As A Result Of The Mutiny On The Bounty, A New Colony Appeared - - Alternative View

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As A Result Of The Mutiny On The Bounty, A New Colony Appeared - - Alternative View
As A Result Of The Mutiny On The Bounty, A New Colony Appeared - - Alternative View

Video: As A Result Of The Mutiny On The Bounty, A New Colony Appeared - - Alternative View

Video: As A Result Of The Mutiny On The Bounty, A New Colony Appeared - - Alternative View
Video: PITCAIRN ISLAND. The legendary past and scandalous present of an isolated island. EXCLUSIVE! 2024, March
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230 years ago, members of the crew of the British ship "Bounty" revolted, which led to a chain of dramatic events. Captain William Bligh, removed from control of the ship, and his supporters survived on a small boat and were able to return to England. Some of the rebels were captured in Tahiti, the rest wandered around Polynesia for a long time and eventually created a new colony on Pitcairn Island. Subsequently, the descendants of the rebels transferred the territory to the British crown.

In 1775, the War of Independence of the local British colonies broke out in North America. According to the head of the department of the PRUE named after G. V. Plekhanov Andrei Koshkin, in London they realized that it would not be possible to keep them, so they staked on the development of possessions in the Caribbean.

“The bread for the slaves who worked on the sugar plantations was imported earlier from the rebellious colonies. However, after the formation of the United States, problems arose with the nutrition of African slaves. Then the idea was born to bring breadfruit from Oceania to the islands of the Caribbean,”the expert said in an interview with RT.

The organization of this experiment was undertaken by the Royal Society of Science and the British Admiralty. For these purposes, the ship "Betia" was purchased. He was given a new name - "Bounty", and William Bligh was appointed captain.

The chairman of the Moscow Fleet History Club, Konstantin Strelbitsky, said in an interview with RT that the Bounty could not be called a warship.

“It was an armed support vessel flying the flag of the Royal Navy,” the expert emphasized.

The ship was strengthened and re-equipped for the transportation of breadfruit seedlings. The crew included people who were versed in gardening and participants in Cook's travels. Bly was asked to recruit people from several aristocratic families. The captain appointed Fletcher Christian as his assistant. Due to the lack of space on the ship, Bligh was unable to take on the command of soldiers and officers, which later played a cruel joke with him during the mutiny.

On December 23, 1787, the expedition set out to sea and headed for Polynesia. Initially, Bligh planned to get to the Pacific Ocean, bypassing Cape Horn, but due to difficult weather conditions he did not dare to do this and went to his destination, bypassing Africa. According to the testimonies of the participants in the voyage, the captain maintained exemplary order on the ship, provided the crew with food and remedies against scurvy.

Promotional video:

William Bligh / globallookpress.com / Mary Evans Picture Library
William Bligh / globallookpress.com / Mary Evans Picture Library

William Bligh / globallookpress.com / Mary Evans Picture Library.

In addition, Bly made his companions move to keep them in good physical shape and not get sick. But when, due to the change in the route, the sailors felt a shortage of food, the activity of the captain began to annoy them.

Then the ship sailed to Tasmania, near New Zealand the captain discovered a group of uninhabited islands (named after the ship - Bounty). Further, the expedition arrived on the island of Tahiti, whose inhabitants have traditionally been good to European sailors. Local leaders remembered Bly from James Cook's travels and allowed him to collect breadfruit seedlings in the forest.

Mutiny

The stay in Tahiti dragged on for the expedition members for six months. When it was time to leave the island, several sailors tried to escape to stay on it, but they were detained and whipped. In April 1789, the Bounty headed for the Atlantic. The moral climate on the ship began to deteriorate rapidly.

As historian and ethnographer Miloslav Stingle wrote in his book "The Last Paradise", the captain was a wonderful navigator, but a very poor psychologist. He did everything to make himself as many enemies as possible among the crew members.

“Bly was a pretty cool commander, which not everyone liked. In addition, fresh water was used to take care of the seedlings, and they began to issue it to the team in a smaller volume,”said Strelbitsky.

