All language subtitles for Convert_y2mate.com - National Geographic The Mutiny on the Bounty royal navy documentary_360p

af Afrikaans
ak Akan
sq Albanian
am Amharic
ar Arabic
hy Armenian
az Azerbaijani
eu Basque
be Belarusian
bem Bemba
bn Bengali
bh Bihari
bs Bosnian
br Breton
bg Bulgarian
km Cambodian
ca Catalan
ceb Cebuano
chr Cherokee
ny Chichewa
zh-CN Chinese (Simplified)
zh-TW Chinese (Traditional)
co Corsican
hr Croatian
cs Czech
da Danish
nl Dutch
en English
eo Esperanto
et Estonian
ee Ewe
fo Faroese
tl Filipino
fi Finnish
fr French
fy Frisian
gaa Ga
gl Galician
ka Georgian
de German
el Greek
gn Guarani
gu Gujarati
ht Haitian Creole
ha Hausa
haw Hawaiian
iw Hebrew
hi Hindi
hmn Hmong
hu Hungarian
is Icelandic
ig Igbo
id Indonesian Download
ia Interlingua
ga Irish
it Italian
ja Japanese
jw Javanese
kn Kannada
kk Kazakh
rw Kinyarwanda
rn Kirundi
kg Kongo
ko Korean
kri Krio (Sierra Leone)
ku Kurdish
ckb Kurdish (Soranî)
ky Kyrgyz
lo Laothian
la Latin
lv Latvian
ln Lingala
lt Lithuanian
loz Lozi
lg Luganda
ach Luo
lb Luxembourgish
mk Macedonian
mg Malagasy
ms Malay
ml Malayalam
mt Maltese
mi Maori
mr Marathi
mfe Mauritian Creole
mo Moldavian
mn Mongolian
my Myanmar (Burmese)
sr-ME Montenegrin
ne Nepali
pcm Nigerian Pidgin
nso Northern Sotho
no Norwegian
nn Norwegian (Nynorsk)
oc Occitan
or Oriya
om Oromo
ps Pashto
fa Persian
pl Polish
pt-BR Portuguese (Brazil)
pt Portuguese (Portugal)
pa Punjabi
qu Quechua
ro Romanian
rm Romansh
nyn Runyakitara
ru Russian
sm Samoan
gd Scots Gaelic
sr Serbian
sh Serbo-Croatian
st Sesotho
tn Setswana
crs Seychellois Creole
sn Shona
sd Sindhi
si Sinhalese
sk Slovak
sl Slovenian
so Somali
es Spanish
es-419 Spanish (Latin American)
su Sundanese
sw Swahili
sv Swedish
tg Tajik
ta Tamil
tt Tatar
te Telugu
th Thai
ti Tigrinya
to Tonga
lua Tshiluba
tum Tumbuka
tr Turkish
tk Turkmen
tw Twi
ug Uighur
uk Ukrainian
ur Urdu
uz Uzbek
vi Vietnamese
cy Welsh
wo Wolof
xh Xhosa
yi Yiddish
yo Yoruba
zu Zulu

Original subtitles

For five perfect months they lingered and loved in a tropical garden of Eden.

But one quiet night on the other side of the world, a shocking act, a seagulling treachery

would forever render their paradise lost.

What is the meaning of this violence, soldier, Tom, sir?

The ship has been taken to get into the log, sir.

I have a wife and four children, and you have danced my children upon your knees.

It's too late.

I have been held.

The mutiny on the bounty.

For over 200 years it's been the most infamous case of rebellion at sea.

A tale of two mariners who could weather tempests and gales, but still could not control their

own violent human passions.

The tale begins in late 18th century England during the great era of the glorious square

rigours.

In those days it took uncommon skills to set out against the sea, expertise in mathematics,

navigation, cartography, abilities that took a special genius or a lifetime of training

to acquire.

From an early age, William Blyse seemed destined for a distinguished naval career.

One near Plymouth, England, the child of humble customs officer, the man who was to

one day command the bounty, was already a sailing master or chief navigator by age 22,

and by 26 he'd married into a wealthy, influential family from the Isle of Man.

Blyse had risen far in a very short time.

By all accounts, Blyse did to be singular, dedication and ambition.

Blyse's talent and enterprising nature soon paid off with a plumb assignment.

He boarded the resolution, a sailing master, for the third voyage of the nation's greatest

adventurer, Captain James Cook.

But during the four-year voyage Blyse's fatal flaws and all-consuming vanity had opened

his day in a verus he judged less competent than himself, were already in evidence.

Blyse so alienated the other officers sailing with Cook that when the expedition's journals

were published they excluded many of his maps and denied him his due credit.

It was a slight that embittered Blyse and made him more rigidly determined than ever

to succeed beyond the dreams of any of these lesser men.

Blyse was a man who could not in any way understand his impact on other people.

He never understood that.

He always saw himself as a victim of incompetence or the malicious plotting against him.

He was somewhat paranoid.

As a consequence, he had great difficulties all his life.

He never had a friend, by the way.

He may have behaved badly with his equals and subordinates, but the crafty and talented

Blyse had a gift for impressing powerful patrons.

In 1787, Sir Joseph Banks, president of Britain's premier scientific body, the Royal

Society, convinced King George III to undertake an expedition to Tahiti and recommended Bly

as captain.

The mission?

To collect breadfruit trees for transplantation in Jamaica, where entrepreneurial plantation

owners like banks were desperate for a cheap food source for their slave labor.

It wasn't a very important mission, but Blyse thought this was a great opportunity

for advancement in the Royal Navy.

He was very ambitious and wanted to get ahead like most Royal Navy officers at the time,

and looked on this as a great challenge.

The 90 foot, 215 ton frigate, Bathea was selected as the vessel that would transport the exotic

bread that grew on trees on what higher ups in the admiralty mockingly referred to as

the grocery errand.

Perhaps to lend more import to the voyage, Joseph Banks suggested re-christening her,

the H.M.S.

Bathea.

Before even setting foot aboard the ship that was forever to be linked with his name, Bly

suffered the indignity of learning that his request to be promoted had been rebuffed by

the admiralty.

He would be a captain by name, but not by rank.

The admiralty added other frustrating obstacles to the voyage.

To make space for the storage of the breadfruit plants, they awkwardly reconfigured the ship,

planning to cram into her tiny han and unusually large crew of sailors and botanists.

One third of the ship was sealed off in the sands for breadfruit plants.

Even Bly had only a little cubicle to sleep in.

The bounty was actually more crowded than World War II submarine.

There is no question about that.

Had that been all Bly had been forced to endure before setting sail on the bounty, it would

have been enough to arouse his volatile temperament.

But the admiralty added to his woes by ordering him to sail to Tahiti by the treacherous Cape

Horn shortcut, then stalling him at port while the fleeting window of good weather and winds

slipped away.

