How movie bosses sunk the reputation of a British hero
On screen, he’s always made out to be a monster. But as MICHAEL BUERK reveals, Mutiny On The Bounty’s Captain Bligh has been terribly wronged
The most famous sea story of them all has everything: adventure, sex, cruelty, violence, the most glamorous of heroes, the wickedest of villains. A glimpse of Paradise and the ordeals of hell.
That’s the Mutiny On The Bounty as we know it, as hollywood has shown it, time after time.
Fletcher Christian, the mutineers’ leader, is always played by an (American) heart-throb — Clark Gable, Marlon Brando. Captain Bligh is an exercise in splenetic tyranny for an (english) character actor — Charles Laughton, Trevor howard — spluttering with rage and fairly simmering with savagery.
The problem is, it’s almost entirely untrue. Worse, it has obscured the real story. A story of bravery, barely believable endurance and extraordinary skill that ranks as one of the greatest maritime achievements in history.
Worst of all, it’s got the hero and the villain the wrong way round. The Bounty was a tiny ship to make such a big mark on history, a Royal Navy vessel little longer than a cricket pitch and too small to merit a proper captain. Bligh was a mere lieutenant; ‘Captain’ was a courtesy to any officer commanding a ship.
And what a bizarre project it was that was to make her famous. The early explorers had discovered a plant in the Pacific Islands called the breadfruit because its fruit — the size of a man’s head — was edible and had a taste and texture (it was claimed) uncannily like bread.
The idea was to sail to Tahiti, load the ship with young breadfruit plants and take them to the West Indies where they would provide a suitably cheap diet for the thousands of African slaves on the sugar plantations.
Bligh had been to Tahiti with Captain Cook and was with him when he was killed. he inherited Cook’s mantle as the foremost navigator of the age. Fletcher Christian, a charming but petulant man, was his protégé.
Christian was poor but his family was well connected. he’d already been on two voyages under Bligh’s wing and begged to go with him a third time.
By the standards of the day, Bligh was a considerate, even exemplary, captain. he divided the crew into three watches, rather than the normal two, so they could get more sleep. he was obsessed with hygiene, having the whole ship washed and rinsed with vinegar — a primitive disinfectant.
he inspected the entire crew for cleanliness, right down to their fingernails, every Sunday, and had dancing sessions on the deck most evenings.
The Bounty, at least in the early stages of the voyage, was a contented vessel. Bligh wrote home: ‘My men are all active, good fellows & what has given me much pleasure is that I have not yet been obliged to punish anyone.’
Tahiti, in 1788, was a paradise that had only recently been discovered. Palm trees rustled over sand, there were flowers everywhere — and sweet-smelling languor in the air.
The people were handsome, clean-limbed, smooth-skinned, their smiles full of snow-white teeth. The english sailors were mostly toothless, the majority of them pockmarked from endemic smallpox, bow-legged, misshapen, scarred — and, despite Bligh’s best efforts, filthy and stinking as well.
The Tahitians were endlessly generous and almost totally uninhibited. The girls’ attitude to sex amazed and delighted the english sailors — and left Bligh aghast, noting in his log ‘the uncommon ways they have of gratifying their beastly inclinations’.
The Bounty’s crew had to stay five months in this earthly paradise to collect the seedlings.
Discipline disintegrated. There were rows. Bligh had a sharp tongue, and a ready temper. But Bligh, in any case, would quickly calm down.
Irritable, he might have been, a tyrant he definitely wasn’t. As soon as they left, however, many of the crew having bade reluctant farewells to friends and sweethearts, relationships started seriously to sour.
The flashpoint for the most famous shipboard rebellion in history was ridiculously trivial. Bligh accused Christian of taking a coconut from a pile kept on deck.
It was little more than a tiff, so much so that Bligh invited Christian to dinner that evening. But he, in a huff, refused.
AT DAWN the following morning, Bligh was woken by Christian and three other seamen armed with pistols and cutlasses. They dragged him out of his cot and bound his hands behind his back.
