In 1775, a war of independence for the local British colonies broke out in North America. According to the head of the Department of the University of Economics named after G.V. Plekhanov Andrey Koshkin, in London, realized that they could not be retained, so they made a bet on the development of possessions in the Caribbean.

“Bread for slaves who worked on sugar plantations, was brought earlier from the rebel colonies. However, after the formation of the United States with the power of the African slaves, problems arose. Then the idea was born to bring breadfruit from Oceania to the islands of the Caribbean, ”the expert said in an interview with RT.

The organization of this experiment took the Royal Scientific Society and the British Admiralty. For this purpose, the vessel Betia was acquired. He was given a new name - "Bounty", and William Bly was appointed captain.

Konstantin Strelbitsky, chairman of the Moscow Fleet History Club, told the RT that the Bounty could not be called a warship.

“It was an armed auxiliary vessel, flying the flag of the Royal Navy,” the expert stressed.

The vessel was strengthened and reequipped for the carriage of saplings of breadfruit. The crew included people who understood gardening and Cook travel participants. Bly was asked to take command of people from several aristocratic families. His assistant captain appointed Fletcher Christian. Due to the lack of space on the ship, Bly failed to take in the command of soldiers and officers, which later played a cruel joke with him during the rebellion.

On December 23, 1787, the expedition set sail at sea and headed for Polynesia. Originally, Bly planned to get into the Pacific Ocean, bypassing Cape Horn, but due to difficult weather conditions he did not dare to do this and went to his destination, bending around Africa. According to the testimonies of the participants in the journey, the captain maintained an exemplary order on the ship, gave the crew food and anti-scurvy products.

  • William Bligh
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  • © Mary Evans Picture Library

In addition, Bly forced his companions to move so that they were in good physical shape and not sick. But when, due to the change of route, the sailors felt a shortage of food, the activity of the captain began to annoy them.

Then the ship went to Tasmania, near New Zealand, the captain discovered a group of uninhabited islands (named after the ship - Bounty). Then the expedition arrived on the island of Tahiti, whose residents traditionally treated European navigators very well. Local leaders remembered Bligh from traveling through James Cook and allowed him to collect breadfruit seedlings in the forest.

Rebellion

The stay in Tahiti was delayed for the participants of the expedition for half a year. When it was time to leave the island, several sailors tried to escape to stay on it, but they were detained and whipped. In April 1789, the Bounty headed for the Atlantic. The moral climate on the ship began to deteriorate rapidly.

As the historian and ethnographer Miloslav Stingl wrote in his book “The Last Paradise”, the captain was a wonderful navigator, but a very bad psychologist. He did everything to make as many enemies as possible among the crew members.

“Bly was a cool enough commander that not everyone liked. In addition, fresh water was spent on caring for seedlings, it began to be given to the team in a smaller volume, ”Strelbitsky said.

  • Capture of Captain William Bligh by members of the Bounty team, engraving from the late 19th century
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  • © World History Archive

Bly accused Christian of stealing coconuts and threatened to flog him. For a young nobleman, this was a cruel insult. During his watch on April 28, 1789, the assistant captain, relying on the punished sailors, seized first the armory room, and then the entire vessel. The crew consisting of 46 people was divided approximately in half: one half supported the captain, the other - the rebels. As a result, Christian landed Bly and his 18 supporters in a lifeboat, and he turned the ship to Tahiti.

Two odyssey

Bly tried to land on the island of Tofua, but the British there were not welcomed by the natives. Then the captain headed for the Dutch colony on the island of Timor. In 48 days the boat under his command covered 6,710 km without maps and most of the navigation equipment. Several participants in the journey of exhaustion fell into lethargy and survived only by a miracle.

“The Journey ... has gone down in history as one of the greatest and bravest voyages of all time," Stingl wrote in his book.

On Timor, Bligh bought a small coastal vessel, which reached Batavia, where malaria dumped travelers. After strengthening his illness, the captain returned to England with two accompanying men. There, Bly appeared before a naval tribunal, which found him innocent of losing a ship. Subsequently, he was appointed head of the new expedition, which went for the breadfruit.

“The rebellion had no effect on Bligh’s career. If during the command of "Bounty" he was officially in the rank of lieutenant, in the future he rose to the rank of vice-admiral ", - said Strelbitsky.

In turn, Christian understood that they would be looking for him, so he decided not to linger on Tahiti. Together with other participants in the rebellion, he went to the nearby island of Tubouai. However, there the natives met them unfriendly. The British tried to intervene in local tribal wars, quarreled with the leaders and were forced to leave the failed colony. On the "Bounty" in the end there were only nine people. The rest settled in Tahiti and were subsequently arrested by members of a punitive expedition that arrived in Oceania on the ship Pandora.

  • The village of Matawai on the island of Tahiti, 1822-1825
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  • © Science Museum

Subsequently, four of the detained sailors died as a result of the shipwreck "Pandora". The rest partially repeated the path of Bly, reaching England through the Dutch possession. Ten people were put on trial - four of them were acquitted, three were pardoned, the rest were hanged.

On September 22, 1789, Christian finally left Tahiti, taking with him 12 Tahitians and several Tahitians. After a while, the Bounty landed on the shores of Pitcairn Island, incorrectly plotted on the European maps of those times. For this reason, the rebels were actually isolated from the rest of the world.

Christian burned the ship so that no one had the temptation to flee, after which he divided the entire territory of the island into nine sections. The British left Tahitians without land and women, turning them practically into slaves. As a result, the Polynesians raised a riot. They killed part of the British, including Christian, but they themselves were completely exterminated. The rest of the British were victims of accidents and died of disease. Survived only sailor John Adams, who later led the colony.

In 1808 she was discovered by an American ship. But there was no one else to pursue by this time, except for Adams. The British crown forgave the last rebel and declared Pitcairn its overseas territory. Part of the descendants of the rebels from the "Bounty" subsequently moved to Tahiti and Norfolk.

  • A shot from the American film "Mutiny on the" Bounty ", 1962
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  • © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Zuma

As noted by Strelbitsky, the rebellion on the “Bounty” is “a dramatic page in the history of navigation,” based on these events “many books were written, films were made”.