Bly shared his bitter disappointment in a letter to a colleague.

If there is a punishment at ought to be inflicted on a set of men for neglect, I am sure it

ought on the admiralty for my three weeks detention at this place.

This has made my task very arduous indeed.

For to get round Cape Horn at the time I shall be there, I know not how to promise myself

any success.

And yet I must do it, or I suppose my character will be at stake.

And Lord Holmes sweetened this difficult task by giving me promotion, I should have

been satisfied.

For Bly's secret ambition was to make this voyage flawless.

This would be his chance to show the world that he was the greatest sailor ever to conquer

the seas, and he would tolerate nothing less than perfection.

Meanwhile the remainder of Bly's 46-man crew were signing on board.

The junior master's mate aboard the bounty was 23-year-old Fletcher Christian, who had

been recommended by Bly's beloved wife Elizabeth.

Bly had sailed with Christian before and accepted him without hesitation.

Unlike the rest of the bounty's offices, Christian was a true gentleman from an influential

Cumberland family that had recently suffered a reversal of fortune.

The seventh of ten children, the formerly privileged Christian, had turned to the navy

as a means of earning a living.

It was clear that Bly favored young Christian and was grooming him for much greater things.

Christian was grateful to Bly for his friendship and patronage, but there existed between

the two men an ambiguous tension that observers noted from the start.

People commented on a peculiar relationship that existed between them.

It wasn't clear what that relationship actually was, but people felt that there was an uncomfortable

element in it, which no one really was able to pinpoint.

Bly was a populist, the person scragging his way to the top, and Christian the gentleman.

Well-spoken dynamic and athletic, Christian was instantly popular among the men of the

boundary.

But there was another side to his personality, a darker side, that the proud, earnest young

man kept well-masked beneath his outgoing demeanor.

He had what we were psychologists today called borderline personality traits.

He tended to idolize and also despise.

He was given to mood swings and often let the emotions take over his judgment.

Shortly before Christian was to depart on the bounty, an evening of drink and talk spent

with his brother Charles may have had a significant impact on his later judgment.

Charles Christian had been a surgeon aboard the merchant frigate Middlesex.

Such a Christian learned that there had been a mutiny on the Middlesex.

It was an unsuccessful mutiny put down by the captain.

But Charles Christian, the surgeon, was named as one of the prime mutineers.

The idea of his brother mutiny kind of took mutiny out of the unthinkable and put it in

the realm of the possible.

Unaware of the immortality that was soon before her, the bounty finally set sail from

Portsmouth Harbour on December 23, 1787.

Bly ordered a Southwesterly course for Cape Horn.

Leaning on the ship's rails, 46 men watched the jagged English coastline slowly recede

from view.

Could they ever have imagined the strange fate that awaited them?

From the earliest days of an ill-fated voyage, the

bounty faced squalls in rough weather.

Still, according to Bly's self-congratulatory lungs, Krumar Al was high.

My little ship does wonderfully well.

My men are all well and cheerful.

Few seamen and officers I may venture to say can ever boast of more comforts at sea.

But the journal of the Boseons mate, the conscientious 27-year-old James Morrison, tells a different

tale of shipboard life.

Early in the voyage, two cheeses were found missing from the ship's stores, and irate

Bly assembled the crew on deck and accused the sailors of thievery.

Then in an act of insolence in front of the bounty's 46 men, the ship's Cooper reminded

his captain that the cheeses had been taken off the boat and delivered Bly's own home

before leaving the docks in England.

Bly's deception was revealed and his wrath became uncontrollable.

Mr Bly told the Cooper he would give him a damn good flogging if he said any more about

him.

He would fly into these uncontrollable rages and then he would almost become incomprehensible

so much so that the crew would look at each other and say what's wrong with this man?

He's just not making sense.

Bounty law holds that Bly was physically violent, but his rage is rarely resulted in

floggings which were an accepted and custom reform of naval discipline.

In fact William Bly flogged his men far less than any royal navy captain at that time.

Bly never abused his crew physically during all the voyage of the bounty.

The abuse was verbal.

He was very authoritarian, very contemptuous, very insulting.

Bly had another habit to rank old many in his crew.

Following the examples of Captain Cook who had pioneered a more progressive humane command,

Bly was determined to ensure the physical well-being of his men.

He brought aboard a half-blind fiddler and ordered the crew on deck for dancing as mandatory

daily exercise.

Now sailors love to dance.

That was one of their great schools.

I mean their balance and their rhythm in the yard.

But when you're told dance a sailor doesn't like to be told to dance when he wants to be

freely to dance.

For just four months after leaving Mother England, the petty disagreements of the voyage

were put aside as Bly and the men of the bounty encountered their first life-threatening

trial.

The treacherous passage around Stormtost Cape Horn.

It blew a storm of wind and the snow fell so heavy that it was scarce possible to haul

the sails.

The storm exceeded anything I had met with a sea higher than I had ever seen before.

The ship falling so heavy to Windwood.

The sea becomes so very high and the weather side of it like a wall.

This was really horrendous.

The ship rolling so badly that the main yards on the main mast, the yard arms, the tips

of them would touch the wave tops.

Bly said these were the worst seas that he had ever seen and he had been at sea 16 years.

For more than four weeks the tiny vessel fought a losing battle against the insurmountable

elements of water and wind.

Finally beaten down by the relentless tempest even the stubborn Bly had to admit defeat

in reverse his course.

It was yet another bitter setback and the flawless master plan blind imagined for the

voyage.

I ordered the helm to be put a weather and bore away for the Cape of Good Hope to the

great joy of everyone on board.

Send the medal off!

Come on, lad!

Smelly now!

Another bad omen shadowed the bounty.

A young seaman aboard the ship passed away in the night.

The ship's surgeon, a notorious drunkard, claimed the cause was scurvy.

Obsessed with the health of his men, Bly stopped the decks in a fury.

First the voyage was ruined for him from that moment on.

In May of 1788 the bounty anchored at full spay on the Cape of Good Hope after five,

two mouches months at sea.

During this 38 day respite to repair storm damage, something happened between Bly and

Christian that sold the seeds for future discontent.

The trouble started in Cape Town and the reason was an obligation of money.

Fletcher Christian was poor.

He wanted to send gifts to his family.

He had no money and evidently there was a loan.

And you know what loans do with friendships.

Some say that Bly, petty and tenurious to a fault, demanded that Christian repay the

loan before the ship returned to England.

An angry refused and a wedge was driven between the master and the protégé.

With tensions simmering among its officers, the bounty made sail from full spay in July

of 1788.

And on an early October evening sighted the towering mountains of Tahiti just over the

horizon.

After ten long months at sea the bounty dropped anchor into Tahiti's pristine matamai bay.

They'd withstood the torment of the horn, the squabbles and confinement of shipboard

life and Bly's capricious temper and insulting outbursts.

Now all of the hardship was washed away by an enchanting welcome.

Within moments of her arrival the bounty was surrounded by hundreds of canoes filled with

joyfully shouting Tahitian men and beautiful enticing Tahitian women.

For the men of the bounty it seemed like paradise on earth.

But their paradise would soon give way to an ordeal beyond imagining.

After nearly a year at sea the HMS Bounty lay at anchor in the exquisite turquoise waters

of matamai bay.

Lieutenant William Bly and his men revel in the indescribable spender of Tahiti and her

friendly natives, especially the beautiful, sexually expressive Tahitian women.

The inhabitants we found stout and well made.

I have seen many parts of the world but all Tahitians capable of being preferable to them

and certainly is so considering its natural state.

Many of the bounty crewmen, young and inexperienced, had only known the pay for pleasure love of

jaded dockside whores.

On Tahiti they found beautiful, uninhibited, guileless women who wanted nothing more than

to please their English visitors.

For young, healthy men, defined cooperative and pliable women was the, Tahiti was, you

might say, a sailor's sexual fantasy come to life.

Bly, rigid and unyielding in this as in seemingly all other things, did not partake of the favors

of the Tahitian sirens.

Fletcher Christian, like the rest of the bounty's men, wasn't so modest.

An intimacy between the natives and our people was already so general that they were

scarcely a man in the ship who had not a tire or friend.

Despite their clash in Cape Town over the loan, Christian must have remained in Bly's favor

for he received the plumb assignment of living ashore to supervise the breadfruit nursery.

Christian soon fell in love with the island culture, becoming instantly popular with

the Tahitians and taking up with a native girl, Maua Toowan.

The bounties stayed anchored in Tahiti for five months, and for five months Christian

and the other sailors indulged in the intoxicating pleasures of island life.

The men were no longer locked together in a survival struggle with the sea and discipline

among them began to wane.

Bly's tongue lashing and his floggings grew increasingly frequent.

The month of January on Tahiti proved an ominous preview of what was to come.

Under a sliver of moon, three crewmen deserted one night, taking the ship's small cutter

with them.

They were captured two weeks later by Bly.

Realising he couldn't afford to keep three of his best seamen and irons for the coming

trip to the West Indies, Bly went easy on the deserters.

They were given the light banishment of 48 lashes.

It was a sensible decision, but seemed to underscore Bly's wane in control over his

own men.

On April 4, 1789, the bounty made sail from Tahiti, serenaded by the poignant farewell

chance of the grieving islanders.

Bly ordered a course for the Indian Ocean by way of the Endeavour's straits.

We made sail, bidding farewell to Otahite, where for 23 weeks we had been treated with

the utmost affection and regard.

The friendly and endearing behaviour of these people may be ascribed the motives for the

events which follow, which affected the ruin of an expedition which there was previously

every reason to believe would have been attended with the most favourable issue.

In the days that followed, Bly's already a rasible temperament became even more volatile,

his demands even more impossible.

Some say that every captain is the cause of his own mutiny, and here, with the bounty

well on its way, Bly's explosive outbursts sealed his fate.

He recognised the crew was at Kamen Glood and he was trying to get the wheels back on

the wagon and shape them up.

And so he was in this period particularly annoying and aggravating to the crew and certainly

to a Fletcher Christian.

It was patiness and fault finding with the officers, plus insults as to their competence

and their integrity and their devotion to duty.

And that was the period when Christian just deteriorated one thing after another.

The last and most lacerating of Bly's irrational outbursts came on the humid afternoon of

April 27, 1789.

Bly suddenly decided to count the coconut seed recently brought aboard.

Bly looked at this pile of his coconuts and made a comment to the master John Fryer that

looked like somebody had instilled his coconuts.

Insensed, Bly ordered all hands on deck and all coconuts brought up above.

Mr Bly said they'd been stolen and that it must have been with the knowledge and connivance

of the officers.

He then questioned each officer as to the number he had bought and going up to Christian, asked

him to state the number in his possession.

I'd really do not know, sir, but I hope you do not think me so mean as to be guilty of

stealing yours.

Yes, you damned hound I do.

You must have stolen them from me or you could have given a better account of them.

God damn you scoundrels, you're all thieves alike and combined with a man to rob me.

I'll sweat you for it, you rascals.

This was to Fletcher Christian, a man who came from a long line of aristocrats.

Honor was a great thing with these people and it certainly was to Fletcher Christian.

His honor offended and by a man he'd once looked up to and admired.

Christian went into an emotional tailspin.

Bly's insults and accusations had broken the over sensitive young officers spirit.

The first reaction of Fletcher Christian after this incident took place was to plan to desert

the ship himself.

He could think of nothing other than getting away from Bly.

One considered the near suicidal act of abandoning ship, but a sultry knight that brought most

of the crew up on deck made it impossible to slip over the railing unnoticed.

Near dawn on April 28th Fletcher Christian awoke for his watch with his head on fire.

He was tired of this torment.

He had to act.

The mood on the ship was explosive and in the darkness a crew member said something

to Christian that triggered the unthinkable in his agitated mind.

A man already found anything.

Christian made the impulsive decision to seize the ship.

Christian seized on the ship.

You with us?

The words spread like wildfire aboard the bounty.

Christian seized on the ship.

The others, less than a dozen in all, raided the arms just grabbing muskets and cutlaces.

They swept into Bly's cabin and shook him awake.

Bly immediately started to scream bloody murder and woke everybody up on the ship.

Bly's wrists were tied behind his back.

He struggled with his captors and pleaded with the men on deck to come to his aid.

But Christian was a man possessed.

Christian was described as not only looking totally mad but behaving as if he were totally

mad.

The ship has been taken.

Get into the lodge sir.

I have a wife and four children in England.

It is too late.

I have been in hell.

The fierce standoff continued and each man was forced to make a decision that would haunt

him for the rest of his life.

Would he be a loyalist?

Or a mutineer?

For Christian the die had been cast long ago and he struggled to keep his senses about

him amidst the chaos on the bounty's deck.

Fletcher Christian was yelling at Bly to be quiet or he will run him through.

And to Bly's credit Bly essentially challenged him to go ahead and do it and Christian did

not have the courage to do it.

Christian took command of the bounty and ordered Bly in 18 loyalists into the ship's

23 foot launch.

The tiny boat wasn't large enough to hold all of Bly's loyalists so some had to remain

aboard the bounty.

The rest gathered their belongings and climbed down to the waiting launch.

Finally the last man down was Captain Bly.

All the while yelling trying to bring the crew to its senses and to their duty.

None of this succeeded of course Christian was adamant.

I see he had taken the first step he recognized that there was no turning back and so he had

to do what he started out to do which was to get rid of Bly.

Even while overthrowing his tormentor, Christian's aristocratic instincts didn't desert him.

Before cutting loose the launch he gave Bly a quadrant, a compass, a few books of declinations

and his own personal sextant.

Finally the loyalists were given some meager provisions and the rope connecting them to

the bounty was cut.

After having been kept some time to make sport for these unfeeling wretches and having undergone

much ridicule we would at last cast a drift in the open ocean.

As the launch pulled away the jeering mutineers triumphantly cast Bly's cherished breadfruit

plants overboard.

Christian and the others were at last free of Bly and his tyrannical terrains and Bly

is over what would become the most notorious mutiny on the high seas was helplessly adrift

in the vast south Pacific.

The mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty had lasted less than three hours and now the ship was

under the command of Fletcher Christian.

His former captain Lieutenant William Bly was now the master of a much more modest vessel.

The Bly's 23 foot launch from 18 men under his command.

After being set adrift in the south Pacific Bly wasted no time in documenting his side

of the story.

If the mutiny had been occasioned by any grievances either real or imaginary I must have discovered

symptoms of discontent which would put me on my guard but it was far otherwise.

With Christian in particular I was on the most friendly terms.

The launch wasn't 30 yards away from the bounty.

When Bly began to question why was their mutiny?

He begins to describe each of the mutineers.

How old they were, how high they were, what sort of tattoos they had on them.

Fletcher Christian 24, 5 feet 9 inches high, darks wore the complexion, makes strong.

Christian is subject to violent perspiration particularly in his hands so that he soils

anything he handles.

Christian had given Bly enough food to sustain the launch loyalists for only five days.

Christian expected that Bly would try to go to one of the islands and make friends and

try to survive there until either a boat came or they died or they were assimilated into

the society.

But he just didn't reckon with the determination and the capabilities of Bly.

Bly first set a course for the nearby island of Tofuur and he and his crew went a short

look for food.

But their arrival aroused the attention of neighbouring islanders who gathered in a

threatening mob surrounding Bly and his men.

As the tension rose Bly heard a sound that filled his heart with dread.

When Bly saw natives starting to knock stones together and gather in large numbers, Bly knew

that it was time to try to leave the island and so they walked down through this massive

yelling natives and got to the launch and at that point the native started to the attack.

Bly and his men narrowly escaped losing a loyalist seaman to the savage attack of

the natives.

At that time he makes the decision he can't go to another island.

He can't land so he makes the decision that he will go to Timor.

That's 4,000 miles across Open Sea.

Bly would have to call upon all of his considerable gifts of navigation and seamanship to steer

the launch through treacherous Open Seas to the Dutch colony of Timor.

He'd never been there and he had no charts.

Some would call it a fool-hardy decision but Bly was confident of his abilities.

I found my mind most wonderfully supported and began to conceive hopes not withstanding

so heavy a calamity to be able to recount to my king and country my misfortune.

With scarce provisions, no shelter from the weather and virtually no navigation tools,

conditions aboard the overcrowded launch were withering to body and soul.

Our allowance for the day was a quarter of a pint of coconut milk and the meat which

did not exceed two ounces to each person and for supper an ounce of the damaged bread and

a quarter of a pint of water.

Our situation on Monday morning, the 11th of May was extremely dangerous.

The sea frequently running over our stern which kept us bailing with all our strength.

At noon it was almost calm, no sun to be seen and some of us shivering with cold.

Of course since yesterday, 89 miles.

Meanwhile the bounty with Christian at the helm made sail for Tumouai, a nearby island

inhabited by natives who would prove to be far less amiable than the Tahitians.

The two things that the mutineers want most of all is meat and women.

But there's no pigs, there's no meat on Tumouai and the Tumouai and islanders will not let

them near the women.

After a brief trip to Tahitih to bring back women, the mutineers decided to build a settlement

despite the island's shortcomings.

Christians set the men to work constructing Fort George.

Typical of the Englishmen, the first thing they did was put up an English flag on a flagpole

and start this fort.

But the battles with the native island is quickly escalated.

Christian realized that for their own survival the mutineers would have to leave Tumouai.

Some of the bounty refugees wanted to return to Tahitih, their Shangri-La.

Christian knew Tahitih would be a death sentence.

Sooner or later the British Navy would send a ship to capture them and Tahitih would be

the first place the Navy would look.

Christian says to them, if you're going to go back to Tahitih, I want only one thing

and that's the bounty.

When they take a vote and 16 of them vote to go back and nine vote to stay with Christian.

Most of those who returned to Tahitih were the same loyalists who couldn't fit in the

launch at the time of the mutiny.

Since they were innocent of any wrongdoing, they fully expected that British authorities

would not treat them as criminals.

Among them was young James Morrison, who was relieved to be back on the island paradise.

We found the Tahitians ready to receive us with every mark of hospitality, the whole

of them striving to outdo each other in civility and kindness toward us, and all were glad when

we said that we'd come to stay with them.

While Christian and his men were going their separate ways, the men of the launch were

at each other's throats.

As much from Blais relentless arrogance and conniving as from the hardships of their journey.

He was as tyrannical in his temper in the boat as in the ship, and his chief thought

was his own comfort.

Blais, for example, when he distributed the food, would surreptitiously let some food

fall on the deck of the boat, and then when he thought nobody saw him pick it up so that

he would get a little more than the others.

It's a voyage in which they're beginning to blame one another.

Blais blaming his men for not warning him.

They are blaming him for getting them into this situation with his attitude.

It's a voyage full of hatred.

It really is a terrible voyage.

By June the seventh after more than 35 days at sea, Blais loyalists aboard the launch

had reached the limits of their physical and psychological endurance.

And daylight, much complaining, which my own feelings convinced me were too well founded.

Extreme weakness, swelled legs, hollow and ghastly countenances with an apparent ability

of understanding seemed to be the melancholy presage of approaching dissolution.

But at their lowest end, Blais, stern hand and navigational brilliance proved worthy of

the task.

Today next morning, with an excess of joy, we discovered Timor, and by daylight we're

within two leagues of the shore.

It is not possible for one to describe the blessing the sight of this land diffused among

us.

It appeared scarcely credible to ourselves that in an open boat and so poorly provided,

we should have been able to reach the coast of Timor, having in that time run by our log

the distance of 3,618 miles.

After 45 days in the Pacific, Blais had guided the tiny launch to Timor in a remarkable

display of seamanship.

But once again Blais revealed the ugly pettiness of his character.

In a pointless display of decorum, he waited off Timor for formal permission from the Dutch

to land, while several of his men lay close to dying.

Even as Blais reached safe haven in Timor, his nemesis was on the other sea of his own,

searching for a perfect hideaway, a paradise that the British navy might never find.

Turning to his former mentor for guidance, Christian raided the books blind left behind

in his cabin.

Finally had a desperation in a book Christian found, Pitcairn Island, which was very far

to the east, something like 1,300 or 1,400 miles.

It's a rock just rising out of the sea.

There's no reef around it.

There's no harbor.

Many isolated Pitcairn Island had abundant food, a rocky terrain and a coast so relentlessly

beaten by surf as to render it inhospitable to visiting ships.

After unloading livestock and provisions from the bounty, Christian and company stripped

and scuttled the ship that would assure their infamy and set it aflame, severing their last

ties to Blais and the Mutiny, but also to their homeland.

By the time William Blais returned to England in 1790 after the bounty mutiny, news of the

crew's treachery had already caused the public sensation.

Blais, anxious to preserve his reputation, released his own version of the events aboard

the bounty to the presses.

In England, a fish shall outrage over the bounty affair swiftly prompted the navy to

send the HMS Pandora to Tahiti to hunt down the mutineers and bring them to justice.

Pandora's commander, Captain Edward Edwards, was one of the most ruthless officers in the

British navy who had himself faced mutiny several years earlier.

Edwards went after the fugitives with a merciless zeal.

On March 23, 1791, the Pandora arrived in Tahiti to the joy of the 14 remaining bounty

crewmen living there.

Some of the loyalists actually paddled out in canoes and swam out to the Pandora thinking

that this was to be their rescue and they were happy as it could be.

But the men had little calls to be joyful.

Edwards made no attempt to distinguish between loyalists and mutineers.

He arrested and shackled every man hand and fought in a wooden cage on the ship's deck

known as Pandora's Box.

Loyalist James Morrison described this chamber of torture in his journal.

The heat of the place when it was calm was so intense that the sweat frequently ran to

the scuppers and produced maggots in a short time.

But there were more terrors in store for the prisoners on the Pandora.

On route to England, the vessel ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef.

Captain Edward's abandoned ship, leaving the shackled men to watch helplessly as deadly

seawater poured into their cage.

At the last moment, most of the bounty men managed to escape.

But four were left to drown, still locked in their manacles.

The ten surviving prisoners returned to England and faced court martial for their part in

the mutiny.

On September 18th of 1792, the court passed its judgement and found six of the men guilty

of mutiny.

One mutiny amounted to vigorous defence and skirted death by a legal technicality.

Two, including James Morrison, received King's mercy narrowly escaping the gallows.

The three of the men who had cast their lot with Fletcher Christian were hanged for their

villainy.

During the trial, Bligh's version of the mutiny was refuted by every witness, even the loyalists.

But Bligh wasn't even in England to defend his character.

He had misread the political winds just as he'd misread the mood of his crew aboard the

bounty and was already oceanbound, completing his mission of delivering breadfruit to the

West Indies.

The short temper, you know, the abusive language created a totally different picture.

And so the public's perception then immediately turned around and by the time Bligh got back,

he was, you know, he just was persona non grata.

Now nearly three years had passed since the day of infamy on the decks of the bounty.

On their Pitcairn Island hideaway, the idyllic tropical life Christian and the other mutinyers

had imagined was evaporating in the humid South Sea air.

Christian himself seemed depressed and spent long hours brooding in a cave high above the

crashing surf of Bounty Bay.

The nine mutinyers divided the island into nine equal pieces in each Tokutahishan wife.

The six Tokutahishan men they brought with them were forced to share three women.

Life goes on in this strange way.

Children begin to appear and then one of the wives of one of the mutinyers dies and the

mutinyer says he must have another woman and he takes one of the Tokutahishan men's women.

The Tokutahishan men tired of being treated like slaves by the mutinyers,

hatched a plot to take over the Pitcairn settlement.

One sunny afternoon in 1793 the island paradise was transformed into a bloody battlefield.

Five mutinyers were slain in the savage struggle, Fletcher Christian among them, shot in the

back as he worked in his garden.

The island was racked with violence for 40 days as the surviving mutinyers joined forces

with the Tokutahishan women and murdered the remaining Tokutahishan men.

An uneasy peace finally descended upon Pitcairn.

The remaining four mutinyers were eventually reduced to just one, John Adams.

Returning to the bounty's water-stained Bible for salvation, Adams became a devout

Christian and converted the women and children of Pitcairn.

This reborn community continued its peaceful existence for 18 years until an American

whaler, captained by Meiju Folcher, found its way to the island in 1808.

Meiju Folger discovers a canoe coming out from Pitcairn and there's a young man looking

like a Polynesian in it and the young man says his Thursday October Christian is his

name and asks, do you know Captain Bly?

Folger realised he'd stumbled upon the hiding place of the infamous Bounty mutinyers.

Bly after surviving the notoriety of the Bounty mutiny, Quatler resumed his naval career.

He was able to spread his body for his folly.

He seemed handed by controversy no matter where he was stationed.

As the governor of the fledgling British colony in Australia then called New South Wales,

he was once again overtaken by mutiny.

This time his own officers held him under house arrest for two years.

There's an axiom in the military that to control men you must know how to control yourself.

And this was the thing that Bly never learned his whole lifetime.

Still the blameless victim in his own mind, Bly returned to England in shame to live a

quiet life with Elizabeth his steadfast wife.

History's most infamous seafarer died without fanfare in 1817.

And what a Fletcher Christian.

Though some have told fanciful stories of a daring escape and a secret life in windswept

Blyleil in northern England, it's probable that the mutiny had died in the massacre on

Pitcairn.

Today his descendants and those of his companions still inhabit this lonely island, living the

idyllic simple life Christian and his men dreamed of for themselves.

They share oral histories of their notorious ancestors, passed down from father to son,

mother to daughter for over 200 years.

Mr. Christian, bring us all the wind.

To his dying day William Bly blamed the bounty mutiny on the temptations of Tahiti on the

law of swaying palms and inviting tropical temptresses.

Though a competent commander of ships Bly never came to understand that mastery of the waves

requires not only individual skill but the willing cooperation of men.

There's a moral to any legendary story, fact or fiction, a lesson of human nature that

lends the tale its timeless air.

The mutiny on the bounty is a reminder that when men come together to stand against the

sea their heroic efforts can unite them or they can tear them apart.

Well-spoken dynamic and athletic.

Christian was instantly popular among the men of the boundary but there was another

side to his personality, a darker side that the proud earnest young man kept well-masked

beneath his outgoing demeanor.

He had what we were psychologists today called borderline personality traits.

He tended to idolize and also despise.

He was given to mood swings and often let the emotions take over his judgement.

Shortly before Christian was to depart on the bounty an evening of drink and talk spent

with his brother Charles may have had a significant impact on his later judgement.

His Christian had been a surgeon aboard the merchant frigate Middlesex.

Fletcher Christian learned that there had been a mutiny on the Middlesex.

It was an unsuccessful mutiny put down by the captain but Charles Christian, the surgeon,

was named as one of the prime mutineers.

The idea of his brother mutiny kind of took mutiny out of the unthinkable and put it in

the realm of the possible.

Unaware of the immortality that was soon before her, the bounty finally set sail from

Portsmouth Harbour on December 23, 1787.

Bly ordered the Southwesterly course for Cape Horn.

Leaning on the ship's rails, 46 men watched the jagged English coastline slowly recede

from view.

Could they ever have imagined the strange fate that awaited them?

From the earliest days of her ill-fated voyage, the

bounty faced squalls in rough weather.

Still, according to Bly's self-congratulatory logs, Krumar Al was high.

My little ship does wonderfully well.

I men are all well and cheerful.

Few seamen and officers I may venture to say can ever boast of more comforts at sea.

But the journal of the Boseons mate, the conscientious 27-year-old James Morrison, tells a different

tale of shipboard light, host Cape Horn.

It blew a storm of wind, the snow fell so heavy that it was scarce possible to haul

the sails.

The storm exceeded anything I had met, with a sea higher than I had ever seen before.

The ship falling so heavy to Windwood, the sea becomes so very high, and the weather side

of it like a wall.

This was really horrendous.

The ship rolling so badly that the main yards on the main mast, the yard arms, the tips of

them, would touch the wave tops.

Bly said these were the worst scenes that he had ever seen, and he had been at sea 16

years.

For more than four weeks, the tiny vessel fought a losing battle against the insurmountable

elements of water and wind, finally beaten down by the relentless tempest even the stubborn

Bly had to admit defeat in reverse his course.

It was yet another bitter setback, and the flawless master plan blind imagined for the

voyage.

I ordered the helm to be put a weather and bore away for the Cape of Good Hope, to the

great joy of everyone on board.

Another bad omen shadowed the bounty.

A young seaman aboard the ship passed away in the night.

The ship's surgeon, a notorious drunkard, claimed the cause was scurvy.

Obsessed with the health of his men, Bly stopped the decks in a fury.

Perhaps the voyage was ruined for him from that moment on.

In May of 1788, the bounty anchored at full spay on the Cape of Good Hope after five,

two mulch was months at sea.

During this 38 day respite to repair storm damage, something happened between Bly and

Christian that sold the seeds for future discontent.

The trouble started in Cape Town, and the reason was an obligation of money.

Fletcher Christian was poor.

He wanted to send gifts to his family.

He had no money, and evidently there was a loan.

And you know what loans do with friendships.

Some say that Bly, petty and tenurious to a fault, demanded that Christian repay the

loan before the ship returned to England.

An angrily refused, and a wedge was driven between the master and the protégé.

With tensions simmering among its officers, the bounty made sail from full spay in July.

A line of aristocrats.

Honor was a great thing with these people, and it certainly was the Fletcher Christian.

His honor offended, and by a man he'd once looked up to and admired.

Christian went into an emotional tailspin.

His eyes in Sultan accusations had broken the oversensitive young officers' spirit.

The first reaction of Fletcher Christian after this incident took place was to plan to desert

the ship himself.

He could think of nothing other than getting away from Bly.

Christian considered the near suicidal act of abandoning ship, but a sultry knight that

brought most of the crew up on deck made it impossible to slip over the railing unnoticed.

Near dawn on April 28th, Fletcher Christian awoke for his watch with his head on fire.

He was tired of this torment.

He had to act.

The mood on the ship was explosive, and in the darkness a crew member said something

to Christian that triggered the unthinkable in his agitated mind.

The men are ready for anything.

Christian made the impulsive decision to seize the ship.

Christian seized on the ship.

Are you with us?

The words spread like wildfire aboard the bounty.

Christian seized on the ship.

Christian and the other reframiers, less than a dozen in all, raided the arms just grabbing

muskets and cutlaces.

They swept into Bly's cabin and shook him awake.

What are you doing?

You're just a son of a...

Bly immediately started to scream bloody murder and woke everybody up on the ship.

Bly's wrists were tied behind his back.

He struggled with his captors and pleaded with the men on deck to come to his aid.

But Christian was a man possessed.

Christian was described as not only looking totally mad but behaving as if he were totally

mad.

The ship has been taken.

Get into the lodge.

Sir, I have a wife and four children in England.

It is too late.

I have been in hell.

The fierce standoff continued and each man was forced to make a decision that would haunt

him for the rest of his life.

Would he be a loyalist or a mutineer?

For Christian the die had been cast long ago and he struggled to keep his senses about him

amidst the chaos on the bounty's deck.

Such a Christian was yelling at Bly to be quiet or he will run him through.

And to Bly's credit Bly essentially challenged him to go ahead and do it.

And Christian did not have the courage to do it.

Christian took command of the bounty and ordered Bly in 18 loyalists into the ship's

23-foot launch.

The tiny boat wasn't large enough to hold all of Bly's loyalists so some had to remain

aboard the bounty.

The rest gathered their belongings.

Lieutenant William Bly and his men revel in the indescribable spend of Tahiti and her

friendly natives, especially the beautiful, sexually expressive Tahiti women.

The inhabitants we found stout and well made.

I have seen many parts of the world but Otaite is capable of being preferable to them all

and certainly is so considering its natural state.

Many of the bounty crewmen, young and inexperienced, had only known the pay for pleasure love

of jaded dockside whores.

On Tahiti they found beautiful uninhibited guileless women who wanted nothing more than

to please their English visitors.

For young healthy men, a defined cooperative and pliable woman was, Tahiti was, you might

say, a sailor's sexual fantasy come to life.

Bly, rigid and unyielding in this as in seemingly all other things, did not partake of the favours

of the Tahiti and sirens.

Fletcher Christian, like the rest of the bounty's men, wasn't so modest.

An intimacy between the natives and our people was already so general that there was scarcely

a man in the ship who had not a tire or friend.

At their clash in Cape Town over the loan, Christian must have remained in Bly's favour

for he received the plumb assignment of living ashore to supervise the breadfruit nursery.

Christian soon fell in love with the island culture, becoming instantly popular with the

Tahiti's and taking up with the native girl, Maua Tua.

The bounty stayed anchored in Tahiti for five months, and for five months Christian

and the other sailors indulged in the intoxicating pleasures of island life.

The men were no longer locked together in a survival struggle with the sea and discipline

among them began to wane.

Bly's tongue lashings and his floggings grew increasingly frequent.

The month of January on Tahiti proved an ominous preview of what was to come.

Under a sliver of moon, three crewmen deserted one night, taking the ship's small cutter

with them.

They were captured two weeks later by Bly.

Realising he couldn't afford to keep three of his best sebumin and irons for the coming

trip to the West Indies, Bly went easy on the deserters, they were given the light

banishment of 48 lashes.