There was confusion on deck. Christian, who’d been drinking heavily, kept poking his captive with a bayonet. Bligh shouted: ‘Consider, Mr Christian, I have a wife and four children in england, and you have danced my children on your knee.’
But Bligh and those loyal to him were ordered into the ship’s launch boat — far more went than Christian had expected. At least four of those who wanted to go with the Captain were forced to stay on the ship because there wasn’t room.
Cast adrift in the South Pacific, Bligh and his men seemed to face certain death. There were 19 of them packed into the launch, which was only 23ft long and little more than 6ft at its very widest.
They had minimal supplies — bread, salted pork, a little rum, and water — enough to last that many people, on normal rations, five days.
The boat was so packed, the freeboard — the bit above the water — was just 9in, the length, it was said,
of a man’s hand. Bligh sailed that overloaded little craft 3,618 miles. It took 48 days. A triumph of navigation, of seamanship, of pure leadership that has probably never been rivalled. And all the time he kept a detailed log — a journal of endurance that sometimes seems beyond belief.
He made first for the nearest island, but the natives there attacked them and killed the quartermaster. So Bligh decided to head directly for the Dutch East Indies, the nearest European settlement, thousands of miles away in what is now Indonesia.
He set the ration — one ounce of bread and a quarter pint of water a day. He split the men into watches, so they could find a tiny amount of physical space in the impossibly overcrowded boat. Almost immediately they were in a violent sea. They bailed non-stop, but were in constant danger of foundering.
The men threw everything they could overboard. It went on like that for 24 days. Endless downpours of rain, violent storms, numbing cold; the small boat was continually awash. All the time, they were bailing, bailing for their lives.
They had terrible cramps from never being able to stretch out. Three times a day Bligh weighed and distributed the tiny rations. If it was particularly grim he’d carefully measure a teaspoon each of rum.
He had no maps or charts. Just a quadrant and a compass, and a bit of rope they put knots in as a log line to measure the speed of the boat.
He recorded it all in his log. ‘Our situation is highly perilous . . . men half dead . . . our appearance horrible. Extreme hunger now evident. Everybody now complaining of violent pain in their bones.’
It was nearly a month after they were cast adrift, and they were barely alive, when they reached the Barrier Reef and then the northern coast of what is now Australia. They were so exhausted and cramped only half of them could get out of the boat to collapse.
They coastal-hopped for four days to the northern tip of the continent. Then all that remained was 1,100 more miles of open water, more storms, more bailing, even greater pain, fear and suffering.
It was a collection of skeletons in rags that reached the Dutch settlement on the island of Timor. Thanks to Bligh’s careful management, there were still 11 days’ rations left.
After he had left those 19 men to die, Christian and half of the mutineers sailed the Bounty to Pitcairn Island with their Tahitian girlfriends, whom they’d collected en route. There, they largely killed each other off. Their descendants still live there today.
The other mutineers stayed in Tahiti where they were recaptured by the Navy and court martialled. Three were hanged.
BLIGH was briefly lionised and sent to do the voyage again — successfully this time, except the West Indian slaves refused to eat the breadfruit.
But he was out of the country, unable to defend himself, when Christian’s powerful family, and the influential connections of Peter Heywood, another mutineer, started the campaign to blacken his name which continues to this day.
It shadowed the rest of his life. But he commanded ships in two of the great battles of the Napoleonic wars, was Governor of New South Wales, and died a Vice-Admiral, the same rank as his friend, Horatio Nelson. He is buried in Lambeth.
The grave has this inscription: Sacred to the memory of William Bligh, Esquire, Fellow of the Royal Society, ViceAdmiral of the Blue. the celebrated navigator who first transplanted the Breadfruit tree from tahiti to the West indies, bravely fought the battles of his country, and died beloved, respected and lamented on the 7th day of December, 1817. in coelo quies [there is peace in Heaven].
It’s not the story we know today, but it is a great deal closer to the truth.