Ships That Made History · Episode 4
Bounty
A floating garden sails for Tahiti to collect breadfruit, and a pile of coconuts sets off the most famous mutiny of all. Captain Bligh's four-thousand-mile voyage in an open boat, a hidden island that's wrong on every chart, and the village the American sealers found there eighteen years later.
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Carol The South Pacific. Dawn, April 28th, 1789.
Shannon The captain of a small British ship is asleep in his cabin. And he wakes up to find men standing over his bed, with his own officer at the front of them.
Carol His hands are tied behind his back. He's marched up onto the deck in his nightshirt.
Shannon And a few hours later, he and eighteen loyal men are watching their ship sail away without them, from a little open boat in the middle of the ocean.
Carol Welcome to Ships That Made History. One ship, one story.
Shannon Last time, the Mayflower carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth. This time, the most famous mutiny of all time.
Carol Episode four. Bounty.
Carol So let's go back to the beginning. What was the Bounty doing in the South Pacific?
Shannon Collecting plants. Specifically, breadfruit.
Carol Breadfruit?
Shannon Breadfruit. It's a big, round, green fruit that grows on trees in Tahiti. When you bake it, it tastes a bit like fresh bread, or a potato. One tree can grow hundreds of fruit a year.
Carol And the British wanted it.
Shannon They wanted to plant it in the Caribbean, as a cheap and filling food. And the famous botanist Joseph Banks talked the Navy into sending a ship to Tahiti to bring back hundreds of young breadfruit plants.
Carol So they needed a ship.
Shannon They bought a little merchant ship, renamed her the Bounty, and turned her into a floating greenhouse. The biggest cabin on board, which would normally be the captain's, was fitted out with racks for hundreds of flowerpots.
Carol So the plants got the best room.
Shannon The plants got the best room.
Carol And the captain was?
Shannon Lieutenant William Bligh. Only thirty-three years old, but a superb navigator. He'd sailed with the great Captain Cook, as the master of Cook's ship on his last voyage.
Carol So he knew the Pacific.
Shannon He knew the Pacific. But he also had a famous temper. He could fly into a rage, shout insults at his officers, and then act as if nothing had happened.
Carol And there was a friend on board.
Shannon Fletcher Christian. A young officer from the north of England. He'd sailed with Bligh twice before, and Bligh liked him and helped his career. On the Bounty, Bligh made him his second in command.
Carol So they set off.
Shannon Two days before Christmas, 1787. And Bligh planned to sail west around Cape Horn, at the bottom of South America.
Carol The way the Victoria went.
Shannon Close to it. But the weather there was some of the worst anyone had ever seen. For about a month, they fought gales, hail, and snow, and barely made any progress.
Carol So what did he do?
Shannon He gave up and turned around. He sailed all the way back across the Atlantic, and went east instead, around the bottom of Africa and across the Indian Ocean.
Carol That's a long way around.
Shannon Very long. They didn't reach Tahiti until October 1788. Ten months after leaving England.
Carol And Tahiti.
Shannon Tahiti was paradise, to these sailors. Warm weather, beautiful beaches, plenty of fresh food. And the Tahitian people were warm and welcoming.
Carol And they stayed a while.
Shannon Five months. The breadfruit plants had to grow big enough to travel. So the crew lived on shore, made friends, fell in love, and some of them got Tahitian tattoos.
Carol And then it was time to leave.
Shannon In April 1789, with more than a thousand breadfruit plants in pots on board, the Bounty sailed away from Tahiti.
Carol And not everyone wanted to go.
Shannon Not everyone wanted to go.
Carol So what set it off?
Shannon A pile of coconuts. Bligh had a pile of coconuts on deck, and one day he decided some were missing. He accused the officers of stealing them, and called Fletcher Christian a thief in front of everyone.
Carol Over coconuts.
Shannon Over coconuts. And Christian was humiliated. That night, he was so upset he planned to slip away from the ship on a raft. But the story goes that someone whispered another idea. Take the ship.
Carol And at dawn?
Shannon At dawn on April 28th, Christian and a group of men came into Bligh's cabin with weapons, tied his hands, and took him on deck.
Carol Was anyone hurt?
Shannon No. Not one shot was fired. In the end, Christian let Bligh go. He put him into the ship's launch, a small open boat about twenty-three feet long, along with eighteen men who chose to stay loyal to him.
Carol Chose to?
