After five months in Tahiti, the crew mutinied rather than sail home. The captain navigated 3,500 miles in an open boat to survive. The mutineers hid on an island for 19 years.
HMS Bounty left England in 1787 on an unusual mission: sail to Tahiti, collect breadfruit plants, and transport them to British colonies in the Caribbean as cheap food for enslaved workers. The voyage took so long fighting storms that the ship spent five months anchored in Tahiti waiting for the breadfruit to mature — time the crew used to form deep attachments to the island and its people.
On April 28, 1789, three weeks after leaving Tahiti, Fletcher Christian led a pre-dawn mutiny. Captain William Bligh was dragged from his cabin at bayonet point and set adrift in the ship's 23-foot launch with 18 loyal crew members, no charts, minimal food and water, and five inches of freeboard above the waterline. They were told to make for the nearest land — roughly 30 miles away — which they knew was controlled by hostile peoples.
What followed was one of history's most remarkable feats of seamanship. Rather than risk the nearby island, Bligh navigated 3,618 nautical miles across the open Pacific to Timor using only a sextant, a compass, and his own knowledge. The journey took 47 days. He lost one man to a stone thrown by hostile islanders on the first day; everyone else survived. Bligh went on to complete the breadfruit mission on a second voyage two years later.
The mutineers split into two groups. Sixteen stayed in Tahiti, where they were captured by HMS Pandora sent to hunt them down. During the return voyage, Pandora ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef and sank, killing four of the prisoners still locked in the ship's brig. The remaining captives were court-martialed in England: three were hanged, three were pardoned, and four were acquitted.
Fletcher Christian and eight fellow mutineers, along with a group of Tahitian men and women, sailed to Pitcairn Island — a remote, uninhabited speck in the South Pacific — in January 1790. They burned the Bounty to prevent its being spotted from passing ships and set about building a colony. The island was so remote it didn't appear on British naval charts in its correct position, which is why they weren't found.
Life on Pitcairn rapidly became violent. Within a few years, the Tahitian men had been killed in disputes over land and women. Fletcher Christian himself died, likely murdered, around 1793. The colony collapsed into a cycle of killing fueled by alcohol distilled from ti plant roots. By 1800, of the nine original mutineers, only one — John Adams — remained alive.
Adams apparently underwent a religious conversion and raised the remaining community's children — a mix of mutineers' and Tahitians' descendants — on strict Christian principles. When an American ship finally found Pitcairn in 1808, 35 years after the mutiny, they encountered a peaceable, Bible-reading community who had no idea that Adams was technically still wanted for mutiny. He lived out his days on the island unmolested and died in 1829.
Pitcairn Island remains inhabited today by about 40 to 50 descendants of the Bounty mutineers — the smallest permanent settlement of any national jurisdiction in the world. The island became notorious again in 2004 when multiple residents were convicted of historic sexual offenses. The Bounty's anchor and cannon are displayed in Fiji; its rudder sits in a museum in New Zealand.