Nic Compton
It’s hard to imagine that after the 1789 mutiny aboard BOUNTY, Capt. William Bligh and 18 men sailed 4,000 miles over 47 days aboard the ship’s diminutive launch. A crew sailed a replica to retrace the voyage for a 2017 British television show, after which one of them, ocean-racing sailor Conrad Humphries (at the helm), acquired the boat.
[“W]hen ships were made of wood, men were made of steel.”
This was the catchline for the 2017 British Channel 4 television program Mutiny. The series followed a group of nine men as they embarked on a 4,000-mile voyage across the Pacific, following in the wake of Capt. William Bligh and his crew. The mutiny in the title refers, of course, to the famous events aboard BOUNTY in 1789, when the ship’s mate, Fletcher Christian, led a mutiny against the (allegedly) authoritarian captain. Bligh and 18 men loyal to him were cast adrift mid-ocean on a 23′ open boat to face what seemed like certain death. Against all odds, the boat reached Timor, with all surviving except one crewman killed by natives on the island of Tofua. The 47-day ordeal is one of the most remarkable stories of survival at sea ever recorded.
The point of the television series was, in the words of Ant Middleton, the broadcast personality who served as the boat’s skipper, to see if “the modern-day man can endure such hardships.” The crew was dropped off at the same longitude and latitude as Bligh and his men, given the same rations of biscuits and cured meat known as biltong, and told to get on with it. Crucially, it was not intended as a re-enactment of Bligh’s voyage, complete with period costumes and a flowery script. It was meant to be a genuine experience, a real test of endurance—albeit this crew always had the option to bail out onto the 128′ mothership that shadowed them throughout the voyage, something that was never a possibility for Bligh and his loyalists.