Captain William Bligh's capture by the Bounty crew, late 19th century engraving / globallookpress.com / World History Archive
Captain William Bligh's capture by the Bounty crew, late 19th century engraving / globallookpress.com / World History Archive

Captain William Bligh's capture by the Bounty crew, late 19th century engraving / globallookpress.com / World History Archive.

Bly accused Christian of stealing coconuts and threatened to flog him. For a young nobleman, this was a cruel insult. During his watch on April 28, 1789, the captain's mate, relying on the punished sailors, first seized the weapons room, and then the entire ship. The crew, which consisted of 46 people, was divided approximately in half: one half supported the captain, the other - the rebels. In the end, Christian landed Bligh and 18 of his supporters in a lifeboat, and he turned the ship towards Tahiti.

Two odyssey

Bligh tried to land on the island of Tofua, but the British were greeted there unfriendly by the natives. Then the captain headed for the Dutch colony on the island of Timor. In 48 days, the boat under his command covered 6,710 km without maps and most of the navigation equipment. Several participants on the journey fell into lethargy from exhaustion and survived only by a miracle.

"The voyage … went down in history as one of the greatest and most daring voyages of all time," Stingle wrote in his book.

In Timor, Bligh bought a small coastal boat, which he took to Batavia, where the travelers were dumped by malaria. Having strengthened from illness, the captain returned to England with two escorts. There Bly appeared before the naval tribunal, which found him innocent of the loss of the ship. Subsequently, he was appointed head of a new expedition that went to get the breadfruit.

“The mutiny did not affect Bligh's career in any way. If during the command of "Bounty" he was officially in the rank of lieutenant, then in the future he rose to the rank of vice admiral ", - said Strelbitsky.

In turn, Christian understood that they would be looking for him, so he decided not to stay in Tahiti. Together with other participants in the rebellion, he went to the nearby island of Tubuai. However, there the natives greeted them unfriendly. The British tried to intervene in local tribal wars, quarreled with the leaders and were forced to leave the failed colony. In the end, only nine people remained on the Bounty. The rest settled in Tahiti and were subsequently arrested by members of the punitive expedition that arrived in Oceania on the Pandora.

Matavai village on the island of Tahiti, 1822 - 1825 / globallookpress.com / Science Museum
Matavai village on the island of Tahiti, 1822 - 1825 / globallookpress.com / Science Museum

Matavai village on the island of Tahiti, 1822 - 1825 / globallookpress.com / Science Museum.

Subsequently, four of the detained sailors were killed in the shipwreck of the Pandora. The rest partly followed Bligh's path, reaching England through the Dutch possessions. Ten people were brought to trial - four of them were acquitted, three were pardoned, the rest were hanged.

On September 22, 1789, Christian finally left Tahiti, taking 12 Tahitian women and several Tahitians with him. After some time, the Bounty landed on the shores of Pitcairn Island, which was incorrectly plotted on European maps of those times. For this reason, the rebels were effectively isolated from the rest of the world.

Christian burned the ship so that no one was tempted to flee, after which he divided the entire island into nine sections. The British left the Tahitians without land and women, practically turning them into slaves. As a result, the Polynesians revolted. They killed some of the British, including Christian, but they themselves were completely exterminated. The rest of the British fell victim to accidents and died from disease. Only sailor John Adams survived, who later became the head of the colony.

In 1808, she was discovered by an American ship. But by this time, there was no one to pursue, except for Adams. The British crown forgave the last rebel and declared Pitcairn its overseas territory. Some of the descendants of the rebels from the "Bounty" subsequently moved to Tahiti and Norfolk.

Shot from the American film "Mutiny on the Bounty", 1962 / globallookpress.com / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Zuma
Shot from the American film "Mutiny on the Bounty", 1962 / globallookpress.com / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Zuma

Shot from the American film "Mutiny on the Bounty", 1962 / globallookpress.com / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Zuma

As Strelbitsky noted, the mutiny on the Bounty is “a dramatic page in the history of navigation”, based on these events “many books have been written, films have been made”.

Author: Svyatoslav Knyazev