Mutiny on the Bounty true story: what the 1789 record says that three Hollywood versions didn't

Three major studio films have staged the Bounty mutiny, and all three cast the same man as the monster. The surviving paperwork is less cooperative.

HMS Bounty left Spithead on 23 December 1787 to collect breadfruit saplings from Tahiti and carry them to the West Indies, where the plants were intended as cheap food for enslaved plantation workers. Lieutenant William Bligh was 34 and had sailed with Cook. Master's mate Fletcher Christian was 24. The ship reached Tahiti in October 1788, stayed more than five months, sailed again on 4 April 1789, and was seized 23 days later, before dawn on 28 April.

What the log says about the floggings

Bligh's Bounty log records a flogging rate below the Royal Navy average for the period — by his own account, punishment was necessary only twice on the outbound voyage, once for insubordination and once for neglect of duty. He also had no marines aboard, the usual enforcement mechanism on a naval vessel, because this was a botanical errand rather than a fighting cruise. What he did have was a temper and a habit of public humiliation, including the row over missing coconuts on 27 April 1789 that reportedly left Christian in tears.

Bligh's diary, quoted in Caroline Alexander's 2003 study The Bounty, complains that he had such a neglectful set about him that nothing but condign punishment would alter their conduct. He wrote that in Tahiti, having barely used the lash.

The 1935 MGM version, directed by Frank Lloyd with Charles Laughton as Bligh, stages both a keelhauling and the flogging of a man already dead. Neither happened. Keelhauling was not a Royal Navy punishment and had been abandoned long before 1787. The 1962 remake, with Trevor Howard, keeps the keelhauling death anyway.

The open-boat voyage the films rush past

Bligh and 18 loyal men were put into the ship's 23-foot launch. They reached Coupang on Timor on 14 June 1789, roughly 3,600 miles later, without charts. One man, John Norton, was killed by islanders at Tofua early in the voyage; the rest lived. Bligh was court-martialled in October 1790 for the loss of his ship, as was routine, and acquitted.

The 1935 film puts Bligh aboard HMS Pandora hunting the mutineers and then at their trial. He was on neither. Pandora was commanded by Captain Edward Edwards, and when she struck the Great Barrier Reef, four of the prisoners drowned — two still in irons.

What the court-martial actually decided

Ten captured men were tried aboard HMS Duke at Portsmouth from 12 September 1792, before Lord Hood and twelve post-captains. Judgment came on 18 September. Under the Articles of War, failing to resist a mutiny counted the same as joining one, so the court spent six days establishing who had been seen holding a musket.

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• Coleman, Norman, McIntosh and Byrn — acquitted. Bligh had named the first three as loyal men kept aboard only because the launch was full.
• Peter Heywood — midshipman, the only officer charged, condemned and then pardoned on 26 October 1792. He returned to the navy, made post-captain at 31, and retired in 1816.
• James Morrison — boatswain's mate, condemned and pardoned the same day. He had written his own account of the voyage while awaiting the verdict.
• William Muspratt — condemned, then reprieved on the technicality that he had been barred from calling his witnesses, and later pardoned.
• Burkett, Ellison and Millward — hanged from a yardarm at Portsmouth on 29 October 1792.

Morrison's prison journal is unkind to almost everyone. His verdict on the officers who stood by during the seizure was that their behaviour was dastardly beyond description, since not one of them made any attempt to retake the ship.

Pitcairn, which no film has really shown

Christian took the Bounty west and found Pitcairn on 15 January 1790, 188 nautical miles from where the charts placed it — the error was the point, since nobody could follow. The ship was stripped and burned on 23 January. Nine mutineers settled there with a group of Tahitian men and women.

On 20 September 1793, the Tahitian men rose against them. Christian was shot in the neck in his yam plot, aged 28, alongside four other mutineers. Matthew Quintal was killed with a hatchet by John Adams and Ned Young in 1799. Young died the following year. When Captain Mayhew Folger of the American whaler Topaz arrived in 1808, Adams was the only mutineer left alive; he died on Pitcairn on 5 March 1829.

The 1962 film instead has Brando's Christian fatally burned aboard the Bounty, clutching a sextant. The 1984 version, The Bounty — Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson, originally developed as two films for David Lean — is much closer to the record, though it still invents a mutiny triggered by Bligh's insistence on rounding Cape Horn.

For the record: Bligh survived three mutinies in his career, including the Rum Rebellion that deposed him as Governor of New South Wales on 26 January 1808. He retired a vice-admiral. The 1935 film about how terrible he was became the highest-grossing release of its year and won Best Picture.

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