The Strange Myth of the Mutiny on the Bounty

The story of Captain Bligh and his ship the Bounty is familiar to us all. The tale as we know it though, is almost entirely false.

The tale of Captain Bligh and the conflict between he and Fletcher Christian is of interest because it is a classic example of a young idealist struggling against an older, conventional leader in a position of power over him. Everybody reading the story of the mutiny which took place on that ship of the Royal Navy  in the late eighteenth century feels an instinctive sympathy for Christian and the other mutineers. After all, we know what a dreadful place the navy was at that time, with its ferocious discipline and savage punishments like flogging and keel-hauling. Who can blame the sensitive young officer for rebelling on behalf of the suffering sailors and going off to seek a peaceful Pacific island where they could all live in harmony? Besides which, we have all been young ourselves and most of us know what it is like, either in a job, school or family, to clash with the generation above us, whose ideas are hidebound and reactionary. More people can more readily identify with Fletcher Christian than they can the notorious Captain Bligh, and it is this which gives this story its special interest and has led to the making of five dramatic films;  all of them colourful and wholly misleading accounts of the mutiny.

      The story of Christian and Bligh had a great impact at the time, chiefly due to the times in which it occurred. The mutiny took place in April 1789; the year that the French Revolution began. Just three months after Bligh and other loyal members of his crew were cast adrift in an open boat, the Bastille was stormed in Paris. One of the first act of the mutineers from the Bounty, once they had deposed the commander of the ship and set him adrift in an open boat, was to make new clothes from an old sail; clothes which meant that they were all equal and that bore no badges of rank.

      By the time that the mutineers were brought to trial, three years later, Europe was fascinated by the whole idea of idealism leading to rebellion against the established order. In a sense, the actual causes of the quarrel between William Bligh and Fletcher Christian were irrelevant; it was what the two men stood for that counted. Little wonder that Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth declared their support on behalf of the young man who had risen in protest and overthrown the captain of the boat in which he had been sailing; it tied in perfectly with the spirit of the times. Everywhere one looked, the image of small men seeking a better life for themselves than that afforded by conventional society as it was currently ordered in Europe could be seen. There were echoes too of the American Revolution in the affair. Had it occurred in 1689 or 1889, it is most unlikely that we would find this incident of any great interest.

     The clash of youthful idealism with the old, established order, that we see in the  mutiny on the Bounty, gives it a universal appeal, but almost no part of the story as it is currently understood is even remotely true. Captain Bligh’s name has become a byword for tyranny and the exercise of cruel authority over helpless men and yet, according to the official records, he was one of  the most lenient captains in the whole of the British Navy! At a time when floggings were ordered on board ships for the most trifling of reasons, Bligh was responsible for fewer floggings than any other ship‘s commander. The friction between he and his crew stemmed more from Bligh’s compassionate nature and desire to maintain his crew’s health than because he was given to excessive punishment.  Before looking in detail at William Bligh though, perhaps we should see how he and Fletcher Christian came to be on the ill-fated Bounty in the first place.

      Before we go any further, I wonder if any alert readers have spotted the deliberate mistakes above, when referring to William Bligh?  Bligh is almost universally called ‘Captain’ Bligh in accounts of the mutiny and I followed this convention above, but in fact he was nothing of the sort; his rank was that of Lieutenant. Lieutenant Bligh does not emphasise the power of the man though, when we are looking at the mutiny as a clash between youthful impetuosity and established order and so the man has become ‘Captain’ Bligh. It is true that as the senior officer in charge of the vessel, Bligh would have been addressed as ‘captain’ by the crew, while at sea; but this was merely a customary courtesy among sailors. Nobody in 1789 would have referred to him as ‘Captain Bligh’, because of course he was really Lieutenant Bligh. It would not be until several years after the mutiny on the Bounty that William Bligh would be promoted to the rank of Captain. Because ‘Captain’ is a title redolent of authority, it fits better with the mythic theme of young revolutionaries defying their elders and allows William Bligh to stand in as a proxy for all the officers whom those men were determined to defy.

     When the Bounty left England in the winter of 1787, the slave trade was in full swing, with the economies of the Caribbean islands being almost wholly dependent upon forced labour. Obviously, the more cheaply that one is able to house and feed slaves; the higher the profit margin on their labour. It is perfectly possible to maintain health and vitality on a pretty restricted diet, as was seen in Ireland, at the time when the staple diet of most of the population consisted almost entirely of potatoes. It was suggested that a plant found growing wild in the South Pacific  might enable the plantation owners of the Caribbean to feed their slaves cheaply. The plant in question was the breadfruit tree, which is related to the mulberry.

