The Mutiny on the Bounty — Cast adrift, Bligh navigated 3,600 miles to safety

On 28 April 1789, in the South Pacific about 30 nautical miles south of the island of Tofua, mutineers aboard HMS Bounty led by acting-lieutenant Fletcher Christian seized the ship from her commander, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and eighteen loyal men adrift in the ship’s 23-foot launch. The boat was dangerously overloaded, with only inches of freeboard, and carried little food, a small store of water, no chart of the seas ahead, and only a quadrant, a compass and Bligh’s seamanship to navigate by. Over the following weeks the launch crossed roughly 3,600 nautical miles of open ocean to the Dutch settlement of Kupang on Timor, arriving on 14 June 1789. All but one of the nineteen survived the boat voyage itself — a feat of navigation and command still ranked among the greatest in maritime history.

The Bounty had sailed from England in late 1787 to carry breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies. After five months at Tahiti, where the crew settled into an easy island life, the return to shipboard discipline under a sharp-tongued commander curdled into rebellion within weeks of departure. The mutiny was not a battle but a sudden, near-bloodless seizure at dawn. Bligh and his men were given the launch, some provisions, and their lives, and cast loose to fend for themselves in a sea where the only friendly port lay thousands of miles to the west.

The single death came early and ashore. At Tofua, where the launch first put in to gather food and water, islanders attacked the landing party; the quartermaster John Norton was stoned to death on the beach as the others scrambled off. After that, Bligh resolved to risk no more hostile islands and ran straight for Timor, holding his starving men to a regime of weighed crumbs and measured water, sailing through storms and burning sun. The voyage is remembered as a triumph, but it was a triumph of grim discipline over near-certain death, and several of the survivors, worn out by the ordeal, died of illness soon after reaching the Dutch East Indies.