Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt for Red October

At 215 tons, the Bounty was ninety feet on deck and was armed with four four-pounders and ten swivel guns. Because space had been made to carry the breadfruit plants, there wasn’t a lot of room aboard for the young crew, who ranged in age from fourteen to thirty-nine.

Like with Potulniy and his crew there was a certain distance between Bligh and his sailors. It was a gap that was filled by Sablin aboard the Storozhevoy and by Christian aboard the Bounty. The ordinary crewmen liked and respected those officers, who both had sympathetic ears.

Bligh had learned early in his career that ships are run by men and that men needed to be well cared for if they were to do their jobs well. To combat scurvy, a disease resulting from deficiency of vitamin C that was very common in those days, Bligh made sure that sauerkraut was served at every meal. And he also knew that exercise was vitally important, so he brought aboard a blind fiddler named Michael Byrne to play music to which the men could dance. No one liked it, but the crew was kept fit. Just like the Russian farm boys aboard the Storozhevoy exercising every day up on deck, it was one of those systems in the military that worked.

The Bounty’s crew bitched about the food and they bitched about the exercise, but Bligh just stamped around on deck and swore at them. He wasn’t going to give any consideration to their complaints. He was the captain and that was the end of it. If they wanted to grumble, they could bitch to Christian for all Bligh cared.

But Bligh, like Potulniy, wasn’t a bad man, even though he was mostly aloof from his crew. For instance, he split the ship’s company into three watches, instead of the normal two, which was unusual for that day. It made duty much easier. The men could get some rest between watches. And after trying to get around Cape Horn for nearly thirty days, being pushed back into the Atlantic by storm after storm, he thanked his crew for a valiant effort, then turned tail and headed for the Pacific by the longer, but easier, route across the Atlantic and around the southern tip of Africa.

The Bounty arrived in Tahiti in the late fall of 1788 and had to remain at anchor for nearly six months until it was the proper season to harvest the immature breadfruit plants. This was Bligh’s big mistake. Six months with no sea duty, at an island filled with good-looking and very willing Polynesian women, for whom white men were a novelty, corrupted the crew. Compared to England, and especially compared to life aboard ship, Tahiti was a paradise. Many of the men had girlfriends, and in six months a lot of the relationships were just as strong as any new marriage. When it was time to leave, a lot of the men didn’t want to go. A few of them even deserted, hiding up in the hills, where they hoped to wait it out until the Bounty sailed away.

But Bligh would have none of that. He took a party and searched the island, finally rounding up the deserters after three weeks of tromping through the mountains and jungles. But he was a humane man. Instead of flogging them and then hanging them from the yardarms, as was the practice, he just had them flogged.

The Bounty finally weighed anchor in the spring of 1789, loaded to the gills with breadfruit plants and a very unhappy crew, miserable that they were being made to leave paradise. Bligh stormed around the deck, swearing and bitching, especially at Christian, all day long, every day, and yet each night Christian was invited to dine with the suddenly civilized captain.

Like Potulniy, who never suspected that Sablin would turn against him, Bligh never had the slightest suspicion that Christian would lead a mutiny. Such an act was utterly unthinkable.

A couple of weeks out from Tahiti, Christian decided to build a raft, jump ship, and somehow try to make it back to Tahiti, where he’d had a warm relationship with the chief’s daughter. He confided in one of the midshipmen, who warned that there were sharks in the water.

“Anyway, if you want to do something like that, why not do away with the old man and take the ship?” the midshipman may have said. “Most of the crew would be with you, sir.”

Christian ran the idea past a few of the crewmen, who agreed. That early morning of April 28, 1789, Christian broke into the arms chest, distributed the weapons to his supporters, and arrested Bligh.

The captain, still in his nightshirt, was brought up on deck, and the assembled crew was asked who wanted to get off the ship with Bligh. Thirty of them raised their hands, and Bligh pleaded that he had a wife and four children and asked for some kind of mercy.

“It’s too late for that,” Christian told the captain. “You have forced us through hell these past weeks, and now there’s no turning back.”