Hero_Doses

Hero_Doses t1_j77voow wrote

People that know this story know it from the movies, but the tangential stories are amazing as well.

  1. While being bad at discipline (with 2 uprisings against him), Bligh was still an amazing leader and mariner. Even though the mutineers dumped him and about 8 others in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Bligh managed to make it all the way to Jakarta to report the mutiny, losing only one man to a hostile islander along the way.

This would be near impossible today, let alone ~200 years ago.

  1. After the mutiny, Fletcher Christian and the other mutineers found Pitcairn Island and hid there, knowing it would be hard for the British Navy to find them.

The island was rocked multiple times by racial violence, often spurred by sexual intrigue and alcoholism, after one of the mutineers learned to make alcohol from a native plant on Pitcairn.

Interestingly, most of the women seemed to be devoted to their English husbands, avenging their deaths when they were killed by some Tahitian men who had been brought along as slave laborers.

One Englishman, Ned Young, slept through the mutiny AND possibly also the massacre of the English.

11