Mutiny on the Bounty

Summary

Mutiny on the Bounty retells the famous rising of April 1789 through the memories of Roger Byam, a fictional midshipman loosely modeled on the real Peter Heywood. Byam, a young English gentleman, joins His Majesty's armed vessel Bounty late in 1787 under Lieutenant William Bligh, whose mission is to carry breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies as cheap food for plantation laborers. Sir Joseph Banks gives Byam a task of his own: to compile a dictionary and grammar of the Tahitian language. On the long voyage round Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, Bligh shows himself an able seaman and navigator but a quick-tempered, suspicious commander, sharp with his officers, especially the master's mate Fletcher Christian, and close with ship's stores. At Tahiti the crew spend some six months ashore gathering plants. Each man takes a taio, or bond-friend; Byam lives with the chief Hitihiti and studies the language, while Christian forms an attachment to Maimiti and Byam's friend George Stewart to a woman the sailors call Peggy. Several men desert and are flogged when recaptured. Soon after the ship sails for home, Bligh publicly accuses Christian of stealing coconuts from the ship's store, and Christian, humiliated, plans to leave the ship on a raft. Instead, in the early morning, he seizes the Bounty with a group of seamen and sets Bligh and eighteen loyal men adrift in the ship's launch. Byam, Stewart and several others who wished to go with Bligh are kept aboard because the boat is full. Christian returns to Tahiti, then sails away with his followers to find a hidden island. Byam stays, marries Tehani, a woman of rank, and has a daughter. About eighteen months later the frigate Pandora arrives; Bligh, who has reached England, has named the men left behind as mutineers, and they are chained in a small deck cell called Pandora's Box. The frigate is wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, Stewart is drowned, and the survivors reach Timor in open boats. At the court-martial in England Byam is found guilty and condemned to hang, until the midshipman Tinkler, believed lost, appears and gives testimony that clears him. Three seamen are hanged. Byam returns to the navy, rises to command, and visits Tahiti again in 1810, where he sees his grown daughter but does not reveal himself. Little, Brown published the novel in October 1932 as the first part of a trilogy.

Top Lessons

• Command and its limits

  Bligh is no fool: he is a fine seaman and keeps his crew healthy on a long voyage. Yet the novel shows how public humiliation, suspicion and meanness over small things wear away an officer's loyalty. Christian's rising grows out of personal insult as much as general hardship.

• Innocent and guilty in one net

  Byam wished to go with Bligh, but the law sees only that he stayed aboard the Bounty. His long imprisonment, the Pandora's Box and the court-martial show how hard it is to prove innocence when appearances, absent witnesses and a commander's report all point the other way.

• Two homes

  Byam comes to love Tahiti, its language and his family there, but his duty and his country call him back. His final visit in 1810, when he chooses not to disturb his daughter's life, shows a man accepting the cost of the course his life has taken.

• History and the novelist

  Nordhoff and Hall followed the records of the voyage and the court-martial closely, but they invented a narrator and changed details of his family to shape the story. The book shows how a historical novel can give life to documents while presenting one interpretation of the people in them.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine is part of the background of 18th-century naval life rather than a subject of the novel. The voyage reflects the era after Captain Cook's voyages, when commanders like Bligh worked to prevent scurvy through diet and cleanliness; the floggings show the physical cost of naval discipline; and the Pandora chapters describe prisoners chained in a cramped deck cell in tropical heat, the wreck, and an open-boat passage on short water. The Pandora's surgeon, Dr. Hamilton, is remembered in the novel for his kindness to crew and prisoners. Historically the Bounty's own surgeon, Thomas Huggan, was known for heavy drinking and died at Tahiti in 1788; how the novel portrays him should be checked against the text.

• Voyage out and Tahiti chapters

  Floggings ordered for offenses aboard and for the recaptured deserters, described from Byam's point of view.

• Pandora chapters

  The prisoners' confinement in Pandora's Box, the wreck on the reef and the passage to Timor in open boats, with the surgeon Hamilton's care.