     Breadfruit is a starchy fruit which tastes something like potatoes and is very rich in Vitamin C. If Irish peasants were able to subsist entirely on potatoes, so went the reasoning, might it be possible to feed the slaves in colonies like Jamaica primarily on breadfruit? The task of the Bounty was to sail to the island of Tahiti, in the Pacific, cultivate a thousand breadfruit plants there and then transport them all the way to the West Indies. Put like that, the enterprise sounds absurdly easy; just another routine sea voyage by sailors of the Royal Navy. What went wrong and turned this expedition into one of the most famous nautical incidents of the eighteenth century? More people today can name  Bligh’s ship than are able offhand to say what Captain Cooke’s ship, in which he discovered Australia, was called. This is a strange state of affairs, in that the colonisation of Australia was of enormous historical importance, whereas the mutiny which took place in the Pacific 20 years later was a trifling matter. That the Bounty became known to everybody, while the Endeavour has become an obscure footnote, unfamiliar to anybody other than those with a particular interest in the period, tells us that something other than a mutiny was involved and that the affair of the Bounty stirs images and ideas in us in a way that the mere discovery of a new continent can never do.

     The Bounty  had been partly converted into a greenhouse or nursery for young plants, before even setting sail. A glazed and drained area, ordinarily the Great Cabin on a ship of that sort, was constructed so that a thousand breadfruit plants could be carried safely from the Pacific to the Caribbean. This made conditions on board cramped from the very beginning and may have contributed to the ill feeling which led eventually to mutiny.

     Lieutenant William Bligh was put in command of the Bounty and chose Fletcher Christian, with whom he had already served, to be the Master. In the event, another man was given this post, leaving Christian as Master’s Mate. Bligh and Christian had a master-pupil relationship; Bligh being a little over ten years older than the twenty three year-old Christian. The two men had socialised together and this was to make Bligh all the more incredulous when the mutiny broke out.

     When the Bounty set sail on 23 December 1787, the intention was that she would sail across the Atlantic and then pass Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America and so enter the Pacific Ocean and make her way to Tahiti to pick up the breadfruit plants. In early April, 1788, the Bounty reached Cape Horn, but was unable to round it because of the fierce storms and mountainous waves. After spending two weeks waiting for conditions to improve, the decision was made to sail back across the Atlantic and the head south and enter the Indian Ocean; making their way into the Pacific from there.  This long diversion probably did little for anybody’s good spirits.  Tahiti was not reached until October, by which time the Bounty had travelled over thirty thousand miles.

     Relations between William Bligh and his protégé were, at first, warm. Bligh treated Christian as though he were his assistant and even lent him money. There was no warning of what was to come. Despite the reputation which Bligh acquired after the mutiny for being a strict disciplinarian, he was in fact one of the most relaxed and humane officers in the Royal Navy. His only real fault was that he had an exceedingly sharp tongue and was apt to use it at the least excuse. But at a time when floggings and hangings were far from uncommon occurrences on British ships, Bligh went out of his way not to impose any punishment at all unless it was strictly necessary. After having to order twelve lashes for Matthew Quintal for, ‘insolence and mutinous behaviour’, Bligh recorded in the log book that, ‘Until this afternoon I had hoped that I could have performed the voyage without punishment to anyone.’ In Tahiti, three sailors deserted, taking with them guns and powder. When they were captured a few weeks later, Bligh would have been acting perfectly correctly had he had them court-martialled and hanged. As it was, he simply had them flogged; which was an act of great leniency.

     When he was in his early twenties, William Bligh had sailed with Captain Cooke and acquired from him an almost fanatical dedication to hygiene and cleanliness. He was determined to keep the ship and the men on it clean and healthy. To this end, he insisted on regular dancing in the evenings, for healthy exercise, as well as the consumption of vegetables to ward off the deficiency diseases such as scurvy which were so rife on ships at that time. For all that these measures might have been designed with the best interests of his men at heart, they did not serve to make Bligh popular with some of the sailors on the Bounty. They felt, with some justification, that their captain was treating them more like fractious children than grown men. This was indeed Bligh’s view of the case. He wrote once that, ‘Seamen will seldom attend to themselves, they must be watched like children.’

     In addition to insisting that they kept their quarters clean and ate up their greens, Bligh also made sure that the men under his command got plenty of sleep. The tradition was at that time on ships of the Royal Navy that men were on duty four hours out of eight. Bligh altered this to four hours in twelve; which was a distinct improvement.

