The Bounty mutiny was the 1789 seizure of a small British naval ship by part of its crew, an act that cast its commander adrift in an open boat and drove the rebels to found a hidden island colony. It grew into one of the most retold sea stories in the English-speaking world, and its descendants still live on Pitcairn Island.
The legend needs a tyrant. For two centuries the tale has cast William Bligh as a floating monster whose cruelty pushed desperate men to revolt. Yet Bligh reached for the whip less often than most captains of his day, and the sailors who fled toward freedom found, on their hidden island, a few short years of killing that left almost none of the men alive.