(William Bligh – 1754 – 1817)
William Bligh was a Naval officer of the British Empire, and during the 1700’s such officers found many new plants across the world which caused great interest to the country that had to have everything.
In 1787 Bligh was given the task of retrieving breadfruit trees from Tahiti and to deliver them to the Caribbean for experiments. The breadfruit was to be grow to see if it could be a sustainable food source for the increasing population of slaves in the region.
Bligh was put in command of “Bounty” a small cutter ship that was built more for speed instead of capacity, and left England to sail to the remote island of Tahiti. The voyage went very well and the crew landed safely on the small island and immediately found plenty of their target crop.
They had to wait on the island for almost 6 months until the Breadfruit had matured enough for it to be safely potted so it could be sailed back to the Caribbean. In April of 1789 Bounty was loaded up and departed from Tahiti, heading east towards the southern point of South America.
During the voyage back, Bligh decided to split the crew into 3 groups instead of 2 so that the men could get longer sleeping periods. Bligh was only a commissioned Lieutenant at the time and also the only officer on board, so when he decided to split the crew into 3 groups to get longer sleeping periods, he nominated 3 of the crewmen to be in charge of each group.
One of these people he chose was someone he’d been teaching for some time to captain a ship, and this man was named Fletcher Christian. On the night of 28 April 1789, Christians group were on their shift when for a reason still unknown to this day, he led a mutiny and seized all the firearms before breaking into Bligh’s cabin and tying him up.
After his loyal crew members saw him brought out his cabin tied up, non of them put up any real fight and the ship was taken by the mutineers without a single death.
They put Bligh and 18 of his loyal crew on a small 21 foot long launch boat, along with a small amount of equipment and enough food and water for one week. The launch boat was so heavily loaded that 4 of the crew had to be taken out and were later released back at Tahiti.
As for Bligh and his men the nearest colonial outpost was in the Dutch east Indies at a distance of just over 3600 miles away. They knew they would never make the journey and so headed towards the island of Tofua to gather more supplies. This turned out to be a bad idea as when they landed on the shore a group of angry tribesmen came out the trees and killed John Norton, the groups quartermaster.
They didn’t stop at any of the other smaller islands as they didn’t have any weapons and couldn’t risk it, so they made for the outpost. Fortunately Bligh was one of the officers in the British Navy who actually knew what he was doing, and was a master at navigation. Even though he didn’t have any of the equipment from his ship to judge distances, he somehow managed to steer the ship all the way across the Pacific ocean, up the Endeavour Strait and across to Coupang, were they found a settlement.
On the 14 June 1789, Bligh and his crew were finally safe and apart from the quartermaster killed by the tribesmen, they surprisingly didn’t lose a single man on the actual voyage itself. The reason they survived seemed to be entirely down to a great leader, who right from the beginning made all the right choices and got his men through the impossible.
The second they were in the launch boat, Bligh rationed all the food and water and set a working routine for the crew. They ate 40 grams of bread each a day but water seemed to be more generous, as the rain was constantly topping up their supply.
After they were safe the men were moved to the Dutch East Indies port of Batavia, located in the modern day Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Unfortunately several of the men died from sickness while waiting for transport back to Britain, presumably Malaria or some kind of sickness brought on by their weakened state.