The Bounty

By Richard Hough

Winner of the Whitbread Literary Award and the Book of the Sea Award.

28th April 1789. Dawn.

Lieutenant William Bligh, captain of H.M.S. Bounty, was dragged from his bunk at gunpoint by his second-in-command, Fletcher Christian. A mutiny had begun, and what followed has become one of the most famous stories in British naval history.

Set adrift, Bligh began an epic endeavour of navigation and survival on the open sea, while Christian eventually established a Rousseau-esque settlement in supposed paradise.

But what had driven these two friends apart? How did a crew who had endured all that they had ultimately crack? And what really happened afterwards?

Discarding popular caricatures, Richard Hough’s reconstruction paints a more nuanced picture of this oft-explored event and reveals what really happened aboard H.M.S. Bounty that fateful night. Originally published as Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian, this is the remarkable true story of the Mutiny on The Bounty, and the inspiration for Dino De Laurentiis’s 1984 film starring Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins.