Bounty Mutiny: Bligh Was a Bad Leader, Not a Tyrant
Bligh used fewer punishments than average, Cook left no criticism, and the Admiralty acquitted him. The Bounty mutiny was nepotism, not tyranny.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
Bounty Mutiny: Bligh Was a Bad Leader, Not a Tyrant
On April 28, 1789, Fletcher Christian and eighteen men seized the HMS Bounty and placed William Bligh in a seven-meter boat with eighteen loyalists. Hollywood has sold tyranny for two centuries. The data point to something else.
The official mission was to collect breadfruit saplings in Tahiti to feed slaves cheaply in the Caribbean. Pure mercantilism disguised as botany. But the mutiny’s trigger was not the lash: it was that Bligh spent five months in Tahiti waiting for seeds to sprout, and his men got involved with the natives. Cook, Wallis, and Bougainville stayed barely a month and a half.
Was Bligh a despotic captain?
Bligh used fewer physical punishments than the Royal Navy average. James Cook selected him as an officer on the Resolution at just 22 years old, and Cook’s own diaries contain not a single critical line about him. When he returned to England in 1790, the Admiralty Court Martial acquitted him with the formula: "exemplary, firm, and valiant conduct." He continued to rise to vice-admiral and governor.
The problem was different: he could not manage the crew. A captain did not deal with the mariners; that was the first officer’s job. And Bligh made the mistake of appointing Fletcher Christian as second-in-command when his actual rank was Master Mate, with four officers ahead of him. The appointee rebelled.
Tahiti, five months, and eighteen mutineers
The numbers do not lie. They spent five months on the island. The crew members who got involved with Tahitian women were exactly eighteen. The mutineers were exactly eighteen. The correlation is too perfect to be coincidence.
Cook carried a dozen Royal Marines aboard to subdue the crew at bayonet point. Bligh did not. And Bligh, according to accounts, remained chaste but was tolerant of his men’s activities, not surprised that they succumbed to temptation.
Did Fletcher Christian do the right thing?
Abandoning eighteen comrades to near-certain death in the middle of the Pacific is not rebellion for the crew’s well-being. It is a political act of "you out, me in." If the problem was Bligh, it was enough to abandon him alone. The prisoners were not tyrants, and it was antiestéticasible to keep them guarded until returning to Tahiti.
Christian knew he would have ended up hanged. That is why he chose Pitcairn: an island in the wrong position on maps, outside maritime routes, in the interior of the South Pacific ocean gyre. A desert of water spanning forty million square kilometers where the nearest humans are usually astronauts.
The Pitcairn Experiment
The original 1790 settlement consisted of nine mutineers and eighteen Polynesians: twelve women and six men. In 1793, after a wave of violence and murders, only four mutineers and the surviving women and children remained. The entire current population, about fifty inhabitants, descends from that handful. The forced endogamy over two centuries is a case study in itself.
Bligh, meanwhile, achieved one of the greatest naval exploits in history: he sailed more than three thousand nautical miles in a dinghy without maps to Timor. He had a sens, experience with Cook, and the valuable Spanish nautical information he possessed.
In the end, the question is not who was the bad guy. The question is why we still need there to be one.
On April 28, 1789, Fletcher Christian and eighteen men seized the HMS Bounty and placed William Bligh in a seven-meter boat with eighteen loyalists. Hollywood has sold tyranny for two centuries. The data point to something else.
The official mission was to collect breadfruit saplings in Tahiti to feed slaves cheaply in the Caribbean. Pure mercantilism disguised as botany. But the mutiny’s trigger was not the lash: it was that Bligh spent five months in Tahiti waiting for seeds to sprout, and his men got involved with the natives. Cook, Wallis, and Bougainville stayed barely a month and a half.
Was Bligh a despotic captain?
Bligh used fewer physical punishments than the Royal Navy average. James Cook selected him as an officer on the Resolution at just 22 years old, and Cook’s own diaries contain not a single critical line about him. When he returned to England in 1790, the Admiralty Court Martial acquitted him with the formula: "exemplary, firm, and valiant conduct." He continued to rise to vice-admiral and governor.
The problem was different: he could not manage the crew. A captain did not deal with the mariners; that was the first officer’s job. And Bligh made the mistake of appointing Fletcher Christian as second-in-command when his actual rank was Master Mate, with four officers ahead of him. The appointee rebelled.
Tahiti, five months, and eighteen mutineers
The numbers do not lie. They spent five months on the island. The crew members who got involved with Tahitian women were exactly eighteen. The mutineers were exactly eighteen. The correlation is too perfect to be coincidence.
Cook carried a dozen Royal Marines aboard to subdue the crew at bayonet point. Bligh did not. And Bligh, according to accounts, remained chaste but was tolerant of his men’s activities, not surprised that they succumbed to temptation.
Did Fletcher Christian do the right thing?
Abandoning eighteen comrades to near-certain death in the middle of the Pacific is not rebellion for the crew’s well-being. It is a political act of "you out, me in." If the problem was Bligh, it was enough to abandon him alone. The prisoners were not tyrants, and it was antiestéticasible to keep them guarded until returning to Tahiti.
Christian knew he would have ended up hanged. That is why he chose Pitcairn: an island in the wrong position on maps, outside maritime routes, in the interior of the South Pacific ocean gyre. A desert of water spanning forty million square kilometers where the nearest humans are usually astronauts.
The Pitcairn Experiment
The original 1790 settlement consisted of nine mutineers and eighteen Polynesians: twelve women and six men. In 1793, after a wave of violence and murders, only four mutineers and the surviving women and children remained. The entire current population, about fifty inhabitants, descends from that handful. The forced endogamy over two centuries is a case study in itself.
Bligh, meanwhile, achieved one of the greatest naval exploits in history: he sailed more than three thousand nautical miles in a dinghy without maps to Timor. He had a sens, experience with Cook, and the valuable Spanish nautical information he possessed.
In the end, the question is not who was the bad guy. The question is why we still need there to be one.
Also available in: Deutsch
Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (104 replies).
More summaries
-
Spain and the American Monopoly: The Jamestown Case
Spain sought to monopolize the Americas for over a century. The key wasn't morality, but logistics and information control.
-
Overvalued Tiger: The Fragility of German Production
Expert analysis reveals that Germany's obsession with the Tiger II was a fatal logistical error in World War II.
-
ETA and GAL: two arms of the same Gladio network in Spain
Investigation linking ETA and GAL as arms of the same NATO Gladio network, with drug trafficking funding and CIA control.
-
Hanson and why World War II still matters
Hanson argues the Axis killed 75% of WWII's victims yet still lost to the side that produced more materiel. The debate over why it matters continues.
-
Debate: Which victory has been most damaging to the winner?
The forum debates whether winning a war can ruin the victor. One user claims England won both world wars and ended up as just another country on the map.
-
Carlism: the succession that never matched its own story
The strict male-only succession imposed by Philip V in 1713 clashed with Alfonso X's Siete Partidas and 500 years of earlier Spanish practice, critics say.