The Bounty Mutiny

On an April morning in 1789 near the island of Tonga, William Bligh and eighteen surly seamen were expelled from the Bounty and began the greatest open-boat voyage in history, sailing some 4,000 miles to safety in Timor. The mutineers, led by Fletcher Christian, sailed off in the Bounty and were never heard of again. Contains: the full text of Bligh's Narrative of the Mutiny, the minutes of the court proceedings gathered by Edward Christian in an effort to clear his brother's name, and the correspondence between Bligh and Christian, and a selection of later Bounty narratives.

William Bligh was born near Plymouth, England, in 1754. His sailing career began in 1762, when, at the age of seven, he was entered on the books of the Monmouth as captain's servant. In 1787, he was given command of an expedition to transplant breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies aboard the Bounty. The mutiny that took place on the voyage has excited the popular imagination for more than 200 years, and his account of it, The Bounty Mutiny, is published by Penguin Classics.

Edward Christian, brother of mutineer Fletcher Christian, was born in 1758 near Cockermouth in the Lake District. The counsel for William and Dorothy Wordsworth in their famous suit against James Lowther, he became chief justice of the Isle of Ely and professor of law at Cambridge. He died in 1823.

R. D. Madison is an author, an editor, and a teacher. He served as a professor of English at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and has edited several volumes of military and naval history, including William Bligh and Edward Christian’s The Bounty Mutiny.