The mutiny on HMS Bounty broke out in the Pacific
On this day · 28 April 1789
On April 28, 1789, Fletcher Christian and his fellow crewmen seized HMS Bounty and cast Captain Bligh adrift in an open boat in the Pacific.
Before dawn on April 28, 1789, master’s mate Fletcher Christian and a band of crewmen took control of HMS Bounty as it sailed the South Pacific. They seized Lieutenant William Bligh and cast him, along with eighteen loyal men, into the ship’s small open launch and left them to the open sea.
The Bounty had spent more than five months at Tahiti gathering breadfruit, and the easy island life made the return to naval discipline bitter. Tensions with the demanding Bligh boiled over into one of history’s most famous mutinies.
What followed split into two extraordinary survival stories. Bligh navigated the crowded launch some 3,600 miles to Timor with almost no charts, a feat of seamanship rarely matched. The mutineers, meanwhile, eventually settled remote Pitcairn Island, more than 1,000 miles from Tahiti, founding a community whose descendants live there still.
Bligh’s open-boat voyage remains a benchmark of survival at sea.
Returning ships later captured several mutineers, three of whom were hanged.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