It was a sensible decision, but seemed to underscore Bly's waning control over his

own men.

He stayed anchored in Tahiti for five months, and for five months Christian and the other

sailors indulged in the intoxicating pleasures of island life.

The men were no longer locked together in a survival struggle with the sea and discipline

among them began to wane.

Bly's tongue lashings and his floggings grew increasingly frequent.

The month of January on Tahiti proved an ominous preview of what was to come.

Under a sliver of moon, three crewmen deserted one night, taking the ship's small cutter

with them.

They were captured two weeks later by Bly.

Realising he couldn't afford to keep three of his best sebumin and irons for the coming

trip to the West Indies, Bly went easy on the deserters, they were given the light banishment

of 48 lashes.

It was a sensible decision, but seemed to underscore Bly's waning control over his

own men.

On April 4, 1789, the bounty made sail from Tahiti, serenaded by the poignant farewell

chance of the grieving islanders.

Bly ordered a course for the Indian Ocean by way of the Endeavour's straits.

We made sail, bidding farewell to Otahite where for 23 weeks we had been treated with the

utmost affection and regard.

The friendly and endearing behaviour of these people may be ascribed the motives for the

events which follow, which affected the ruin of an expedition which there was previously

every reason to believe would have been attended with the most favourable issue.

In the days that followed, Bly's already a rasible temperament became even more volatile,

his demands even more impossible.

Some say that every captain is the cause of his own mutiny, and here, with the bounty

well on its way, Bly's explosive outburst sealed his fate.

He recognised the crew was at common glued and he was trying to get the wheels back on

the wagon and shape them up.

And so he was in this period particularly annoying and aggravating to the crew and certainly

to a Fletcher Christian.

It was patiness and fault finding with the officers, plus insults as to their competence

and their integrity and their devotion to duty.

And that was the period when Bly so alienated the other officers sailing with Cook that

when the expedition's journals were published they excluded many of his maps and denied

him his due credit.

It was a slight that embittered Bly and made him more rigidly determined than ever to succeed

beyond the dreams of any of these lesser men.

Bly was a man who could not in any way understand his impact on other people.

He never understood that.

He always saw himself as a victim of incompetence or the malicious plotting against him.

He was somewhat paranoid.

As a consequence, he had great difficulties all his life.

He never had a friend, by the way.

He may have behaved badly with his equals and subordinates, but the crafty and talented

Bly had a gift for impressing powerful patrons.

In 1787 Sir Joseph Banks, president of Britain's premier scientific body, the Royal Society,

convinced King George III to undertake an expedition to Tahiti and recommended Bly as captain.

The mission to collect breadfruit trees for transplantation in Jamaica where entrepreneurial

plantation owners like Banks were desperate for a cheap food source for their slave labor.

It wasn't a very important mission, but Bly thought this was a great opportunity for advancement

in the Royal Navy.

He was very ambitious and honored to get ahead like most Royal Navy officers at the time and

looked on this as a great challenge.

The 94 to 215 ton frigate Bathea was selected as the vessel that would transport the exotic

bread that grew on trees on what higher ups in the admiralty mockingly referred to as

the grocery errand.

Perhaps to lend more import to the voyage, Joseph Banks suggested we christening her

the HMS Banti.

Before he even set in foot aboard the ship that was forever to be linked with his name,

Bly suffered the indignity of learning that his request to be promoted had been rebuffed

by the admiralty.

He would be a captain by name, but not by rank.

The admiralty added other frustrating obstacles to the voyage.

To make space for the storage of the breadfruit plants they awkwardly reconfigured the ship,

planning to cram into her tiny han and unusually large crew of sailors and buffenists.

One third of the ship was sealed off in a sense for breadfruit plants.

Even Bly had only a low cubicle to sleep in.

The bounty was actually more crowded than World War II submarine.

There is no question about that.

Had that been all Bly had been forced to endure before setting sail on the Banti, it would

have been enough to have yet another bitter setback and the flawless master Bly had imagined

for the voyage.

I ordered the helm to be put a weather and bore away for the Cape of Good Hope to the

great joy of everyone on board.

Send the medal off!

Come on, lad!

Smolly now!

Another bad omen shadowed the bounty.

A young seaman aboard the ship passed away in the night.

The ship's surgeon, a notorious drunkard, claimed the cause was scurvy.

Obsessed with the health of his men, Bly stopped the decks in a fury.

Perhaps the voyage was ruined for him from that moment on.

In May of 1788, the bounty anchored at full spay on the Cape of Good Hope after five,

two much was months at sea.

During this 38 day respite repair storm damage, something happened between Bly and

Christian that sold the seeds for future discontent.

The trouble started in Cape Town and the reason was an obligation of money.

Fletcher Christian was poor.

He wanted to send gifts to his family.

He had no money and evidently there was a loan.

And you know what loans do with friendships.

Some say that Bly, petty and tenurious to a fault, demanded that Christian repay the

loan before the ship returned to England.

Christian hourly refused and a wedge was driven between the Master and the Protege.

With tensions simmering among its officers, the bounty made sail from full spay in July

of 1788.

And on an early October evening sighted the towering mountains of Tahiti just over the

horizon.

After ten long months at sea, the bounty dropped anchor into Tahiti's pristine mat of I-bay.

They'd withstood the torment of the horn, the squabbles and confinement of shipboard

life and Bly's capricious temper and insulting outbursts.

Now all of the hardship was washed away by an enchanting welcome.

Within moments of her arrival, the bounty was surrounded by hundreds of canoes filled

with joyfully shouting Tahiti and men and beautiful enticing Tahiti women.

For the men of the bounty, it seemed like paradise on earth.

And their paradise would soon give way to an ordeal beyond imagining.

Claim the cause was scurvy.

Obsessed with the health of his men, Bly's stomped the decks in a fury.

Perhaps the voyage was ruined for him from that moment on.

In May of 1788, the bounty anchored at full-spay on the Cape of Good Hope after five, two

months was months at sea.

During this 38-day respite repair storm damage, something happened between Bly and Christian

that sold the seeds for future discontent.

The trouble started in Cape Town, and the reason was an obligation of money.

Fletcher Christian was poor.

He wanted to send gifts to his family.

He had no money, and evidently there was a loan.

And you know what loans do with friendships.

Some say that Bly, petty and tenurious to a fault, demanded that Christian repay the loan

before the ship returned to England.

Christian angrily refused, and the wedge was driven between the Master and the Protege.

With tensions simmering among its officers, the bounty made sail from full-spay in July

of 1788.

And on an early-octem evening sighted the towering mountains of Tahiti just over the

horizon.

After ten long months at sea, the bounty dropped anchor in Tahiti's pristine mat of

Ibey.

