The Last Word on the Bounty?

Its hard to know why The Mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 is such an enduring and compelling story, but recently I got a new angle on the old yarn that nicely demonstrates how history is ever-evolving as new threads of a story can be spun and re-spun again and again.

I was watching a show – “The Bligh Conspiracy Revealed”  mainly charting attempts of a direct descendant of Captain William Bligh’s – Mark Arundel to better understand his ancestor’s life and why his reputation was so poor.  It was also an obvious attempt to tidy-up that legacy.  In this I felt it was very successful, climaxing with Arundel coming face-to-face with one of Fletcher Christian’s descendants in an electric charged meeting.

Since I arrived in Australia nearly ten years ago it had begun to become clear to me that the Bounty story was more complicated than Hollywood would have us believe – well there’s a shocker.  Bligh was obviously a man with poor communication and people skills, but what was less clear was whether he was quite the ogre Historical consensus would have us believe.

The upshot:  a man’s reputation, legacy - and much of the latter stages of his career - in tatters, quite possibly entirely unfairly.  What began with a clever PR campaign by the family and friends of Fletcher Christian was continued for mere story-telling convenience. This man has been persecuted to his grave and well beyond.

What was immediately interesting was the sub-plot of the Bounty itself.  Sent on a voyage to Tahiti to procure breadfruit plants that might be taken to the Windies for re-planting, several aspects of the trip almost guaranteed a mutiny:

  • Very unusually, to make space for plants, there were no Marines on board to protect the cargo and maintain order among the crew.
  • Also to make breadfruit space, crew and officers were required to co-exist in much more cramped quarters than usual
  • Finally, the role of captain and bursar were rolled into one to cut down on headcount.  As the short-changer-in-chief, the bursar was always an unpopular character – doubly so when combined with the captain


So regardless of Bligh’s character, a stage was set by the Royal Navy that made mutiny almost inevitable.  Then – with the arrival on Tahiti – the rough, cramped and deprived conditions on board were contrasted sharply (and famously) with beautiful naked women, alcohol in great abundance and an idyllic climate.  The crew’s rampant sexual endeavours on Tahiti – none more prolific by all accounts than Christian himself – ultimately led to an outbreak of The Clap.  With an eventual return to deprivation on board the Bounty amid such – shall we say – discomfort, it is no wonder things got testy.  We all know what happened next.

Bligh did return to London a hero following his subsequent legendary feat of navigation.  But bad fortune once again impeded Bligh’s career: he was sent off on a second breadfruit voyage just when several of the now-captured Mutineers – Christian excepted – were put on trial.  It was essential to their defence, and increasingly convenient to the establishment (one mutineer – Peter Heywood - was even related to the judge!), that Bligh’s captaincy and even character were maligned and he himself scapegoated.  By the time he returned home, he was a pariah, a case fervently prosecuted by Christian’s Lawyer-brother who felt the ill-wind of guilt-by-association chilling his own reputation.

So Bligh was despatched to New South Wales as Governor, where his reputation preceded him and once again the misunderstood and admittedly intransigent disciplinarian was embroiled in yet another great episode of civil unrest – The Rum Rebellion in 1808 .

He died in obscurity in 1817 at 63. Yet his reputation continued to be further assaulted.  One of the Mutineers – James Morrison - whose death sentence was commuted drafted a journal of the Mutiny – albeit an exceptionally biased one.  Its confusion of the contemporary with the retrospective, however, ensured it was not published until the manuscript was adapted many years later by a novelist called Sir John Barrow who based on it his 1831 pseudo-history of the Mutiny  – all but popularly forgotten by this time.  It was this book that inspired the 1935 movie  with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton that made the story so famous.  The travesty of truth was taken so much further again by the subsequent Mel Gibson effort.

However, with all this blight on Bligh’s reputation – its interesting to stop today to think about how the battle of reputation that is the Mutiny on the Bounty has really panned out over the more than two centuries that have elapsed since.  Besides the episodes of Rum and Bounty, Bligh’s other main historical legacy is that of the delivery of the Breadfruit, which features in the epitaph on his grave:

“Sacred To The Memory Of William Bligh... The Celebrated navigator Who First Transplanted The Breadfruit Tree From Otahette To The West Indies”

More importantly, there is his epic journey to Papua New Guinea following his jettisoning by Fletcher and the rest of the crew – which this very day is being re-enacted in strict attention to detail as homage to his unsurpassed feat of survival and seamanship.

Finally, there is the statue  opposite the Sydney Opera House at Circular Quay that even alludes to the misunderstood nature of his legacy and first asked me to change my view when I first saw it on my arrival in Sydney in 2000:

“Over the years, writers have built misleading legends about Bligh.  He was a severe disciplinarian, but never cruel. He was brave and honest but unfortunate in his subordinates.  This monument seeks to restore the image of a much maligned and gallant man.”

The full inscription

And what of Fletcher Christian?  His most memorable and most likely final legacy is that of his descendants’ conviction in 2004 for systemic child abuse on Pitcairn Island.  (It is interesting that the men's appeal to the Privy Council was based on an assumption that Fletcher Christian's Mutiny placed the men outside the Law.  The Privy Council saw it differently.)

I would say Bligh has won out in the end, wouldn’t you?