Voyage of 

Bounty[edit]
Main article: Mutiny on the Bounty
The mutiny on the Royal Navy vessel HMAV Bounty occurred in the South Pacific Ocean on 28
April 1789. Led by Master's Mate / Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, disaffected crewmen
seized control of the ship, and set the then Lieutenant Bligh, who was the ship's captain, and 18
loyalists adrift in the ship's open launch. The mutineers variously settled on Tahiti or on Pitcairn
Island. Meanwhile, Bligh completed a voyage of more than 3,500 nautical miles (6,500 km;
4,000 mi) to the west in the launch to reach safety north of Australia in the Dutch East
Indies (modern Indonesia) and began the process of bringing the mutineers to justice.

First breadfruit voyage[edit]

The mutineers turning Lt Bligh and some of the officers and crew adrift from His Majesty's
Ship HMS Bounty. By Robert Dodd
In 1787, Lieutenant Bligh, as he then was, took command of HMAV Bounty. In order to win a
premium offered by the Royal Society, he first sailed to Tahiti to obtain breadfruit trees, then set
course east across the South Pacific for South America and the Cape Horn and eventually to
the Caribbean Sea, where breadfruit was wanted for experiments to see whether it would be a
successful food crop for enslaved Africans there on British colonial plantations in the West
Indies islands. According to one modern researcher, the notion that breadfruit had to be collected
from Tahiti was intentionally misleading. Tahiti was merely one of many places where the
esteemed seedless breadfruit could be found. The real reason for choosing Tahiti has its roots in
the territorial contention that existed then between France and Great Britain at the time.
[4]
 Bounty never reached the Caribbean, as mutiny broke out on board shortly after the ship left
Tahiti.
The voyage to Tahiti was difficult. After trying unsuccessfully for a month to go west by rounding
South America and Cape Horn, Bounty was finally defeated by the notoriously stormy weather
and opposite winds and forced to take the longer way to the east around the southern tip
of Africa (Cape of Good Hope and Cape Agulhas). That delay caused a further delay in Tahiti, as
he had to wait five months for the breadfruit plants to mature sufficiently to be potted in soil and
transported. Bounty departed Tahiti heading east in April 1789.