigated over “3600 nautical miles to safety in 41 days using only a sextant and a pocket watch.”