Page 83 - All About History - Issue 34-16

Mutiny on the Bounty

The crew of Bounty
received a warm welcome
when they arrived in
Tahiti for the first time

Christian’s return
The Mutiny to Tahiti
28 April 1789 6 June 1789 – 16 June 1789
Fletcher Christian
The mutineers are forced to
seizes control of return to Tahiti and, after lying
Bounty and sets
to the local chieftains, secure
Bligh and his loyal provisions and a number of
crewmen adrift in
Polynesian passengers.
an open boat.

Tahiti Pitcairn
26 October 1788 – 15 January 1790
5 April 1789 Leaving 16 mutineers on Tahiti,
Bounty arrives in Tahiti Christian and the remaining
to begin its mission of nine reach Pitcairn and
harvesting breadfruit establish a settlement. Eight
plants. Welcomed ashore days later, Bounty is burned.
by natives, discipline
begins to crumble among
the crewmen.

satisfy the hunger for action. Life on Bounty was
a world away from the movie world of brutalised
crews and fatal punishments, with lashings few
and far between, while keelhauling would have
been unthinkable to Bligh, so outdated was the
punishment by the time Bounty sailed.
For audiences in 1935 and 1962, the mutiny on
Bounty was a fairytale of good versus evil, where
power runs rampant and men brutalised by an
unforgiving madman look to a hero to save them,
all against the travelogue background of an Earthly
paradise. Those who sat down to The Bounty in
1984 were treated to a more balanced view of
events, a world in which friends were pulled apart
by ambition and resentment. There was no sadist
revelling in the violent punishment of innocent “Life on Bounty was a
men, but a captain of experience who believed that
discipline was the way to a happy ship and let his world away from the movie
obsession with duty cloud his good judgment.
All three films tell a riveting and entertaining
tale, but none of them are as fascinating as the world of brutalised crews
reality. The true story of the mutiny on the Bounty
is one of friends torn apart, survival against all and fatal punishments”
odds and the violent end of an island idyll: so much ©JoeCummings
more dramatic than fiction.
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