Bounty (vessel)

Bounty (vessel), name of a British merchant ship under the command of Lieutenant William Bligh. The crew mutinied in 1789 near the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific, setting 19 men, including Bligh, adrift in a small boat with few provisions. Despite many hardships, Bligh's remarkable seamanship brought the 19 safely to Timor in the Malay Archipelago, 5,823 km (3,618 mi) away. He and the men who were loyal to him returned to England. In 1808 a settlement at Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific was discovered. The settlement had been established in 1790 by 9 of the mutineers and 6 male and 12 female Polynesians whom the mutineers had brought from Otaheite (now Tahiti). The last of the mutineers, John Adams, died in 1829, leaving a growing colony that was annexed to Great Britain ten years later. The story was used by the renowned British poet George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, in his poem The Island and by the United States writers Charles Nordhoff and James Hall in their novel Mutiny on the Bounty (1932) which was one of a trilogy; three films were also based on the story.