       There seems little enough during the voyage to Tahiti of which any reasonable seaman of the time might complain. Their captain was a paternalistic man who assumed that those under his command were not really capable of taking care of themselves, but this was surely an irritation, rather than a cause to risk one’s neck in taking part in a mutiny. The penalties for such an action were severe indeed and any man who raised his hand against the captain might expect to be hanged for it. There was in reality none of the starvation and savage floggings which have been so luridly depicted in the Hollywood films made about the voyage. Perhaps comparing one of those films with the reality might underline this point.

     Here is Clark Gable, playing the part of Fletcher Christian in the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty. He is accusing Bligh, played by Charles Laughton, of mistreating  the crew;

     The captains I’ve served with before didn’t starve their men. They didn’t

     save money by buying up the stinking meat. They didn’t buy yams that

     would sicken a pig. They didn’t call their men thieves and flog them to the

     bone…

This then is the traditional view of ‘Captain’ Bligh; a vicious martinet, whose crew suffered dreadfully under his rule. We shall examine this charge-sheet later and see upon what Hollywood based their partisan view of the case. This is necessary, for it is the image of William Bligh and Fletcher Christian which is generally held to this day.

     It was in Tahiti that the seeds of mutiny were really sown. Because of their delay in arriving, it took almost a year to get to the island, the Bounty arrived at the start of the rainy season. This meant that it was necessary to stay anchored there for the next five months so that the breadfruit plants could be cultivated in readiness for the long journey to the West Indies. During that time, Bligh was quite relaxed about the fact that his crew were spending their free time ashore and forming liaisons with various women living on the island. After their long and arduous journey, Tahiti must have seemed like paradise to the sailors; a view, incidentally, that Bligh himself shared. He wrote in his log that the island was;

     Certainly the paradise of the world, and if happiness could result from

     situation and convenience, here it is to be found in the highest perfection. I

     have seen many parts of the world, but Otaheite is capable of being

     preferable to them all.

Although he did not take a native lover himself, there is every reason to suppose that Bligh was tolerant about this happening among the crew, as long as the breadfruit were cultivated and the ship kept ready to sail when the rainy season came to an end.

    In January, almost three months after the Bounty arrived in Tahiti, came the first serious problem. There had been friction and disagreements between the captain and his crew during the voyage, but these all blew over fairly quickly. Although Bligh had a hot temper and was prone to exploding in fury at some fancied offence, his anger was manifested only in sharp words. As soon as the matter was ended, he seemed to forget all about it and expect others to do the same. When three of the crew went missing, along with a considerable quantity of arms and ammunition though, this had to be dealt with firmly. The men concerned were Charles Churchill, John Millward and William Muspratt. They had had enough of being under naval discipline and hoped to disappear on Tahiti until the Bounty had left and simply carry on living with their Polynesian lovers in what they too saw as some kind of Garden of Eden.

     When the deserters were tracked down and brought back to the ship, Bligh had two choices. He could, had he been so minded, have brought them to court martial on a charge of deserting and stealing weapons. Since the Bounty was on active service, the Articles of War applied and there could be little doubt that the men would have been found guilty and hanged. Instead, the captain chose to address the matter informally, having the men flogged and placed in irons. It is recorded that the three of them were very grateful for this mercy and knew that they had got off lightly and escaped with their lives.  It is upon this incident, which actually earned the gratitude of the supposed ‘victims’, that the idea of Bligh being a ferocious disciplinarian is founded. It has already been remarked that there were fewer floggings on the Bounty than on any other Royal Navy ship operating in the Pacific.

     When the time was up and the Bounty made ready to leave Tahiti, on the afternoon of 5 April 1789, many of the sailors probably felt regret at leaving this beautiful place and were far from enchanted at the idea of sailing to the other side of the world to deliver a load of potted plants to islands in the Caribbean. It is likely that very few of the men on the Bounty felt very cheerful about life.

     This kind of thing though was the lot of the British sailor and mutiny was a very rare thing in the Royal Navy. It is almost certainly the case that it was less that William Bligh was a cruel tyrant, than that he had a very emotional and unstable second in command which brought about the rebellion which ended in the ship’s commander being set adrift in an open boat.

