After the Mutiny: Pitcairn Island a Tragic Paradise

Two hundred and twenty-five years ago today, on April 28, 1789, 20 men of the British warship HMS Bounty mutinied against their captain, William Bligh, and took over the ship. This is probably the most famous nautical mutiny in history, having been the subject of countless books and three big-budget movies (one in 1935, one in 1962, one in 1984), and the term “Captain Bligh” has passed into our language as a synonym for a tyrannical, overbearing authority. There's no need to retell the whole Bounty story here, even as it is different than pop culture would have us believe–Captain Bligh, for instance, does not appear to have been as tyrannical as he's often been portrayed. There are many lesser-known aspects of the mutiny that deserve attention, in my opinion, and one of them is the interesting fate of what happened to nine members of the Bounty's crew who eventually settled on Pitcairn Island, the Pacific paradise that will forever be associated with the ship whose remains still lie there to this day.