look closer

The name BOUNTY runs in gold across the stern. Men are still moving in the cabin windows above it. That cabin had been rebuilt as a floating greenhouse for more than 1,000 breadfruit plants bound for the West Indies.

Before dawn on 28 April 1789, in the warm water near the island of Tofua, Fletcher Christian and a handful of armed men walked into the cabin of Lieutenant William Bligh. They tied his hands behind his back and marched him up on deck in his nightshirt. The Bounty was a small ship on a strange errand. She had spent five months at Tahiti gathering breadfruit shoots, more than a thousand young trees potted up in her great cabin. They were to be carried to the West Indies and planted as cheap food for the enslaved people on the plantations there. The crew had lived like kings among the Tahitians for those five months. Three weeks back at sea under Bligh’s tongue had been enough. Christian, by his own later account, said he was in hell. What the mutineers did next was, by the standards of the trade, almost merciful. They did not kill Bligh. They put him over the side into the ship’s launch, a boat 23 feet long, and with him 18 men who would not join the mutiny. The little craft sat so low that a few inches of freeboard stood between the men and the sea. They handed down a quadrant, a compass, a small stock of bread and water and rum, four cutlasses, and no chart of anything. Then they cast off the rope. The Bounty sailed away west with the breadfruit still green in her windows. What followed is one of the hard facts of seamanship. Bligh, whatever kind of man he was to serve under, could navigate. He took the overloaded launch 3,600 nautical miles across open ocean to the Dutch post at Coupang on Timor, a passage of 47 days. He rationed each man to about an ounce of bread and a quarter-pint of water a day, weighing the portions against a pistol ball for a counterweight. He kept a log the whole way. He lost one man, John Norton, stoned to death by islanders at the first landfall on Tofua before the long passage even began. Everyone else he brought in alive. Robert Dodd engraved the moment within a year, in 1790, while England was still arguing about it, and coloured the print by hand. The Bounty’s gilded stern carries her name across it. The mutineers line the rail, and the launch is already crowded, appealing to a ship that will not turn. The men who kept the Bounty went looking for somewhere the Navy could not reach and found Pitcairn, a rock so badly charted it was 200 miles off its marked position. They burned the ship in the bay. When an American sealer stumbled on the island in 1808, of the mutineers only one was still alive.