Shannon Mostly, yes. So many wanted to go with Bligh that the boat was dangerously crowded, and some loyal men had to stay behind on the Bounty. Bligh told them not to worry. He promised he'd see that they were treated fairly.
Carol So here's Bligh, in a little open boat, with eighteen people crammed aboard.
Shannon With a little bread, some water, a few coconuts, a compass, a quadrant, and the gunner's pocket watch. No charts.
Carol And where's the nearest help?
Shannon The nearest place with Europeans who could help them was Timor, in the East Indies. More than three thousand miles away.
Carol Three thousand miles. In an open boat.
Shannon Over four thousand miles, the way they had to sail it. And Bligh did it. This is where Bligh, for all his temper, shows what a great sailor he really was.
Carol How did they survive?
Shannon Bligh rationed the food down to a tiny bit of bread and water each day. He weighed it out using a pistol ball as his weight. They caught rainwater whenever a storm came over, and now and then a seabird. And through storms and endless days soaked to the skin, Bligh kept navigating, from memory and from his instruments, mile after mile.
Carol And they made it?
Shannon Forty-seven days later, on June 14th, 1789, they sailed into the harbor at Timor. Bligh wrote that they were nothing but skin and bones.
Carol That's one of the greatest small-boat voyages ever.
Shannon It's still talked about by sailors today.
Carol And the Bounty?
Shannon Fletcher Christian knew the Navy would come looking for them. So he needed somewhere to hide. Somewhere nobody would ever look.
Carol And he found it.
Shannon He found it. A tiny island called Pitcairn, a long way from anywhere. And here's the clever part. Pitcairn was marked in the wrong place on the British charts. Off by about two hundred miles.
Carol So nobody would find him.
Shannon Nobody would find him. Christian, eight other mutineers, and a group of Tahitian men and women who came with them landed on Pitcairn in January 1790.
Carol And the ship?
Shannon They took everything off her that they could use. And then the Bounty was set on fire, and burned, in a little bay that's still called Bounty Bay.
Carol So there was no going back.
Shannon No going back. And to this day, every January, the people of Pitcairn celebrate Bounty Day by burning a model of the ship.
Carol So what happened to them?
Shannon For eighteen years, nobody in the outside world knew. And then, in 1808, an American ship called the Topaz, hunting for seals, stopped at Pitcairn.
Carol Expecting an empty island.
Shannon Expecting an empty island. And instead, a canoe paddled out to meet them, with young men in it who called out in English.
Carol In English!
Shannon In English. They were the children of the mutineers. And they led the American captain to the one mutineer still alive, a man named John Adams.
Carol And what had happened to the island?
Shannon It had become a little village. Mostly women and children. And John Adams had become a kind of gentle father to all of them. He taught the children to read, using the Bible that had come from the Bounty, and he led them in prayer every day.
Carol Out of a mutiny.
Shannon Out of a mutiny. And that Bounty Bible is back on Pitcairn today, kept safe under glass in the island's little museum.
Carol And did Bligh ever get his breadfruit?
Shannon He did! The Navy sent him back to Tahiti a few years later, with a new ship. And this time it worked. He delivered hundreds of breadfruit trees to the Caribbean.
Carol So the mission finally got done.
Shannon The mission finally got done. And breadfruit still grows in the Caribbean today. Bligh went on to become an admiral.
Carol And Pitcairn?
Shannon People still live on Pitcairn. About forty of them. Many are descendants of the Bounty's crew, with last names like Christian and Young. They have a little village called Adamstown, after John Adams.
Carol And the story itself.
Shannon Became one of the most told stories in the world. Books, and at least three big Hollywood movies. Clark Gable played Fletcher Christian in 1935. Then Marlon Brando, and then Mel Gibson.
Carol So can you see the Bounty today?
Shannon You can see a piece of her. In the 1950s, divers found the Bounty's anchor in Bounty Bay, and raised it. It's on display in Adamstown.
Carol And the island?
Shannon You can visit Pitcairn, if you're very patient. There's no airport. You have to get to another island first, and then take a supply ship for about a day and a half. It's still one of the most remote places on earth.
Carol Which was the whole point.
Shannon Which was the whole point.
Carol That's the Bounty. A floating garden, a pile of coconuts, a four-thousand-mile voyage in an open boat, and a hidden island that turned into a village.
Shannon And a story we're still telling.
Carol Next time, the most famous ship of all. The biggest ship in the world in 1912, and her first voyage across the Atlantic.
Shannon The Titanic. That's next time, on Ships That Made History.