HMS Bounty

Bounty began as the collier Bethia, reportedly built in 1784 at Blaydes Yard in Hull. The Royal Navy bought her for £1,950 on 23 May 1787 for a single purpose, refitted her and gave her a new name. She was a small ship at 215 tons but carried three masts and was full-rigged, and after conversion she mounted four 4-pounder cannon and ten swivel guns. She was refitted at Deptford in June 1787, the great cabin converted to house potted breadfruit plants and gratings fitted to the upper deck.

The mission was the idea of the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, who promoted it in Britain and recommended Lieutenant William Bligh to the Admiralty as its commander: breadfruit from Tahiti, transplanted to the British West Indies as a cheap source of food for the region's enslaved people. Bligh was appointed on 16 August 1787 at the age of 33. He had been sailing master of the sloop Resolution on James Cook's third voyage. The complement was 46 men, Bligh the only commissioned officer aboard, plus two civilian gardeners for the plants.

Bounty sailed from Spithead on 23 December 1787. For a full month the crew tried to work west around Cape Horn; adverse weather beat them, and Bligh turned east instead, rounding Cape Agulhas and crossing the Indian Ocean by a route 7,000 miles longer. On the outward passage he demoted Sailing Master John Fryer and replaced him with Fletcher Christian, an act that damaged the two men's relationship for good; Fryer later claimed it had been entirely personal.

She reached Tahiti on 26 October 1788, after ten months at sea. The crew spent five months there collecting and preparing 1,015 breadfruit plants. Bligh let them live ashore tending the pots, and they took on the customs of the place: many of the seamen and some of the young gentlemen were tattooed in native fashion, Christian married a Tahitian woman named Maimiti, and other warrant officers and seamen were said to have formed connections of their own. Bligh's popular reputation as an abusive captain has been disputed — Caroline Alexander's 2003 study argues he was relatively lenient by the standards of the service.

Bounty sailed with her cargo on 4 April 1789. Some 1,300 miles west of Tahiti, near Tonga, mutiny broke out on 28 April. Despite strong words and threats on both sides the ship was taken bloodlessly and, apart from Bligh himself, without a struggle from the loyalists. Of the 42 men aboard besides Bligh and Christian, 22 joined the mutiny, two stayed passive and 18 remained loyal. Bligh, two midshipmen, the surgeon's mate and the ship's clerk were put into the ship's boat, and several more men joined them voluntarily.

The boat made 30 nautical miles to Tofua for supplies and had to flee after an attack by hostile islanders killed one man. Bligh then took her over 3,500 nautical miles to the Dutch settlement of Coupang, landing 47 days later having lost no one else. The Admiralty sent HMS Pandora after the mutineers in November 1790; she reached Tahiti in March 1791 and took fourteen men within a fortnight, confining them in a makeshift wooden cell on the quarterdeck they called "Pandora's box". Pandora was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef on 29 August 1791 with the loss of 35 lives.

Christian, eight crewmen, six Tahitian men and eleven women, one with a baby, had sailed on in search of somewhere the Navy could not reach. According to a journal kept by one of his followers, the Tahitian men were effectively kidnapped, Christian sailing without warning them in order to acquire the women. They passed through Fiji and the Cook Islands before rediscovering Pitcairn Island on 15 January 1790, misplaced on the Royal Navy's charts. Livestock and stores were landed, and on 23 January the ship was burned in what is now called Bounty Bay, to prevent detection and to stop anyone leaving.

The settlement stayed hidden until February 1808, when the Boston sealer Topaz under Captain Mayhew Folger found the last surviving mutineer, John Adams, with the Tahitian women and their children. Adams gave Folger the ship's azimuth compass and marine chronometer. In 1825 HMS Blossom under Captain Frederick William Beechey spent nineteen days off Pitcairn, and Beechey took down Adams's account of the mutiny. One of his crew, John Bechervaise, found remains of Bounty and took away pieces of wood that were turned into snuff boxes.

The rudder was found in 1933 by Parkin Christian and is still displayed in the Fiji Museum in Suva. Luis Marden rediscovered the rest of the wreck in January 1957, diving for several days in dangerous swells off the island against local warnings, and bringing up a rudder pin, nails, an oarlock, fittings and an anchor. He later advised Marlon Brando on playing Fletcher Christian in the 1962 film, and wore cuff links made from Bounty nails. The last of the four 4-pounder cannon was recovered in 1998 and, after nearly 40 months of conservation, returned to Pitcairn.

Sailing replicas have had mixed fortunes. A new Bounty was built in Nova Scotia in 1960 for the 1962 film and spent half a century visiting harbours and carrying paying and volunteer crew; on 29 October 2012 she sank off North Carolina in seas raised by Hurricane Sandy. Captain Robin Walbridge was never found, and crew member Claudene Christian, a descendant of Fletcher Christian, died. A second replica, HMAV Bounty, was built in New Zealand in 1979 for the 1984 film, worked the tourist trade from Sydney and later Hong Kong, and was decommissioned on 1 August 2017.