     Fletcher Christian came from what would then have been termed a ‘good family’; meaning one which was well-educated, well-to-do and well-connected. His brother Edward was a professor of law at Cambridge university; a fact that was to have some bearing on the creation of the myth of the mutiny on the Bounty. Christian had already served with Bligh before and was so trusted by him that Bligh wanted Christian to be his second-in-command on the voyage of the Bounty. Although this was not technically the case, Fletcher Christian was not Master, but Master’s Mate, the captain treated the young man as being his assistant and representative.  This was not an unalloyed pleasure for a sensitive man like Christian, because being close to Bligh meant bearing the brunt of the older man’s anger and being on the receiving end of tongue-lashings, which apparently really upset Christian. After one particular episode, a member of the crew testified that Fletcher Christian had tears running down his face at the mortification of being publicly upbraided in so harsh a fashion.

     It is altogether possible that the it took the crew of the Bounty a little while to adjust to naval discipline after their sojourn on Tahiti. William Bligh, as we have seen, regarded the sailors under his command as being little better than children, who had to be constantly scolded in order to get them to do things properly. Three weeks after leaving Tahiti, matters came to a head.

     There was increasing personal tension between Bligh and his subordinate, Fletcher Christian. This was no secret; indeed, on a small ship of that sort, it would hardly have been possible for others not to hear their captain abusing the younger man. On the night of 21 April, Christian was overheard saying to the captain, ‘Sir, your abuse is so bad that I cannot do my duty with any pleasure. I have been in hell for weeks with you.’

     On 22 April, the Bounty anchored off the most inaptly named Friendly Islands; now known as Tonga. The aim was to collect supplied of water and wood for the next leg of their journey. Fletcher Christian was put in charge of the boat sent to shore. Anxious to avoid bloodshed and confrontation with the inhabitants of the islands, Bligh allowed muskets to be taken in the boat, but ordered Christian to leave them in the boat when he and his men landed and not to carry them about when they were collecting the provisions. When there was trouble with the islanders and Christian was obliged to leave in a hurry, Bligh was furious and called him, ‘a damned cowardly rascal.’  For a young man of good family to be spoken to in this way in front of everybody was unusual, but William Bligh made no allowances for status or class. He spoke to his second-in-command just as he would to any other seaman whom he suspected of dereliction of duty.

     It is worth remembering here that the expression ‘damned’, while considered today the very mildest of expletives was, two hundred years ago, among the strongest of words that might be used in an argument. As late as the 1930s, there was great debate when making the film of Gone With the Wind, as to whether it would be possible to include the word ‘damn’ in what was meant to be a family entertainment. For Bligh to curse one of his officers in such terms was really a bit much.

     The ill feeling which led to the mutiny was essentially a personal matter between the bitterly resentful Fletcher Christian and his hot-tempered commander. A journal kept by the boatswain’s mate, James Morrison, suggests strongly that after leaving Tahiti, there was no thought of mutiny in anybody’s mind. He noted though that Bligh was even more irritable than usual and that he spoke very sharply to Fletcher Christian. Matters came to a crisis when Bligh accused Christian of knowing about the apparent theft of some coconuts.

     A pile of coconuts had been left on the deck of the Bounty and Bligh got it into his head that people had been helping themselves to them; which would not have been in the least surprising. After questioning various other men, he chose to lay the blame on Fletcher Christian. After hinting in this way, Christian asked outright what the captain was driving at, saying, ‘I hope you don’t think me guilty of stealing?’

     James Morrison wrote down an account of this whole affair at the time and it is from his journal and the later evidence given at the courts martial of some of the mutineers that we know what led to the mutiny. Bligh replied to Christian’s question by saying ‘Yes, you damned hound, I do. You must have stolen them from me or you could give a better account of them.’ After this angry exchange, Bligh calmed down and invited Christian to dine with him that evening, as he often did. Fletcher Christian was left with tears, ‘running fast from his eyes in big drops.’

     Just before the sun rose the next day, Fletcher Christian and several other men burst into Bligh’s cabin and forced him from his bed. His hands were tied behind his back and he was led out onto the deck. Christian announced that he was taking over the ship and that the captain was to be set adrift in one of the little boats carried on the Bounty. It is now that the myth of this mutiny as a popular uprising against a cruel and inhumane officer really breaks down in the most spectacular way possible, because more than half the ship’s crew wished to join Bligh in the little boat, rather than remain on the Bounty with Christian and the men he was leading. This was in spite of the fact that to undertake a long voyage in the tiny craft must have seemed tantamount to a death sentence. Over twenty of the crew still preferred to remain loyal to their captain. So many wished to throw in their lot with Bligh, that there was not room enough for them all in the boat. They begged Bligh to remember that they had chosen to follow him and not Christian, to which he replied, ‘Never fear, my lads. I’ll do you justice if I ever reach England.’

