![]() According to Captain Bligh's diary, the mutineers threw breadfruit after him as he was forced off the Bounty, and yelled, "There goes the Bounty bastard, breadfruit Bligh!" Miraculously, Bligh and his loyalists survived the seven-week, 3,600-mile voyage in the cramped boat, finally reaching the island of Timor. A little more than three weeks later, near the island of Tonga, the crew, led by first mate Fletcher Christian, staged a mutiny against Captain William Bligh, under whom they claimed to suffer inhuman treatment.īligh and eighteen loyal sailors were set adrift in a 23-foot open boat. On April 4, 1789, the Bounty embarked on the second leg of its journey with a cargo of a thousand breadfruit saplings aboard. For Christian, Maimiti had the face that launched one mutinous ship. After sailing 27,000 miles over ten months, the crew spent a sybaritic idyll on Tahiti, where they reveled in the subtropical climate, lush surroundings, and overwhelming warmth and hospitality of the Tahitians.Ī scientist of the time, gladly abandoning reason for passion, claimed that the Tahitians knew "no other god but love every day is consecrated to it, the whole island is its temple, all the women are its idols, all the men its worshippers." Many of the men found Tahitian companions, and Fletcher Christian and a Tahitian named Maimiti fell deeply in love and later married. It was sent to collect a cargo of breadfruit saplings, which was then to be transported to Jamaica where the breadfruit would serve as food for slaves working on the plantations. It is as if history had been preserved in a petri dish (another admittedly romantic notion about an already widely romanticized past). The islanders speak a dialect that is a hybrid of Tahitian and eighteenth-century English. ![]() Living on a 1.75 square mile volcanic speck in the South Pacific that is surely one of the most isolated places on Earth, the contemporary Pitcairn Islanders still bear the surnames of the eighteenth century mutineers (Tom Christian, for example, is the great-great-great-grandson of Fletcher). What has also helped to perpetuate the romantic fascination with the mutiny is the existence of a small community on Pitcairn Island directly descended from the mutineers and their Tahitian wives. Set in the paradisiacal islands of the South Seas, the mutiny involved a host of colorful characters, including the tyrannical Captain Bligh, the aristocratic Fletcher Christian (a distant relation of William Wordsworth's), numerous uninhibited Tahitian women, and a pack of sailors made up of cockney orphans and ruffian adverturers. The mutiny has generated five films (who can think of Fletcher Christian without picturing Marlon Brando?) as well as countless books (including a historical novel by Mark Twain, The Great Revolution in Pitcairn). ![]() It is not surprising that the most famous of all mutinies, that of the British HMS Bounty, has become ideal fodder for popular history and legend. ![]() Courtesy of the Pitcairn Island Web site. Source: Ray and Eileen Young, New Zealand residents descended from Midshipmen Edward Young of the Bounty. – I'm going out yonder for red guavas.įoot yawly come yah? – Why did you come here? – I'm going down to Father's place tomorrow. HMS Bounty Phrases in the Pitcairnese Dialect Infoplease Staff April 28 marks the anniversary of the world's most famous mutiny by Borgna Brunner
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