They'd withstood the torment of the horn, the squabbles and confinement of shipboard

life, and Blieskopricious temper and insulting outbursts.

Now all of the hardship was washed away by an enchanting welcome.

Within moments of her arrival, the bounty was surrounded by hundreds of canoes filled

with joyfully-shouting Tahitian men and beautiful enticing Tahitian women.

For the men of the bounty, it seemed like paradise on Earth.

But their paradise would soon give way to an ordeal beyond imagining.

After nearly a year at sea, the HMS Bounty lay at anchor in the exquisite turquoise waters

of Matovai Bay.

Lieutenant William Blind is man-revel in the indescribable spender of Tahiti and her friendly

natives, especially the beautiful, sexually expressive Tahitian women.

The inhabitants we found stout and well-made.

I have seen many parts of the world, but outahite is capable of being preferable to them

all, and certainly is so considering its natural state.

The people were telling him for much greater things.

Christian was grateful to Blies for his friendship and patronage, but there existed between

the two men an ambiguous tension that observers noted from the start.

People commented on a peculiar relationship that existed between them.

It wasn't clear what that relationship actually was, but people felt that there was an uncomfortable

element in it, which no one really was able to pinpoint.

Blie was a populace the person, scragging his way to the top, and Christian the gentleman.

Well-spoken dynamic and athletic.

Christian was instantly popular among the men of the bounty.

But there was another side to his personality, a darker side, that the proud, earnest young

man kept well-masked beneath his out-going demeanor.

He had what we would say as psychologists today called borderline personality traits.

He tended to idolize and also despise.

He was given to mood swings and often let the emotions take over his judgement.

Shortly before Christian was to depart on the bounty, an evening of drinking talks spent

with his brother Charles may have had a significant impact on his later judgement.

Charles Christian had been a surgeon aboard the merchant frigate Middlesex.

Fletcher Christian learned that they had been a mutiny on the Middlesex.

It was an unsuccessful mutiny put down by the captain.

But Charles Christian, the surgeon, was named as one of the prime mutineers.

The idea of his brother mutiny kind of took mutiny out of the unthinkable and put it in

the realm of the possible.

Unaware of the immortality that was soon before her, the bounty finally set sail from Portsmouth

Harbour on December 23, 1787.

Bly ordered a Southwesterly course for Cape Horn.

Heaning on the ship's rails, 46 men watched the jagged English coastline slowly recede

from view.

Could they ever have imagined the strange fate that awaited them?

On the earliest days of her ill-fated voyage, the bounty faced squalls in rough weather.

Still, according to Bly's self-congratulatory logs, Krumar Al was high.

My little ship does wonderfully well.

My men are all well and cheerful.

Few seamen and officers I may venture to say can ever boast of more magic than the strange

fate that awaited them.

From the earliest days of her ill-fated voyage, the bounty faced squalls in rough weather.

Still, according to Bly's self-congratulatory logs, Krumar Al was high.

My little ship does wonderfully well.

My men are all well and cheerful.

Few seamen and officers I may venture to say can ever boast of more comforts at sea.

But the journal of the Boseons mate, the conscientious 27-year-old James Morrison, tells a different

tale of shipboard life.

Early in the voyage, two cheeses were found missing from the ship's stores, and irate

Bly assembled the crew on deck and accused the sailors of thievery.

Then in an act of insolence in front of the bounty's 46 men, the ship's Cooper reminded

his captain that the cheeses had been taken off the boat and delivered Bly's own home

before leaving the docks in England.

Bly's deception was revealed and his wrath became uncontrollable.

Mr Bly told the Cooper he would give him a damn good flogging if he said any more about

it.

He would fly into these uncontrollable rages and then he would almost become incomprehensible

so much so that the crew kind of, you know, would look at each other and say, what's

wrong with this man?

He's just not making sense.

Bounty law holds that Bly was physically violent, but his rages rarely resulted in floggings

which were an accepted and custom reform of naval discipline.

In fact, William Bly flogged his men far less than any royal navy captain at that time.

Bly never abused his crew physically during all the voyage of the bounty.

The abuse was verbal.

He was very authoritarian, very contemptuous, very insulting.

Bly had another habit to rank old many in his crew.

Following the examples of Captain Cook who had pioneered a more progressive humane command,

Bly was determined to ensure the physical well-being of his men.

He brought the board a half-blind fiddler and ordered the crew on deck for dancing as

mandatory daily exercise.

Now sailors love to dance.

That was one of their great schools.

I mean, their balance and their rhythm in the yard.

But when you're told dance, a sailor doesn't like to be told to dance when he wants to

be freely to dance.

But just four months after leaving Mother England, the petty disagreements of the voyage were

put aside as Bly and the men of the bounty encountered their...

Who that was, time to try to leave the island.

So they walked down through this massive yelling of natives and got to the launch and at that

point the natives started to the attack.

Bly and his men narrowly escaped, losing a loyalist seaman to the savage attack of the

natives.

At that time he makes the decision.

He can't go to another island.

He can't land, so he makes the decision that he will go to Timor.

That's 4,000 miles across OpenSea.

Bly would have to call upon all of his considerable gifts of navigation and seamanship to steer

the launch through treacherous open seas to the Dutch colony of Timor.

He'd never been there and he had no charts.

Some would call it a fool-hardy decision, but Bly was confident of his abilities.

I found my mind most wonderfully supported and began to conceive hopes and not withstanding

so heavy a calamity to be able to recount to my king and country my misfortune.

With scarce provisions, no shelter from the weather and virtually no navigation tools,

conditions aboard the overcrowded launch were withering to body and soul.

Our allowance for the day was a quarter of a pint of coconut milk and the meat which

did not exceed two ounces to each person.

And for supper, an ounce of the damaged bread and a quarter of a pint of water.

Our situation on Monday morning, the 11th of May, was extremely dangerous.

The sea frequently running over our stern which kept us bailing with all our strength.

At noon it was almost calm, no sun to be seen and some of us shivering with cold.

Of course since yesterday, 89 miles.

Meanwhile, the bounty with Christian at the helm made sail for Tumouai, a nearby island

inhabited by natives who would prove to be far less amiable than the Tahitians.

The two things that the mutineers want most of all is meat and women.

But there's no pigs, there's no meat on Tumouai and the Tumouai and islanders will not let them near the women.

After a brief trip to Tahitian to bring back women, the mutineers decided to build a settlement

despite the island's shortcomings.

Christians set the men to work constructing Fort George.

Typical of the Englishmen, the first thing they did was put up an English flag on a flagpole

and start this fort.

But the battles with the native island is quickly escalated.

Christian realized that for their own survival the mutineers would have to leave Tumouai.

Some of the bounty refugees wanted a return to Tahitian.

Can't find what you're looking for?
Get subtitles in any language from opensubtitles.com, and translate them here.