On this day in 1789, acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, leading disaffected crewmen, seized control of HMS Bounty from the captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and eighteen loyalists adrift in the ship’s open launch. Bligh navigated more than 3,500 nautical miles (6,500 km; 4,000 mi) in the launch to reach safety. He then began the process of bringing the mutineers to justice. The mutineers variously settled on Tahiti or on Pitcairn Island.
After Bligh reached England in April 1790, the Admiralty dispatched HMS Pandora to apprehend the mutineers. Fourteen were captured in Tahiti and imprisoned on board Pandora, which then searched without success for Christian’s party that had hidden on Pitcairn Island. After turning back towards England, Pandora ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, with the loss of 31 crew and four Bounty prisoners. The ten surviving detainees reached England in June 1792 and were court-martialed; four were acquitted, three were pardoned, and three were hanged.
Christian’s group remained undiscovered on Pitcairn until 1808, by which time only one mutineer, John Adams, remained alive. His fellow mutineers, including Christian, were dead, killed either by one another or by their Polynesian companions. No action was taken against Adams. Descendants of the mutineers and their accompanying Tahitians have lived on Pitcairn into the 21st century.
Fletcher Christian and the mutineers set Lieutenant William Bligh and 18 others adrift, depicted in a 1790 aquatint by Robert Dodd
Today is the birthday, in 1945, of American drummer John Wolters who was a member of Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show (shortened to Dr. Hook in 1975). They had the 1972 UK No.2 and US No.5 single ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ and in the same year a hit with ‘The Cover of Rolling Stone’. Wolters died of liver cancer on 16 June 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVXVO_vF2Io