     The plight of the nineteen men in the twenty three foot long launch was perilous in the extreme. Although they had been given water, bread and a compass; they were many miles from the nearest land. All that they could do was rely upon William Bligh’s skill as a navigator to save them. The twenty five men who remained on the Bounty turned the ship around and headed back to Tahiti.

     Bligh might have been a tough and outspoken man, with a knack for rubbing others up the wrong way, but in a desperate situation such as this, he came into his own. It was his iron discipline during the next two months which saved the lives of those who had chosen to stay with their captain. Conditions in the boat were dreadful, with no shelter at all and barely enough water and food to keep the men alive. Bligh rationed out the water at a quarter of a pint a day and weighed out the bread in two-ounce measures. This meagre diet was supplemented by the catching of fish and the occasional seabird. There were violent thunderstorms, which meant that the men had to bale out frantically, to avoid their fragile vessel sinking. Most became ill and suffered from exposure, but William Bligh somehow maintained their spirits; even organising sing-songs!

     The nearest European settlement was in the Dutch East Indies, some four thousand miles from the point in the Pacific where they had been cast adrift. Never the less, on 14 June 1790. Bligh’s boat arrived at Timor and his crew were saved. It took him the best part of a year in total after the mutiny to get back to England. When he did so, the Royal Navy determined at once to scour the Pacific Ocean for the men who had taken part in the mutiny.

     Fletcher Christian and the others had not had an easy time of it. Once rid of their captain, they had thrown all the breadfruit plants into the sea and made themselves new uniforms, without any badges of rank. This was to symbolise the fact that all of them were now equal. The ideas of the American and French revolutions were clearly at work; at least in the educated mind of Christian; who was the driving force behind all that happened. When the navy came looking for the men, two years later, they found some on Tahiti, but there was no trace of Christian. He and some of the others, along with a number of Tahitian men and women had settled on Pitcairn Island, where they set up what amounted to a colony. In fighting over women, Christian and some of the other mutineers were killed by Tahitian men, who were then murdered themselves. After a time, things settled down and the community became a peaceful one.

     Up to this point, there is nothing especially remarkable about the events on the Bounty. Mutinies were uncommon in the British navy, but they did happen from time to time and there was no reason to see this as any different from the other cases where a crew had seized control of a ship. However, the Bounty had happened to sail at a time of great upheaval throughout Europe and North America, and partly due to this it was destined for immortality of a kind. Before seeing how this occurred, we might look back to the quotation from ‘Fletcher Christian’ in the 1935 film;

     The captains I’ve served with before didn’t starve their men. They didn’t

     save money by buying up the stinking meat. They didn’t buy yams that

     would sicken a pig. They didn’t call their men thieves and flog them to the

     bone…

Flogging men ‘to the bone’ refers to the three deserters whose lives Bligh spared. The captain didn’t starve his men, merely threatened to reduce their ration of yams. The food on the Bounty was good and, as we saw earlier, Bligh was very concerned about his crew’s dietary requirements. The only true bit of this speech is that Christian was actually called a thief, but shortly afterwards Bligh invited him to dine as usual and it is reasonable to suppose that this was just an outburst of temper.

     Nothing so far really supports the accepted status of ‘Captain’ Bligh as a tyrannical slave-driver and it was not until the courts martial of the surviving mutineers that this notion emerged. The ten men were all tried together at Portsmouth on 12 September 1792. The legal situation could hardly have been more clear-cut. When a mutiny takes place on a ship, there can be no such thing as a neutral bystander. Every member of the crew has a duty to help a captain put down any mutiny and simply refusing to help one side or the other makes one every bit as guilty of mutiny as those actually taking arms against authority. The Articles of War, under which the Bounty was sailing, were very plain, Article XIX stating that;

     If any person in or belonging to the Fleet shall make or endeavour to make

     any mutinous Assembly upon any Pretence whatsoever, every Person

     offending herein, and being convicted thereof by the Sentence of the

     Court- martial shall suffer Death.

     Of the ten men on trial, four were acquitted and six convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. Three of these men were pardoned and at the end of October just three of the Bounty mutineers were hanged from the yard-arm of HMS Brunswick. The matter was closed and there was no reason to think that there was anything out of the ordinary about the case. Needless to say, as leader of the mutiny, Fletcher Christian was largely held to blame for what had happened and both prosecution and defence did their best to lay on the absent man’s shoulders the full responsibility for what had happened in the Pacific on that fateful April day. There was also a good deal of blackguarding of the character of another man who was not present at the court martial. William Bligh had been despatched by the admiralty on another expedition to the Pacific to collect breadfruit plants and so it was safe for the defendants to make various allegations about his conduct during the earlier voyage.

     After the court martial was over, the attorney for one of those convicted, but later pardoned for his part in the mutiny, published the minutes of the trial. This was done at the urging of Edward Christian who, it will be recalled, was Fletcher Christian’s brother and a well-known jurist. He contributed an appendix to the minutes of the court martial, in which he blamed William Bligh’s conduct for provoking the mutiny in the first place. Until the publication of the minutes and their appendix, the only account of the events of the Bounty’s voyage had been those written by Bligh in A Narrative of the Mutiny on the Bounty and also A Voyage to the South Sea.

     Every so often, there are affairs in Britain which capture the imagination of the public and cause sides to be taken. Usually these things are trifling matters which are soon forgotten but sometimes, due to the circumstances prevailing; they assume a symbolic importance. So it was with the mutiny on the Bounty. Everywhere one looked in the late 1780s and early 1790s, there were signs of revolutionary change in the air. Britain’s colony in America had been lost to revolution, France had fallen in the same way and there were stirrings in Britain as many ordinary people became dissatisfied with the political and social situation as it was at that time. Captain Bligh, as he was universally known, represented the established order; rigid, dictatorial and tyrannical. Young Fletcher Christian, on the other hand, was a symbol of youthful rebellion; a man who wished only to live an unrestricted life with his fellows in an earthly paradise. There was certainly something attractive about this idea. Nobody, not even his own brother, denied that Christian had led a revolt, but was he perhaps justified in doing so?

     Edward Christian’s appendix to the minutes of the courts martial of the mutineers from the Bounty was one strand in the birth of the myth of the mutiny on the Bounty, another came from a most surprising direction. Fletcher Christian had grown up in the Lake District town of Cockermouth. A childhood  acquaintance  of his was one William Wordsworth; who of course went on to become one of the famous English poets of all time. Wordsworth and his contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were leading poets of the Romantic Movement and the story of Fletcher Christian exercised a strange fascination for them. It was the idea of those young sailors throwing off the shackles of the harsh discipline of the Royal Navy and wishing to live a free life beneath palm trees on a tropical island which fitted perfectly the notions of such poets and artists.

     Not only did Wordsworth and Coleridge champion the mutineers of the Bounty, it is possible that they actually saw Christian after his supposed death and, even more peculiarly, might have commemorated the mutiny in two of their most well-known literary works! When the rumour became current that far from being killed on a Pacific island, Fletcher Christian had actually returned to England and was living in Devon, a pamphlet was published containing letters which had supposedly been written by Christian. Wordsworth wrote to the newspapers, saying that he, ‘had it on the best authority’ that these letters were forgeries. Some assumed that by the ‘best authority’, William Wordsworth was hinting that Fletcher Christian was indeed in England and that Wordsworth had been in touch with him.

     The day after Wordsworth wrote to the Weekly Entertainer, denouncing the spurious letters, his sister Dorothy wrote that he was composing a tragedy. In fact, this was to be the only play which William Wordsworth wrote and it was called The Borderers. The plot involved a mutiny and a man being thrown off a ship and abandoned on a deserted island. Some saw in this an echo of the mutiny on the Bounty.

     Wordsworth’s inclusion of a mutiny in his literary work, just as he was writing to a newspaper about Fletcher Christian, may have been a coincidence. His neighbour and fellow Romantic poet, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, was also working on perhaps his most famous poem at this time and that too had a curious resonance with the affair of the Bounty. In that instance, it was probably not a coincidence that the poem was set largely on board a ship, because in a notebook which he was keeping at the time, Coleridge had written, ‘Adventures of Christian, the mutineer’.

     In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner the eponymous hero is on board a ship when he commits a terrible crime; as a result of which, all his shipmates die. At the end of the poem. The mariner returns to his own country and finds absolution. It has been supposed  by some critics that this ending is a coded reference to Fletcher Christian’s return to Britain after the mutiny which he instigated.

     It was, among other things, the interest shown by poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge which created and maintained sympathy for Fletcher Christian and the other men who had mutinied on the Bounty. Christian is an early archetype of the little man rebelling against authority; a popular figure in British mythology. He also represents at this time the young idealist struggling against the established order.